Finding Light in Darkness: Writer Katharyn Blair's Quest for Meaning in Stories and Life

What does it mean to be human?

At 36, Katharyn Blair, who goes by Katie, is a published novelist and a screenwriter for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She shares four children with her husband Ross, the love of her life, whom she met in college. Her parents live next door, and her mom likes to watch the kids when Katie and her husband are at work.

Katie is kind, funny, and full of life. Her cheerfulness is contagious. Some will think that must be pretty easy for her. She has it all … right?

The truth is, these things were not offered to her on a silver platter. She has gone through the depths of darkness to get where she is today. Much like the heroines she creates in her stories, she has transformed through the battles she fought in solitude. Many times, she begged for help. But it only came much later, after she’d dealt with the worst by herself.

Growing up in a church where women weren’t allowed to speak, Katie chose to open her mouth anyway. She went through a crisis of faith, suffered from severe panic attacks and OCD, and engaged in self-harm. She was assaulted by men who mistook her for a helpless little girl—not once, but multiple times—only to fight them off with her own bare hands (because who else was going to do it?).

Countless times, she cried for the God she was raised to believe in. But in her younger years, she felt left to her own devices. So, she decided to train herself. She asked her mother to let her watch movies unfit for children. Her goal was clear—she wanted to study how characters dealt with dire situations. “If they could do it, I could do it, too,” she says.

Whereas others are afraid of something, Katie’s biggest fear was nothingness. When she imagined the vacuum of outer space, she couldn’t breathe. It caused an indescribable physical pain in her.

And she decided to go there. To explore it. She plunged herself into the darkest corners of the human mind. She went on her own quest—not to torture herself, but to cleanse, cope, and conquer. She wanted to experience darkness with all her senses so she could take its power away—or at least master it, so she could set herself free.

Now, in her mid-thirties, she has come out on the other end. It is not gone. It’s always looming over her, like a sleeping volcano that might decide to erupt again. But she’s got it under control.

When I meet Katie, the first thing I notice about her is her persistent optimism. It’s rare to meet someone who carries a burden this heavy with such lightness. She talks about her struggles with a smile. When she gets emotional, she’s quick to say she loves crying. She is candid but never dramatic. There’s a down-to-earthness to her that makes for a smooth and lovely conversation.

She knows she didn’t deserve many of the things she went through, but she accepts them gracefully. Even more so, she owns them. To her, it’s all part of the human experience.

Over the course of six hours—spread over two days—she shares her experiences, feelings, and thoughts with me. We talk about her challenges and her milestones. One moment, she tells me about finding answers to existential questions in quantum physics. The other, she introduces me to her dog that tries to join our conversation.

The common thread is the one thing that has kept her going—storytelling. To Katie, stories are the prerequisite for a person’s survival. That’s why she gets infuriated when people downplay the importance of (genre) fiction. “Stories are a life raft in difficult times,” she says mid-conversation, with a sudden fierceness. “They’re the guides that help us navigate existence.”

“When church ‘turned on,’ the rules were different.”

Born in Anaheim, California, Katie found herself in a world of paradox from early on. The oldest of four daughters, she grew up in a middle-class family. They lived in a nice house, across from a country club with a pool they used to swim in during summers. Katie’s mother was a dental hygienist. Her father was a director at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and a minister at the church where Katie spent significant portions of her childhood—a place that turned out to be the root of major inner conflicts.

“It was a really fundamentalist corner of an already fundamentalist church,” she says. “Women weren’t allowed to speak in the assembly.” This instantly strikes me, as Katie is one of the most outspoken women I’ve ever met. I ask her whether that’s despite or because of her upbringing. “I’d say both,” she says. “My parents and my grandparents encouraged me to speak up and built me up as a person outside of the church. But when we were in church, there was an adherence to tradition I think was detrimental. Every time a woman got up, she had to have her husband stand with her. I remember sitting there going like, This isn’t the case at home.”

From her earliest childhood days through college, Katie’s father told her to get an education and encouraged her to develop her own views. “My dad has always been a feminist,” she says. “But when church ‘turned on,’ the rules were different.”

Katie recalls a moment when churchgoers wanted to sing a particular song but didn’t know it—“I said, ‘Don’t worry, I got this.’ And in front of everybody, my dad was like, ‘No, you don’t. We’ll pick a different song.’ I remember thinking, What’s going on? When we got in the car, I asked him why I couldn’t just teach everyone the song. He said, ‘It’s not what we do.’ It was this weird dichotomy, because he was feeding a rebellion in his own house. He created women that would not put up with that when they grew up.”

