LOVE
Every person you have ever loved is standing at the end of an impossible chain of things that could have gone differently. Think about what had to happen for you to be sitting wherever you are right now, reading these words.
SURVIVAL
My last steps looked almost like dancing. There was no one there to see them. No music was playing in the kitchen. I was simply doing something I had done hundreds of times before, sliding my feet across the cool tile...
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, the lost years, love, music, mental illness, faith and the absence of it. Then a spinal cord injury divided everything into before and after, followed by hospitals, loneliness, survival, despair, and the slow work of becoming someone again. 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. The light changes depending on the glass I hold it against.
You may never know what it is like to wake up paralyzed or 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.
I am still inside the story myself. This is 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
Est. 12 min read
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.
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.
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01The moments when staying alive became its own kind of story.
02The years I disappeared into addiction, instability, and everything I was trying to outrun.
03The things that happened, the things that remained, and the long work of understanding both.
04Life inside a body that changed, and the world I have had to learn again from a wheelchair.
05Bipolar disorder, depression, survival, treatment, and learning how to live inside my own mind.
06Marriage, devotion, friendship, and the person who stayed when everything else changed.
07The songs that carried memories, marked seasons, and occasionally helped keep me alive.
08The earliest rooms, wounds, memories, and questions that followed me into adulthood.
09The people we come from, the people we lose, and the complicated distances between us.
10A faith lost, questioned, rediscovered, and still being learned one prayer at a time.
11Acceptance, rebuilding, and the unfinished work of becoming whoever comes next.
12Everything that refuses to stay inside a single category.
A few places to enter the story. Love, survival, childhood, disability, and the moments that changed the color of everything.
Every person you have ever loved is standing at the end of an impossible chain of things that could have gone differently. Think about what had to happen for you to be sitting wherever you are right now, reading these...
Read Essay→
My last steps looked almost like dancing. There was no one there to see them. No music was playing in the kitchen. I was simply doing something I had done hundreds of times before, sliding my feet across the cool tile...
Read Essay→
By the time Indianapolis became my playground, Lighthouse Mission had become the place where I returned every night. It was where I slept, showered, kept my duffel bag and learned the peculiar choreography of living i...
Read Essay→
“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.
Follow the Light
New stories, old memories, songs that still follow me, and whatever I discover along the way. If you want to keep walking through the prisms with me, I'll let you know when something new appears.
Just new stories from Prism of a Life. No noise. No constant emails.
No selling your attention to somebody else.
