I Came Back as Someone Who Could See It

I grew up on "the southern side of Northern Kentucky," just north of Falmouth (population 2,100) and the county seat of Pendleton County. This rural county of about 15,000 people is along the Licking River, forty miles south of Cincinnati. A river known to swallow entire communities with quasi-regularity. I left — for college, for AmeriCorps, for graduate school, for a faculty position, for the kind of life that takes you far enough away that home becomes both familiar and strange.

Along the way, I learned about community development, public policy, and education, all examined through the lens of leadership and public service. During undergrad, I interned and focused on Kentucky's high school dropout crisis, particularly in Appalachia. During two stints in graduate school, I researched poverty and participatory action in Kentucky, then the authentic leadership development of millennial gay men.

As a doctoral student abroad, I studied community and indigenous leadership in Cambodia and Peru. As a faculty member, I traveled with students to the Netherlands and Stockholm, focused on global leadership and gender equality. I even sat in Sweden's Riksdag, watching a coalition government at work — observing five parties negotiate in real time, with no single party holding all the power, no binary forcing every question into two predetermined answers. I felt something I can only describe as civic longing. This is possible. This is what it can look like.

I signed my own permission slip to leave the academy, to change the container, and to cultivate the conditions for rest and recess; for pause and play.

Then I came home, fifteen years after first departing.

I came back as someone who had seen what differently possible looks like — near and far, in classrooms, parliaments, and community circles across multiple continents. I came back having navigated an HIV diagnosis, a few precious years (and counting!) of sobriety, and the slow, nonlinear emergence of a spiritual practice I'm still learning to name. And what I found was not what the think-pieces told me I would find. Not Hillbilly Elegy. Not a cautionary tale about what happens when rural America is left behind.

What I found was a place doing what every place is doing right now — trying to hold civic life together while everything accelerates around it — just more visibly because there's less insulation. Yes/And. A nod to my relative privilege and vulnerability to oppression, marginalization, precarity, velocity — my humanness. I signed my own permission slip to leave the academy, change the container, cultivate the conditions for rest and recess; for pause and play.

I found a county where the Licking River floods every generation and the community rebuilds. Where 96% of students graduate from high school, but only 38% of third-graders are reading proficiently, in the same year that the median household income rose by $12,000. Where a 43-page elections bill was signed into law — declared an emergency — that quietly embedded a federal citizenship data pipeline into the county clerk's job description. No headlines. Already law.

I found a closed-primary state where center-left candidates run as Republicans because there's no other path to viability — and where the ask to Democratic and unaffiliated voters to switch registration is structurally offensive on principle. 61 of 119 General Assembly candidates on Kentucky's 2026 ballot face uncontested general elections; only 12.7% of registered voters cast a ballot in the 2024 primaries. Politicians shouldn't get to pick their voters. Gerrymandering is the upstream problem. The binary is the cage.

I found a county simultaneously represented by Mitch McConnell (in the U.S. Senate since before I was born) and by Rand Paul and Thomas Massie, who are among the few elected officials willing to publicly push back against the current President. And I found that the libertarian edge in Paul and Massie that sometimes butts up against my liberalism — and against Governor Andy Beshear's and Charles Booker's — is real and worth naming. I am, in a phrase I've started using for myself: politically unhoused. Pro-democracy. Pro-humanity. Pro-possibility. Anti-corporate-backed candidates of any stripe. Anti-Democrat vs. Republican. The binary obscures more than it reveals.

Politicians shouldn't get to pick their voters. Gerrymandering is the upstream problem. The binary is the cage.

I found a primary race where four candidates are competing for the top county executive position, and one of them is an impeached former mayor who was arrested on city property nine months ago — and who frames every institutional constraint as a targeted conspiracy against him. This story is not primarily about him. Or another impeached mayor within the same decade. Or any party or individual. It's about what post-rupture civic reconstruction looks like when it fails. The 1997 Licking River flood didn't just destroy buildings. It destroyed civic continuity. The community has been trying to reconstitute itself for nearly 30 years — in an era when the Supreme Court decided that corporate money is speech, and a $10 million check to a Senate primary super PAC is perfectly legal.

And I found — with some astonishment — that a bipartisan coalition of former Montana officials has developed the first genuinely new legal theory for dismantling Citizens United in fifteen years. The theory: corporations only have the powers states grant them. No state has ever thought to simply not grant them the power to spend on elections. Montana is trying to change that — and the $10 million Elon Musk wrote to a Kentucky Senate super PAC is exactly what the Montana Plan would prohibit, state by state, if it succeeds.

Humanity Is the Infinite Game is the book I'm writing about what I found. It argues that social acceleration — the speed at which technology, politics, economics, and culture change — has outrun our capacity to deliberate together, to encounter each other, to do the slow relational work that democracy actually requires. The crisis is not left or right. It's forward — and the question is whether we can reclaim it together, in possibility, rather than let it carry us somewhere we didn't choose.

The response is not a policy fix. It's encounter. Deliberate, structured, practiced encounter at every scale — in schools, workplaces, communities, and the specific places where we actually live.

I'm a scholar-practitioner who spent fifteen years studying how organizations — and more importantly, the people inside them — navigate identity, creativity, and change under pressure. I left academia to found Creative Recess: a practice ecology for people navigating the same. And I came home to do the work in the specific, documented, un-abstracted place where the argument lives.

My biography is my method. The method is called Manifestemoir.