Essays
Essays is the home for my nonfiction writing.
These pieces grow out of experience and attention to the forces that shape private lives: family, care, responsibility, identity, power, and belief. Some essays stay close to the personal. Others step back to examine patterns, systems, or tensions that resist easy resolution.
What connects them is not argument or conclusion, but a commitment to looking carefully and allowing complexity to remain intact.
Hiking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing: Perspective on Pursuing Life Goals
Hiking the Tongariro Alpine Crossing tested my limits in ways I didn’t expect. Battling wind, cold, and uncertainty, I found myself confronting the same questions that surface when pursuing any meaningful goal: when to turn back, when to persist, and how growth often comes not from reaching the summit, but from continuing when the outcome is unclear.
Recent Presidential Pardons: Blanket Immunity’s Devastating Injustice
A reflection on blanket immunity and presidential pardons, examining how unchecked power harms people beyong the victims and weakens public trust.
The Best Gift: A Family Holiday Tale About Giving
A heartfelt introduction to The Best Gift, a family holiday tale inspired by a real moment of love and the quiet joy of giving.
Breaking Free: When it’s Time to Try Something New
A tale about the courage requited to break free from old habits and tradition when they no longer work.
Character Revealed: Actions as the Ultimate Test
A reflection on character, accountability, and why actions—not intentions or words—are the truest measure of who we are.
Facing Down Doubts and Claiming My Artist Identity
A reflection on being told “you’re not an artist,” and what it takes to claim creative identity despite doubt, criticism, and fear.
Quiet pieces shaped by lived experience. Moments of pause, noticing, and meaning.
Writing from inside the work—endurance, doubt, revision, and the long middle where stories resist and slowly take shape.
