I’m not “just a writer.”
I’m a human learning how to exist outside of motion.

An ICU nurse.
A flight nurse.
A military officer.
A woman trained to stabilize bleeding bodies while quietly negotiating fractures inside her own nervous system.

I spent years moving through tension—Soviet era, command rooms, a war zone, helicopters, trauma bays, fluorescent hospital corridors—where adrenaline becomes language and vigilance becomes muscle memory. The mission makes sense. Reintegration rarely does.

Because coming home is not the same as arriving.

Where does one place:
the intensity,
the clarity,
the velocity of purpose,
the strange comfort of functioning where everyone understands urgency without explanation?

So I write - to make it make sense.

Then I paint what I see in the words.

My body needs somewhere to place the static.

Ink becomes decompression.
Paint becomes grounding.
Texture becomes proof that tension can leave the nervous system without destruction.

I write the things people carry quietly.
I paint the feeling of existing between identities:
soldier and woman, medic and poet, survival and softness, motion and stillness.

Some stories arrive as paragraphs.
Others arrive as color, pressure, hidden words, and orbit lines.

This is Rita Riddles. Soviet-born.
A Ukrainian and Russian cocktail. An American patriot.
Awake at strange hours, needing to tell stories.