“It was just like I couldn’t handle life.”

Young as she was, Katie began to struggle with existential questions. She says, “I remember getting up and going downstairs in the middle of the night to talk to my dad, who was in his study reading. I’d be like, ‘I don’t know if I believe in God.’ He told me it was okay. ‘Talk to me,’ he said. ‘What are you thinking?’”

Katie was too little to verbalize the fear that brewed inside her. She didn’t realize these were the early stages of a crisis of faith that would come to light through her very own body.

The first outburst came in sixth grade. Katie had drunk a lot of water before she went to class, so at some point she needed to go to the bathroom. When the teacher said no, Katie had a major panic attack. She felt trapped. Although she ultimately made it to the bathroom in time, the incident kicked off a vortex of anxiety that put severe limitations on her life.

To explain those limitations, she decides to share something she’s never talked about publicly. Now that her own daughter is in seventh grade, Katie wants it out, and she’s no longer embarrassed by it. “My OCD got very bad,” she says. “The only way my mom could get me to go to school was to wear diapers. It wasn’t just one. I’d wear a pad, a diaper, leggings, another diaper, leggings, and pants—and a thick raincoat on top of it all. Even when it was 90 degrees outside, I’d be covered in multiple layers on the bottom part of my body and a raincoat. I wanted to cover myself. I didn’t want to be seen.”

Meanwhile, Katie did everything she could to avoid being sucked into a looming invisible prison. “Once a door was closed, I felt that I was locked,” Katie says. “If I’d be stuck somewhere, I couldn’t go. I just completely imploded. And then I lost my friends, because I wasn’t able to step into cars or go to the movies with them. I didn’t want to tell them about my anxiety disorder, so I came up with a bunch of lies. Eventually, they were weirded out by me. They paid a girl 50 cents a day to pour stuff on me at lunch, such as shaved almonds. She would always apologize for it, and I’d tell her it was okay.”

Years later, far into adulthood, Katie talked to the same girls. “They said they were really sorry and had no idea what I was going through,” she explains. “I was like, ‘We were 11. We didn’t know anything.’ I wouldn’t be okay with it if this were happening to my kid, but I did understand them.”

At the time, Katie chose not to tell her mother about the bullying. She felt her parents had enough to deal with already. “My mom took me to therapy,” she says. “This was in early 2000. The right equipment wasn’t there, and I spiraled into self-harm that was really, really bad. I still have massive scars on my arms from it.”

She pauses to show them to me—with the same smile that was on her face when she talked about her pets. Then she sits back down and continues, in a light-hearted tone, “My counselor asked me, ‘What’s this?’ And I was like, ‘A mosquito bite.’ He just looked at me, and I kept going with that story. So then I had to go to more psychiatric appointments.”

Katie’s dad didn’t know what to do. “He wasn’t against medicine,” she says, “but he didn’t understand why I wasn’t getting better. I was falling apart. It was just like I couldn’t handle life.”

“I was supposed to be your joy.”

Katie is the oldest child, but she wasn’t her parents’ firstborn. One of the first things she remembers is hearing about Erin, the sister she’s never met. “She died when she was 10 months old,” Katie says. “After she’d had open heart surgery, she didn’t seem to be doing well. My mom took her to the hospital. In the emergency room, they said my mom could take her back home because she was fine. She then died from pneumonia—a risk from this surgery. So, she lost her life to a doctor’s error.”

After four months of intense grief, Katie’s mother got pregnant again. “She always said I brought her joy back. I was special because I took her sorrow away.”

Throughout her life, Katie’s family has kept Erin close. I happen to interview her on what would have been Erin’s 37th birthday. Like every year, Katie and her family will get together to celebrate with cake and candles. “My parents were always very open about her,” she says. “At the front of our hallway, there was a big chest of her stuff, like her onesies and toys that still had remnants of her baby food on them. When I was little, I would open it up every once in a while, just to have a look. We’d also go to her grave and make sure it was clean.”

As a child, Katie deeply loved the older sister whom she was separated from by time and space. But she didn’t know how to deal with Erin’s omnipresence in the household. She says, “I feel really bad about this now, but when it was dark, there was one light from the fire alarm that would shoot down, and for years I was convinced it was my sister showing her anger that I took her place. I told my friends at school, and then it ended up with my dad, who was on the board. When my mom picked me up, she was really upset. ‘Why would you say that?’ she asked. And I don’t know why, because I never actually felt my sister was mad. But maybe I was like, There’s this person who is so important—she’s here all the time, and I don’t know how to process it.”

