Kiera Gerety

There are things I didn’t write down.
Not because they didn’t matter, some of them mattered more than the things I did. But not everything survives translation. Some truths stay lodged in the body, bone-deep, in that place just behind the ribcage where grief hums like a tuning fork. Some things I held too tightly to loosen their shape into language.

“I tried to become ash. Instead, I caught fire.”

Ink, Blood, & Prayer is not the whole story.
It’s a bleeding, yes. A collection of what I could bear to show you while I was still stitching myself shut. It’s my last relapse, the edge of my scream, the ninety days I spent clawing toward light. But it’s also a curated survival. There were memories I couldn’t bring myself to touch. There were names I didn’t write, apologies I didn’t make, and rooms I still can’t walk back into. Not even in poems.

People talk about courage like it’s in the telling. But sometimes courage is also in the silence. In the restraint. In the choice to let certain wounds remain unnamed, sacred, or festering. I didn’t write everything. I couldn’t. And maybe I shouldn’t have, even if I could.

This post is for what I left out.
For the haunted edges, the invisible chapters. For the version of me who still weeps over the pages I burned. I want to talk about those absences, not as erasures, but as choices. I want to pull back the veil just far enough to show you the cost of telling the truth, and the grace of holding some of it back.

So here we are. Let’s talk about the silence between the stanzas.

The Things I Didn’t Write

There’s a weight to what we don’t say. A hum beneath the poems, a kind of shadow that holds the shape of what was left behind. When I wrote Ink, Blood, & Prayer, I wasn’t trying to document everything. I wasn’t building a timeline or writing a memoir. I was surviving. I was trying to speak the truest things I could without splitting myself open again.

So no, this book doesn’t include every detail. It doesn’t walk you through the darkest hours in real time. There are moments I chose not to share, for my own sake and for the sake of those who walked beside me during the hardest years of my life. There are names I left out. People I once loved fiercely who are now just soft echoes in the corners of old memories. There are things I did, things I said, people I lost, that I’m still not ready to hold up to the light.

Some stories I’m still learning how to hold:

• The moment I realized I didn’t want to die, but also didn’t know how to live
• The dreams I had for who I’d be by now
• The prayers I whispered to Gods I no longer trust the same way
• The ways my body remembers things I’ve tried to forget
• The love I still carry for people I had to walk away from

I think it’s easy to assume vulnerability means complete exposure. But it doesn’t. Vulnerability, real vulnerability, is choosing to tell the truth with care. It’s knowing what to say and what to let rest in silence. It’s saying: This is the part I can offer you now. This is what I’ve made peace with.

There were cravings that nearly swallowed me whole that I only gesture toward in the poems. There were days I didn’t think I would survive, not just because I was using, but because I no longer wanted to survive. There were people who hurt me deeply. And people I hurt in return. I’ve wrestled with whether or not to include those stories, and I’ve had to be honest about what I’m ready for, and what isn’t mine alone to share.

What you won’t find in this book are the graphic details of my lowest points. You won’t find stories that belong to others, repurposed for the sake of catharsis. You won’t find cruelty for the sake of drama. Not because those things didn’t happen, but because I believe in protecting the sacred, mine and theirs.

I’ve learned that silence can be a kind of prayer. That withholding can be a boundary. That what we leave out can be just as meaningful as what we choose to say.

I don’t owe the world everything. And neither do you.

“My recovery began not with hope, but with surrender.”

So if you’re reading this and wondering if your story matters, even if it’s not written in full, know that it does. If you’re still holding parts of your past close to the chest, still unsure how to name them, know that you’re not alone. Sometimes the bravest thing we can do is not tell the whole story. Sometimes survival means holding something in your hands and choosing to keep it there.

This book is honest, yes. But it isn’t exhaustive. It wasn’t meant to be.

I gave you what I could. The rest is still mine.

The Reader I Wrote For

I didn’t write Ink, Blood, & Prayer for a general audience. I didn’t sit down and think about market trends or genre expectations or how it would land with people scrolling Amazon for their next poetry collection. I wrote it for someone specific. Or maybe for a dozen someones, all of them real to me, even if I’ve never met them.

What I hope you find in these pages:

• A reminder that your worst day isn’t the end
• A voice that doesn’t flinch from your truth
• A little breath of hope between the pain
• A sense of sacredness in your survival
• The knowledge that you are never too far gone

I wrote it for the girl in a sober living house, curled on a twin bed under a scratchy blanket, hands still trembling from detox. She’s holding a copy of this book like it might bite her or save her. She’s circling poems and whispering stanzas to herself like spells. I wrote it for her, because I was her, and sometimes, I still am.

I wrote it for the witch who pours herself a shot of something stronger than courage after moon prayers she doesn’t believe in anymore. She’s in withdrawal, physically or spiritually or both. Her altar’s dusty, her hope is cracked, and she’s begging her Gods, any Gods, to give her a reason not to give up. She sees herself in the shadows of my stanzas. She recognizes the ache.

