I didn’t set out to write about isolation. Or detached outsiders. Or the quiet, invisible ways we exile ourselves.

I’ve ended up there anyway. Again.

The project I’m working on now (in the background of my main project, Deep Space Blues) is called —After Checkmate. It didn’t start as a confession. It started as a story. A good one, I think. Character-driven, sharp-edged, reflective in the ways I like best. But the deeper I go, the more I realise I’m writing a kind of psychoanalysis. Not in theme, but in pattern. Not consciously, but undeniably.

Deep Space Blues too—the two main characters are perpetual outsiders, travellers throughout the galaxy. They live rootless, connection-free lives. They’re in the worlds they inhabit, but they’re not of them.

I don’t write self-inserts. Never have. I’ve always hated the idea—too exposed, too self-indulgent, too easy to break the spell of fiction. I build characters the way I build settings: deliberately, with distance.

But still, aspects of me creep in. Not the surface details, but something quieter and harder to fake. A worldview. A fracture. A mechanism.

When I step back, I see it.

The way my characters build distance. The way they refuse intimacy, real connection without always knowing why. The way they watch the world more than they let it affect them. Their competence as camouflage. Their quiet, practiced detachment.

They’re not me. Not even close.

But the architecture of their internal world has my fingerprints, whether I meant to leave them or not.

It’s something I only really notice in reflection. When I go back to earlier drafts, or when I try to explain them to someone else. That’s when the patterns show. That’s when I realise I’ve been circling the same themes again and again. Not out of any intent, and not with solution involved. There’s a part of me that returns to these themes, turning them over, and slowly, I’m coming to understand the weight and shape of them.

Some part of me has always stood one step removed. Even now—writing this—I feel like I’m describing someone I used to be, even though I know I’m still wearing parts of that skin. I have always been drawn to the margins, to liminal spaces, to be the observer rather than the participant. And like the characters I write, I’m fluent in belonging without fully trusting it.

What fascinates me and, if I’m honest, what haunts me a little, is how I keep coming back to it in fiction. I’ll think I’m telling a plot-driven story, or building a cool concept, and then somehow I’m back at the edges again. Back with the girl who left before she could be left. The man who doesn’t speak unless it’s strategic. The ally who can’t quite make peace with being truly seen.

I don’t know if writing heals this. Maybe it doesn’t have to. Maybe it’s enough that it illuminates it. That it lets me hold the shape of the thing, turn it over, see how it refracts light.

This isn’t a post with a takeaway. I’m not trying to wrap it in meaning. I just wanted to name it, this thread I keep finding in my work, this thin, persistent line between my fiction and the parts of me I rarely acknowledge.

I’m not writing about me.

But I am writing through me.

And sometimes, that’s even more revealing.