When Katie struggled to get through her teens, this family trauma surfaced more than before. “I looked at my parents and went like, ‘I was supposed to be your joy. I was supposed to be what made you happy.’”

Until then, her mom had been the one who’d talked openly about Erin. But when panic attacks and self-harm hurled Katie into despair, her dad began to open up to her. “He would tell me about his faith journey, and part of it was losing my sister,” she says. “He said he’d ask God, ‘Let me walk amongst the dead and see my daughter.’ And he heard God say back, ‘She’s with the living. You are with the dead.’ I wrote that on a Post-it and put it on my dashboard when I was 17. Whenever I had a panic attack, it was one of the things I could see. And that phrase made me feel better.”

Katie talks about her parents with genuine love and appreciation. She knows they meant well. But, she explains, being the one that brought their joy back was both a blessing and a burden. “I wanted to make sure I could fulfill that. And as Erin didn’t get a chance to live, I said to myself, You better not waste this opportunity. So, when I was a major reason for my mom’s anxiety in my teenage years, that wasn’t great.”

“Let’s get to the truth of what it’s like to be a person.”

The late-night conversations with her dad, combined with the therapy sessions her mom took her to, ultimately resulted in Katie going back to high school—though it didn’t go smoothly. “For the first six months, my dad had to walk me into school every single morning,” she recalls. “He went into the office and sat with me until the bell rang. It was mortifying for a 14-year-old, but we both knew I’d run if he didn’t do that.”

Gradually, Katie’s anxiety became manageable. But it didn’t leave her alone. In fact, it morphed into something worse—existential dread, which transformed the nature of her panic attacks. She explains, “I went through a crisis of faith. I didn’t know if God was real, and then I got mad at Him for not being real. My panic attacks lasted all night. I’d drive to the local Catholic church, and even though I’m not Catholic, they’d let me in.”

During her quest for answers, Katie immersed herself in scary movies. To her, it was a way to face and tackle her fears. “Fortunately, my parents were always cool with letting me read and watch what I wanted,” she says. “They never censored me. My mom did make me a deal. She said, ‘You can watch it, but if you freak out and come into my bed, you’ll have to do extra chores.’ I took the bet and won.”

Friends didn’t get it. They asked how Katie could watch these movies, wondering if they didn’t enhance her existing fears. “What they didn’t get was that the inside of my brain was already doing things I didn’t want it to do,” she explains. “At least now, I could watch people who were scared choose to be brave. I saw them decide to be okay amid bad situations. That was what I needed. Actually, I prefer something to look really bad, because then I know what to expect. I don’t trust situations or people that seem really fine.”

The problem was, the world around her did its utmost best to look fine. “Growing up, we lived in a very nice neighborhood. All the lawns were always pretty, we lived across the street from a country club, and I went to a church where dressing nicely was very important. I had to wear skirts and my hair had to be done. And there was just such a darkness in me that I couldn’t name. Everybody around me thought it was because I was into dark stuff, but it wasn’t like that. There was a deadness everywhere around me except in the dark stuff. I find that when things are scared, angry, or damaged, there is some sort of hope and truth in that. People tried to keep things safe, clean, and pure for me. But it just made me feel like I didn’t belong there.”

Katie didn’t know it back then, but this would become the main theme in her work. “To me, it’s about finding the light in darkness,” she says. “Everybody’s got it. Pretending you don’t, or the world doesn’t, will not help anyone. So, let’s get to the truth of what it’s like to be a person, and then let’s say there’s still hope there. I want to clear a little space in whatever forest I’m in and be like, I’m making a camp for the weirdos, and you can come if you want.”

“Stories taught me how to be brave”

After graduating from high school, Katie surprised her loved ones by applying for the vocal program at Pepperdine. She says, “My mom and dad didn’t understand how someone who was afraid to go to school could get in front of a crowd and sing. But singing made me feel special. It was something I knew I was good at.”

When a professor heard Katie sing an Italian aria, he said she could attend a summer intensive for opera students in Germany. Her mom was relieved. “She was just so glad I was alive and able to go outside,” Katie says. “But then I had to sing in front of a jury. Since I’d started practicing too late, I stopped halfway into the performance, said I couldn’t do it, and walked out. One of my professors followed me out into the hallway and said, ‘Whatever you’re going through, it’s fine. You go shake this off and come back in a couple of weeks, and we’ll do this again.’”

Katie appreciated it, but she never returned. The incident had triggered an epiphany—“I realized I liked singing because it was a talent I had, so I thought I wouldn’t fail. But I was up against the best of the best, and they had a cut-throat mentality. I did fail. And I didn’t like it that much. I didn’t like it enough to fail.”

