From Mound to the White House

I grew up in Mound, Minnesota, part of the Westonka Public Schools district, Westonka Class of 2010, where for most of my life I felt like my voice didn’t matter—the quiet kid in the room, the one who felt everything but kept it inside. Before I ever had the chance to understand where I came from, there was someone missing from my story: my paternal grandma, who passed away from breast cancer in 1983, eight years before I was born. It was a loss that shaped my family long before I could understand it, and over time that absence turned into something deeper—a quiet pull to learn about her and the life she never got to share with me.

That pull is what led me, after growing up in Mound, to travel across Europe—not just to see the world, but to follow the footsteps of my ancestors. I stood in Scrooby, England, walked through Boston, Lincolnshire, and even stepped inside the same jail cell where they were once imprisoned for their faith. I made my way to Leiden in the Netherlands, where they found a brief sense of freedom, and visited churches where generations before me were baptized centuries ago. In those moments, history stopped being something distant and became something I could feel—I wasn’t just learning about the past, I was walking through it.

Everything became real in Ireland. My family came from near Charleville, County Cork, leaving during the Irish Famine of 1851, a time when survival meant saying goodbye to everything you knew. I found their old family home just outside Charleville, and I stood there as the one who came back generations later. I went down to Cobh, the port where so many began their journey to America, and for the first time I understood that the bond between Ireland and America isn’t just historical—it’s emotional, it’s sacrifice, it’s people choosing hope over certainty. But Ireland didn’t just teach me history—it gave me something I didn’t know I was missing. I spent nights in Irish pubs, singing my heart out with locals, listening to stories, learning from people who have a way of turning life into something meaningful just by the way they tell it. The Irish are some of the greatest storytellers in the world, and in those moments, singing and laughing with people who felt like family, I wasn’t just visiting—I was paying homage to my roots and finding my own voice in the process.

Somewhere along that journey, I stopped feeling like I never knew my grandma and started realizing that maybe I had been learning about her all along—through the path I chose, through the places I went, through the way I learned to see people and love people. When I came back home to Minnesota, back to Mound and everything familiar, I wasn’t the same person anymore. For the first time in my life, I believed my voice mattered.

That belief led me to Washington, D.C., on Inauguration Day 2025 at Capital One Arena. I wasn’t trying to make history. I just spoke five words from the heart—“We love you, Mr. President.” And somehow, those words carried farther than I ever imagined. A moment that started with one voice turned into something bigger than me.

But as powerful as that moment was, the part of my story that matters most is still the most personal. Because even after traveling across Europe, walking through Ireland, and doing things in Australia that most people only dream about—holding a koala at Australia Zoo in Beerwah, feeding giraffes and kangaroos, riding a camel through the Outback, crossing the country on The Ghan and the Indian Pacific from Perth to Darwin to Adelaide to Sydney, climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge and experiencing the Sydney Opera House—I realized none of it meant anything if I didn’t live with the right heart.

And that brought me back to someone from my past.

A girl I grew up with at Grandview Middle School in Mound, Minnesota—back in band class, holding trumpets, a moment frozen in time where I was too shy to say anything. She once told me she always loved my stories, and after everything I’ve experienced in this world, I know she would have loved these too. Years later, in 2020, I made mistakes. I pushed when I shouldn’t have, and she was right to tell me to back off. At first, I didn’t handle that the way I should have—but life has a way of teaching you, if you’re willing to listen.

Everything I experienced—the history, the sacrifice, the people I met, the stories I heard—taught me something I couldn’t ignore.

I could never hate her.

Not after everything I had learned. Not after everything I had seen. Because in my mind, she will always be that pretty girl I grew up with.

So before any of this became public, before any attention or recognition, I reached out privately—not expecting anything, not asking for anything—but simply to say I was sorry, to show respect, and to do something I wish more people in this world would do: choose love over anger, growth over pride, and respect over impulse. I wanted her to know, and I want the world to see, that if you have a true heart—if you’re willing to learn, to grow, and to treat people the right way—things can change. People can change.

From Mound, Minnesota… to the churches of England and the Netherlands… to the fields and pubs of Ireland… to the deserts and cities of Australia… this journey didn’t just show me the world.

It showed me who I am.

I spent years thinking my voice didn’t matter.

I was wrong.

Because one voice, spoken from the heart, can travel farther than you ever imagined.

I wasn’t looking for history… history found me.

And through it all, I learned that choosing love—no matter what—might be the most powerful thing we can do.