I’ve written five books. 

It sounds like a sentence that should feel victorious. It sounds like something you’d imagine a writer whispering to themselves in front of a mirror with bloodshot eyes and coffee-stained teeth. And maybe I have. But more than anything, it feels like something I survived.

Not just the writing. Not the early mornings or the late nights. Not the edits or the self-doubt or the unbearable weight of staring at a blank page knowing I was about to dig up parts of myself I had buried so damn deep I forgot they ever lived in me. No—surviving the stories meant surviving myself.

Each of these five books—Fading Into Silence, Out of the Closet, The Lonely Road, Brilliantly Broken, and All For Him—are paper trails of pain, beauty, and becoming. They are less “projects” and more emotional autopsies. They’re messy. They don’t pretend to be neat or tidy or polished for the sake of literary approval. They exist the way I do: cracked, bruised, maybe bleeding a little—but breathing. Still here.

Love, loss, and life. That’s the spine of every word I’ve written.

Love, not just in the romantic sense, though there’s plenty of that—wild, aching, tender, intoxicating love. But also love for the self I’ve hated. Love for the people who left too soon, and the ones who never stayed long enough to get to know me beyond the versions they needed me to be. Love for friends I thought were forever but turned into footnotes. Love for silence, even when it’s deafening. Love for my younger self, who wrote stories in his head as a way to escape a world that didn’t know what to do with his truth.

Loss, the kind that strips you bare. I’ve lost people. I’ve lost parts of myself. I’ve lost time—years of it—trying to be who I wasn’t just to earn a scrap of belonging. These books are grief rituals in disguise. I didn’t write them to “move on” or “heal” in the Instagrammable way people like to talk about healing. I wrote them because if I didn’t, I’d be buried underneath the weight of everything I couldn’t say out loud.

Life, the most brutal muse of all. Life is absurd and beautiful. It’s full of disappointments and tiny glimmers of hope that keep you showing up for another day. Life is the silent car rides after a fight. The way your hands shake when someone touches you too tenderly. The gut punch of realizing you’re repeating your parent’s mistakes, even when you swore you wouldn’t. Life is realizing no one’s coming to save you, but still keeping your door unlocked just in case.

These five books didn’t make me a writer. They made me a man.

Each one is a time capsule of where I was emotionally, mentally, spiritually—where I was barely holding on or finally letting go.  Some were born out of pure fury. Some were apologies I couldn’t give to the right people, so I gave them to the page.

You can’t fake your way through this kind of writing. The type where your guts are in full view and you’re daring someone to look away first. There were nights I wrote with tears streaming down my face, nights I didn’t think I deserved to write at all, and days where I looked at a finished page and thought, Damn, I didn’t think I’d survive this far.

And just when I thought I was done bleeding out onto paper, something else happened.

I fell in love.

Not the kind of love I’ve written about in fragments and fantasies. Not the conditional kind that made me shrink or shape-shift or tiptoe around my own worth. No—this was different. This love felt like a home I didn’t have to build from scratch. A mirror that didn’t distort me. A voice in the dark that said, You don’t have to write your pain just to be seen.

It wasn’t perfect. Nothing real ever is. But it was honest. It was laughter in the middle of grief. It was soft mornings that didn’t ask for anything. It was being met halfway without begging. It was someone looking at the jagged edges of my past and saying, You’re still beautiful here.

And in a strange, beautiful twist, it’s teaching me that love doesn’t have to cost me my identity. It doesn’t have to be earned through suffering. It doesn’t have to end in a plot twist of abandonment. It can simply be—lived, trusted, and held with both hands.

This new love didn’t erase what came before. It’s not the bandage. It’s the breath after the wound finally closes. It’s the chapter I never thought I’d get to write—not because I didn’t have the words, but because I didn’t believe someone would stay long enough to read them.

And now, I’ve reached the five-book mark. Not because I had a blueprint. Not because I had a team cheering me on from the sidelines. Hell, most days, I didn’t even have money in the bank. What I had was this voice. Raw, sometimes shaky, sometimes angry, but always mine.

Writing has been the most unforgiving mirror and the most tender balm.

I don’t write because I have answers. I write because I’m still asking the questions.

I don’t write to be understood. I write because, in a world that often asks me to shrink, these pages are the only place I’ve ever been allowed to take up space.

So yeah. Five books.

Not just words. Not just titles. Not just stories.

They’re evidence that I lived.

That I felt.

That I refused to be silenced.

Check out The Debut - A Collection on my website and preorder today to secure your copy early! 

Coming November 7th.