I'm Drew.
This is one life,
refracted.
I have lived several lives inside one. Some were beautiful. Some were difficult. A few nearly ended me. Prism of a Life is where I have begun gathering those pieces and looking at what they become when the light passes through them.
Every life begins before we can remember it.
I was adopted at birth. Before I had language for family, belonging, separation, or home, my story had already begun with all four.
Years later, I would understand how far those first questions could travel. Childhood gave me memories I still carry with tenderness and others I spent years trying to understand.
Before I understood the story, I was already living inside it.
Childhood is strange when viewed from the distance of adulthood. Ordinary rooms become landmarks. Small moments become clues. Things a child accepts without explanation can take decades to find words for.
Some of what shaped me happened quietly. Some of it left marks I would recognize much later. All of it belongs to the same life.
I spent years trying to become someone before I knew who I was.
Growing up brought friendship, music, rebellion, mistakes, longing, and the slow realization that adulthood does not arrive with instructions.
When I look at younger versions of myself now, I see someone searching for somewhere to belong long before he understood that was what he was doing.
There are years of my life with almost no photographs.
The absence became part of the archive.
Some years left fewer pictures behind.
Addiction, homelessness, jail, mistakes, broken relationships, and years I once wanted erased became part of my story.
There are fewer photographs from that period. Memory has had to carry much of what the camera did not.
Then life gave me someone to come home to.
I met Lacey in 2015. We built a marriage, crossed the country together, collected ordinary days, and created the kind of home I had spent much of my life looking for.
Love became one of the clearest ways I learned that a life can change without disappearing.
My own mind became one of the places I had to learn to survive.
Depression, bipolar disorder, crisis, treatment, and the long work of learning how to recognize myself again became another part of the map. At my worst, the torment in my mind began showing itself on my body. I picked at my fingers and toes until nails, cuticles, and nail beds were damaged and bleeding. Even then, I did not understand how dangerous a place I had reached.
There were warning signs written across my own body before I knew how to read them.
Then my body changed the story.
On Easter Sunday 2023, a fall and spinal cord injury left me paralyzed. Surgery, intensive care, complications, wounds, and years of recovery followed.
The life I understood ended very quickly. Learning how to live inside the one that remained has taken much longer.
Eventually I stopped waiting for my old life to return.
For a long time I measured progress against the person I had been before the injury. Eventually I began asking a different question: what can this life become?
That question changed the way I think about disability, independence, faith, love, memory, and the years still ahead.
One life.
Twelve prisms.
More colors than
I knew were there.
This archive is my attempt to look at a life from more than one angle. Love changes the meaning of one memory. Trauma changes another. Music, faith, disability, family, survival, and time bend the light again.
I am writing these stories because I want to understand what happened, preserve what mattered, and leave room for whatever the next color turns out to be.
There are still colors I haven't seen yet.