The Simple Stuff

• For education and work details see my resume.
• I’m an introvert and an external processor. I enjoy diving into conversation, even with someone I just met.
• I’d dance every time I hear music if it was socially acceptable. Unfortunately, the years of ballet plus falling off horses plus recent running broke my back, so I’m marking off my third month on crutches and anticipating back surgery.
• Oh, and I have an obsession with nonbreaking spaces, commas, and citations.
• I cringe every time someone asks me “where are you from?” because I have no idea; I’ve moved 18 times none of them count as a forever home. So home is with my people. Right now home is deep in downtown Chicago, where I walk as much as I drive and having a yard or a driveway is unheard of.

The Deeper Stuff

Am I the sum total of what I do, who I love, what I’ve experienced? But what about what I can’t remember? What about the parts of me that I know but others never will? Or the parts of me that others know but, thanks to amnesia, I don’t? My layers of identities—career, relationship status, history—are tattoos on my skin. They’ll mark me, be part of me forever, and they are the easiest thing to see when you look at me. But tattoos are not the end of the story. My soul is safe in God’s hands no matter what happens to my body or brain.

No matter how you read my skin and story, remember that all of us—even hard-edged survivors like me—are more than meets the eye. We who stumble around in marked-up bodies that are  continually failing us and trapping us in pain? We are souls who continually feel the infinite layered between the tears and pain and skin. We see eternity mixed with pain and despair, and so we see how alive we can be before the sun sets.