Never Mind Who She Was

How much of your life can you spend surviving before you finally decide to live?

Never Mind Who She Was is a collection of poems about the versions of ourselves we become along the way: the child who learns to stay quiet, the woman who stays too long, the mother who keeps getting up, and the person who eventually realizes she is allowed to choose herself.

With honesty, humor, anger, tenderness, and faith, Jess Ayala writes about childhood, love, heartbreak, motherhood, solitude, forgiveness, aging, open roads, ordinary Tuesdays, good coffee, and the quiet moments that begin to feel like a life worth noticing.

These poems do not ask you to erase the past.

They ask what happens when you stop letting it have the final word.

For anyone who has spent years explaining who they were, what they survived, why they stayed, or how they got here, this collection offers another question:

Who are you becoming?

Because surviving may have gotten you here.

But it doesn't have to be where your story ends.

Never mind who she was.
There is still a whole life ahead of her.