Qualia Reed

By Qualia Reed What’s an Inner Lawyer? Throughout much of my life, I’ve felt a pull toward what I like to name my inner lawyer. Think of the inner lawyer as a sort of hyper-vigilant defence mechanism. My inner lawyer operates largely on my childhood programming that I am inherently an unsafe, inadequate, or downright wrong person, and therefore, to achieve a state of safety, adequacy, or rightness, I must create a case for myself and plead it to the people around me, the jury of my peers, so...

Helping is a beautiful thing, but when it becomes a person’s identity, it can bring with it a lot of pain as well. I always wanted to help others. After years as a paramedic with the ambulance service, I decided to explore what I then considered a more sustainable career path and went to university to become a registered nurse. It seemed a great option; I could gain knowledge, help more, earn a more livable wage, and be safer while doing it. A nursing instructor and mentor once told me that...

I use a lot of storytelling and metaphors in my work. This is part of who I am, and is partly because it comes natural to me. It’s why I write novels for fun in my spare time. There’s always something powerful for me, the way humans interact with stories and storytelling. It’s one of, if not our oldest art forms. It’s also more than that. Storytelling is a way of communicating ideas to each other when the plain facts themselves may not speak loudly enough. It’s why science needs art. So many...