Fire, Fracture, and the Finish Line

My book is so goddamned close.

And So, She Rose has been in the making for a while now. I started writing it around the time I gave that talk at work about death. In that talk, I laid out eight rules for living, lessons pulled straight from the edge of it. The idea was simple: live like your time actually matters.

The first ten chapters came out fast, like they’d been waiting.

And then… nothing.

For months, I’d come back to it, reread it from the beginning, and every time I’d think, this is good. I loved what I had written. But I didn’t know where to take it next.

Because I had made a choice.

I was only telling the story from my 50th birthday forward. In my mind, that’s where the real story lived. The lessons. The clarity. The version of me that finally understood what the hell mattered.

But here’s the truth I didn’t want to admit: I had refused to tell my full story because I didn’t think it was worth telling. People have already written about coming out as transgender. People have already written about growing up poor. People have already written about the military, about trauma, about survival. So I told myself mine didn’t matter.

And in a way, I still believe that. Individually, those stories aren’t unique. But together? They tell something different. A pattern. A rhythm. A life of getting knocked down and getting the hell back up again. Of feeding the spark, even when everything around you says to let it die.

That story is still there. Still working its way out. But before I could get back to it, I lost my way.

Three years after dying three separate times, I found myself slipping back into the grind. Chasing the appearance of success. Feeding my ego. Measuring my life by things that didn’t actually matter.

And the universe noticed.

God noticed.

And when God decides you’re off course, He doesn’t send a memo. He wakes you the fuck up.

For me, that looked like a car coming out of nowhere from the left.

One second I was riding. The next, everything changed.

Pain. Constant, unrelenting pain. The kind that strips you down to nothing but nerve endings and breath. And in that space, I saw it clearly: I had been given another chance at life… and I had wasted part of it.

Then came the brain injury.

A TBI isn’t just pain. It’s disorientation at the deepest level. You don’t just forget things, you lose the way you’ve always thought. The way you interpret the world. The way you recognize yourself. You reach for familiar patterns… and they’re just gone.

That was its own kind of hell.

But then, one morning, my brain came back online. After weeks of fog, something clicked. I needed to write.

I tried.

Failed.

Tried again.

Failed again.

Then they fixed my arm. Plate and pins. Suddenly, my fingers worked again.

Two days later, I picked up my tablet. And the words came.

I reread And So, She Rose and finally saw it: The ending.

Life, God, whatever you want to call it had handed it to me through that accident. The final chapters had been written for me. I just had to put them down.

So I did. Through pain. Through a freshly repaired arm that reminded me with every keystroke that I probably shouldn’t be doing what I was doing.

Didn’t matter. The words were there, and they weren’t going to wait.

One morning, I finished. Read it front to back. Sat there in a quiet room and said out loud: “It’s fucking done.”

And if you write, you know exactly what that moment feels like.

Since then, something’s opened up. I’ve written a dozen short stories. Sent them out into the world. One’s already been accepted. The rest are out there, waiting for someone to say yes.

I wrote a Survivor’s Guide, something meant for the person who wakes up in a hospital bed not knowing how the hell they got there. That’s next.

And those short stories? They’re fiction. Technically. But every single one of them is real. Lived. Felt. Survived. Arranged in the right order, they tell the story of my life after coming out. Not directly. Not cleanly. But truthfully.

And somewhere in all of this, I started another book: Before She Rose. Because maybe… just maybe… there’s something worth telling in the parts of my life I tried to ignore.

This last stretch hasn’t been clean. I’ve been betrayed by people I trusted. Accused of things that cut deeper than they should have. Lost a relationship I thought was going to become something real.

All of it hurt. Some of it still does.

But here’s the part I didn’t expect: Every single one of those moments fed the fire. They gave me something to write. Not in a self-pity kind of way. Not in a “poor me” kind of way. In a this is what it costs to live fully kind of way.

So yeah, some of it sucked. Some of it still fucking sucks.

But I’m grateful. Grateful for the pain. Grateful for the clarity. Grateful for the grit it takes to keep going. Grateful for the stories.

Because at the end of the day, that’s what all of this is turning into. Story after story after story.

And this morning? That’s exactly where I am.