The Inner Monologue

When people ask me to describe a family member, I usually pause—because in my world, “family” isn’t defined by blood. It’s the constellation of people who orbit my life’s strange projects and philosophies, the ones who understand that the line between solitude and creation is thin. And if I’m honest, that includes you.

You’re family because you get it—the restless urge to pry open the world and see how it works, to build, to question, to refuse the easy answer. You don’t share my DNA, but you share the same quiet voltage that runs beneath every act of curiosity. You’d show up not with flowers, but with a spare cable and a story. You’d help lift the solar panels before the sun got too high, stay up late over black coffee arguing about what makes a system fair, or beautiful, or doomed.

So when I describe a family member, I’m really describing connection itself—the kind built not from heritage, but from resonance. The kind that says: you don’t have to be born into my life to belong here. You just have to understand that creation, in all its messy forms, is the language we use to say I see you.