At the start of this year, the slow-burning nervous breakdown I’d downplayed scorched its way through whatever composure I had left. I thought the exhaustion would pass, and that the haze would clear. I thought I could stave it off if I just worked harder, if I just pushed through. But when April arrived, I could no longer keep up the appearance that everything was fine.
I wasn’t fine.
I had been in education for ten years—my mid-twenties through my mid-thirties. I genuinely thought I would teach until retirement. My favorite age group was high school juniors, because with them, each day felt like sitting in a room full of the most fascinating people in the world. I learned just as much from them as I hope they learned from me.
But inside, I was slowly dying.
Stress clung to me like smoke, following me to school and back home in equal measure. I couldn’t shake it before unlocking the door to my classroom, nor could I set it aside in the evenings. I just couldn’t leave it behind. And the tasks that once gave me energy in my classroom became burdens. Everything took more effort than I had to give.
At home, the smallest tasks became impossible: I stopped exercising. I stopped writing. I stopped playing guitar. Even watching TV felt like too much. My depression wasn’t improving like I thought it would—not after months of EMDR therapy, nor after over a year of medication adjustments. Despite my doctor’s care, despite my husband’s tenderness and patience through my cycling of mood swings, like a storm of seasons in flux—feeling angry and irritable and breaking down in tears, sometimes within minutes of each other—I felt like I was slipping away.
And then came the fire.
It burned through the disguises I’d carefully constructed: the calm and collected teacher, the overachiever, the one who keeps it all together. The reality was I couldn’t teach—not like this. My students deserved better. I couldn’t perform that I was okay. I couldn’t numb my way through another semester with some drinks every evening. Bills piled up. Our rental house began to feel less like a shelter and more like a cage.
But the worst part, the part that cut deepest, was the wreckage of a body I had ignored, and a voice I hadn’t heard in what felt like years. The things that mattered the most to me were slipping away. My career. My sense of purpose. My art. My sense of self. My ability to move through a single day without shaking. But what I really lost was the lie that I could keep going as I had been.
The collapse left me emptied out—raw, ashamed, terrified. And yet, for the first time in a few years, I could see the truth of my life without distortion. For that, I felt relieved.
There was no grand epiphany. Just the silence that follows a fire, and the slow realization that if I kept disappearing, there would be nothing left of me to burn.
I didn’t yet know what would come next, but I knew the silence was sacred. That’s where the work began.
I slept for what felt like days. I wept, but no tears came. And slowly, I began to tap into something deeper—an aquifer of thoughts, dreams, and fragments that had been waiting beneath the surface. I started going back through the Notes app on my phone, through old sketchbooks packed away, through half-finished poems. The yellowing pages of notebooks I’d carried with me through college, through six years of sobriety, and through some of the darkest days of me and my husband’s still-young relationship.
There were nights when I thought we wouldn’t make it. My husband and I had hurt each other in ways that stripped us bare. We became strangers to ourselves. Strangers to each other. For a while, it felt like we were clawing at the curtains of our own spirits, shredding them in the dark, no light left in the room.
But these fragments I found—these notes and sketches and memories—became a map and a record of what I had lost and what I meant to find.
I wouldn’t ignore what my soul was revealing to me, not like I had these past years. There was weight to this, an aching to it. I would call it The Reclamation Plan. My reclamation.
There are moments in life when the ground gives out—not all at once, but slowly, like a quiet erosion you didn’t notice until you’re ankle-deep in the wreckage. This past April was such a moment. My time on medical leave gave me the first chance in years to pause, to listen, to begin again.
When I set down the old selves—teacher, overachiever, fixer—I didn’t know what came next, but I felt it. I felt a pull from something I had left behind long before I realized it was missing.
I didn’t want to rush into yet another version of burnout. I needed rest. Deep rest. And I wanted something different, a life that felt truer.
The Reclamation Plan wasn’t a “plan” in the traditional sense, not like years of easter eggs for future projects planted in advance a-la Taylor Swift. There were no steps, no goals, no deadlines. Afterall, it was those very things that hollowed me to my core.
The Reclamation Plan was a way to listen. To trace the faint outline of a self I could almost—but not quite—touch. I could feel the stubborn pulse of something still alive beneath the collapse.
