The Stillness Between the Rain: Writing

Ireland was my first big solo trip. Not just a vacation, not a weekend girl’s trip, not some half-baked getaway. No. This was me, a Black woman from America, stepping onto new soil, alone, to see the vastness of the world with nothing but faith, a carry-on, and a dream. It was December 31st, 2024, and I had officially become what I used to whisper about when I was too scared to dream too big: a solo traveler. A woman walking into the world.

I started in Ireland.

There’s something about the way Ireland breathes. It’s not just misty hills and sheep-dotted pastures. It’s not just the stone castles or winding roads carved like veins into the land. It’s the stillness. The hush that falls between the raindrops, the green that whispers to you in tones older than language. Ireland isn’t just a place you see. It’s a place you feel. And what it whispered to me was: Remember.

Ireland made me remember.

It made me remember my childhood. The daydreams I used to escape into. The way I would huddle in the back corner of the library at age seven, clutching fantasy novels bigger than my head. The librarian’s old cat stretched lazily on the windowsill, watching me with bored indifference as I traveled through stories that lit my imagination on fire. That quiet, magical solitude of discovery. I felt that again in Ireland.

Ireland made me remember who I was before the world told me who I was supposed to be. Before the anxiety, before the fear, before the weight of expectations. Before the jobs and the bills and the relationships that wore me down. Ireland reintroduced me to the girl who believed in magic. Who believed in her own voice. And once I met her again, I knew I wasn’t going to lose her.

Every stone, every raindrop, every whisper of wind told me what I had forgotten: You are a writer. Not just someone who writes, not someone who hopes to write someday—but a writer, born and bred. A writer of fantasy, of romance, of suspense. A writer of screenplays, of novels, of short stories that crack hearts open and pour in light. A writer who weaves entire universes from sentences. I had known this once, in a quiet way. But Ireland made me shout it from the mountaintops.

I didn’t go to Ireland just to travel. I went to remember.

I went to remember how fiction saved me. How it held me in moments when no one else did. I went to feel again what it was like to be transported by a story, to live inside a world so fantastical it could only exist between pages. I went to find that still, sacred place where the writer in me lives—and I found it, nestled between the emerald hills and the steady patter of Irish rain.

When I listened to Irish history told from Irish mouths—stories of resistance, survival, and soul—I felt something stir. The rhythm of those voices, the weight of those stories, the bloodlines woven back centuries into that very land... it cracked something open in me. It made space. Not just for my own voice, but for the voices of my characters, for the worlds I had yet to write, for the futures I hadn’t yet dared to imagine.

Ireland reminded me that stories are sacred.

That creating them is an act of defiance. Of beauty. Of hope.

So I walked through ancient streets and along mossy cliffs with a pen in one hand and a thousand ideas in the other. I wrote between the raindrops. I dreamed between my steps. I breathed in that thick Irish air like it was medicine and let it do what it came to do: heal me.

Because Ireland wasn’t just my first stop. It was the beginning of a new life. A life where writing isn’t a wish—it’s the way I move through the world. A life where I chase landscapes and people and myths and moments and weave them into something alive. Something whole.

A life where I don’t just read fairytales—I write them.

And so, in the stillness between the rain, I remembered.

I remembered why I was created.

To write.

To dream.

To bring magic to the page.

And now, the world knows it too.

—Stephanie