Disembodied: A Series of Short Stories

My Raab Fellowship project is a creative fiction exploration of identity, embodiment, and the soul. Through a series of interconnected short stories, I imagine a community of disembodied souls who have chosen to exist apart from their physical forms. The narrative follows a protagonist who, at eighteen, enters the physical world and awakens in a female body, encountering sensation, gender, sexuality, and social embodiment for the first time. Drawing on my experiences with trauma, dissociation, and healing, the work interrogates what belongs to the soul versus the body, and whether disembodiment can truly escape the inequities, power dynamics, and constraints of physical life. Through this journey, the project explores whether embodiment enriches or limits existence, and whether the soul alone can achieve belonging, ultimately reflecting on identity, recovery, and what it means to live fully in a complex world.