How I Got Here
(A Becoming Peter entry)
I didn’t arrive at this life in a straight line. Most people don’t, but I think some of us feel the bends more sharply than others.
When I look back now, I see a journey made of pieces, moments scattered across decades, places, losses, trades, stories, and quiet reinventions. None of it looked connected at the time. But somehow, all of it was shaping the man I would eventually become.
I grew up in Ireland, a small boy trying to understand a world that...
Where Elio Was Born
(Becoming Peter)
The Wonderful World of Elio & Solace.
Elio didn’t begin as a character. He began as a small boy, a real one, sitting at a kitchen table in Ireland, trying to understand why his mother was gone.
I was seven. Too young to name grief, but old enough to feel its shape. Old enough to know something had broken open inside me. Old enough to reach for anything that might help me hold it.
So I wrote.
Not stories, not poems, just little letters. Simple words from a...
The Quiet Work of Surviving.
There are moments in a life that don’t announce themselves. They don’t arrive with drama or noise. They slip in quietly, almost shy, and yet they change everything.
One of mine happened on an ordinary morning.
I was standing in a hallway, nothing special about it. Just a corridor in a building where I worked, a place filled with routines, repairs, and the steady hum of people moving through their day. But inside me, something was unravelling.
I had been carrying more...
I’ve learned that a life is shaped less by the big moments and more by the quiet ones, the ones most people pass by without noticing.
A hallway conversation at work. A memory from Ireland that still follows me. A resident’s soft thank‑you in a hospice room. A story that arrives before I’m ready to write it. A moment of stillness that reminds me I’ve survived more than I ever speak about.
I don’t write from a place untouched by hardship. I’ve walked through seasons that tested me, stretched me,...