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A 2026 version of my 2024 bio:

I have been intimate with pain and with peace. Where I have gone, I go again as a different person. I ask for the world and let it reach me, and move through me as I move through it. Things affect me. I notice things, and against my will, only very little goes unregistered. My most common emotional experience is awe and interest. I live life with the awareness that everything I touch, I change, and all that I change changes me.

I come from great ambition and great self-denial. As a firstborn daughter, both were given to me through a rushing tap from a spring, and to whom much was given, much of the same has been expected. But somewhere along the line, self-denial became an unstoppable force, ravaging everything in its path, and so ambition became an immovable object, trapped with nowhere free or proportionate to go. I stay alive only because life insists on itself through me, and I hope that one day people become my reason to stay.

Most of my life has been spent questioning myself, but I’ve nearly questioned myself to death, and I’m now trying something else: listening to myself and believing her, putting her first. An incredible thing to imagine as I write this, given that this option was previously unavailable and unimaginable to me. Younger me would be happy to hear that feeling misunderstood routes to relief now.

I really like flowers, and so I became one. But/and I’ve also been learning that not everything I like I have to become or berate myself for not being. It’s a tiny trip whenever the world reveals things like this to me- that there are endless beautiful things, all of them having their good time, most of them separate from me. I can know of very many animals in the air, land, and sea, but I cannot know them all, and only a sliver of them I will ever meet.

I am learning, with many failures in tow, how to make a body and life spacious and fenced enough for the voracious appetite in it. I am learning I have limits and what a mercy it is.