When I think back to when I first started my business, it is hard to deny that it had begun in a way that, looking back now, almost feels as though it happened in another timeline.

It seems familiar, but only in the way I recognize an old photograph of myself.

I remember the circumstances and the person I was, yet watching it now feels strangely difficult. Something about it feels off.

The vision was there.

The standards were there.

I could see pieces of what things could become, but I had not yet learned to make decisions based on where I actually felt pulled.

I was way too concerned with only creating stuff other people wanted or defining my services based on what I saw people regularly being interested in.

I didn’t find time to create anything that I wanted anymore. I was only after the quickest and most guaranteed avenue to make money.

I mean, a lot of that had to do with the fact that I was now relying on it as my primary source of income, whereas before, I would do stuff whenever I felt pulled to or inspired.

I had been somewhat successful operating as such, yet somewhere along the way, although I didn’t acknowledge it, I felt myself losing the very spark that had always separated me from everyone else.

I was too ashamed to admit it. I felt like it would have made me feel like a fraud.

But losing my desire to create frightened me more than pretending ever could.

There is something unsettling about realizing that the business you built to give yourself freedom came with the clause that you would have to sacrifice some of the eccentricities that made you, you, simply to be widely embraced by everyone.

I was able to maintain a steady flow of business and maintaines success for years, but I’d be lying if I said I was content. It no longer felt like the success I imagined.

I knew in order to fix this feeling, it would require me to do something drastic. If I didn’t act fast, familiarity would trick me into trading that part of myself away just to guarantee a flexible routine and decent money.

There was no map.

No obvious direction.

Just a dimly lit path into unfamiliar territory and the fear of not knowing where it would lead.

But I knew I could not stay where I was.

So I took the leap.

Blindly.

Not because I knew where I was going, but because I knew I could not remain where I was.

Sometimes you might have to choose between following your heart or remaining where you are and just continue maintaining the life you have, even through you know you’ve since outgrown it.

What followed transformed my modest artistic business into something far more difficult to define, and with it came an entirely new version of myself.

One I would have never known existed had I remained inside the cycle of familiarity.

I did not simply discover a new direction for my business. From my business, a brand was born. I discovered parts of myself that had never been given enough room to emerge.

It started by finally listening to those lifelong “I got an idea!” moments I had trained myself to dismiss. The “What if I did this instead?” thoughts I once considered scatterbrained became hidden roads leading somewhere entirely new.

Even those moments when I would say, “I can’t believe nobody’s done this yet,” finally received my attention.

Instead of creating another version of what already existed, I began taking things apart, reverse engineering them, rebuilding them in ways that made sense to me, and removing everything that felt unnecessary.

The days of forcing myself into something more acceptable were over.

After I stepped away long enough, I could finally see how much of myself I had been containing because I had started believing there was something wrong with me that needed to be corrected.

Once I stopped suppressing myself just to be more tolerated and embraced by others, my creativity reemerged with ideas that began building on one another.

They moved in different creative directions, but they all shared the same denominator:

Possibility.

One possibility became something tangible.

Then another.

Eventually, those possibilities grew beyond the world in which they were conceived.

The Xposed brand represented parts of me I had once contained. They showed up one after the other, in a collective of products that all took on a life of their own after being born in those random moments of creativity and curiosity.

The expression of those ideas is the magical ingredient that exists and still, to this day, remains embedded in the foundation of everything that I feel proud to attach my name to.

That evolution is ultimately what my brand collectively represents.

The initial business had expanded.

The mediums extended.

The customer base went from a primarily local base to mostly all sales taking place in the digital world.

The purpose now is not to create based on what is widely favored and popular to compete with many, but to create things that reveal more than what is immediately visible and do it in a way that aligns with what I feel most gravitated toward.

No matter the branch it grew into.

Eventually, each of these bloomed into their own individual worlds.

Some were planned.

Some were seemingly accidental.

Most came from following a thought a little farther than I had anticipated.

With that borderless terrain allowing these thoughts to roam freely and take shape, each one separately followed the same pattern.

They evolved beyond what they were initially purposed to be.

And with that one parallel, another became apparent once everything was connected.

There was something deeper underneath it all.

A root where everything was woven back into one.

Something that stayed safely beneath the surface, bracing the structure as it continued growing up, out, farther, and farther over time.