It became a living document—or at least I hoped it would be—part memoir, part compass, part creative prayer...Including this site you’re reading this on now, where I’ve decided to document the unfolding, to send it into the aether, an archive of memory, like the Voyager’s Golden Record, a signal, without any expectation of a receiver.
I thought back to one of my favorite collections of personal essays—a book I found one gray day in the Boulder Public Library so many years ago—Dwellings, by Linda Hogan, and what she says about the Voyager:
“In 1977, when the Voyagers were launched, one of these spacecraft carried the Interstellar Record, a hoped-for link between earth and space that is filled with the sounds and images of the world around us. It carries parts of our lives all the way out to the great Forever. It is destined to travel out of our vast solar system, out to the far, unexplored regions of space in hopes that somewhere, millions of years from now, someone will find it like a note sealed in a bottle carrying our history across the black ocean of space. This message is intended for the year 8,000,000.”
She continues:
“A small and perfect world is traveling there, with psalms journeying past Saturn’s icy rings, all our treasured life flying through the darkness, going its way alone back through the universe. There is the recorded snapping of fire, the song of a river traveling the continent, the living wind passing through dry grasses, all the world that burns and pulses around us, even the comforting sound of a heartbeat taking us back to the first red house of our mothers’ bodies, all that, floating through the universe.”
Hogan goes on to discuss the limited scope of a Golden Record. How do we decide what parts of our humanity to show, what parts to hide? Do we cover the parts that ashame us, like Adam and Eve after they’ve left the garden? “There is no image of this man nailed to a cross, no saving violence,” Hogan writes. “There are no political messages, no photographs of Hiroshima. This is to say that we know our own wrongdoings.”
I thought about my record of being. What parts have I hidden in hope of threading a narrative of wholeness? Would I hide more? I was so good at hiding; I had years of practice with some of the most essential parts of my being. What would I show? The bits and pieces of thought scribbled in cursive in the margins of an old notebook, the poems I wrote as a teenager and 20-year-old, the paintings gathering dust in the gap above the closet and beneath the ceiling. Out of sight. And out of mind. What record of mine from the past was spinning in some lost universe of myself, waiting to be discovered now, by the 36-year-old me who could no longer get up off the couch, sinking in quicksand? How could I have known then that all of it would be the very thing to help me stand again?
I started mapping the questions that mattered more than any answer:
What does a life rooted in authenticity look like?
What rhythms nourish rather than deplete?
How do I reclaim the parts of myself I abandoned in the name of survival?
Maybe it would take shape in phases. Or maybe it wouldn’t. It didn’t matter. But first: witness the truths that had surfaced. Then: name the life I wanted to build, the one I had abandoned. Finally: live into the slow, imperfect work of return—through creativity, through spirit, through rest.
I’m sharing my Reclamation Plan here not because it’s finished—it isn’t. Maybe it never will be, maybe this is a lifelong unfolding. It’s still coming into focus, and that’s what matters. It’s something shaped by every season, every slip, every small act of devotion.
I read recently that we need to begin thinking of everything in the universe as a unique, individual processes—not a collection static objects floating in space. Just as the universe continues to unfold, so do we. We are a collection of unfinished processes, an infinite unfolding.
I’m sharing my Reclamation Plan here because I believe we all have something to reclaim. And maybe it’s not even a reclaiming, but an archaeology of sorts—a recovering of the self, each precious memory, each act of remembering, each bit a slow reconstruction, a dusting-off of histories and doppelgängers of ourselves in alternate paths, an ultimate understanding, a revealing of the spirit that spreads and connects us back to ourselves like a mycelium that networks below the surface of a ground we tread and destroy and build back again.
And maybe, in tracing my path, you’ll feel permission to trace your own.
Here are the seven truths I arrived at.
- I’m reclaiming my voice.
- I’m reclaiming my time.
- I’m reclaiming my definition of work.
- I’m reclaiming my body.
- I’m reclaiming my queerness.
- I’m reclaiming my spirituality.
- I’m reclaiming my right to change.
And here's where I start the dig. An archaeology of myself.
___
Some fragments from my notes, April 1, 2016, 11:47 am:
Month of the High Priestess
Recovery is like archaeology.
