Half of My Heart ✔️

hi | author's note

TW: mentions of manipulation, gaslighting, toxic relationships, emotional abuse

♔

From the moment we finished Taming the Street Racer, as much as both of us loved it, we decided that we could create a better well-thought out story that could impact our readers.

During the pre-planning for this story, we thought of a couple of morals and thought provoking themes that we wanted to get across so Half of My Heart wouldn't be another basic Wattpad story. We wanted you guys to truly take something away from reading our creation. Not to take anything away from TTSR (it is our baby, and it did create this whole universe), but we thought we could create something more impactful for our audience.

Our goal with HOMH was to develop a cautionary tale about the dangers of toxicity and manipulation in a relationship. We created two incredibly diverse love interests that our readers could stand behind, but implemented toxic traits to Levi. Obviously we wanted to make this book worth reading so he wasn't just toxic. He was sweet at times, even caring. But with the sweet there was bad lurking below the surface. He was always blaming Scarlett for things beyond her control. His actions in some way, always caused Scarlett some amount of pain, no matter how well he could talk his way out of it.

We know that the words gaslighting, manipulative, and toxic are commonly used today and practically watered down so they have no meaning. Some readers adamantly defended Levi during these manipulative moments. This sparked a conversation that was very interesting to observe.

One thing that we noted was some readers mistakenly defending Levi's actions because of his intentions and troubled past. Our intention was to create a morally gray character whose actions and reasoning were realistic—Levi is a realistic human with very human flaws that any one of us could encounter. But we have to make a couple things clear:

Gaslighting with good intentions is still gaslighting.

Manipulation when you have a troubled past is still manipulation.

Toxicity with deep psychological problems is still toxicity.

Levi wasn't a bad person, and he had his good and bad sides. Just like every one of us. While writing Levi, we loved him just as much as you guys grew to; he was funny, witty, insanely attractive, and talented. Like all of our characters, Levi was our baby that we crafted painstakingly and lovingly, flaws and all. Just like you guys, it made our hearts soar when he'd say all the right things to Scarlett, and it crushed us when he'd tear it all down with an insensitive comment or action. And oftentimes, this is how it is in real life. Humans are complex and have many different sides to them. It's up to us to recognize that they might not all be good.

As the story progressed, we saw many of our readers try to separate Levi's good side from his bad side, claiming that we were "unnecessarily destroying Levi for the sake of the plot" or that "this isn't Levi."

The thing is: from the beginning, we knew Levi's entire character. From the beginning, we had already planned every single thing that Levi would do in this story, and if you go back and read closely, you will find that his toxic 'not Levi' traits were revealed quite early on. It's just that this bad was sprinkled among the good, making it difficult to recognize.

But Levi hurt Scarlett, and it's important that we do not let his good moments overshadow the pain he caused.

In this world, the people who hurt us aren't always the big bad monsters that we see in books and movies. Sometimes, they are people who laugh with us and care for us. Sometimes, they're boys with dark brown eyes who lend us pens, patiently teach us to skateboard, and learn to play our favorite song on the guitar. Nothing is black or white.

Especially on Wattpad, stories targeted toward young women have a tendency to romanticize toxicity. And as girls who grew up reading Wattpd stories, we totally understand the allure of a troubled bad boy. And if we're being completely honest, we perpetuated some of that in TTSR through Grayson.

And while it's fun to read about, it's not fun to experience. The mean bad boy isn't always going to change—sometimes he stays bad and ends up causing more pain than happiness.

We hope that if you come across a Levi in this world, you remember the grayness of this world and the duality of human nature. We hope you all stay safe and remember that that pain is not synonymous to love.

We hope that you can take something from this story. Maybe this wasn't what you were expecting when you picked up a Wattpad book, but we hope you enjoyed it anyway. We have big announcements coming very very soon.

Thank you for sticking it out until the end and for trusting our story.

We love you all.

— Kenzie Myers, aka Violet and Peyton