Writing an artist statement in our present world feels like a love letter to past selves. Not just to who I once was, but to who the world once appeared to be. At this moment, I am excavating a ghost who saw art and the word as survival, and even as I type, I can feel a resuscitation taking place.

The work I seek to make is just this: an excavation through exploring the particular, a resuscitation of the life that fills our bodies when we are truly in a room, absorbed in another human, drowning in the nowness of a moment—the epiphanies that happen within the minutiae of living but seem to shift our entire perception of the world and how we will move through it going forward. I want to write stories of people who truly know nothing until they stub their toe so hard it brings them to their knees one day, and then while flat on their back, staring into the rotating fingers of a ceiling fan, they realize that pain is the only thing that can jolt them into the present. These small, violently humorous, yet devastatingly universal moments, when living is electric, are what I hope to unearth.

I want to create connection with my work, but not connection that’s predicated on the lie that we are all the same. We’re not. To say we are would be to ignore the deep racial, socioeconomic, and political divides that live at the core of our existence. I do think, however, we all worry that we won’t matter—that we will never be a thing that matters.

I once thought I was a thing. A playwright, a theatremaker, a writer. When I was younger, even just in college, life felt really loud, and I thought I had so much to say that everyone needed to hear. I would describe myself as a “highly politically motivated writer,” one that knew how to reach Conservatives because of my upbringing in rural Oklahoma. Almost four years later, I know that’s utter bullshit. It feels farcical to call my writing political when I now know that everything is political just by being.

Creating empathy through art in a society that’s still clamoring for survival will never change the world. Working for a non-profit, I’ve found a way to use my writing for something that feels quantifiable, but my ghost knows that only viewing myself and my worth through a means that can be measured has made my own world feel so much smaller, even if it’s changing someone else’s.

Theatre was once my identity, and I don’t miss that. But I need the drop of selfishness that’s required to keep creating. I know now that it can’t just be for others. It has to be for myself. I hope to be resurrected as an artist and reacquaint myself with that feeling of curiosity as I create an ever-expansive world of characters who feel like a piece of us all.