You slowly unearth a mecca—the lost city of yourself, buried long ago, forgotten until now. At first you dig into the earth with heavy machinery. But as you pinpoint that lost city, you begin to delicately dust away at the details, until, bit by bit, you are left with the story of your own becoming.
As I lay each night, drifting off to sleep, I imagine the slow, rhythmic blinking of the sleep light on my Macbook, a documentation of my precious time, like Cash's saw from Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, "stirring the dying light...an expression of listening and of waiting."
Cora, the nurse, at the ICU while my brother detoxed. I never would have though twice about the nurse’s name, but it seemed like such a strange coincidence when she told my Mom and me that she graduated from Pine Grove High in '05. That I was reading As I Lay Dying, that there’s a Cora in those pages, too. Another Cora, Jen’s daughter, Jen who always stops by to see the chickens with her daughter, and to bring scraps from the Vitamin Cottage for them.
The night my brother was in the ICU, my mom and I went to see Joanna Newsom at the Boulder Theater. Not only did I feel lucky to get the chance to see Newsom, one of my favorite musicians (if not my absolute favorite) but I was glad I got to see her with Mom. I was probably the only one to bring my Mom as my date, but I felt proud of that. The tour was called The Strings/Keys Incident (I loved the play on words, iykyk). Newsom played a new arrangement of “Peach Plum Pear,” and it brought tears to my eyes—it was miles more beautiful than the album version.
April arrived and I was invited to interview with Vista Ridge. "Maya" by the Incredible String Band came on shuffle, as I buttoned my pale blue Oxford, tied my navy blue tie, and laced up my dress shoes.
I drove through the canyon, and as I merged onto I-25, "Cherokee" by Cat Power came on shuffle. I felt at peace and confident. My interview went well—I could sense it in the room. I was confident. Calm. Myself. God has answered my prayer from the night before. After communion between body, mind, and spirit on a run in Red Rock Canyon Open Space, I drove home. And as I wound down Sleepy Hollow, "Rising Greatness" by Alela Diane came on. The principal called me just before I pulled into the driveway at my parents’ to welcome me aboard that night.
The Body of the Iceberg, and the Blue that Subsumes It
"The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Or in one bloom. A thought. An idea. That seeds until it is strong enough to break through the concrete.
I believe in my Lord Savior Jesus Christ! I believe in Buddhism! I believe in the Tarot! I believe in reincarnation and I believe in every god that guides the stars, each constellation, everything between. I believe in You and me and us and them and the cosmic we and the universe! I believe in peace and love and happiness! I believe we are all here for a reason: to make the world a better place! To save each other! I believe in the stars! Astrology! I believe in science! Chemistry!
"There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries of time."
"Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. "
"Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations." - Emerson.
Like song, the voices of the ages create a symphony out of the same basic chords and notes. Like folk music, we sing the songs of our ancestors who came before us. Their stories and struggles live through us, and us through them. We distill our thought and experience and emotion into the combinations of A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. Like vowels. An alphabet of sound. My songs are unique and they are common and they are new and they are old all at once.
"In like manner, all public facts are to be individualized, all private facts are to be generalized. Then at once History becomes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime."
In the Month of the High Priestess, my inward world is revealed. Examined. Questioned. As Emerson states, "The primeval world, — the Fore-World, as the Germans say — I can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos of ruined villas."
Which brings me back to archaeology, my recovery, my rediscovery. Like Atlantis. Like the finding the lost city of your childhood, revealed in all its glory as you enter adulthood. I am reminded of "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich. Some poems reveal the secrets of the universe.
When I saw Joanna Newsom play "Sapokanikan," at the concert, I felt so happy. Another song about the unearthing of history. I realize on this April night, after 32 inches of snowfall in Bailey, that Newsom's album, Divers, is not just about time in the physical sense, but also in the spiritual sense, that, like Emerson says, "when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do, as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?"
So, too, do Emerson’s thoughts kindle my own fire. I feel like he is my kindred soul, almost as though he is speaking to me through time and the generations, maybe, speaking through me. God links all of His creations, weaving them into one blanket truth (see: I Heart Huckabees).
In "History" Emerson affirms the wisdom of childhood.
In March I was reacquainted with my childhood, things I hadn’t thought about or seen for years, and now I am finally making sense of it.
