A Reflection: The Girl Who Read Horror and Romance

A Hope-Filled Break from the Serious Stuff

Some days, after many hours of writing the serious stuff, I get a spark of creative inspiration that turns into a reflection piece. It happened today, and this is what I wrote…

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Once upon a time, there was a teenage girl who felt like the world had forgotten to send her an instruction manual. She watched her peers laugh their way through adolescence—confident, carefree, and magnetic—while she moved like a ghost in the hallways of high school, always a few steps behind.

She wanted what most girls want at that age: to be pretty, to be chosen, to be adored by her crush. She studied them all like foreign languages—the glossy-haired girls with perfect teeth and easy laughs, the boys who looked right through her as if she were wallpaper.

So she disappeared into books. They were her escape hatch from a reality that felt like walking through fog with stones in her shoes. She devoured vampire horror and romance novels—an odd pairing, perhaps, but one that made more sense the older she got. After all, both genres involved hearts being chased, consumed, broken open.

She didn’t know it then, but the stories were training her for something.

When it came time to choose a man, she had no map, only myths. Her idea of love was stitched together from paperbacks and painful memories: the screaming matches behind closed doors, the long silences at the dinner table, the way her mother seemed to fold smaller every year.

Still, she believed in love. She believed, especially, in survival.

So she set the bar where many girls from chaos do:
A man who doesn’t gamble.
Doesn’t drink too much.
Doesn’t take hard drugs.
Doesn’t cheat.

She never knew that even men who ticked all those boxes could still be dangerous. That cruelty could come with clean fingernails. That control could wear the scent of aftershave. That manipulation might sound like “I’m only doing this because I love you.”

She mistook the absence of obvious red flags for safety. She thought pain had to be loud to be real.

But the books had tried to warn her.

Horror taught her how to scream.
Romance taught her how to hope.
And somewhere between the two, she learned how to survive.

Still with me?

Because this isn’t just her story. It’s the story of many women who grew up thinking love was something to endure rather than enjoy. Who were taught to make do, not to ask for more. Who mistook the minimum for enough, and thought that quiet suffering was the price of being loved.

But there comes a day—quiet, almost imperceptible—when a woman wakes up and decides:
No more novels.
No more fantasies.
Only truth.

She becomes the writer of her own story. And this time, she doesn’t kill herself off in the second act.

But here’s the good news:

She didn’t stay stuck in that story.

One day, something shifted. Not all at once, not dramatically. Healing rarely shows up like a parade. It was subtle—like a lamp turned on in a dim room. A verse she couldn’t shake. A deep knowing in her spirit that she was made for more. That love shouldn’t feel like fear, and peace isn’t earned through endurance.

She started unlearning the noise.
She began rebuilding her identity—not around who had hurt her, but around who had held her all along.

God was always there, in the library corner, in the quiet tears, in the pages of those stories she escaped into. And now, He was gently calling her back—not to fantasy, but to truth. To a life that doesn’t need to be survived, but lived.

Because here’s what no one told her back then:

She wasn’t too much.
She wasn’t too quiet.
She wasn’t unlovable.
She was simply surrounded by people who couldn’t see her light—or worse, wanted to extinguish it.

And among those people, there were real-life vampires—energy vampires.

They weren’t immortal, and they didn’t sparkle in the sun. But they had the same hunger: to feed, on her light, her hope, her very soul.

They wore different faces—sometimes kind, sometimes charming, sometimes painfully familiar.

At first, she didn’t recognise them for what they were. She thought love meant giving until there was nothing left. She thought endurance was strength. She thought silence was peace.

But slowly, she saw the truth.

That her energy was precious. That her boundaries mattered. That no one had the right to drain her and leave her empty.

And just like the heroines in her vampire novels who fought for their lives, she fought back—quietly, fiercely, with every piece of herself.

She learned to protect her heart, to recognise the hunger masked as love, and to walk away from what would consume her.

Now, she walks differently. Not because the road is easier, but because she knows who walks with her.
She’s not waiting to be chosen—she already is.
Not chasing love—it already found her.
And she’s no longer living in someone else’s story.

This one?
This is hers.
And she’s just getting started.

She is me.
She is you.

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Healing loudly so others don’t have to suffer quietly…
Elaine Christine xx