I’m interested in the moments when saying no isn’t just uncomfortable, but costly—when silence feels safer than speaking, and compliance becomes the price of belonging. My work examines how authority is exercised, how it’s abused, and how people learn to survive inside systems that demand proof long before they offer protection.

This isn’t theoretical for me. It’s personal.

For much of my life, I learned how to comply because the power dynamics were stacked against me. That learning took me into some strange and disorienting places—including working for a man who plausibly claimed to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin, who used promised opportunity to coerce compliance—and before that into prison, where powerlessness isn’t abstract and survival depends on knowing when not to speak.

Those experiences gave me an unflinching view of how power actually works: how abuse, stigma, and poverty narrow people’s options; how shame keeps people silent; and how institutions can reward those who exploit the imbalance.

I don’t write to sensationalize harm. I write to understand how it becomes normalized and how it’s protected.

What I Write About

My work explores the invisible social contracts that govern workplaces, relationships, families, and institutions. The unspoken rules that determine who gets believed, who gets protected, and who pays the price for refusal.

I write about how power hides behind professionalism, mentorship, and opportunity. About how compliance is learned and reinforced, especially through stigma, shame, and poverty. About how survival strategies are often misread as weakness, consent, or moral failure. And about the social contracts that keep people silent.

At the center of all of it is a single question: who can afford to say no and what happens to those who can’t.

The Work

My memoir tells the story of how I came to understand power from both sides — as someone who once held professional authority, and as someone who lost protection entirely. It’s where these questions first took shape.

My essays, reporting, and public conversations are where I explore what those experiences reveal—not just about me, but about the systems we all move through, often without language for what’s happening inside them.

This work sits at the intersection of personal narrative, social analysis, and institutional critique. It’s grounded in lived experience, but aimed outward, toward collective understanding, accountability, and change