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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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Theme · Trauma
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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.
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.
The Practice of Being Seen
Traces the movement from performing specialness to tolerating accurate visibility. Being seen becomes a reciprocal practice of dropping spectacle, remaining present, and allowing ordinary reality to carry intimacy.
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.
Melatonin Regrettably
Interprets sleeplessness as the return of needs ignored during the productive day. Night becomes the only quiet in which an inner child can protest neglect, making insomnia a relational message rather than merely a chemical problem.
The Alignment Model
Human suffering arises when our perception and nervous system fall out of alignment with reality. Pain signals this misalignment but our culture encourages avoidance through performance, stimulation and distraction. These strategies reduce perception and deepen the friction between ourselves and the world.
Dimensionality Reduction
Examines how trauma compresses a complex, multidimensional self into a narrow set of defensive reactions—and how embodiment restores lost range and choice.
Transparent and Legible
Explores the vulnerability of becoming readable to oneself and others after a life organized around concealment, shame, and protective opacity.
Constipained
Addresses neglected pain as an inner child whose unmet experience has become a chronic bodily contraction. Compassionate witnessing allows the body to stop bracing around what it once had to hold alone.
Continue Here - The Arc of Becoming
How do you become a decent father when the one you had either wasn’t there or taught you all the wrong lessons? How do you become a steady, safe, encouraging presence for your children and community when you grew up with violence, neglect, mockery or abuse? How do you reclaim masculinity when the version you inherited wounded everyone it touched? How do…
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.
The Role of a Mother
Defines mothering as the capacity to remain present with pain without abandoning, fixing, or becoming overwhelmed by it—and considers how that capacity is internalized.
Eye of the Mountain