Prism of a Life — An Autobiographical Literary Gallery & Essays
The Day My Body Went Silent
On Easter Sunday 2023, a coughing spell ended with me on the floor, paralyzed below my shoulders and alone for hours. I thought the story was about surviving that day. I didn't know survival was only the beginning.
LOVEThe Making of a Forever
Before hospitals, wheelchairs, and the life neither of us could have imagined, there was a small apartment on Michigan Road, a puzzle on the kitchen table, a fire in the fireplace, and one ordinary night when I realized I wanted this woman beside me forever.
A LIFE, REFRACTED
One life. Different prisms. And somewhere in the colors, perhaps something that looks a little like yours.
My life does not make much sense to me as a straight line anymore. There was childhood and all that came with it. There were lost years. There was love, music, mental illness, faith and the absence of it. Then there was a spinal cord injury that divided my life into before and after, followed by hospitals, nearly two years spent mostly in a bed, profound loneliness, survival, despair, and eventually the slow work of becoming someone again.
But those things are not separate stories. They are one life seen through different prisms. Hold the same memory up to love and it becomes one thing. Pass it through trauma and it becomes another. Music has carried me into places words could not reach. Faith has disappeared and returned. Survival has sometimes looked heroic and sometimes looked like nothing more than making it through another night. The light changes depending on the glass I hold it against.
That is what this place is for. I am telling these stories because I have come to believe that the most personal things can also be the most universal. You may never know what it is like to wake up paralyzed. You may never spend years looking at the same bedroom walls. But you probably know something about losing a version of yourself. You may know loneliness, regret, fear, devotion, grief, forgiveness, or what it means to keep going when the life you imagined is no longer available to you.
I don't expect you to find yourself in the details of my life. I hope you find yourself in the feelings underneath them. Maybe something I survived gives language to something you survived. Maybe a song that carried me reminds you of the one that carried you. Maybe my loneliness makes yours feel a little less private. Maybe somewhere in all these fractured colors, you recognize a piece of your own light.
There is no lesson I am trying to hand you from a mountaintop. I am still inside the story myself. This is simply one life, honestly examined: what hurt, what healed, what I lost, what I loved, what nearly ended me, what kept me here, and who I am still becoming.
Music That Brought Me Back From the Brink
For twelve hours in a hospital room, the same album played again and again. I had gone in wanting my life to end. Somewhere between the first song and the last, something changed. The music didn't fix me. It did something more important: it made me want to stay.
Which prism
will you follow?
12 Prisms of One Sweet World
A life changes depending on where the light enters. Mine has passed through love and loss, music and silence, faith and doubt, trauma and survival. These are the twelve prisms I keep returning to, not separate stories, but different colors cast by the same life. Follow one. Eventually, they all lead into each other.
SURVIVAL
I have nearly died more than once. The stranger story is what happened every time I woke up.
THE LOST YEARS
Addiction, homelessness, jail, mistakes, broken relationships, and years I once wanted erased. Now I wonder what they were trying to teach me.
TRAUMA
Some things happen once and echo for decades. These are the stories of those echoes, and what happened when I finally turned around to face them.
DISABILITIES
Paralysis changed almost everything about how I move through the world. It did not end my life. It forced me to discover what a life could become.
MENTAL HEALTH
My own mind has been a sanctuary, a battlefield, and sometimes a place I could barely recognize. I'm learning how to live inside it.
LOVE
I thought love was something you found. Then one woman taught me it can also be the place you survive inside.
MUSIC
Some songs became memories. Others became maps. A few found me when I was no longer sure I wanted to be found.
CHILDHOOD
Before I understood trauma, I simply called it growing up. Memory has given that child a language he did not have then.
FAMILY
Blood, adoption, absence, loyalty, forgiveness, and the people we choose to call home. Family has never been a simple word in my life.
FAITH
I lost God, argued with Him, ignored Him, and eventually began looking for Him again. I'm still learning what happened in between.
BECOMING
For years I waited to become the person I used to be. Then I began asking a better question: who am I becoming now?
THE WHOLE SPECTRUM
Not every story belongs inside one color. This is where the light gets messy, the prisms overlap, and ordinary life sneaks in.
Selected essays
Flagship chapters exploring memory, sound, and what remains.
“There are still colors
I haven’t seen yet.”
Some parts of a life are remembered. Some are survived. Others are still becoming. This archive is about all of them.
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