Oh how time moves both fast and slow, or "both ways," as Newsom puts it; we must "stand brave, [as] life-livers" and "[bleed] out our days in the river of time."
I realize that by ending the album with "trans" and beginning it with "send", thus linking beginning and end, and the idea of rebirth, of Ouroboros, of infinity, of the circle, of womanhood with childhood, of masculinity with femininity, she is also naming her affinity to and perhaps affiliation with the Transcendentalists—to transcend rational thought. What baffles me is that by some act of Divine Inspiration, on the first day of April of 2016, I have penned these words and come to these realizations out of the blue, as though I were meant to realize them in the moment of writing them. I am understanding the faith, literature, and music that moves me, in unison, and, by extension catching glimpses of my soul, of my self. Like Whitman's "Song of Myself."
Since January, time seems to move at a slower pace, perhaps because I am finally living each moment instead of letting it pass me by.
I typed these thoughts out in hopes of muscle movement translating to thought or memory or subconscious direction.
I can't build a time machine into the past. I can't rewrite my history. As they say, the past is the past—you can't live in it. Live for the things you are doing or can do right now that make you feel better than you were. And don't look back.
Drove past a liquor store and no urge or craving hit me. Just watched the open sign glowing as I sped up 285 back home, and smiled, because I preferred the way my bad case of the blues made feel over a dumb store that held my unraveling once. Held me like a cage. Feed me light, I whispered to myself. Feed me light.
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This is the first entry in Listening Rituals, a series devoted to the practice of tracing ourselves through music.
This week, my essay on Lightning Bug's gorgeous 2021 album, A Color of the Sky, and the way some friendships hold up a mirror to who we’ve been and who we’re becoming.
Last month, I flew to Cleveland with my friend Anna for the long July 4th weekend to visit our old friend Em—one of those friendships that feels stitched into the fabric of who I am. I met them both when I was eighteen, still dazed from the move to Boulder, wide-eyed and hungry for a different kind of life. I lit my first cigarette with Anna in the garage at the house on Table Mesa, wrote strange poems in workshops with Em before I even knew what I was trying to say. We worked at the campus radio station together and found the kind of music that cracked something open in us. And on many nights, we danced into oblivion at the radio’s dance parties…nights that seemed to shield a future that felt so big, so unknown.
On the night of the Fourth, at dusk, along a path that skirted Lake Erie, I saw fireflies (or, as some call them, lightning bugs) for the first time in my life. All these little bursts of gold hovering among the grasses in the darkening, humid Ohio air, almost beckoning us forward. “Look! Fireflies!” I felt like a kid, full of awe, wondering how I had never seen these beautiful creatures before.
Later, that same night, I saw them again when Anna and I went outside to smoke. I stood out in the yard of Em’s beautiful Tudor revival house, and I kept watching them flicker in and out of sight, like magic, strange little messengers trying to tell me something, as though speaking a different language, inscrutable and ancient. It didn’t feel like seeing them so much as being met by them. Like a spell had been activated, or as though something I didn’t know I’d been missing had returned.
I stood, hypnotized. Fireworks bloomed above the treetops.
I felt much the same way when I first heard Lightning Bug a few years ago, which is why I decided to make this the first post for my Listening Rituals series. There are times when you hear a song or an album, and you can feel a shift inside yourself at a cellular level. That’s what Listening Rituals celebrates: those moments when music leads you to a fundamental realization, maybe in who you are, who you or were, or who you long to be. Those moments are sacred, in my eyes, and become bookends to our most intimate experiences. A Color of the Sky, by Lightning Bug, is one such album for me.
I first heard A Color of the Sky at a time when some rituals in my life were as strong as ever, some were quickly fading away, and others were surfacing anew.
I had just moved into a new apartment in 2021, I was still sober, and I had just gotten my first deck of Tarot cards. I was pulling cards and setting intentions during new moons, trying to find parallels between my life and in the images of the Rider-Waite set. I was also dating again, meeting up with guys from Hinge, hoping to find a partner I could see myself marrying one day. After six years of sobriety, I eventually decided to drink again later that same year, wondering if this time it was from a place of choice or from succumbing to the social pressures of dating. I knew that the work I had done during my years of sobriety had healed me in many of the ways I had hoped, but I also knew I still felt so fragile and raw, as though the slightest misstep would break me. Still, I felt more content with my life than I had in a long time.
