I didn’t choose to go inward.
The choice was made for me.
Most of us never learned how to read ourselves, knowing only how to perform, produce, and impress while leaving the private self in the dark. When the pandemic stripped away the external world, turning inward wasn't a luxury—it was the only direction left and for me, it was the right direction.
I started coaching to help people with creative work, but sessions addressing blocks or fears inevitably revealed a deeper root: people were misreading their own interior. Once they saw themselves clearly, those problems dissolved or became solvable. Recognizing a collective lack of narrative literacy, I decided to take the co-curricular lab Cosmic Glory Project into classrooms and creative spaces as a Traveling Teaching Artist to help people realize they are the authors of their lives.
“... most of us have been given almost no instruction on how to read ourselves.”
Writing my novel, Spire's Cosmic Glory, forced me to confront my own interior, turning concepts like discipline and “the specific texture of my own strangeness” into the tools for my allegorical frameworks.
Ultimately, teaching, writing, and coaching all stem from the same core conviction: that the interior life is not decorative. It is, in fact, the most consequential thing a person carries. And that learning to read it correctly changes everything.