Image: ChatGPT
Legacy is not built all at once. It takes shape over time—quietly, unevenly—through the choices we make, the truths we speak, and the lives we touch. I don’t imagine mine will be written in bold headlines or etched into stone. But I hope it will be felt in subtler, more enduring ways. In the freedom someone claims because I once stood up. In the insight sparked by something I taught or wrote. In the love that lingers in the spaces I leave behind.
I’ve lived many chapters in this life—some of them linear, others far more tangled. I began as a student of anthropology, drawn to the study of culture, meaning, and human complexity. It taught me to listen deeply, to question what seems natural, and to honor what is often ignored or devalued. Anthropology gave me not just tools for understanding others—it gave me a way to understand myself. As a transgender woman, as a spiritual seeker, as someone shaped by forces both seen and hidden, I learned to situate my life within broader currents of history and identity. That perspective never left me.
Eventually, I put my education into service in a different way—as a SNAP program specialist with the USDA. There, I saw how policy lives not in abstract theories but in the faces of people trying to feed their families. I worked at the intersection of administration and survival. It gave me a profound respect for the dignity of everyday life, and a deepened sense of duty to advocate for those so often silenced by red tape and economic cruelty. That role grounded me in the real: in food, in need, in systems and the people caught within them.
But even before all of that, I served my country in uniform. I am a U.S. Navy veteran. I served as a submariner and fought in Desert Storm. It was a life of discipline, of structure, of submerged tension—both literal and emotional. That chapter gave me a close relationship with mortality, with silence, with sacrifice. And later, it gave me the courage to live my truth. Because once you’ve survived war, you learn how little time there really is for pretending.
Though my time teaching in a classroom was brief, it was profoundly meaningful. Education, I believe, is one of the most radical forms of love and hope. I did not stay long enough to become a fixture, but I hope I was a spark. I hope that somewhere, a student remembers me not as perfect, but as present. As someone who saw them clearly, challenged them to think differently, and held space for who they were becoming.
Throughout it all, I’ve remained a writer, a creator, a witness. I write not just to tell stories, but to make space—for desire, for defiance, for complex and beautiful lives that rarely make it into the mainstream. I write for those on the margins, for the ones building new worlds from the ruins of the old, and for the future selves who need proof that we were here.
If I am remembered, I hope it is as someone who lived with fierce honesty. Who loved without shame. Who fought for justice, even when she was exhausted. Who stood in her womanhood and her queerness not as burdens, but as blessings.
I hope my legacy is not one of perfection, but of permission. Permission to live. To change. To desire. To dream beyond the roles assigned at birth or by circumstance. I hope I leave behind courage in those who need it. Gentleness in those taught to harden. Fire in those told to shrink.
And if some future soul—browsing an archive, reading a quote, hearing a story—finds a piece of me and thinks, “Because she lived, I feel less alone,” then that is all the immortality I will ever need.