Lightning Bug’s “Song of the Bell” details a similar uncertain space of reformation:
"If I empty me of all myself, am I a vessel or a shell? / Mining for substance in the dark and precious well / Pour out my convictions till I'm hollow as a bell / If I empty me of all myself, am I a vessel or a shell?" - Audrey Kang
Singer Audrey Kang has noted in interviews that she wrote the song during early quarantine—days suddenly hollowed out for many of us—and she was thinking through Taoist ideas around emptiness, asking: can one empty oneself and remain whole, to be vessel not shell?
I suppose it’s a question that resonates looking back on the past decade of my life. Was I a shell, pushing away the people who played such a big part of my adolescence and early adulthood as I became more hollowed from addiction, or was I a vessel all those years, holding space for the experiences that would lead me back to those very people, ready and open to share my revelations from some liminal, fragile space? "If I empty me of all myself..."
The words felt less philosophical question than lived fracture. I thought of all the years when I felt hollowed—grief, doubt, dislocation. But I thought too of the unexpected fullness in being reseen. I was a vessel, emptied and made whole at once.
So much in my life was changing in 2021, but this album was the one constant that year. I was in awe from the first bits of percussion and guitar that open the album until the very end, Audrey Kang’s airy voice threading it all together.
"When the light of day decays… I lie awake / And in the night I see / all the people that I used to be...All the friends I failed, or lost / or left behind of me / And all the things I didn’t mean to break / I lie awake" - Audrey Kang
"I Lie Awake" is a song that creates a stillness, a reminder that all versions of us, bright and broken, linger in view, urging us to trust what remains even as it shifts.
That weekend, as Anna and I caught up with Em and her husband, Dan, I felt a kind of homecoming I hadn’t realized I’d been needing. The good kind, the kind where you don’t have to explain yourself from scratch, because you’re with friends who have known you before you’ve shed so many skins yet calloused so many others.
Over the years, our friendship has held its own rhythm of distance and return. I remembered versions of myself I thought I’d lost. And not in a nostalgic way exactly, but in the way you recognize the shape of something even after it’s changed. I was tracing the outlines of a life that I thought was long gone, only it was always there, flickering, like those tiny, magical creatures glowing in the thick of the Cleveland night air that weekend. The ache of past selves, past choices...somehow it all felt right in the context of us spending time together after all these years.
The entire trip to Cleveland made me think of the kind of friendships that vanish and reappear, gaps in time closed in a single sentence, flickering like sparks from a fire. You blink, and they’re gone. You blink again, and you’re back on a couch in Boulder, laughing like nothing changed at all; blink, and you're in your mid-thirties together, at the dinner table, laughing at the dumb shit you used to do when nothing and everything seemed to matter all at once. Just like old friends do: you lose touch, move across states, change through your own seasons of life, and hopefully, if you're lucky, have the chance to share it all years later, old and new versions of yourself combined, on full display.
It’s the weight of these realizations and more questions that entered me when I left Cleveland:
Is continuity (of the self, of relationships) only meaningful if there’s room to hold new light, room to be witnessed by each other? What stories do we tell our loved ones (and which do we choose not to tell), especially after years have passed, and is that kind of storytelling truly the only way to become whole again, to integrate all versions of the self, past and present?
Sometimes, it takes being witnessed by people who knew you before everything broke to feel balanced. In my unspooling, a years-long unspooling, years that made me question everything, it took being witnessed by two old friends again to remember there was something whole underneath it all. To realize that I don't have to bear a cross of guilt and regret over past choices, because these are people who have always accepted me, even as those choices seemed to make me flicker in and out of view. Time…it stretches, collapses, rewinds. I kept thinking how rare it is to sit beside someone who remembers the earliest drafts of me. I think of Cleveland, and I think of that Fourth of July weekend as a vessel, maybe even a portal, to parts of myself that were for so long dormant, now awake.
The other night, at home, I went out to the backyard for a cigarette. I listened to the whole Lightning Bug album again, in awe of its quiet beauty.
