I build things that don't exist yet. That's the shortest true thing I can say about myself, and it's been the same since before I had any of the tools I use now.
My dad was a sculptor. Clay, cast in bronze, finished by hand. But he wasn't satisfied just making the thing. He took a job at a foundry so he'd understand every step of how a sculpture came to be, from armature to patina. Knowing how it worked, all the way down, made him better at the part everyone else could see. I grew up watching that: a man who'd stay up the whole night on his own work, sleep a couple hours, then go learn the materials so the work could be truer.
There's a piece of his I think about all the time, a Native American war chief about three feet tall. He could have just sculpted it. Instead he built the armature, then sculpted the skeleton to learn the bones, then the internal organs from anatomy books, hidden inside where no one would ever see them. Then the muscles and ligaments, one at a time. Only then did he lay the skin over all of it, and because the structure underneath was real, the skin sat right: the stretch, the pull, the direction of it, all true. He even carved a tiny flintlock rifle you could cock and fire.
I didn't know it then, but I've been doing the same thing my whole life. I build the part nobody sees so the part everybody sees comes out true.
My mom taught me the other half. She made pottery and painted ceramics after full days as a legal secretary, and I'd sit with her while she worked. What I picked up at that table wasn't technique. It was that what you do when no one's looking is the part that counts. Both of them made honesty the whole point of our house, and it stuck harder than anything else they gave me.
I went to school to sculpt monsters: special effects makeup, because horror and sci-fi and fantasy let you make things that don't exist anywhere else. Then I saw my first 3D animation and the floor moved. I could sculpt without running out of clay or running out of money for tools, and make the impossible thing at any scale I could imagine. I left the makeup program, went home to Arizona, and threw myself into 3D and animation, and into code: C++, Director, Flash, on machines I'd never touched. Bigger medium, fewer limits, same thing I was after the whole time.
What I haven't said is where I was when all that started. A few years before any of it, my life had come apart completely. The way out wasn't something I engineered. God pulled me out of the dark and into the light, and everything I've built since stands on that.
I was partway through the degree when Compaq saw my portfolio and offered me a job. They moved me to Houston, into interface design before "UX" was a phrase anyone said out loud. I finished my associate's on the way out the door. Someone had seen me, and I was too new to all of it to grasp how much that meant.
From there, the work just kept changing shape. Brand and creative direction. UX and design leadership. Immersive and generative work. And now AI, one more tool in the same hands, used the way I've used all of them: to make what doesn't exist real. The tools kept changing. What I was doing never did: know how it works all the way down, build the unseen structure so the surface is true, make the thing that isn't there yet.
These days that means agentic AI systems, generative pipelines, and the interfaces that make them make sense, built the way my dad sculpted, from the armature out. I still need to know how it works inside. A surface without real structure under it can look right, but it never is.
And the reason under all of it is the one my dad gave me without ever sitting me down to say it. He never cared what degree I got or where. He cared whether the work made me feel alive, and he lived exactly that way. For me, that feeling is a kind of release: the pressure drops, everything goes sharp and clear, and I'm reminded how much I've been given and what it took to get here. I was brought out of the dark for a reason, and a lot of that reason has nothing to do with work. It's to do for other people what was done for me. The building is one way I get to do that. When it's right, the person on the other side feels what I felt making it.