This isn’t a memoir in the traditional sense. There’s no single through-line, no tidy arc, no moment where everything clicks into place and the lesson lands.
It’s more like evidence.
The older I get, the more my life looks like a case file — exhibits of who I am, repeated themes, moments that seemed ordinary when they happened but turned out to be load-bearing. I’m a trial lawyer by trade, so maybe I can’t help thinking that way. But I’ve come to believe everyone’s life works like this, whether they notice it or not.
I noticed.
Core Memories is what happened when I stopped letting these stories live only in my head. Some of them I’ve been carrying for forty years. A few I wrote down the same week they happened, in journals I kept when the world was moving too fast and I needed somewhere to put it. Some are funny. Some are painful. A couple are both at the same time, which is honestly the most honest category.
They’re organized loosely around Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey — not because I think I’m a hero, but because that framework was the first map that made sense of terrain I was already lost in.
The call. The rupture. The road. The return. I found Campbell in the rubble of something I’ll tell you about later, and he gave me language for what I was already living.
This started as a WordPress blog because that’s the most honest format for what it is — unfinished, editable, still becoming. A workbench, not a museum. Right now it’s that.
Eventually it may be something else.
Take what’s useful. Ignore what isn’t.
And if you see something in here that feels familiar — some inherited wiring, some shared frequency you thought only you carried — good.
That’s exactly the point.
Core Memories 