What she did love, she discovered, was writing. “I was willing to fail at it,” she says. “I was okay with looking like an idiot—with trying over and over again. When people ask me what to major in, I’ll tell them to find something that’s worth embarrassing yourself, big time. In front of people. Then, if you do come up against failing, you won’t be like, ‘Oh, this just isn’t my thing’—like I did with singing.”

After graduating from Pepperdine with a screenwriting degree, Katie interned at her dad’s high-rise office in L.A. Soon, her old fears returned. She was afraid to step into the elevator, so she put her tennis shoes on and walked 23 stories up—in some cases, multiple times a day. “I was mentally unwell, and I knew it,” she says. “It was starting to get bad again. I would doom scroll before it was called that. I’d panic and search my triggers online.”

But this time, Katie reverted to what she’d learned helped her survive difficult times—storytelling. She explains, “Story was the thing I could go back to. When I was in a panic spiral, I would turn on stories like Battlestar Galactica or Lord of the Rings. I would also write my own stories now. This is why I get very angry when people say, ‘It’s just a story,’ or when they call movies or books 'guilty pleasures.' They formed the training ground for my brain. Stories taught me how to be brave when I wasn’t feeling brave.”

Later in life, Katie would need to apply this self-imposed training. For example, when her newborn son had to undergo surgery, Katie told herself to be like a fierce dragon rider character in one of Sarah J. Maas’ books. It gave her the courage she needed but might not have found otherwise. “When things like these happened,” she explains, “I’d go through the gamut of characters who were scared in similar moments. People who think fiction is silly don’t realize what those moments do for you when you feel like you have nothing. These are life-changing things, so don’t belittle them, you know?”

“He attacked me while the other guy sat on the stairs and guarded the door.”

In her early twenties, Katie’s courage had already been put to the test multiple times.

Around the age of 15, she had fought off her lifelong friend who tried to assault her during a barbecue. She recalls how an elder’s son told Katie they’d put her purse up in the kids’ classroom because they didn’t want it to get stolen. “He walked up with me, which I thought was kind of weird,” she says. “Then I saw that my friend, the guy I grew up with, was waiting for me in that room. He attacked me while the other guy sat on the stairs and guarded the door.”

Katie says she wasn’t sure what was happening, but her survival instinct took over—“He shoved me against a wall and tried to kiss and grab me. I pushed him off and kicked him, but it shook me because I didn’t know what he had planned. And I didn’t have the words for what they were trying to do. I just walked out and said, ‘I don’t know what that was, but never do it again.’”

Looking back, Katie wonders if her mind blocked the incident in the years that followed. They were still in the same community, so she coped with the guy’s presence. It was only years later, at a funeral, that it all came back to her. “I had brought Ross, my now husband,” she says. “This guy was there, too. He looked at me over the casket and asked if I was going to marry Ross. I was like, ‘Yeah, probably, we’re engaged.’ And he goes, ‘Are you still a virgin?’ We were literally standing by his family member’s dead body. That’s when it clicked. Not when he grabbed me all those years ago. Not the time when we were 13 and he asked me, ‘Do you shave yet?’ It was this.”

One night, when Katie was already a mother of two, she told her husband. “We were driving, and he slammed on the brakes,” she says. “He was like, ‘He tried to rape you?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t know if he did.’ And Ross asked me, ‘What would have happened if you hadn’t fought him?’”

Later, Katie found out she wasn’t the only woman who’d had this experience with him. She says, “When I reached out to an old friend, she was like, ‘He did it to you, too?’ So, we all knew, and we didn’t talk to each other.”

This wasn’t the only time Katie dealt with harassment. She tells me about a guy in high school who followed her to the soda machine near the locker rooms after PE class one day—“He came up behind me and said, right into my ear, ‘If you are a virgin, you should just know that if you are ever anywhere I can get you, I will rape you.’ He just said it like that. Plainly. I went to the principle, and he got expelled. Then his girlfriend and her friends wanted to kick my ass. I was like, ‘You’re going to fight for a guy who followed me and said he was going to rape me? That’s going to be the place you put your flag?’”