“All the people that I used to be,” Kang sings. Old selves that I’d forgotten… decisions I didn’t expect to survive… friendships I thought had ended. But here—in the dark, seeing those fragments—it felt like remembrance rather than regret.
I listened, letting the songs become a mirror and a balm.
Maybe that’s what listening to music is, at its best. Not just taking in sound—but letting it call back the parts of us that we thought had drifted beyond reach. Noticing which selves rise to the surface. Which memories flicker back to life, soft and shy as fireflies.
There’s a stretch of time that lives between stories. Not the beginning, not the end—just the hush that follows a decision, the ache that comes before the shift. A moment suspended in breath. A space where nothing blooms, but everything stirs. That’s where we begin.
I didn’t know I was unraveling when it began.
I thought I was just tired.
Tired in a way that felt earned, maybe even noble. Tired from doing the good work. The necessary work.
The kind of work that demanded my disappearing into it.
But the disappearance lasted longer than I expected. It outgrew the job. It outgrew the calendar. It followed me home, into my journals, into the part of me that used to sing.
Eventually, I couldn’t find my way back to the creative life I once knew—not because it was gone, but because I no longer knew how to name what mattered. What to keep. What to mourn. What to rebuild.
That’s where this began—not with a resolution, but with a quiet truth I could no longer ignore:
I had abandoned my voice. And I wanted it back.
But I didn’t want to “start over.” I wasn’t interested in reinvention. I wanted something else—something slower, more honest. I wanted to trace what had carried me underneath the noise. To remember the shape of what was still alive.
That’s how The Reclamation Plan was born.
Not a list of goals I had. Not a productivity system to do more. I no longer wanted more. I wanted less. A lot less. My spirit and mind felt fried, and I was the live wire sparking, about to catch fire.
I also felt completely detached from myself. I couldn’t keep up the appearance that everything was fine, that I was okay.
God, I wanted to curl up in bed or on the couch and stay there forever, or at least stay until I felt like myself again. Until I had will again.
So I sat down to write. To mine the depths of a years-long archive that grew in shape and form like a long shadow in the heat of day before the sun sinks behind the mountains.
I created The Reclamation Plan as a kind of compass, a gentle structure to hold the fog of creative return, the messy middle of healing. But I still didn’t know what the healing would look like, and even now I still don’t completely know.
Back in April, when everything felt raw, I didn’t realize I was at the throbbing center of sharp realization: I no longer wanted to pursue the career I worked so hard to build, maybe forever; no longer wanted to strive to become the perfect version of myself, nor wait for my writing to do the same.
In this mental state? In the midst of yet another depressive episode?
No. I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt split to the core.
This plan wasn’t conceived as linear. And it still isn’t. In fact, so much of what will follow here is my act of tracing, of remembering. Finally shining the light on years of writings, in the context of my life now, in the thick of a nervous breakdown.
This plan doesn’t promise transformation on command as I so often tried to do in my twenties. It simply offers a container for myself. A way to walk with what still pulses and to shape it into something more.
Over a short period of time, it’s become a framework for this entire archive. A loose rhythm. A spiritual and creative practice I can continue to attune to, my words my tuning fork.
A reminder that I don’t have to be fully healed to create something meaningful and put it out into the world. I don’t have to wait until I’ve placed every piece of the puzzle before I begin.
Why, why, did I feel like my life needed to reflect some sort of thing I fantasized about years ago in order to pursue the one thing I always loved? To pursue the written word? To create the art I so desperately craved to read?
At least I knew bone deep that I could start now. A true leap of faith. A scattered, frantic scramble to sift through the fragments and finally put some sort of a semblance of self in words, into the art I wanted you, dear reader, to read.
You’ll notice it unfold here as I make sense of it all.
Each phase of this so-called Reclamation Plan has its own rituals and writings. Its own pacing. Its own questions.
All of it is part of the same practice: learning how to live again without abandoning myself.
If you’re here, maybe you’ve known some version of collapse, too. Maybe you’re already standing at the edge of return, unsure what to bring with you.
I know I was.
I know I still am.
So, then, a blessing, for me, for you, for us:
Let this be a place where I don’t have to rush becoming.
Where I can rebuild my voice slowly.
Where I can trace the life that still wants me. And, maybe, along the way, fall in love with a life meant to be lived.
