Hi! I’m a husband and father in Oklahoma City. Most of my life orients around my family. For what they teach me about love, reward, and patience I am grateful.
I think my hobbies have a collective thread. I find joy in riding motorcycles for familiar experiences: danger, weather on my body, a feeling of competence I first found in places I didn’t need to be. I keep returning to video games like DayZ and Arma, survival and military games set in places I recognize for reasons likely related. I read and write about that—about repetition, trauma, and unconscious drives.
I came to social work through a windy road and some doubling back. As a young person, I found myself drawn to public service: the military, overseas security contracting, political campaign work, to working on the staff of a Member of Congress.
And yet when I thought about my career, I wasn’t making an impact on the world that felt good to me. I took a position as a case manager in a youth shelter because the work seemed necessary and directly benefited people in my community. This radically changed the direction of my life.
Working with young people to navigate a world stacked against them to meet their immediate needs, help them work on their goals, and be someone they could be vulnerable with changed my perspective on the world. It went from a big place that often filled me with anxiety and sometimes despair to a small place, right outside my door, where I saw growth, achievement, and hope every day. That continues even years later.
Of course, I still run into obstacles: individual, group, and structural. But through experience I can break the big problems into small problems. Through therapy I’ve learned how to cope and, importantly, how I was compounding those problems. Through education—in psychoanalytic and critical theory seminars, a Social Work graduate degree, and now post-graduate training—I have learned a satisfying way to see the world: How it makes sense precisely when it doesn’t make sense and how to avoid repetitive cycles of destruction by acknowledging that which seems impossible to be acknowledged.
I hope to help others see their world—both outer and inner—as a place they belong and can change in their own way.