Young Belizean Author Turns Pandemic Pain into Hope

This week on The Bright Side, we’re sharing a truly inspiring Belizean story. It’s about how the simple love of reading can grow into something powerful. Meet Sheneil Sinclair, a Belizean author who, at just twenty years old, turned heartbreak into hope. During the height of the global pandemic, as grief and loss touched so many lives, Sheneil put pen to paper and wrote her very first book, This Is Hope. What started as a personal response to a difficult moment became a story meant to comfort and uplift young readers, reminding them that even in hard times, hope can still be found. Drawing from her own life experiences, her studies in forensic psychology, and deep personal reflection, Sheneil’s journey shows what can happen when resilience meets creativity. From falling in love with books to actually writing one, her story is a powerful reminder that light can come from even the darkest moments. Here’s Sabreena Daly with that story.

 

Sabreena Daly, Reporting

Every avid reader remembers that one book, the first story that pulled them in and made them fall in love with reading. And in much the same way, most writers can point to a moment when they knew they wanted to tell stories of their own. For Sheneil Sinclair, that moment became the beginning of a journey, one that would eventually lead her from turning pages to writing them.

 

Sheneil Sinclair, Author

“I’ve been interested in reading and writing ever since I was really young. And it didn’t really start for me until primary school when we had language arts and creative writing classes in primary school. One of my teachers, she was the one who noticed that whenever we would get an assignment, one or two pages of writing, I would do three or four more than I should have.”

 

Written at the height of the global pandemic, the twenty-year-old author says her first story was inspired by the grief she saw all around her and the loss of an educator who encouraged her to write. Sinclair transformed that pain into a message of hope for young readers. Now, her first book is ready to be shared with the world, fittingly titled This Is Hope.

 

Sheneil Sinclair

“ The story itself follows Harley, Harley Hope and the book itself is named after her. This is Hope. It’s kind of like a play on words there. It follows her after she experiences the death of her father by murder in front of her. And sparks awakened powers inside of her. So it’s a fictional book, like superheroes, kind of like that vibe. I would love for people to be immersed in the experience. And Harley, the character, the main character, she’s, I resonate with her in a lot of like smaller ways.”

Sinclair is pursuing a degree in forensic psychology. She also shares how her formal education played a key role in shaping the message and depth of This Is Hope.

 

Sheneil Sinclair

“ Emotion is a really big thing. In psychology, we talk about the difference between grief and depression, and that’s something that I had to be very careful with, when writing and not crossing the line between grief and depression because they’re very similar and can be mistaken. But they both go hand in hand together so grief can turn into depression. And so that was something that I used to help write behaviors within the characters and how they would react to certain situations.  At the time when I wrote it, she was older, but now I’m the same age as her now. And so looking at it from that perspective, I think I sympathize with her a lot more with her experience as a teenager, and I would hope a lot of other young adults would also be able to see themselves in some of her behavior, some of her characteristics. So this part is an excerpt from a letter that Harley writes after her father passed away. Of course there’s no address. She just kind of writes it to herself and I think there’s so many aspects that could resonate. A lot of times when people are in the denial phase of grief is when they send a text message to their loved ones or write a letter to their loved ones, knowing that it won’t get to them. But it just helps as an outlet to get the emotions out.”

 

And beyond the pages of her book, Sinclair carries a powerful hope, that her words will spark something in every reader who picks it up. That they’ll see themselves in the characters she’s created, find hope in their journeys, and maybe even discover a love for reading just as she did.

Sheneil Sinclair

“ When you read more books, it influences how you interact with things in the real world. You learn new things through reading and earn new experiences, new words. That’s my personal testament with writing. I learn new words. So the impact of reading is a lot. It’s like meditation and to ease down after a stressful day.”

 

Looking on the Bright Side, I’m Sabreena Daly.

 

Sinclair hopes to have This Is Hope published and available both online and in physical copies by the summer.