This isn’t just my story—it’s a remembering I hope might feel familiar to something in you.

I believe that as very young children, we all have some connection to a wider awareness—a sense that there’s more to life than what we’re taught. Over time, most of us lose touch with it. I have always felt that as a lose and recently have tried to return to some of this.

As a kid, I spent a lot of time alone and in my head. People called it daydreaming. To me, it felt real. Like there were other layers to life—soft, subtle places that spoke in symbol and feeling, not logic. I think children know these places. And some of us never stopped listening.

Even back then, I had the sense that I wasn’t fully seen. Not because others were unkind, but because I was tuning into something that didn’t fit. I didn’t understand how to live in the world without pushing parts of myself down.

School, jobs, institutions—I felt drained by the constant pressure to perform or conform. I didn’t know how to make sense of a world that didn’t value what felt most alive in me.

I wanted more than just functioning. I wanted truth. I wanted a life that meant something.

That longing led me to a lot of spiritual seeking, trying to rise above the parts of being human that felt too messy. But what I eventually found was the opposite.

Not a higher self.
Not transcendence.
But the part of me that had been here all along—in my body, in my emotions, in the ordinary textures of my life.

It was only when I stopped trying to become something better, and let myself be with what was already here, that I started to feel whole.

This is where I live now. Not in a perfected version of myself. Just in the realness of the moment. I’m not trying to escape it anymore.

My writing is one way I meet myself—and maybe it helps others do the same. I write from the raw, quiet places. I don’t need to dress it up. I’m not trying to inspire anyone. I just want to tell the truth as I experience it.

Some of my poems and reflections may question the systems we come from—family, religion, work, success. That doesn’t mean I don’t love parts of what I came from. But I’m also willing to look at how those systems shaped me, and where they asked me to go quiet or be smaller than I am. That’s the part I’m most interested in now—what happens when we stop shrinking.