Ladybugs know things
My mind winds around corners. It’s not quite the nodes and webs of a systems thinker, nor is it the bulleted list of a linear one. It’s oddly spatial, even though I am terrible at spatial reasoning in general. My thoughts live on a map, and I can spend hours wandering my own interiority, perfectly content to stroll along a garden path of reasoning and pause for ladybugs.
Ladybugs know things.
When I was a child, my favorite thing was to find roly-poly bugs and pick them up. They would curl into their armored ball in my hand, and I would sit, still and watchful, waiting until they opened up and started to crawl along my fingers. There was something sacred and beautiful in that moment, when they started to trust that I would not crush them and they could explore me.
Somehow I was born with the trust that if I was patient and open, others would find me. The world has been trying to talk me out of it ever since.
A woman I dated once told me she loved that I had a rich inner life. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so seen, and not because she saw all that deeply. Most of my life, I haven’t been seen at all.
My deepest wounds are made from an immaterial knife. I didn’t expect that writing my book would activate them so intensely, though perhaps I should have, as it’s my oldest story: trying to weave a narrative that entices the mind of another, bringing them to a new place so they can understand things in a new way. So they can understand me.
I’ve made a truly astonishing number of 3D models for a video game I like (again, a hilarious hobby given that I can’t order anything on Amazon that isn’t comically over- or under-sized). Garden gates and fairy houses, beehives, and flower pots, drawing tables and lamps and armchairs draped with cozy blankets. Coffee shops and bookshelves, so many bookshelves.
What they all have in common is welcome. I spend the majority of my professional and personal lives arranging mental and physical spaces to make someone walk in and feel safe, understood, welcome. A good friend once complimented the lighting in my house and I carried that compliment for days, because it meant that all my effort to find just the right things had paid off.
Writing this book was not just an intellectual project. I crafted every sentence with the same care and anticipation I put towards everything I love, building argument on example on emotional truth that I spent hours embodying to make sure it was right. This argument matters to me, in part because it’s the truest thing I know, and in part because some part of me believes that if I can tell it right, I will be seen along with it.
It’s that last part that’s getting me into trouble. Because everywhere I go, now that I’m trying to sell it, tells me some variant of your packaging is wrong. Didn’t grab me. Make it punchier. Tell everyone what’s going to happen, make sure they feel no sense of confusion or curiosity or wonder, just give them the takeaway.
Which chapter do I skip to for the answers?
The way you present yourself is confusing, I don’t get you, maybe if you were easier to want, easier to package, had more charm or more zing, I could find some kind of access point, but alas, there’s something that smells good down the road.
But you know, when I’m honest and not speaking just from my injuries, I get a lot of other messages too. Comments that say this mattered to me, thank you. You make it so safe here. I didn’t know where we were going but somehow we always end up in the right place. You thought you were getting it wrong, but you did everything right. You taught me something I didn’t know I was missing.
I waver a lot, internally, between those two sets of messages: you’re getting it right and you’re getting it wrong. I think I might finally be at a point in my life where I might just let it be that way.
I think the truth might be that I do have something true to say, and there are people who want to read for the experience of discovery and not just the nugget they walk away with at the end. But in between us is this marketing machine that we are both trying to navigate: me trying to compress myself into a quick punchy intro that doesn’t make my soul die and them trying to sort through a stream of clickbait to find something worth settling into.
You know what’s funny? By market standards, my book is slightly too short.
This is a beautiful reminder that some of the most profound lessons in biology come from simply observing nature.
As a physician-scientist, I find it fascinating how organisms that seem simple on the surface often reveal extraordinarily sophisticated biological strategies. Evolution does not optimize for elegance, but it optimizes for survival within a complex environment. Traits that appear surprising or counterintuitive often reflect millions of years of adaptation to ecological pressures.
Ladybugs are a wonderful example of how small organisms can embody principles that also resonate in human biology: defense mechanisms, signaling, cooperation with their environment, and resource allocation. Nature repeatedly demonstrates that resilience is rarely based on a single advantage; it emerges from networks of interacting systems.
One of the most exciting aspects of modern science is that we are increasingly learning by looking outward from insects to whales to plants and asking what evolutionary solutions can teach us about our own health and longevity.
Curiosity is often where discovery begins. Sometimes the smallest creatures offer some of the biggest insights.
In the quest to reduce word count I decided to rewrite a chapter on a certain part of our history so it was more straightforward and less confusing. Taking EBDAC and turning it into ABCDE. It certainly cut the page count. But, as I read through it, I realised it had lost something important...
It was supposed to be confusing! That had been the emotional heart of the chapter. It was supposed to leave you feeling "Well that was a messy bit of history". It wasn't supposed to make sense of it. It was supposed to show how idiotic it was.
Clearer communication isn't always about making something easier to read. It's about pulling out the heart of the work and making sure it sings through. Perhaps that is a message which goes somewhere between the two voices you've been struggling with? Perhaps, rather than change the book, it's asking you to sing your song louder within it?
In the end, every book is different. So trust in yourself and don't get too lost in trying to prempt what editors or agents may want. Write your book. Sooner or later someone who you resonate with will help it sing in a way that resonates with you 🤗