About
Scroll to read about Alyssa and her debut novel dear body…
about the author - by the author
Hello beautiful humans! My name is Alyssa. I am a former ballerina, turned author, that hopes to inspire passion, creativity, and self-love with my work.
I started writing dear body… in 2017 when I moved away from my hometown, Littleton, Colorado, to Pennsylvania in pursuit of a professional ballet career. There, at 16-years-old, I moved in with a host family. While living with them, the mother subjected me sexual abuse. During that intolerable time I found solace in poetry, writing whenever triggers popped up in my life.; allowing my thoughts to bounce around on a page instead of in my head.
Due to the abuse at the host family’s house my body changed. I gained weight, a physical subconscious attempt to protect myself from the hurt; which, plagued my ballet career. My twelve-year-long pre-professional career fell after the first domino of improper respect for my body toppled over.
My ballet teachers told me to be at my “best weight” or to try Weight Watchers so I could perform again without “ripping the costumes” or “looking too soft”. Consequently, I began to abuse both my body and my mind. I was over exercising, undereating, binge eating, and purging in a constant and cruel beating on my body.
I could still not quiet my mind. So I kept writing. Pausing the cyclicity of my eating disorder for fleeting scribbling moments.
Writing was, and continues to be, my liberation. It propelled me into activism for body acceptance and destigmatization of eating disorders. That included advocating for myself by attending an intensive eating disorder treatment program. This program, while challenging, taught me I deserve to live unplagued by negative body and food thoughts. Now I use my work to try and inspire that same lesson in others.
So, I wrote dear body… as a means to heal. I published it so you all could too.
About dear body…
Writing whenever I could not calm my mind or escape the spiral of catastrophizing or cyclical self-hatred proved fruitful. After a while I realized my poems were aplenty and I decided to to put them together to create a novel. I thought if my writing these poems was helping me heal, maybe others reading my writing could help them. From there, dear body… was born.
I chose dear body… as a title both including the lack of capital letters and the ellipses to reflect the diary-like vulnerability and privateness of the included stories. I wanted to emphasize both the casualness and the intimacy of the novel by softening the title with lowercase letters. The ellipses is again showcases my intentional subversion of grammatical rules to hint at typical grammar missteps made when writing hurriedly or intended for personal use only.
dear body… is a love letter to my body that I never thought I would write. The novel is an extension of its title. It is raw and vulnerable because I wanted it to tap into the taboos and reveal them to its readers.
