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 you fill the absence? How do you regrow a spine when the only way to survive childhood was to hide, contort and abandon yourself?

“See my shadow changing
Stretching up and over me
Soften this old armor
Hoping I can clear the way by
Stepping through my shadow
Coming out the other side
Step into the shadow
46&2 are just ahead of me”

-Maynard, 46&2

I. Safe and Grounded

Baseline Human (Not Enlightened, Just Healed)

This piece is about choosing how you meet life. Not as performance, not as the version that gets approval, but as a grounded, embodied commitment to presence, integrity and truth, especially when things hurt. It’s a way of saying: this is who I am and this is how I stand.

Erotic Charge (Contained Fire)

This is about power that doesn’t rush, grasp, seduce or dominate. It’s about the kind of aliveness you can hold in your body without losing yourself: the dignity of strength that doesn’t need to prove itself. It’s a meditation on readiness, depth and clean energy.

Precious (Holding Gently)

This is a love letter to attention. Whatever we treat as precious grows: our body, our children, our relationships, our own life. This piece is about devotion, care and the quiet power of choosing to truly value what matters.

II. Walking into the Fear

Rock Bottom Has a Keyhole (And Your Body is the Key)

This piece explores despair honestly, not as an inspirational slogan but as a real threshold of initiation. When life collapses, something breaks open and there is often a doorway hidden inside the darkness. This is about learning to see that opening and walk through.

The Frozen Scream (Developmental Order - Part 2)

This is one of my most revealing pieces, a descent into preverbal trauma, terror and helplessness. It shows what happens when we finally stay present with that pain instead of abandoning it again. It’s about love meeting the oldest wound.

Stuck in an Inhale (Of a Former Identity)

This is a nervous-system story. It’s about what happens when the body gets trapped in vigilance, never really exhaling, never really softening. And it’s about how breath, surrender and safety slowly return when we finally stop fighting ourselves.

III. Naming the Shadow

The Venomous Voice (Its Echo and the Echo of the Echo)

This one names the inner abuser: the internalized voice of shame, punishment and self-attack. Seeing it clearly is the first crack in its power. This is about recognizing that voice and beginning to loosen its hold.

Faking of the Faking (Of the Faking)

This piece is a sharp, poetic look at how we lose ourselves in performance and cultural pretending. It asks what happens when life becomes imitation rather than presence and what it costs us to keep playing along. It’s a call back to something real.

The Splinter (In My Left Foot)

Sometimes the childhood wound embeds itself so deeply that it shapes everything quietly from the inside. This piece explores those subtle injuries: the ones that don’t scream but never quite stop hurting until they’re finally tended to.

IV. Healing the Spine

Fragile Shoots (Don’t Stomp)

This piece honors the early stages of healing: the fragile new life that appears after devastation. The small green parts of us that return after numbness or collapse. It invites tenderness instead of pressure.

The Role of a Mother (Staying with Pain)

This is an exploration of how mothering shapes our relationship to pain, safety, love and separation. It holds tenderness, truth and reverence for how early care forms our nervous system and sense of self.

The 5 F’s: Freeze, Fawn, Flee, Fight, Follow (Developmental Order - Part 3)

This piece explains how survival responses from childhood become personality patterns in adulthood. It’s clear, compassionate, non-pathologizing and it points toward how we slowly reclaim choice and freedom.

Coherence of the Center (General Theory of Transformation)

Here I try to map the journey of healing and awakening: psychologically, emotionally, spiritually and physically. It’s an attempt to name how growth really unfolds, without mysticism or bullshit. A big-picture framework for becoming more whole.

V. Breaking the Bond

Adolescence: The Test of Love (Breaking the Bond - part 1)

This is about individuation and honest love. It asks whether love can survive truth, freedom and a refusal to perform. It’s a meditation on relationships that don’t demand shrinking to stay connected.

The Blame Wrapper (Narcissism as a Defense from Shame)

This is an honest, unromanticized exploration of narcissism - as fossilized shame, not evil - and the tragedy and harm it creates. It holds compassion and clarity at the same time, without minimizing either.

Dating Profiles (Not Real People)

This one uses humor as a scalpel. It’s a playful, painful satire of modern dating and the attachment wounds hiding underneath our personas. You’re allowed to laugh and wince at the same time.

VI. Moving Home

Shedding Skin (No Need to Cut It)

Transformation isn’t pretty, efficient, or Instagram-worthy. It feels biological, uncomfortable, like molting through a skin that no longer fits. This is an honest look at what real change feels like when it happens in the body, not just in ideas.

Porous (And Ever Changing)

This is a meditation on wholeness that isn’t rigid. It’s about being open, permeable, responsive: strong without armor, grounded without shutting down. A vision of wholeness that breathes.

How to Do 100 Years of Transformational Healing in One Year (20 Easy Steps)

This is a fierce, funny, and brutally honest take on healing. Not the romanticized version: the disciplined, messy, humbling reality of doing the work for real. If you’ve ever wanted a compassionate kick in the ass, this is it.

VII. Sovereignty

Tip of the Spear (A Pyramid in Time)

This piece places you inside lineage. It’s about standing where generations converge: inheriting trauma, power, strength, pain and responsibility and choosing what continues forward through you. It’s about courage, forgiveness and mythic adulthood.

Facing the Void (Give Me My Wings)

This is about stepping into life without guarantees. It’s about faith without dogma, surrender without collapse and learning to trust movement even when there’s no ground beneath you. A love letter to courage and devotion.