Dispatch #6: Loneliness, Solitude, and the Making of Max West

People assume writers create solitude to work — but I didn’t start writing because I enjoy being alone. I started writing because I spent most of my life feeling alone already.

Not in the dramatic teenage diary sense.
More in the way where you can be surrounded by people and still feel like you’re orbiting on your own frequency.

Growing up, loneliness wasn’t mysterious — it was normal.
You don’t have to be abandoned to feel like an orphan; sometimes it’s just knowing you were never rooted anywhere to begin with.

I was told early that I wouldn’t amount to much — at least not compared to my brother — and that most people would either using me or laugh at me. You internalize that. You shrink before anyone else gets the chance to do it for you.

I carried that into adulthood, especially in the military. I knew how to excel, perform, and lead — but I didn’t know how to connect. I kept people at arm’s length. I didn’t build many close friendships, and I filled the space with unhealthy relationships until I met my husband and finally understood what stability looked like.

And here I am, middle-aged, and in many ways that worldview proved accurate — Monday marks two years since anyone in my family has spoken to me, and two years since I decided I didn’t need to speak back. The silence doesn’t shock me anymore; it has merely clarified what was already true.

But I wouldn’t undo any of it.

When Loneliness Turns Into Solitude

At some point, loneliness stops being something that happens to you and becomes something you choose — not because you’re bitter, but because you’re done contorting yourself for belonging that never existed.

Somewhere between my late thirties and now, being alone shifted from ache to asset. I stopped shrinking. I stopped playing small. I stopped worrying about making other people comfortable.

Solitude isn’t the absence of connection; it’s knowing who you are without needing permission.

It didn’t come from a single moment or epiphany — it came from lived experience. Years in the military taught me how to stand on my own.

And that’s where Max West came from.

He isn’t tortured or brooding for effect. He just operates better at the edges — connected, but not dependent. Loyal, but not naive. Present, but rarely understood.

That worldview didn’t come from craft books. It came from life.

Solitude became my fuel — not my escape.

And once I stopped shrinking, my imagination stopped doing it too.

Max arrived as someone who doesn’t apologize for being separate — he simply is. He lives in a world full of noise while remaining fundamentally apart from it. He notices things. He moves through a city without trying to belong to it.

He grew out of the parts of me I finally stopped hiding.

Claiming It

Two years without contact from my family isn’t surprising.
It just confirms what I already knew — I was never really part of them to begin with.

And here’s the truth people don’t expect:
I wouldn’t erase any of it.

The isolation, the conditioning, the years spent performing smallness — all of it shaped me in ways that matter more than whatever “belonging” I was supposed to earn.

Without that history, I don’t think Max West would exist.
I don’t think No Rest for the Wicked would, either.

Loneliness didn’t break me.
It built me.

I built a life that wasn’t predicted for me.
I wrote characters nobody else would have written.

Max West exists because I stopped shrinking.
No Rest for the Wicked exists because I stopped waiting for permission to do what I want to do the way I want to do it.

That’s not tragedy — that’s ownership, and I feel pretty damn good about it.

— Kat