Eye of the Mountain
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Writing about breaking into reality.
Essays, memoir and poetry on attention, grief, belonging and aliveness. What does it take to live beyond survival and projection? How do we move towards participation and thriving?
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Form · Memoir
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Prolog
Introduces the lifelong spiral of terror at the center of the memoir, then marks the story’s turn from decoding and surviving trauma toward the possibility of an ordinary life.
The Tragedy of My Life
Confronts the painful gap between finally seeing one’s life clearly and discovering that insight alone cannot restore what trauma, absence, and adaptation took away.
Performance Won't Earn Belonging
I spent most of my life performing to belong. It wasn’t intentional manipulation. It was survival. The only strategy I had. I grew up with a lot of physical and emotional abuse in a home run by a narcissist. Authenticity was never an option. In fact, it was the most punishable offense. I learned to disconnect from myself and become hyper-attuned to…
Crossing the Desert
Describes the exposed middle of healing after survival strategies have been relinquished but no new identity or capacity has solidified. The desert measures progress precisely because there is no familiar shelter left.
A Brush with Death
Recounts an early climbing partnership and a fatal encounter with risk that altered the author’s relationship to mortality, responsibility, and the mountains. Adventure’s beauty is held beside the irreversible consequences of inexperience.
The Practice of Imperfection
Uses an imperfect creative act to examine exposure, inherited judgment, and the practice of letting unfinished or flawed work be seen without turning against oneself.
Rites of Initiation
Reads a life not as gradual progress but as a sequence of thresholds that ended one identity and made another possible. The piece gathers embodied, relational, and spiritual rites of passage into an autobiography of discontinuous becoming.
Rock Bottom Has a Key Hole
Addresses the point at which effort, money, and familiar strategies stop producing change. Rock bottom becomes not a sealed floor but a lock whose key is embodied contact with pain, need, and reality.
Shedding Skin
Uses an animal shedding its skin to describe identity change that cannot be forced. The old form tears only when it is ready, making transformation both organic and persistently disorienting.
The Splinter
Turns a childhood splinter and the compensating limp that followed into a model of trauma: avoiding one localized pain distorts the entire body until healing requires returning weight and attention to the original wound.
The Frozen Scream
Investigates preverbal terror whose bodily evidence persists without a recoverable narrative. The frozen scream names an early survival state that organized vigilance, identity, and relationship long before conscious memory.
Murder of Innocence
When I was twelve, two tiny pet rats taught me the truth about cruelty. This story is one of the hardest I’ve written, but it was also a turning point in how I began to understand my father — and myself.