Roots & Resolutions

As 2025 drew to a close, and we welcome 2026, there's that familiar push to reinvent ourselves.

New goals.

New habits.

A new version of who we're supposed to come.

But this year, I've felt something different. Something less about becoming, and more about remembering.

Much of this reflection was sparked by my work on The Cardinal Code series. At its heart, the story explores ancient and forgotten bloodlines. What is buried, erased, or deliberately hidden. And what still finds a way to surface. While writing it, I didn't realize how closely those themes would begin to mirror my own questions.

I've spent my entire life drawn to the past.

Even as a child, I was captivated by history. By places and people long since gone. By stories that lingered long after their tellers disappeared. I didn't know why. I just knew I felt tethered to something older.

Ireland, in particular, always called to me. the lore. The ruins. The rugged coastline and that deep, impossible green people talk about like it's a living thing. I promised, myself I'd go one day. I even wrote an unreleased novel set along set along the western coast—a romance between a pagan and a Christian—long before I had any reason to believe that place had anything to do with me at all.

Then I started digging.

I learned that grandmother, who I had always believed was fully Sicilian, was only half. Her mother's parent's came directly from Ardvarney, Ireland. And as if that weren't surprising enough, one was Presbyterian and the other Catholic.

Whaaaat?

Of course they left, right?

It's speculation, mind you. But imagining the tension, the impossibility, the quiet scandal of that union, made something click. The pull towards divided faiths. Old beliefs colliding with imposed order. Love set against doctrine? Maybe.

Islands with long memories tend to leave their mark. Ireland and Sicily (both shaped by conquest, faith, and resistance) suddenly felt less like separate places and more like echoes of the same story told in different tongues. Like the worlds I write about, they are shaped by what survives despite being rewritten.

Another moment that made me pause was finding my great-grandfather's draft registration card.

It was stark and official.

A brief physical description.

His occupation and address.

And then, his signature.

His handwriting.

There's something disarming about seeing a life reduced to ink and paper, knowing how much will never be recorded. What he feared, what he hoped for, what he carried. And yet, that life echoes forward. Quietly. Persistently.

It reminded me that we aren't knew to survival. Reinvention didn't begin with us. We carry instincts, resilience, and questions that were forming long before we arrived.

I've started to wonder how many of us are drawn, again and again, to the same kinds of stories, places, or eras without knowing why. the histories we reread. The landscapes we ache to see. The themes that find their way into our art, our interests, our longings. Maybe they aren't random at all. Maybe they're familiar. Because, in some quiet way, they belong to us.

The older I get, the more I understand that identity isn't about something we invent from scratch. It's something we uncover. Strip away expectation. Strip away noise. What remains had usually been there all along.

So now that the new year has come upon us, I'm choosing intention over reinvention.

To move forward without forgetting.

To honor what shaped me without being bound by it.

To recognize that some of what guides us now was written generations ago.

the new year doesn't ask us to become someone else.

It simply asks us to arrive more fully as ourselves.

And that feels like exactly the right place to begin.