This is the space between endings and arrivals.

For years, my right arm carried more pain than possibility. In 2022, after a long search for quality of life, I crossed a threshold – guided by remarkable surgical thinking and the belief that amputation could be designed with intention, not simply endured.

The work done to my body — AMI, TMR, RPNI — created a new structure beneath the skin. Nerves were redirected. Muscles paired. Signals preserved. Not to restore what was, but to prepare for what could exist. The structure is sound.

For now, I live one-armed.

Not because the science failed — but because translation is slow, expensive, and uneven. Upper-limb prosthetics live in a narrow corridor: small patient population, fragmented systems, and definitions of “medical necessity” that often stop short of real life. The limitation isn’t human intelligence or effort. It’s how slowly innovation its way into the real world.

What followed the surgeries wasn’t resolution. It was a pause.

Additional surgeries on my remaining wrist. Weeks without hands. Loss of independence. Grief moving quietly through ordinary days. Northport, Michigan — the Pinky at the edge of the mitten — became a place where slowing down was unavoidable, and listening became survival.

That’s where clay entered.

Hand-building ceramics became a way to stay in conversation with capability. Clay responds to pressure, balance, and intention — not perfection. Working with one-and-a-half arms wasn’t a workaround; it was an exploration. Each piece carried a quiet question: What if adaptation isn’t a failure of the body, but a failure of the system to imagine differently?

This website lives between The Lab and The Studio because that’s where change often begins — not in answers, but in lived experiences.

It’s for people considering amputation, for the deeply curious, and for those who understand that systems improve when real bodies are allowed to inform them. The prosthetic is still evolving. So is my role in helping shape what “usable” and “necessary” might someday mean.

I’m living between two lives — one shaped by loss, and one shaped by possibility navigating constraint.

This is the work in between.