
Crossing the Finish Line At long last, the official trailer for Paper Birds is here! I want to start by giving a huge thanks to Jordan Graff, my editor, for putting this together. As you may know, this thing has been nearly half a decade in the making, and that’s if you don’t count its origin in…

Put Your Life Vest On First I wanted to share something that intersects with both Suicide Prevention Month and our current landscape as a country after flying back home on 9/11 in the wake of a very publicized assassination. While abroad, I was lucky enough to connect with people from all over the world. Something…

Yapping Into The Void Back with a vlog…it’s been awhile! Wanted to share some candid thoughts after watching the cut of Paper Birds for my editor, and touch on how I feel approaching the 5th anniversary of my first flashback on August 29th, 2020. If anyone would like to see the current cut of the…

Introducing the ‘Life Binder’ Chat, I have more reflections, but this will be two posts so sorry in advance: So as I established, I realize now I’m solidly in phase three of Judith Herman’s “Trauma & Recovery” model. The clearing. The integration. The reconnection. Well, I’ve been trying to step into that in a few…

Summer 2020: Creative, Colorful, Curious So I won’t be able to line this up perfectly as I’ll be abroad the first two weeks of September, but seeing as we’re nearing the five year anniversary of when this whole story began, I thought maybe I’d document that fall in real time, half a decade on. This…

“Look for the Helpers” I’ve wanted to post something like this for a while, and likely will again in the future when the film is officially released. These are a few comments left by strangers regarding the film (these were all posted publicly but thought I’d blur out the usernames anyway). I’ve also received a number of…

A couple months, ago my nieces and I built a little fort in the brush behind my house, or started to, rather. I spent a lot of time in the woods growing up—and still do, though the trail in my neighborhood was ruined by a storm about a year ago. This was one of my…

A Million Layers Between Two Roles Early on in the weekend, I was in full Paper Birds mode—emailing my editor, corresponding with Jim, combing through transcripts–and, consequently, it brought up a unique inner tension I’ve encountered a few times while working on this piece. Since it’s sort of an abstract look ‘behind the scenes’, I…

Digital Tools to Guide the Way While the documentary, Paper Birds, aims to start a discussion, the hope is for the film’s website to guide viewers’ next steps. The last addition to our resources tab was a master list of book recommendations directly sourced from trauma survivors across a number of online communities. Now, we’re…

“No one will ever know the violence it took to become this gentle” This was originally posted to the Paper Birds Instagram on July 16th: Some more stream of consciousness since people seem to be connecting with these more than I thought. This will also be a bit of an extension of my post from…