Erin E. Schaden

Erin E. Schaden is a writer, memoirist, avid reader, and chronic observer of the complicated, heartbreaking, hilarious business of being human.

She began writing at nine years old as a way to process trauma — filling journal after journal and never really stopping. Long before she had language for what she was experiencing, she had a pen and a blank page. Writing became a place to put the things she couldn't say out loud and to make sense of what didn't make sense.

All these years later, that really hasn't changed.

Erin still writes because it is the only way she knows how to fully process her feelings and her life. The difference is that now she shares it. She believes there is something powerful in saying the things we are most tempted to hide — and that if she is brave enough to tell the truth about her own life, it just might help someone else feel less alone in theirs.

Her perspective has been shaped by trauma, recovery, more than a few spectacular wrong turns, and the discovery that becoming yourself sometimes requires admitting all the ways you've been pretending not to be who you actually are.

For the past seven years, Erin has done exactly that through Naked Random Thoughts, her daily blog about identity, relationships, recovery, reinvention, heartbreak, absurdity, and whatever else wanders into her head over morning coffee. Writing every day has taught her that if you sit still long enough and tell the truth, eventually you're going to write something you weren't planning to admit.

She is also rarely without a book, reading roughly two a week and believing that some of the best conversations of her life have been carried entirely through pages someone else wrote.

Before turning her attention more fully to writing, Erin spent more than three decades as an attorney, mediator, and coach, sitting beside people through some of the messiest chapters of their lives. Eventually, she realized there was one story she had spent a very long time avoiding — the one she needed to tell about herself.

Untangling Samantha is that story.

At the heart of Erin's writing is the belief that it can take a very long time to fully blossom into the person you were always meant to become. Trauma may come to us through other people, but once it lands in our lives, it becomes ours. We don't get to choose what happened to us. We do get to decide what we will do with it — and how much longer we are willing to let it decide who we are.

Maybe becoming yourself isn't about becoming someone new at all. Maybe it's about finally setting down everything you had to become in order to survive.

Erin lives in Ojai, California, where she writes every morning, spends as much time outside as possible, reads anything she can get her hands on, works out like a fiend, and is perpetually outnumbered by animals.

Again, still...