Showing Up Again Estuaries Launch Party 2025

I showed up for myself this week in March.

Not quietly. Not halfway.

Fully — voice, art, story, and presence.

The Estuaries Launch Party was my first time in a long time standing in front of a room of friends, strangers, creatives, community members — and feeling not fear, but excitement. There was a time when speaking publicly tied my nerves into knots. But something has shifted. I am no longer trying to disappear. I’m stepping into the artist I have always been.

One of the highlights was reading Smoke, a short story rooted in my father’s death and the complex love of a difficult childhood. It could have remained a wound — but instead, I wrote it into myth. I allowed the trauma to transform, to become something transcendent. Smoke is a reminder to myself that endings are often just energy changing form. Grief can become light. Fear can become meaning. The story helped me build a belief system that honors transformation over loss.

The art exhibition that followed felt like a continuation of that transformation. Guests didn’t just look — they interacted. They asked questions. They connected the work to their own stories and memories. There was engagement, laughter, deep attention. It wasn’t simply an art show; it was an experience. A shared moment. A reminder that art lives most vibrantly in conversation with others.

Photography also made its entrance as part of my ever-expanding creative language. A stump — overlooked, dismissed by many — became poetic through the lens. Composition shifted perception. The ordinary revealed its beauty. The discarded found new life. This is the magic of art: resurrection through attention.

And then there is my name — tagged in spray paint, improvised and raw. Not just a signature, but a voice. It covers, drips, interrupts. It says: The artist was here. It declares that presence is itself an act of creation. Of claiming space. Of refusing erasure.

All of these pieces — the spoken story, the visual art, the photography, the signature — are part of one truth:

I am showing up again.

Not shrunken. Not hidden.
But alive, connected, and fully present in my work.

Here’s to the next launch.
Here’s to courage taking shape, one creative act at a time.
Here’s to transformation — always.