From Blog to Newsletter: My Journey with the Mystic Review

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

📖 The Backstory 

I started this blog in 2010. 

Three years after my life imploded. Deep in what I would later learn was autistic burnout. A state that was the inevitable result of a lifetime spent pretending to be someone I wasn’t.

This was not my first experience of burnout, named or not, and I knew what to do with it. I returned to the spiritual and creative interests I’d left behind years earlier.

I did yoga. I wrote stories. I went back to school for graphic design. I read mythology and literature and vampire stories. I got a job at our local paper.

But it wasn’t enough money, and I had kids to think of. So I went back to my old life. And this time, when I burnt out I sought help and was immediately misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Heavily medicated and unable to engage with the things that I loved, I sunk into a deep depression. And then I had a dream.

🌙 The Dream

The dream was unlike any dream I’d ever had before. It was complex and vivid and remarkably coherent. It was so numinous and beautiful I knew it came from somewhere else—somewhere not-me.

I called it the Spirit Dream. And while I had no idea what to do with it things were different in its wake. I had other unusual dreams. I had spiritual experiences. I noticed synchronicities I could not dismiss.

Nobody in my day to day life understood what was happening to me then, or cared, so I started The Mystic Review because I needed a place where I could make sense of my experience.

I blogged my way through the New Age, Spiritualism, earth-based practices, and everything in between. I loved everything I was doing but I did it too hard. Things went wrong. I got burnt out again. I went back to the church.

I set The Mystic Review to private. I stopped writing down my dreams. When something seemed synchronistic, I dismissed it.

Until I couldn’t.

Because spirit wasn’t done with me yet.

✨ What Happened

In 2022 I was diagnosed with autism. In 2023 I hit a wall with my writing and took my first parapsychology course.

I began my first Substack newsletter, Writing on the Spectrum, in 2023 in an attempt to make sense of my autism and later ADHD diagnoses.

In 2024, I returned to dreamwork. Later that same year, I discovered Carl Gustav Jung. Synchronistically.

I saw the Spirit Dream in a whole new way—and I knew it was time to come back here to The Mystic Review.

I set the blog to public. I republished many of my old posts. And I started sharing some of those posts to substack at Writing on the Spectrum.

I finished a novel in 2025 and started another. And in between I wrote a neurodivergent spiritual memoir I called The Spirit Dream.

In 2026 I finished my paranormal romance novel and the memoir.

📝 What I’m Writing Now

With two books finished, I was interested in learning more about publishing so I took a workshop through Hay House. On day 3 of the workshop  Colette Baron Reid led us in a connect-with-the-spirit-of-your book meditation. I saw an 8 pointed star—a symbol I strongly associated with the spirit of the spirit dream.

I had been going back and forth on what to do with the memoir, knowing it probably wouldn’t get read on Amazon. The meditation brought me back to source and source seemed to be saying what the spirit of my book really wants is to be heard.

So I started serializing it to Writing on the Spectrum.

Then I started thinking about what The Mystic Review might want. And my intuition was that it would like its own space on Substack. So that’s what I’m doing.

The Mystic Review will continue here at this URL indefinitely, but all of the content will also be availble in the Mystic Review Newsletter. 

You can sign up for it here: