why i wrote forged

For years, I existed in rooms where I was expected to perform at a high level professionally while privately carrying things that would have broken a lot of people.

The strange thing about pressure is that eventually it stops asking permission. It reveals everything. Your weaknesses. Your coping mechanisms. Your fears. Your identity. Your limits. Your strength.

And eventually, if you survive enough of it, it forces you to decide who you are actually becoming.

I did not write FORGED because I wanted to write a book.

I wrote it because there was no other way to explain a life that often felt impossible to explain out loud. The career people saw was real. The awards, the rooms, the title, the steel — all of it was real. But it was also the smallest part of the story.

Underneath it was everything else. The illness. The marriage. The grief. The motherhood. The reinventions. The version of myself I was raised to be, and the version I had to build instead.

FORGED is the book about that.

It is not a comeback story. It is a story about what survival actually looks like up close. About the cost of being the woman who refuses to break. And what gets built in the place of what's been lost.

I am writing it the way I lived it.

Slowly. Honestly. In the dark when it needed to be in the dark.

— Julie