Having already penned a few blurbs here on my site as well as my blog, any further exposition feels redundant and self-serving. But what's the point of a personal website if not to archive who I am as a person? It's nice to sift through my identity, past, present, and future, and shaping all of it into a retrospective on the person I've worked hard to become—and worked even harder still to love and appreciate. If that sounds of interest to you, go on and continue reading below...

I was born three months early on March 23rd, 1998, at 3:21 PM. Had the doctors waited two more minutes, my time of birth would have lined up with my birthday. But seeing as I was dying and all nobody had a second to spare, least of all me.

My parents have a lot of fun facts about my birth, which they regaled to me so often as a kid that my entrance into the world took on an almost mythic quality in my mind. I spent two months in the NICU, hooked up to several tubes and wires while baking inside of a high-tech incubator. I weighed one pound, ten ounces. I fit in my fathers hand head to toe, from his fingertips to the base of his palm; he could slide his wedding band past my fist and elbow, all the way to my shoulder. There are a few Polaroids taken of me like this. One features my parents looking down at me from above my incubator. These photos always frightened me. I looked more alien than human; my birth seemed more of a grotesque twist of fate than some divine miracle.

There is no telling how my traumatic entrance to the world, or spending the first two months of my life in a glorified Easy Bake oven, had an effect on me. I was lucky in that I had no lasting complications from my premature birth—or if I did, they were well hidden.

Sometimes I think that my transsexuality is a product of my premature birth. Sexual development in human fetuses occurs around the sixth month mark, which was when I was born; maybe if I had more time to bake I would've came out cisgender. The whole thing makes for a satirical Rocky Horror nativity story: a transsexual born between star signs, trimesters, and genders.

Please don't take the mythologization of my youth as narcissism. I just have to romanticize everything in my existence to make it palatable, then dictate it into an amusing read to make it shareable; lucky for both of us that everything comes out sweeter than it did going in.

I was born and raised in central Illinois. I've been infatuated with the flat landscapes of the rural Midwest since I was a young kid. Some of my earliest memories include sitting in the back of my mom's van, watching endless stretches of sunlit earth infinitely roll past, or looking out across black swathes of farmland at night, mesmerized by the limitlessness of both land and sky. Sometimes it felt like the blinking red lights crowning radio antennae (now multiplied with the proliferation of electric windmills) were heralding alien spaceships, and that the stars above twinkled in reply, beaming down telegrams in Morse code.

The Midwest's broad skies and endless horizons have made any other locale existentially claustrophobic by comparison—whether I find myself in the mountainous western US, the balmy crescent of the Gulf of Mexico, or the verdant hills of England and their brick-and-cobblestone metropolitan counterparts.

The ratio of America's population to its landmass means that for every citizen there's approximately six and a half acres of land. I don't think anywhere is more illustrative of this figure than the Midwest. It isn't a boring wasteland of nothing; nothing implies a lack of something, but the Midwest isn't empty—it's full; full of empty space.

I only have to drive five minutes outside of town to escape all that chafes and grinds the mind, where the earth—flayed by two-lane backroads—unfolds like a pair of hands beneath the open-mouthed sky, ready to catch whatever comes out. Sometimes the sky shouts, broiling with thunder and lightning; sometimes it screams, deploying fearsome winds that tear apart entire towns. Sometimes it sings, painting a transcript of its measures in bands of dusky, gradated sunset. Most of the time it just sighs, exhaling gentle winds that roll off the clouds, across great fields of grass, corn, and soybeans, all the way to my shoulders, stirring my hair and shirtsleeves, intimately impersonal.

This familiarity with the Midwest produced in me a romantic streak of regionalism, which I've striven to showcase here on my personal site. Nearly all of the decorative images were taken by me while traveling through Illinois.

Living on this land has influenced a great deal of my creative pursuits as well. One of my goals with my original fiction is for it to act as a love letter to the Midwest. I also aspire to paint a series of Midwestern landscapes, and to continue studying them through the medium of photography.