My Book Is Available Now!

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My book is available now! I’m thrilled to share this with you. This has been a lengthy process, and it’s almost surreal to be here. I can’t wait to hear what you think. Orders are so helpful for authors, and I’d really appreciate your support.

Book Description

When writer and blogger Ayana Lage became pregnant, she prepared as any parent would: voraciously researching, Redditing, preparing for anything. And having experienced a previous miscarriage, she braced herself for the worst. But days after giving birth, Ayana’s sense of control began to break when God started speaking to her. After growing up Pentecostal and longing to hear from God, she heard him audibly for the first time—and often. God told her that she had been chosen. He told her that her daughter was the second coming of Jesus Christ. She carried around notebooks to ensure she didn’t miss any divine words. Eventually, she was diagnosed with post-partum psychosis and sent to a psychiatric ward, unable to see loved ones or her baby and sometimes unsure whether she’d actually had a baby at all.

Her once-rational thought process was consumed with delusions, and overnight, the self-professing people-pleaser turned into a fearless charismatic, obeying what she believed to be God’s orders—including pulling the fire alarm to force an evacuation in the hospital—and shouting at anyone who disagreed with her. Slowly, the medication and treatment began to work, and when she was well enough to be released, the hard road to recovery began.

Ayana struggled to adjust to normal life after the breaks she endured—both the psychosis itself and the experience of feeling betrayed by her mind. Once a fierce mental health advocate, she was still hesitant to share about psychosis, because of the stigma associated with this mental health disorder.

Drawing from Ayana’s notebooks and medical records, Missing Me is a gorgeously-written exploration of the revelations Ayana received during her psychotic episode, the surprising lessons about her life and faith revealed in the aftermath, and the long road to trusting her mind once again.

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Praise for Missing Me

“The unflinching debut from blogger Lage lays bare her struggles with mental illness, beginning with panic disorder and leading to postpartum psychosis […] This brave memoir does valuable work in dismantling the stigma of an often overlooked mental illness.” — Publishers Weekly

“Lage […] has chronicled her story in her brave and elegantly told new book.” — Tampa Bay Times

“In Missing Me, Ayana Lage lays bare her harrowing descent into postpartum psychosis and her fight back to herself. Raw, riveting, and unexpectedly hopeful, it’s a memoir about faith, stigma, and the resilience of the human spirit.” — Kate Baer, New York Times bestselling author of What Kind Of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, & And Yet

“In her stunning memoir, she recounts the moments her grip on reality began to slip, being placed in a psychiatric ward, and her return to health. […] Missing Me does important work in both vulnerable storytelling and the dismantling of the stigma around postpartum mental health.” — Bustle

“The only way we reclaim and heal our stories is by telling them in our own time and in our own tongues. The messy, the breathtaking, the painful, the beautiful, all of it belongs. These are the threads of our becoming, and vulnerability is the vessel that carries them home. Ayana opens her heart wide, offering a tender reflection of her own ache and beauty.