I AM: Starting the Conversation

I have been conceptualizing this project for years, though the word “conceptualizing” feels like a polite fiction. It is more accurate to say that I have carried it in snippets, snatches of thought, half-formed sentences in journals, moments of painting or collage that felt like they were asking for a larger story. I have always wanted to write a book, a proper book, though the word “proper” seems increasingly unnecessary. What I wanted, I suppose, was a coherence I could rarely hold, a thread that could connect the scattered pieces of my life. And yet, over the years, I have found it difficult, often impossible, to be consistent. My moods rise and fall like a tide I cannot predict. My energy comes and goes, sometimes with no discernible reason. One day I am capable of creating a work that feels substantial, and the next I cannot hold a pen without trembling.

And still, the project has remained, persistent in its silence. I have returned to it again and again, each time hoping that the next time I would be able to assemble the pieces into something whole. I have worked on it continuously, though not systematically. The project exists, scattered across journals, in stacks of paintings, in digital files I rarely revisit. There has been no cohesive plan, only the imperative to follow through, to honor the ideas as they arrive, even when the timing is inconvenient, even when I am inconvenient.

I knew, eventually, that if I were to be true to myself, I had to see it through. Not because anyone was waiting, not because there was a promise of recognition or even understanding. Simply because the work needed to exist, even if its audience was only me. The I AM. I AM. I AM. Project, as it has come to be called, is not a book in the traditional sense, nor is it a memoir or a manifesto. It is a lens, a deliberate reframing of my life through art, through words, through memory, through family history, through the medical reality of my existence, through the small and large acts of being that have defined who I am. It is a way to confront, or at least observe, the things that have carried me here, to try to understand them, and to see them reflected in a manner that is intentional and unflinching.

The project is a reckoning of sorts, though I do not wish to romanticize it. There is no neat narrative arc. There is only life as it has been lived, fragmentary, uneven, beautiful at points, cruel at others. The work is intended to hold those contradictions, to hold the contradictions of myself, without judgment. Art becomes the medium through which I make sense of the senseless, and words become the stage on which I try to build a coherent reflection.

And so, in the quiet hours, I sit with paper and pen, with canvas and brush, and with digital files that I hope someday will feel organized, if not complete. I consider the entries of journals written years ago, the letters I will never send, the images that capture only a fraction of my intent. I work not with a deadline, not with expectation, but with honesty with myself to my own sense of truth.

I have learned, painfully, that consistency is not a measure of worth. The work is still valid, even when I am absent from it, even when my moods preclude participation for weeks or months. The project is a living archive, and it accommodates absence as readily as presence. It is a vessel large enough to contain all of me, my uncertainty, my hope, my regret, my curiosity.

What I hope to achieve is not clarity so much as understanding. I hope to gather. To reflect, To witness. I hope to see patterns emerge where there were only fragments, to recognize the ways in which my family, my medical experiences, my creativity, and my history intersect to form a whole that is intelligible not in conventional terms, but in terms that are honest. I hope that by doing so, I may better understand myself and perhaps offer a mirror for others who are also trying to piece together their own lives from the fragments they carry.