I used to read to find the right answer.
That is how reading was taught to me — as a problem to be solved. What is the author trying to say? What is the theme? What does the symbol mean? There was always a correct interpretation and your job was to find it. Your own emotional response to the text was not part of the curriculum.
I almost became a teacher. I went back to school for my second degree in elementary education and got close enough to see the system from the inside. Close enough to understand exactly what we were doing to children and their relationship with books. Teaching them that reading was about getting it right. That their feelings about a story didn't count as a legitimate reading of it.
I couldn't finish the degree. Not because I gave up — but because I couldn't reconcile what I believed about reading with what I was being asked to teach.
So I left. And I went back to books.
The Moment Everything Changed
I was working in hospitality and travel — a job that kept me moving, kept me present for other people, and left very little room for the interior life I was quietly carrying.
Then I read Viola Davis' memoir.
Her experience was nothing like mine. Her life, her struggles, her particular kind of survival — none of it mapped directly onto my own. And yet somewhere in those pages, I found something I had been looking for without knowing I was looking. I found what bravery looks like when it doesn't look like anything you expected. I found language for something I couldn't yet say out loud.
That is when I understood what reading could actually do.
Not the reading I had been taught. Not the reading that asked me to find the correct answer. But the other kind — the kind that sits with you in the dark and doesn't need to be correct at all.
What I BuiltI built The Literary Wellness Coach because I wanted a space that didn't exist yet.
Not a book club with homework and deadlines. Not a therapy space. Not a place you needed to be well to enter. Something softer. Slower. More human.
A place where reading meets reflection. Where mental health meets literature. Where you don't have to separate what you're feeling into categories.
I built free tools for intentional readers — a personal reading library, a mood matcher that finds your next book based on where you actually are emotionally, a ritual builder, a personality quiz. I wrote essays on what reading does to the anxious mind, the grieving body, the searching soul. I launched a podcast for the books that won't let you stay quiet about them.
And I built a community — The Books We Sit With — for every woman who was taught to read correctly and is learning, maybe for the first time, to read for herself.
Who This Is For
This is for you if you have ever —
Finished a book and needed to tell someone — anyone — what it did to you.
Read a sentence that felt like someone wrote it specifically about you.
Sat in a parked car for four extra minutes because you couldn't leave the chapter yet.
Cried at a book and not been entirely sure why.
Picked up a book during the hardest season of your life and found it was the only thing that made any sense.
You don't have to read fast. You don't have to have opinions. You don't have to have finished the book.
You just have to be willing to sit with it.
That's enough.