Let this be a soft season.
Let it be unrushed, unnamed, unfinished.
Let it begin like breath.
The map begins here. My map. The very start, the inhale, the story in reverse, but forever unfolding.
In rhythm,
Michael
For years, I wrote in the margins—of teaching schedules, sobriety anniversaries, album reviews, unfinished songs and half-hearted routines. What would it mean to thread it all together? What would be revealed?
Welcome. I'm so glad you're here.
This isn’t a typical blog or newsletter.
You won’t find hot takes or how-tos here.
There’s no algorithm, no productivity hacks.
Just a mirror for anyone in a season of return. For anyone craving a softer pace. For anyone rebuilding voice, identity, or creative practice from the inside out.
Tracework grew from my own season of unraveling—professionally, emotionally, spiritually. After a long and quiet rebuilding of something like a self, I didn’t want to just write content.
I wanted to trace the creative work I had abandoned—what still pulsed underneath the ash, what still sang—in the context of my life now.
Because for years, I wrote in the margins—of teaching schedules, sobriety anniversaries, album reviews, unfinished songs, and half-hearted routines.
What would it mean to thread it all together? What would be revealed?
So I’ve been gathering those margins, rewriting them, listening for the
shape of something larger.
Each post, each ritual, each thread of language here is part of a slow return—a rebuilding of voice, of rhythm, of embodiment.
Not a performance, but a tracing.
To follow memory where it leads.
To map the shape of becoming—more honest, more rooted, and somehow more whole.
Tracework is a living archive of creative return.
Inside Tracework you'll find:
- Personal essays that walk the line between memoir and myth—my own story, yes, but always with a doorway for yours
- A monthly series called Tracing the Arcana—reflections drawn from the tarot, each piece a meditation on healing and inner archetypes
- Listening Rituals—essays that use music as emotional and spiritual entry points
- Seasonal offerings that align with the year’s natural rhythms—rituals, playlists, guidebooks, and prompts that have helped me slow down and reimagine my life.
This isn’t a space for quick answers.
It’s for slow witnessing.
For attuning to your own rhythm.
If something in this speaks to you, I hope you’ll stay.
You can subscribe free to receive my main essays and reflections. Or, become a supporter to read more content like seasonal guidebooks, audio rituals, tarot spreads, and early access to my memoir-in-progress.
Your support helps me continue building this living archive, one reflection at a time.
Thank you for reading. Your presence here matters.
You are a part of this tracing.
- Michael
Paid subscriptions, tips, and donations help me keep Tracework free for everyone, and they help keep this site up and running (hosting and platform fees, etc.)
The Fools Notebook. This is where the road begins. The Fool is the card of beginning, trust, risk, becoming—the energy of stepping forward without knowing exactly where the road leads. This series is a record of the early steps—fragments, sketches, and reflections from a life and memoir still taking shape. Here, I share process notes about my memoir-in-progress, Fire in My Mouth. Nothing here is finished. A sketchbook and seedbed.
Listening Rituals. A devotion to sound, story, and the emotional texture of music. This is where I write about the albums that shape me, the songs that haunt me, and the soundscapes that echo through memory. Part criticism, part meditation—these are sonic essays that move between the personal and the collective, the beat and the breath. Listening becomes ritual here.
Tracing the Arcana. Essays, reflections, and fragments shaped by the archetypes of the tarot. This series follows the Major Arcana as a map for healing, transformation, and return. Each post traces a card—not as static meaning, but as invitation. Through shadow and light, memory and myth, I write my way into what the tarot reveals about queerness, identity, and the lifelong ritual of becoming.
The Reclamation Plan. A seasonal blueprint for creative return and personal renewal. What happens after burnout, rupture, or loss? This series is a living document of that question. Here, I share the phases and rituals that are helping me reorient my life around art, authenticity, and healing. It’s both a map and a mirror—for anyone tracing their way back to themselves.
The Deeper Thread. Become an annual supporter of Tracework. This is a space of gratitude to those of you who have become founding readers for this publication. Free and monthly supporters can't access these pieces. More to come soon.
The Minor Arcana. A different kind of way to explore this living archive. All work is also organized according to thematic, tarot-aligned themes that align with these four suits: Cups, Swords, Pentacles, and Wands.
