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Monday, 8 June 2026
What comes after therapy?
Why I Turned My Internet Essays into a Book and Why I’m Giving It Away
I’ve collected some of my essays into a book titled Sorry, But Your Ex Is Probably Not a Narcissist: Essays on Depth, Complexity, and Human Transformation. If you’ve been reading my work, you’ll recognize many of them, but probably not all. They’ve been scattered across several years and several publications, including Medium and this Substack, The Reflective Eclectic. This is the first time they’ve appeared together in one place. The essays I chose examine what psychology is actually for, and what gets lost when culture borrows its language to sort complicated people into categories; to diagnose rather than understand, to prescribe rather than explore. Read individually and online, each one makes its own argument. Read together, they make a larger one: about what we lose when we flatten human experience to fit a framework, and what becomes possible when we don’t. There’s also the more candid reason I made it into a book: I didn’t want this particular work to remain in the ethereal realm of the internet, destined to be harvested by AI and forgotten. A book stays put. It can sit on a shelf and be found years from now by someone who needs it. If all that doesn’t convince you to get this book, I have one more. For a few days, it’ll be free. If you get it, you’ll be able to keep it, read it when you want to, and pass it on to someone who might be interested. It’ll look impressive sitting in your bookcase. Try doing that with something you found on the internet. How to get the Kindle edition free, June 8–12During the first five days after publication, the Kindle edition is free. Here’s what to do: Click here to go to the book’s webpage and buy it. The price will show $0.00. That’s all. You don’t need a Kindle device. The free Kindle app works on any phone, tablet, or computer, and if you don’t have it, Amazon will prompt you to download it at no cost when you complete the purchase. The free window opens June 8th and closes at the end of the day on June 12th. After that, the price goes back to a manageable $2.99; so even if you’re late, it shouldn’t break you. The book is also available in paperback but it’s not included in the giveaway because of printing and shipping costs. A couple of favors to askFirst, if you know someone who reads this kind of work, or who has been in therapy long enough to have opinions about it, please share this post with them. The free promotion week is the best chance a new reader has to pick it up at no cost, and a recommendation from someone they trust is more likely to get them there than anything the Amazon algorithm will do on my behalf. Secondly, if you read the book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. Amazon’s algorithm decides which books to surface to readers based largely on reviews, how many there are, and how recently they came in. An independent author without a publisher’s marketing budget has essentially no other lever to pull. A review from you, however brief, is worth more than almost anything else I could do to get this book in front of people who haven’t heard of me. Because you’ll be downloading the Kindle edition directly from Amazon, your review will show as a verified purchase, which the algorithm weighs more heavily than reviews from people who received a copy another way, like from a friend or the library. There’s also this reason. You’ve already subscribed to my work, which means you value what I’m trying to do. If the essays have been worth your time over the years, a few sentences saying so is a reasonable way to support my work. I’d appreciate it if you would. Invite your friends and earn rewards
If you enjoy The Reflective Eclectic, share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.
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Sunday, 7 June 2026
The Other Side
I tried something a little different this week. I wrote a short piece for a Reedsy site prompt: “Write a story from the POV of a sidekick, or someone who is happy to stay away from the spotlight.” As I discovered, point of view can be more than a technical choice. Sometimes it opens a portal. I didn’t expect this prompt to lead me to Elliot’s imagined voice — present, but not omniscient; near, but not fully reachable. The result is The Other Side. It’s part ghost story, part grief meditation, part Twilight Zone transmission. The line is always open. 
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What comes after therapy?
"Where do I go from here?" ...
