Why I Created the Archive of Lost Ideas

At some point, I stopped recognizing myself.

The things that used to make me feel alive had become a blurry memory. Getting excited by an idea. Disappearing into a story. Making something just to see what it might become.

I remembered feeling that way, but I could no longer remember how to get there.

The rest of me kept going. Work, expectations, the ordinary grind of being an adult. Most days, though, I felt like I was moving through the motions of a life that used to belong to me.

Ideas still came, which might have been the worst part.

I would see something I desperately wanted to make, get excited, buy the supplies, and then watch it collect dust. I wanted to begin, but rarely had the energy. When I did manage to start, I doubted every decision until stopping felt easier.

I was living with autistic burnout, anxiety, and a body that did not cooperate the way I needed it to. At the same time, I was trying to keep up with everything adults are supposedly meant to know how to do and pretending I was doing fine.

Somewhere in all of that, I had lost access to myself.

Then I started realizing I was not the only one. A neurodivergent friend told me she still loved making things but could no longer create the way she once had. A coworker said she wished she were creative, as though she had missed her chance. Post after post said some version of the same thing: burned out, disconnected, sure their spark was gone.

The last thing any of us needed was another course.

When you are already exhausted, a course can feel like homework. Something meant to help quietly turns into something else to fall behind on.

I did not want to teach people how to be creative.

I wanted to make them curious enough to forget, for a moment, that they were afraid to try.

I wanted to wake up the part of us that once believed a wardrobe might lead somewhere else, a letter could arrive from a hidden world, or an ordinary room might contain a secret no one else had noticed.

I grew up loving Narnia, Hogwarts, mysteries, secret societies, and worlds that felt larger than the one I was standing in. When real life felt too heavy, those stories made possibility feel real again.

I wanted to build a world that could do that.

Then I realized I already had.

In high school, I started writing a mystery called Knowing. It followed a girl working in a library who became tangled in something hidden. The further I wrote, the stranger and more magical the story became. I shared the first chapters online, and people loved it.

Then college happened. Work happened. Life happened.

The story disappeared beneath everything else, and eventually I lost the spark that had been guiding it. For years, I thought of Knowing as another thing I had failed to finish.

Then an idea appeared: a hidden Archive where abandoned characters, unfinished projects, and everything we meant to return to might still be waiting.

And suddenly, there she was.

The girl from the library.

Knowing had not vanished. It had become one of the first lost ideas inside the Archive.

That changed the way I saw everything I had left unfinished. An idea did not have to reach its intended ending to matter. It could still have taught me something, carried me through a hard season, or helped me become someone new. Returning did not mean going backward and trying to recreate the person I had once been.

I could come back changed.

The idea could change too.

That became the heart of the Archive of Lost Ideas: a world where unfinished does not mean failed.

Inside, ideas glow in jars, strange notes turn up where they should not be, and hidden rooms wait at the ends of corridors that seem to move when no one is looking.

It is part story, part mystery, and part invitation to see what your own imagination does with what it finds.

I built the doorway I needed when I no longer recognized myself.

Now I am leaving it open.

Enter the Archive of Lost Ideas →

Explore the first month free, follow the clues, and see what has been waiting for you.