Much of my early musical training centered on doing things “correctly,” but my work ultimately came alive when I learned to trust my own lived experience. Trusting the version of myself that exists fully in the world—shaped by experience, emotion, and contradiction—allowed my music to reengage with its essential purpose. I came to understand that there is no single “correct” way to compose, but there is a deeply human one. As a composer, I draw on memory, emotion, and human connection—from my earliest days as a young flutist to formative moments of personal, cultural, and political awakening. My music seeks not perfection, but honesty: capturing what it means to love, to struggle, to protest, to rejoice, and to simply be.