At 17,  Katie did meet a woman who had her back. At the time, she worked at the library, one of her favorite jobs of all time. One night, when she was locking up, she was approached by an elderly man who always came in on Thursdays. Until then, he’d been nice and polite. But now that Katie was alone, he came up to her with a cane, backed her into a wall, and told her she was a pretty girl who shouldn’t be without a boyfriend. It was dark, and she felt cornered. When he tried to touch her, she reached for a book to hit him with it. But she hesitated because she was afraid he’d fall and bleed, especially given his age. She was saved by her boss, who had come to look for Katie. She told the man to leave because they were closing. Then, she called the police. “They asked if he touched me,” Katie recalls. “When I said he didn’t, they told me they couldn’t do anything about it. And my boss was like, ‘But he was going to.’”

For the next year, the elderly man would come in every Thursday. He’d sit at the table and watch Katie. Whenever her boss spotted him, she had Katie work on other tasks in the back. On those nights, an older male friend would walk Katie back out—a man she considered her friend, until it turned out he wasn’t. “He was my safe space,” she says. “But six months later, he wound up calling me drunk. He said, ‘We don’t fuck because you think you’re so much better than me.’ He was 29, and I had just graduated from high school. I was like, Great. The person who walks me to my car is also no longer safe.”

Katie’s turning point came when she was a freshman at Pepperdine. She was casually seeing a guitar major whom she really liked. One day, when they were talking outside her dorm, his roommate walked up to them. He scrutinized Katie and asked the guy she was with, “Are you fucking her?”

Then, the roommate swaggered closer to Katie, taunting her. “He walked me back into the wall, which had happened several times at this point,” she says. “I told him, ‘Back away from me. You need to back away from me.’ He didn’t. And then I grabbed his esophagus with my nails, and I dug in and squeezed as hard as I could. When I shoved him back, he started coughing and said, ‘You fucking crazy bitch.’ And I was like, ‘You know what? Yeah.’”

To her, the tables had turned. “I occasionally ran into that guy for the next couple of years,” she says. “He’d always tell me I was crazy. And I said, ‘Sure.’ It had been building for such a long time. Something had just snapped. I thought, If you’re going to whine about me choking you, I will say exactly what you said about me—and let the chips fall where they may.”

“I choose to do something that’s better for me.”

Although Katie had taken a major step toward empowering herself, she was struggling on the inside. Things didn’t get better when she began to date a new guy, who slowly revealed himself to be harsh and controlling.

Back then, Katie didn’t like herself much, she says. She had an eating disorder and was cutting herself. “He would see the marks on my arms and say, ‘When we get married and you do that, I will have you put into a psych ward and have your children taken away from you.’ I didn’t stop. I just did it in places you couldn’t see.”

When Katie was on an exchange program in Germany, her boyfriend flew out to fight a guy he believed liked her—Ross. Although Katie ended up marrying Ross later on, they were just friends at the time. “My boyfriend had been weirdly gaslighting me from across the ocean,” she says. Ultimately, he didn’t fight Ross, who turned out to be taller than expected. But Katie’s boyfriend did end things with her soon after. “I wasn’t really sad. I’d already realized I wasn’t in love with him. And there was this goofy redhead guy who was very kind and emotionally smart—Ross.”

Before they got together, though, Katie hit a low point. “On my 20th birthday, I was home alone, and I cut so deep I couldn’t really stop. I remember being afraid. Any deeper and I would have had to get stitches and tell my mom. My family thought I’d stopped when I went to college, and I let them believe that. So, I wrapped it and thought, I’m not going to do that anymore.”

She had a few brief relapses, but she always managed to stop right away. “Ross never shamed me about it,” she says. “He always asked me to talk to him.” And she did. She’s discussed it with her children, too. When they came to her with questions about the scars, she told them she was angry at herself and the world, and she scratched herself. “I want my kids to know they can talk to me about that kind of stuff,” she says. “I try to be very open. My mom calls it ‘that thing you used to do.’ But it’s the thing I still want to do. It’s part of my personality. Alcoholics say they’re never not an alcoholic, even when they don’t drink anymore. I am never going to not want to cut. It’s my natural inclination. I just don’t do it anymore, because I choose to do something that’s better for me.”

“Parenthood isn’t a hardship—having stitches in your butt is.”

Some of the guys who harassed Katie have found their way into her writing as fictionalized characters. She finds it cathartic to write about them, even though she sometimes does it subconsciously. This is why continuing down the writer’s path has always been a non-negotiable for her—even when she got pregnant in grad school and her academic environment didn’t seem built for it.

“Eventually my belly didn’t fit in the desk, but they wouldn’t get me a different chair,” she says. “And when I said I needed to Zoom for a few weeks because I was healing from a C-section, they advised me to take a year off, saying parenthood doesn’t qualify as a Title IX ‘hardship.’ I said, ‘Parenthood isn’t a hardship—having stitches in your butt is.’”

