What This Work Is Actually About

The Thread

My work doesn't live in one discipline. It moves across theater, writing, code, and music — but it's not scattered. There's a single question running through everything, even when it's dressed differently:

What happens when mediation enters the space between intention and expression?

When you stand on stage and the director tells you to "just be yourself" — which self? When you sit down to write and the machine finishes your sentence — whose thought is that? When the analyst listens to you and you hear yourself say something you didn't plan to say — who spoke?

The thread goes like this:

I. The Actor's Problem (2016–2020)

Stanislavski asks the actor to use the "magic if" — if you were in this situation, what would you feel? It's a deliberate fiction that produces genuine emotion. The paradox is the point: you have to fake it to make it real.

Winnicott names the same structure in development: the False Self that protects the True Self by learning to anticipate what the environment needs. Polite, functional, alive — but not yours, exactly. The gap between the self you perform and the self you can't name is where the work begins.

This was my undergraduate thesis in Theatre Arts and Psychology — Analytic Introspections from an Actor's Perspective — written while I was acting in Chekhov at Salt Lake Acting Company and trying to understand why my own rehearsal anxiety kept showing up as a kind of intellectual performance about anxiety. The thesis documents the real thing. Not an analysis of it — the thing itself, happening on the page.

Explore the full record: Theater credits → · Gallery (57 credits) → · Directing work →

II. The Mediated Self (2024–2025)

Then I got a job in consulting and used AI to survive meetings I wasn't equipped for. Method acting, but for professionalism. That's when the question changed shape: if Stanislavski's actor mediates through the "magic if" and Winnicott's child mediates through the False Self — what does the adult mediate through when the tool is a language model?

AI doesn't just mediate expression. It exposes the mediation that was already there. Lacan says the unconscious is structured like a language — not that language represents the unconscious, but that the unconscious is a structural operation, and language is where we encounter it. The Other speaks through us. AI makes this visible: if an algorithm can mimic speech patterns, anticipate desires, and produce texts indistinguishable from human writing, what was "yours" about the original act of speaking?

III. The Research Trajectory (2026–)

The essays above are thinking finished on the page. Below is thinking in progress — research that hasn't found its final form yet but is driving everything forward:

The Journal

The essays above are the finished versions. But the thinking that seeds them is messier — fragments, false starts, half-formed connections that haven't earned the right to be essays yet. That's what the journal is: the working notebook, open for anyone who wants to see the process.

Eventually, each essay will link back to the journal entries that seeded it. That's what will make this site feel alive instead of like a museum — the finished work connected to the living thought behind it.

Where to Go From Here

Or start anywhere and follow the thread back. It all connects to the same question: what happens when something stands between you and your expression — and why that gap might be the most honest part of who you are.