Welcome & Why This

I've started this blog for my summer research while traveling through Rwanda, Northern Ireland, and the UK to study how communities recover after violence.

But it’s also more than that.

It’s a space for the stories and questions I can’t always fit into academic papers. It’s about the why, the how, and the what comes after the most insidious kinds of conflict—neighbor against neighbor, family against family.

How do we come back from that?

How do we forgive our enemies—and ourselves?

What does healing look like?

And how do we learn to live with memory, not just survive it?

I’m a veteran, a student, and at times a wanna-be writer. More than that, I’m a survivor—of a suicide car bombing, a mild-traumatic brain injury, and the kind of darkness that doesn’t show up on a CT scan. I’ve met the worst in myself. I’ve wanted to give up. And I’ve also met the best in all of us—and found something worth coming back and staying for.

This space is for that journey.
The grief. The grace. The work.
The hope that maybe, just maybe, we can leave every person, place, and being a little better than when we found them.

Thanks for walking with me.