After their first baby was born, Katie and Ross, who were both still in grad school, ran out of money. The young family moved into Katie’s parents’ kitchen, where they lived for a year. “We put up an IKEA screen, and in the morning my dad would walk in and say, ‘Good morning guys, what do you want for breakfast?’ Ultimately, he bought a condo, and we rented it from him. When we moved in, there was this awesome feeling of independence. Later, my parents bought the house next to their own. They moved into that one, and we moved into theirs.”

Meanwhile, Katie kept working on her writing. She attended conferences and wrote a few books she now finds terrible. Although she got repped several times, it amounted to nothing.

It was only during her second pregnancy that Katie’s writing career took off. She found a new agent, sold two books to Harper Collins, and finished two degrees.

Then, she met a manager who she believed would shepherd her into being a screenwriter. She worked hard, but he didn’t like anything she wrote. Eventually, Katie ended their professional relationship. During their last conversation, he told Katie she’d ‘always be more of a novelist, anyway.’ “I work really well on spite,” she says, “so I was like, Okay, I’ll hire Lee Jessup.”

Lee, a well-known career coach for emerging and professional screenwriters, vividly remembers the day she first met Katie. “There was something very tentative about her,” Lee says. “She was apologizing for herself consistently throughout. We met at a cafe in Culver City, and she showed up equal parts brilliant and vulnerable, which I really loved about her. There was no question about how smart and talented she was. But it was amazing how she gave access to her stories and who she is and the things that are meaningful to her. I just instantly became a fan and felt very protective of her. But I also had that realization of, You’re dealing with a badass. This woman, who is so vulnerable and who’s apologizing for herself, is actually a powerhouse. She raised children while getting multi-book deals with major publishers. And she went into the world of literature because she was too intimidated by screenwriting, even though she has a screenwriting MFA from Pepperdine.”

Katie tells me she went to Lee for clarity. “I felt people were being either too nice or too mean to me,” she says. “I wanted to know if I had what it takes. Lee told me my script needed a lot of work, but she didn’t think I should give up on my writing. That’s all I needed to know.”

Next, Katie pitched a fantasy script to Lee. “I was not seeing it,” Lee recalls. “Katie said, ‘That’s okay. We’ll get there.’ And she just worked on it. When she delivered it to me, I did see it come together. Katie needs very little handholding when she is developing something new. Yes, she’s going to take notes and listen to things. But she has such conviction in the stories she has to tell. It’s a huge gift. Writing is where the world is less chaotic and makes sense to her. It’s where she finds herself, and I think that really saw her through the biggest challenges.”

“If you want this life, it’s on the other side of whatever this is.”

In 2019, Katie was a finalist at NBC’s Writers on the Verge. In 2021, through a mutual contact, she sent a writing sample to someone who worked on "Loki," the TV series that’s part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

She ended up getting staffed on "Loki: Season 2." A few months later, she got a phone call. “They asked, ‘You couldn’t come to London, could you?’” Katie says. She consulted with her husband. He had a fulltime job as a clinical psychologist specializing in severe mental illness and extreme drug abuse, so it didn’t seem feasible. But he was instantly on board—“Ross said, ‘Pack it up, we’ll all move to London.’”

When they arrived on the other side of the pond, a driver picked them up. Suddenly, Katie’s sixth-grade self came back. “I was very anxious getting in the car,” she says. “I’d always assumed I’d be driving myself.”

Soon, she found herself reverting to old habits. “I would get up very early,” she explains. “Before the car got there, I packed an extra pair of pants and body spray. That’s what I used to do in sixth grade. I don’t know why, but I felt that if I had those items in my backpack, everything would be fine. And I was doing these OCD things once again at 34. It didn’t hinder my job, though. I was able to do a really good job and that was a wonderful feeling. For so long, I had struggled with two things—I wanted to be good at something I wasn’t good at, and I was good at something that didn’t make me happy. Now, the directors were telling me they were excited I was there. And I loved the team.”

Katie felt this was her chance to fight her old self. She explains, “When the executive producer was like, ‘Hey, just ride with me,’ I didn’t want to say no. So, I told myself, You’re going to shut up and get in the car. If you want this life, it’s on the other side of whatever this is. I couldn’t be a person that needed any extra things from this team. I wanted to be a person that made things better for everyone. So, I just pushed through it. They never knew.”

But during the nights, Katie increasingly struggled with her crisis of faith—which, as it turned out, had not yet been solved. “Sometimes I woke up, mid-panic attack,” she says. “It didn’t make much sense because there was no trigger. I would crawl to the bathroom thinking, What’s going on? I do believe there was a spiritual component to it. I felt an abyss—something very dark and empty and void that was so antithetical to hope. Honestly, it was like an entity … a really dark thing.”

