This is not a redemption story.
It is a story about consequence—about harm caused, harm endured, years lost to confinement, and the difficult work of becoming someone different without pretending the past disappeared.
Writ & Rust exists in the space where those truths meet. The songs and writing here do not ask anyone to forget, excuse, or forgive. They examine what remains after the sentence is handed down, the doors close, and a person must decide what to do with whatever life is left.
The moment I could no longer look away.
I was arrested on March 3, 2003. I was released on April 28, 2022—the day before my birthday. After more than nineteen years of confinement, my first full day outside was also the first day of another year of my life.
But prison did not automatically change me. Time alone does not do that.
The change began while I was reading a legal case and unexpectedly came across the name of one of my victims. Seeing her name forced me to confront how much my actions had shaped what followed in her life. Until then, I could still tell my story mainly through what had happened to me—what I had lost, what had been done to me, and what I believed was unjust.
That moment made it impossible to keep looking in only one direction. I had been harmed, and I had caused harm. Both things were true. Neither erased the other.