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The stories we tell ourselves can shape our reality, contributing to anxiety, depression, OCD, or other mental health challenges when those stories take a fearful or bleak turn. Here author Chloe Benjamin shares her own mental health journey, and the role storytelling has played in leading to self-awareness and healing.

Q: Share a bit about your background and what inspired you to write your latest novel, Under Story.

Chloe Benjamin: I’m not a scientist, but I often write about them! Science fascinates me from a philosophical perspective, as a way to muse about big, existential mysteries. Scientific disciplines have come so far—we can send a shuttle into space and treat cancer—and yet there are these enormous questions we still don’t know the answers to: what happens after death, or whether there is other life in the universe. On the other hand, I’m also interested in spirituality, intuition, and feeling as alternate ways of approaching the unknown. Under Story is my third novel, and all of them circle these themes in some way.

As for the specific inspiration behind Under Story, there were two initial threads. In 2020, I heard about ANITA, a neutrino experiment at Antarctica’s McMurdo base. ANITA had detected unexpected results, and an outside scientist suggested that perhaps those results were evidence of a speculative model known as a CPT-symmetric universe. In this model, the Big Bang created two universes: the one we know, and a second universe where properties like........

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