This is a work of memoir / creative non-fiction.

What happens when you ask the natural world to help you heal? 

As a child, Syd didn’t know how to ask for help, but she did know how to talk to rabbits and squirrels, and how to listen to the rustle of the trees overhead — and in doing so, she would eventually lean deeply into those relationships to carve a path forward towards a full recovery from Bulimia (B).

For Syd, B lived with her and in her body for close to three decades. Regardless what form B took during those years, it was a struggle for Syd to find space, agency and freedom — to have an identity separate from B. She struggled with knowing who she was, where she fit in (if anywhere at all), and how to define the desires (emotional, sexual, spiritual) that naturally moved through her body as she grew up. Nothing seemed to make sense — even the therapists and groups she sought out in later years seemed only to make things worse. 

As a queer, mixed race, gender queer being, Syd refused to give up on the belief (no matter how squished it became at times) that who she was, must matter. Because, she existed — her body existed. To accept these two things meant that somewhere and somehow, her full, unapologetic being-ness must therefore be divinely ordained. 

How to get to that knowing in her body, however, is where the rabbits and squirrels and trees came in. 

This is the story of Release: how a young child invited in a magical being who would help her survive a life of emotional abuse, excessive bullying, racism, homophobia and self-hate…and what it would take, close to 30 years later, to release that energy, the bulimia, completely from her life. 

This is not a self-help book. It is a journey into the mystical realms of recovery and through the veil between reality + illusion. This is a story that is told in moments, a spell cast between covers, a weaving together of memories that reach back centuries and dream forward into the unknown.