Ariana Alexis Torrence

My name is Ariana Torrence, but most people call me Ari.

When I was a child, teachers would ask what I wanted to be when I grew up. My answers usually rotated between a children’s author, a journalist, and a teacher. I did not know exactly what my life would look like, but I knew I loved words. I loved stories. I loved learning about people, and somewhere inside of me was the desire to create something that mattered to someone else.

I had no idea how complicated the journey to becoming that person would be.

As a teenager, I lost my mother. There are some losses that become events in your life, and there are others that divide your life into a before and an after. Losing my mother became the latter.

Grief changed me.

In the years that followed, I struggled to understand not only her death, but myself. I searched for belonging, made mistakes, survived experiences I did not yet have the language to understand, and learned firsthand how complicated human beings can be. I learned that people can be hurting and still hurt other people. I learned that survival does not always look graceful. I learned that sometimes the things we do to escape our pain create entirely new kinds of pain.

And I learned that a person can lose themselves for a while without being lost forever.

My path into adulthood was anything but linear. I served in the U.S. Army Reserve. I became a mother. I pursued an education in psychology and eventually became a mental health therapist. I studied trauma, addiction, grief, relationships, mental illness, and human behavior—not only because they became part of my profession, but because I have spent much of my life trying to understand why people become who they become.

Somewhere along the way, I returned to something that had been there since childhood: writing.

Writing became a place where I could tell the truth.

I journal when my thoughts become too loud. I write poetry when ordinary language does not seem sufficient. I write about trauma, grief, identity, motherhood, relationships, survival, mental health, and the uncomfortable spaces between who we once were and who we are trying to become. Even when I write educational material, I never want to forget the human being behind the psychology.

I am interested in the parts of people that do not fit neatly into categories.

The person behind the diagnosis.

The story behind the behavior.

The grief underneath the anger.

The frightened person underneath the mistakes.

The things we carry quietly because we are afraid of what people might think if they knew.

My experiences have deeply influenced the way I write. I do not write from the perspective of someone who believes she has figured life out. I write as someone who has lived enough of it to know that people are complicated, healing is rarely linear, and becoming who you are can require grieving who you used to be.

Today, if someone asked me what I became when I grew up, I could give them a list.

I am a mother.

I am a U.S. Army veteran.

I am a mental health therapist.

I am an author.

But those titles only tell part of the story.

I am also someone who has grieved deeply, loved deeply, made mistakes, started over, questioned herself, survived difficult chapters, pursued an education while building a family, and continued searching for meaning in experiences that once seemed meaningless.

Outside of my professional work, I still find myself drawn to creating. I journal, write poetry, and work with leather, including making journals by hand. There is something meaningful to me about taking separate pieces and turning them into something that can hold a story.

Maybe that is what I have been doing all along.

My books are pieces of that journey. Some are educational. Some are personal. Some are creative. But beneath all of them is the same curiosity I have carried since I was young: **Why do people hurt? How do we survive what happens to us? And how do we find our way back to ourselves afterward?**

I don't write because I have all of the answers.

I write because I know what it is like to search for them.

And when I think about the little girl who once told her teachers she wanted to become an author, I realize something.

After everything it took to get here, she did.