Katie thought she might find answers by reading. She dove into the Bible, some theological tomes she had long avoided, and books on quantum physics.

When she tells me this, we spiral into a lengthy conversation about quantum entanglement. Given the topic, it’s unusually high-spirited—but it happens to be a phenomenon we’re both fascinated by. As I listen to Katie explain how she found answers to life’s biggest questions in the tiniest of realms, I realize she spent years excavating all corners of existence to find what every person craves—a sense of belonging. We’re all on this quest. We all want the reassurance that there’s someone or something out there protecting us. And yes, we might arrive at wildly different conclusions, because each individual creates or adopts a belief system that works for them. But what we seek is universal—meaning, connection, and love in the purest sense of the word.

“Growing up, I really wanted to believe that there’s a God who loves me deeply and has a purpose for my life, and that all this stuff I’ve been through has a reason,” she says. “I wanted to believe that someone’s looking out for me. But the thought that all of time and space is empty and void of any love made me panicky as a kid. As an adult, I was almost mad—Why are You not hearing me? I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I would search and yell and read my Bible, and I’d wait … and it was quiet.”

When she learned about quantum entanglement, the deafening silence finally went away. “The fact that every atom knows what to do was really comforting,” she explains. “I said to myself, You’ve never been alone. Not one second in your fucking life have you been alone.”

“I like my life. Do you like yours?”

The next spring, Katie was scheduled to do production writing for Daredevil. Due to several reasons—including the writers’ strike—it didn’t happen. But after a while, Katie was asked to write a comic. Another book came out. And on the day of our second interview, she tells me she recently got hired to consult on The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

She feels incredibly lucky to be a professional writer. “If someone in this industry doesn’t treat their job or the story like a gift, I get angry,” she says. “You’ve been entrusted with these beautiful characters that people love so much. You’ve been given a life where not only do you get to write stories for a living, but you get paid very well to do it. You get to do this, so don’t sit there and say everything sucks.”

She tells me about a conversation she had with a production assistant who has since become her friend. One day, he handed her coffee, sat down, and said, “You have one minute to convince me that your worldview is better than mine. Go ahead.” Katie replied, “I like my life. Do you like yours?”

Her younger self might not have considered it possible, but Katie has built the life she once dreamed of. She tries to cherish every second she has in a writers’ room, even if it’s a grueling eight-hour shift. Once they call it a day, she excitedly heads home to be with her family.

“In my wildest dreams, I hoped I would be this person,” she says. “When I drove to Marvel today, I remembered that 10 years ago I was still working a shitty job at a marketing place. I’d asked for time off that they didn’t want to give to me. My books were getting rejected left and right. And now, I’m giving Marvel notes because they asked me to. I was the only woman in that room. This is what I hoped would happen—that someone would look at my storytelling abilities and say, ‘We need her opinion.’”

After all those years, Katie’s mind seems to have calmed down. After solving her existential crisis in London, she hasn’t suffered from any panic attacks. She knows they might strike again, but she’ll likely be better equipped to deal with them if they do. When I ask if she does or doesn’t believe in God, she tells me she’s found her faith—although she has left the church she grew up in. With her father’s blessing, Katie, Ross, and their kids joined a Baptist church instead.

Katie is trying her best to raise kind, decent children. One way to do that, in her view, is to create a safe space where virtually no topic is taboo. She’s there for them, but she won’t embellish the truth the way people did when she was little. Her kids know that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. They’re aware of life and death. Katie answers their questions, confrontational as they may be.

At the same time, she works hard on her writing. But she never divides her world into different siloes. Michele Blood, who was an associate producer on the second season of "Loki," tells me she’s impressed by Katie’s ability to include everyone she loves in her work life. “Katie has a relationship with her kids that makes them root for her,” Michele says. “Her whole family roots for her, and that’s so beautiful. She doesn’t live her career life separately. A lot of career-driven people have to compartmentalize, and I see how difficult it is to keep your world balanced. But Katie just has a big enough heart to fit all of it inside.”

After they met, Michele and Katie quickly found they had a lot in common. Like Katie, Michele grew up in a religious environment. She had left the Mormon Church two years prior. “It was really fresh when I met Katie,” Michele says. “I was going through a lot at the time, and she was so nice. I wasn’t used to having somebody at work whom I could talk to about it.”