I wrote it for the mother who relapsed during her kid’s birthday party. Who washed the icing off her hands and locked the bathroom door and stared into the mirror and said, What the fuck have you done again. I wrote it for the woman who walked back into her NA meeting with her head down and still got hugged. Who thinks she doesn’t deserve forgiveness, but reads my words and dares to believe she might be wrong.

I wrote it for the punk kid who’s still raw from last week’s overdose. Who has a crow tattooed on their collarbone and a cigarette tucked behind their ear. Who doesn’t believe in anything except music, and maybe death. Who finds this book in a thrift store bin and flips to the page where I say, I didn’t want to survive either, and believes me.

“I’m not at war anymore, but I still flinch at the sound of peace.”

I wrote it for the ones whose bodies hold more stories than they’ve ever told. The ones who were raised with religion and hurt by it, but who still ache for divinity. The ones who’ve buried friends. The ones who think they’ve gone too far to come back. The ones who don’t want to be saved, but do want to be seen.

And it’s that reader, you, if you recognize yourself in any of these shadows, who shaped what I wrote. I didn’t hold back because I was afraid. I held back because I respect you. Because I didn’t want to make you bleed just to prove that I did. Because I know what it’s like to be early in recovery, to be fragile, to be furious, to be unsure if any of this is worth it. I didn’t want to trigger that part of you. I wanted to sit beside it.

When I wrote these poems, I imagined them being read in stolen moments: on smoke breaks behind a shelter, in the passenger seat of a friend’s car, under covers at 3 a.m. I imagined them dog-eared, stained with coffee or tears. I didn’t imagine them being dissected in an English class. I imagined them being clutched in shaking hands.

And that meant I had to write from a place of honesty, not spectacle. That meant I had to prioritize connection over completion. That meant I had to write not the most devastating thing, but the most true thing I could offer you, without it costing me my soul.

If you’ve ever felt like you weren’t supposed to survive, and then you did, this book is for you.

If you’re still not sure if surviving was a good thing, this book is for you, too.

Glimpses of What Comes Next

Ink, Blood, & Prayer was the scream.
The raw cry from the bathroom floor, the altar of ash, the gasp of a woman clawing her way back from the edge. It was written inside the rupture, through relapse, through surrender, through the trembling early days of recovery where every breath felt borrowed.

“The Gods grew quiet, and I had to learn to listen in the silence.”

But there’s more to say.

My next book, When the Noise Stops, Who Am I?, is about the quiet that follows survival. It’s about what happens after the drama fades, after the applause of your own resurrection dies down. It’s the long days where no one claps, no one checks in, and no one warns you how heavy the silence will be.

This is the book of early recovery, the real kind. The one where your body is clean but your mind is still at war. Where the cravings come back in softer, more manipulative ways. Where you sit with the wreckage of your own choices and try to make peace with the person who made them. It’s about making amends not just with others, but with the self you abandoned, the God you cursed, the body you betrayed.

What recovery taught me when the world went quiet:

• That peace can feel threatening after chaos
• That forgiveness is a daily ritual, not a single act
• That rebuilding is lonelier than I expected—and more honest
• That the Gods don’t always shout—they whisper
• That staying is its own kind of miracle

In these poems, I look hard at the truth. I wrestle with the work of letting go of shame while still being accountable. I try to name the parts of me that I wanted to kill, but now have to learn how to live with. There is less fire in this collection and more ash. More stillness. More sitting in the ache. And yet, somehow, more light.

And then there’s The Longest Walk Back to Myself.
This one is quieter still. Not about breaking or burning, but about becoming. It’s about learning how to live in the body again. About walking through grief, rage, forgiveness, and the slow rebuilding of identity. It’s a book about rediscovering softness. About meeting the version of me who survived it all, and choosing to stay with her.

“Healing wasn’t loud. It was quiet as moss. Slow as breath. Sacred as staying.”

It’s full of poems that sit with silence, with beauty, with memory. There are moments of sacred rage, yes, but also moments of deep gentleness. Of realizing that I am not who I was when I first cried out to the Gods. And that’s okay. I’ve changed. I’ve healed in places I didn’t think could be touched. I’ve grown new skin.

What comes next is not louder. It’s deeper.
Not more dramatic, but more true.

And I hope, wherever you are in your own journey, you’ll come with me.

Come Sit With Me a While

If something in this post stirred something in you, if you found yourself remembering what you chose not to say, or the chapters you’ve never been ready to write, I’d love to hear about it. Share in the comments what you’ve left unsaid in your own recovery, your own rituals of survival. You don’t have to give it all away. Just enough to know you’re still here.

If you haven’t yet, you can pre-order Ink, Blood, & Prayer now, available in both print and eBook, releasing July 17th, 2025. It’s a book born of blood and belief, and I can’t wait to put it in your hands.

You can also subscribe to my newsletter to get deeper reflections, behind-the-scenes insights, and the sacred mess of the writing process delivered to your inbox every Saturday. I share things there I don’t post anywhere else.

And if you know someone who’s still in it, who’s still clawing their way back from the dark, please send this post to them. We don’t always need advice. Sometimes we just need to see someone else survived.

Not every story fits between two covers.
But if you’re still reading, still breathing, still reaching,
I wrote this for you, too.