About me
I was born in motion.
Even before I knew words like wanderlust, like longing, like grief, I understood the rhythm of the road, the way it hummed beneath me, stretching long and endless into the rear window of my parents’ Volvo. I don’t remember where we were going that day, but I remember how it felt. The too-big sunglasses slipping down my nose, my ponytail loosening in the wind, the sweet smear of something on my lips—chocolate, maybe. Or maybe just the remnants of another moment I wanted to make last.
I liked to pretend I was in control. Hands gripping the car seat, body leaning forward like I could steer us somewhere, anywhere. Even then, I was always looking back, watching the past get smaller in the rear window, knowing even as a child that time only moved in one direction.
I didn’t know yet that my mother was born in the month of Elul, the season of return, of broken hearts brought to God for mending. She entered the world on a late September day, a time when people reflect on the year behind them and atone for their sins. Maybe that’s what she was always searching for—atonement, a way back to something she could never quite reach. She left the world the night before the winter solstice, the darkest night of the year, as if she had been holding her breath for the light to return but couldn’t wait a moment longer.
I didn’t know yet that my father had been conceived on a boat headed toward America, that he came into the world already caught between two places. He was a boy who didn’t speak English, made to wear a dunce cap in school for his Ukrainian tongue, taught young that silence was safer. But silence can be its own kind of inheritance, and I have spent my life trying to undo it—writing, documenting, creating, making sure nothing is lost the way so much was for him.
I grew up. Became the girl with the camera, the one who learned early how to frame a moment before it disappeared. The advertising executive who knew how to sell a dream. The artist who tore it apart to find the truth underneath. The entrepreneur, the full-time freelancer, the kind of person who never worked for someone else’s vision when I could build my own. The writer who learned that stories aren’t just told, they are survived.
And I have survived.
I survived my mother’s suicide. I survived losing my father to the slow erasure of dementia. And then, at 38, I was told I might not survive at all. Cancer. The kind that grows quiet and unseen until it decides to make itself known. I used to joke that I had spent so many years wishing for an exit, and now my body had taken me seriously. But the truth is, cancer wasn’t some great revelation, some destined poetic tragedy—it was biology, plain and simple. A roll of the genetic dice. The inheritance no one talks about. The grief that rewrites itself in the body.
I should be bitter. Maybe I am. But all these melodramas have served as muses.
Grief made me a writer. Survival made me a creator. The past made me an archivist, an artist, a collector of lost things. I have spent my life documenting what vanishes, making sure no moment is left unlived, unseen, unremembered.
I think about that little girl in the backseat. The one who wore sunglasses too big for her face because she liked the way they made her feel—cool, untouchable, a little older than she was. The one who gripped the armrests like she was steering her own fate.
She didn’t know what was coming.
The loss. The love.
But she did know this: she was going somewhere. Always. Moving forward through it all.
And she still is.
