About me

Hello! As you may have already seen, my name is Melissa Rendón, and I am an independent author of horror, fantasy, mystery, and thriller stories. I am currently 43 years old and I’m from Mexico.

I started writing at a very young age. When I was nine, I watched Willow, a Ron Howard movie that made me think writing stories was the coolest thing on the face of the Earth. At ten, I saw The NeverEnding Story (an adaptation of Michael Ende's book), which confirmed that creating worlds was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. At that age, I created my first and only fanfic about a girl who reached a fantasy world through a magic book.

At eleven, I realized I wanted to write my own original stories, so I started my first fantasy novel about three thirteen-year-olds who get lost in the mountains. And guess what? The mist transports them to another dimension full of fairies, adventures, and strange creatures. I finished that novel at fourteen and even registered it with the copyright office in my country, but I never published it.

For many years, nothing stopped me. I wrote science fiction and adventure stories, but I mainly wrote fantasy for 20 years.

At 36, I fell severely ill due to two "medications" prescribed by doctors who never managed to diagnose me correctly. When I was 21, I was told I suffered from anxiety and depression, and they started giving me benzodiazepines and an SSRI antidepressant. The reality was that those were symptoms of another condition: ADHD. So, what I should have been given was medicine for that. That’s why the drugs they gave me never worked. They only kept me sedated and zombie-like for several years.

The worst part is that the clonazepam and escitalopram I was given cause brain damage when used long-term. Let me briefly explain the neuroscience behind this, based on Dr. Heather Ashton's research:

Benzodiazepines flood the brain with artificial GABA. GABA is a neurotransmitter that causes your neurons to "disconnect." It acts like the brake of the nervous system. This stops you from overanalyzing; you calm down, and anxiety, sadness, anger, or negative thoughts decrease. The issue is that the brain has a mechanism you’ve probably heard of called "neuroplasticity." This means it adapts to everything. So, if given benzodiazepines, it notices there is too much GABA around and wants to level it out. Consequently, it generates the opposite: Glutamate, which is the neurotransmitter that acts like the brain's accelerator. It makes neurons connect and makes you think normally, or excessively.

After this, the brain kills off or disconnects the GABA "neuroreceptors" so that not as much enters the neurons. Something similar happens with antidepressants because they influence serotonin, which in turn influences whether GABA works or not. So, when you’ve been taking this DRUG for a while and you quit cold turkey or too quickly, the brain is left with too much Glutamate and very few natural GABA levels. Plus, the GABA that exists doesn't work because, even though the neurotransmitters are there, the receptors have died or are deactivated. It’s as if you had a bunch of electrical appliances but couldn't plug them in because there are no outlets.

The result is that your nervous system cannot brake and remains in an extreme state of alert 24/7. That means living in extreme survival mode, which translates to living in panic, guilt, shame, anger, and reliving the past and everything that went wrong. Not to mention that since your neurons don't "disconnect," you start becoming unable to sleep, but chronically. I went more than six months without sleeping.

What saved me in that situation were bouts of microsleep, where you fall asleep for very few minutes without realizing it. But that is just one of a thousand symptoms in a long list that all of us living through this situation suffer from, such as hair loss, weight loss, memory loss, extreme fatigue, constant dizziness, not to mention the amount of pain and mental health struggles that started with this and that I NEVER had before... And the worst part is that it all hits you at once.

For this reason, I have spent many years going through a very slow and difficult recovery. The illness made me age very quickly, and I stopped posting photos of myself after 2018. For the first few months, I couldn't even walk, and I couldn't write for four years. Thank God, I was able to return to my stories after that time. That was when I started this series, which is literally one of the very few things that have made me want to stay in this world. Writing, and other forms of art, like painting realistic portraits and listening to music, have helped me a lot.

For the same reason, I have been unable to get an in-person job for the last eight years. As much as I looked for remote work over the last two and a half years, I couldn't find any. I wanted to hire a professional to help me with the illustrations; unfortunately, although many people helped me spread the word about a Crowdfunding campaign, I didn't receive support, so I decided to postpone publishing an illustrated version for later.

That is why I want to invite you to be part of the birth of my new trilogy: share my project with your reader friends or followers who love suspense. Help me share this story with the world.

Thank you for reading this far. If a book ever saved you during a difficult moment, I hope this can be one of those books, just as writing it saved me.

Some of my paintings