Welcome to the archive.Welcome to the stories.Welcome to the becoming.

Before I begin sharing these stories, I want to tell you why I’m opening this door.

My name is Joey.

I’m a writer, a queer Marine combat veteran, an artist, a seeker, and a human being who has spent a great deal of his life trying to understand what it means to survive, to love, to belong, to lose yourself, and eventually... to choose yourself again.

For years, I have written privately.

Notes. Poems. Confessions. Visions. Memories. Questions I was afraid to ask out loud. Stories about love, fear, masculinity, identity, trauma, spirituality, desire, rejection, transformation, and the strange ways people enter our lives and change us.

Much of it has lived quietly inside my phone and computer.

A private archive of who I was becoming.

Tonight, I’m opening it.

Beginning at midnight, I’ll be sharing a piece of my writing every two hours.

Some of these stories were written in moments of clarity.

Some were written while I was hurting.

Some came from love.

Some came from fear.

Some came from the version of me who desperately wanted to be chosen.

And some came from the man who eventually realized that the person he had been waiting for was himself.

I’m not sharing these writings because I believe I have everything figured out.

I’m sharing them because I believe there is medicine in telling the truth about becoming.

There are parts of ourselves we hide because we think they make us too emotional, too complicated, too spiritual, too sensitive, too intense, too much.

But those are often the places where our humanity lives.

My intention with what follows is not to expose anyone.

It is not to create heroes or villains.

It is not to convince anyone of my version of a story.

It is simply to tell the truth as I experienced it... the internal landscape of a person learning how to see himself more clearly.

These writings are reflections.

Of people I loved.

People I feared losing.

People who awakened something in me.

People who mirrored wounds I still needed to heal.

And the many versions of myself I met along the way.

If you recognize yourself somewhere in these words, maybe that is part of the invitation.

Take what belongs to you.

Leave what doesn’t.

My hope is that somewhere inside these stories, someone feels a little less alone.

Someone remembers that sensitivity is not weakness.

That vulnerability is not failure.

That love does not require abandoning yourself.

That fear can become a doorway.

And that becoming who you truly are sometimes begins with finally allowing yourself to be seen.

So this is me allowing myself to be seen.

Not perfectly.

Not completely.

But honestly.

Every two hours, beginning at midnight.

Welcome to the archive.

Welcome to the stories.

Welcome to the becoming.

The Beautiful Story Never Told, Jo He and Mai Taeo

"It is because you stopped seeing the good in me."