Katie openly spoke about her crisis of faith, which ultimately found its way into the show. “A crisis of faith is a true tragedy,” Michele says. “It’s like part of you has died. That version of yourself is no longer, and it’s typically the happier one because ignorance is bliss. So, it’s a tragedy to have that innocent part of you be replaced with something that’s a little more critical, perhaps—but wiser and deeper. That crisis of faith was ultimately Loki’s story. And so without Katie there to bring that raw perspective to the very thing Loki was going through, it wouldn’t have been nearly as deep. So much of it was in the dialogue between our characters.”

“I don’t think she realizes how she empowered me.”

For years, Katie fought a radical fight to find light in darkness. What she might not know is that she now is that light for others.

“She’s just a bright ray of sunshine,” Michele says. “And I don’t think she realizes how she empowered me. There are a lot of voices in the room, especially at Marvel. A challenge I’ve always struggled with is to consider my perspective worthwhile. It’s unnatural for me to feel confident enough to speak up. I had to fight it every day, and I could see that in Katie, too. When we’d be sitting in a room, she would text me, ‘Just say it.’ I’d reply, ‘You say it.’ We pushed each other to feel like we deserved to be there. She did that for me, and I think I did that for her.”

What also meant a lot to Michele was that Katie regularly asked for her opinion. She says, “Rarely had I been given the opportunity to feel needed by someone else. Katie running something by me implied that I’m valuable. And so I did everything in my power to help her. But so much of my motivation and passion to help her came from how she respected me.”

Like Michele, Katie’s friends describe her as someone who’s their ride or die—a brave and gentle human being who always tries to give as much as she receives. “Katie is one of my fiercest protectors,” says Brittany Sawrey-Coulson, one of Katie’s best friends since college. “I genuinely believe that there is nothing I can’t tell her or talk through with her or admit to her. She holds unfathomable grace with the kindness of truth. And she’s a world of contradictions—the girl who likes to think she’d rage on a battlefield but would also try to rehab a hurt cricket if she thought it was possible.”

Ashtyn Aragon, Katie’s former executive writing assistant and very close friend, echoes this sentiment. Two things immediately come to mind when she thinks of Katie—“Her compassion and her generosity. She’s generous to anyone … people she loves, people she doesn’t like, and people she’s never met. There are different cultures in her life, so I think that brings a broad perspective. She walks through all these spaces with wisdom, and a lot of it comes from knowing she doesn’t always have all the answers. But her goal is to be kind to everyone. She wants to be a safe person to talk to and a nice, professional person to work with.”

What Ashtyn deeply admires is Katie’s ability to power through when things get tough. “She’s a fighter,” Ashtyn says. “She has more tenacity, grit, and determination than anyone I know. She clawed her way through internal realizations, came out of them, and was able to not close the door behind her. I think a lot of people would just want to move on, but Katie can still pull from when she was in that place.”

“The girl you hope to be—you’re going to be her.”

Katie’s journey to the present was arduous, but she has found inner peace. When it comes to pursuing her dreams, though, she is far from done. When I ask her where she’ll be in 10 years, she sits up straight and passionately sums up a range of goals—“I want to write stories that make people feel brave. I want to create shows and books and movies. I want to have my own production company with Ashtyn and get our fingers into everything from directing to picking the music. And I just want to write stuff that people—people who are made fun of—will care about. I want to write about vampires, dragons, brave girls, and moms that try to figure shit out.”

What Katie refuses to do is let others pigeonhole her. “People might want to write me off as the annoying Christian girl or the girl who left the church she grew up in. But they can’t. I’m going to keep one foot in both worlds and not let either one kick me out. I’d like to bring out those stories that combine the dark stuff with hope. Yeah … that’s what I want.”

She leans back cheerfully, stressing her desire to take care of her family and protect them. “I want to make sure my kids can go to college and do whatever they want to do,” she says. “I’ll probably have one or two more kids, because I love being a mom. It’s my favorite thing. And being a writer is my favorite thing. I’ve never been forced to choose, which makes me happy.”

I ask Katie if there’s anything she’d like to say to her future self. She sighs briefly—then smiles. “When I look at the girl I was 10 years ago … she wanted to write for Marvel. She wanted to get book deals. She wanted to do all this stuff. So, I’d say to future me what I’d say to old me—‘Thanks. Thanks for being a little delusional.’ Because it wasn’t delusional.”

And little Katie—what would she tell her?

She pauses. In a softer voice, she says, “Thank you for keeping the light on when there were so many reasons not to. And hey … the girl you hope to be—you’re going to be her. It will be hard. But it will be fine.”

*Feature photo by Bethany Seagrave