Looking at it now from an outside perspective, I can see why I struggled to find the appropriate words to describe what I was building. I couldn’t have properly translated it because even I was not fluent in the language it was written in.

It seemed to happen rather sporadically, going from simply hand painting mediums that remained on heavy rotation to growing far beyond the original infrastructure, expanding into an ecosystem that still remains difficult to condense for brevity.

Never has there been a way, in spite of the undeniable progression, to navigate me away from the deeply rooted love and appreciation for all forms of art, no matter the obscurity.

The direction this venture began moving in was, in many ways, ahead of its time.

As Xposed evolved, so did the demographic it naturally attracted.

What had once been sustained locally slowly became something that was far less relatable within the immediate environment surrounding me.

That shift could have been interpreted as a reason to alter the work, soften the ideas, or make them more digestible for the audience I had always known.

Instead, it became an invitation to look beyond it.

I did not need to change the work to make it more relatable locally. I needed to find the people who were already capable of relating to it.

So I began venturing into a much larger marketplace, one populated by artistic appreciators who did not need my ideas explained away before they could appreciate them.

People who recognized the projects for what they were and welcomed them as a breath of fresh air in a world that had, perhaps unknowingly, become lulled into a creative sleep.

The things that once felt too rebellious, too unconventional, or simply too different for the environment I was creating within suddenly had somewhere to breathe.

One might assume that coming so close to losing the majority of my clients would have been something to mourn.

Honestly, I experienced it differently.

It felt like a turning point.

For the first time, I was being relieved of a burden I had been carrying quietly for years.

I did, in fact, start to silence more and more of my ideas, not because I had stopped having them, but because I was subconsciously filtering them through the question of whether they would fit the mold I believed I needed to remain inside in order to stay relevant.

Once those shackles were removed, something in me came back to life.

My creative energy began flowing freely again, without the constant hesitation of wondering whether an idea would be understood or ridiculed simply because of the form it took.

I no longer needed to create within the boundaries of what was familiar to the people around me.

The most logical place to build something intended for a more widespread audience was a worldwide marketplace.

Online storefronts became more than a convenient way to sell.

They became the infrastructure that allowed Xposed to reach the people it had been trying to find all along.

The people who were not merely willing to look at the work, but willing to see it.

One branch of Xposed, the streetwear division, was intentionally dubbed the tagline “Deeper Than Threads,” a phrase meant to hint at the necessity of looking beyond what initially meets the eye.

At first glance, the creativity woven into each design could easily be mistaken for nothing more than vibrant graphics aligned with whatever visual language happened to be trending at the time. Something visually striking. Familiar enough to catch the eye. Attractive enough to stop the scroll. Yet for those willing to look a little longer, that first impression was only the surface.

Each piece was designed to quietly invite a second look, often concealing visual cues and subliminal suggestions beneath an appearance that could initially seem deceptively straightforward. The underlying philosophy was simple: there is always more than meets the eye, and what someone sees depends just as much on the eyes they bring to it.

The graphics were constructed as layered compositions of imagery, symbolism, information, references, and hidden messages, stacked deliberately within the design. What appeared to be a catchy, familiar graphic on a well made tee could reveal itself as something entirely different once the layers began to unfold. The intention was to transform the shirt from ordinary apparel into an optical illusion of thought provoking wearable art, where the possibility of controversy existed not because everything was openly displayed, but because some of the most provocative elements were hidden in plain sight.

That concealment was intentional. Xposed was never designed with the expectation that everyone would understand it. In fact, part of the experience was knowing that they wouldn’t. Every design could carry multiple interpretations, allowing different people to walk away with entirely different understandings of the same piece. The deeper the viewer looked, the more they could discover, and with that discovery came a different kind of appreciation.

In that sense, wearing Xposed became its own kind of risk. Not the risk of simply being noticed, but the risk of being seen by the right people. The people capable of catching the subtle cue. Recognizing the reference. Questioning the image. Following the visual trail far enough to realize that what initially appeared to be one thing was deliberately constructed to suggest another.

The ultimate objective was never simply to make someone look at the shirt. It was to make them look again.

“Deeper Than Threads” eventually began to feel almost premonitory, as though the tagline had articulated the philosophy long before the full scale of the concept had revealed itself. It foreshadowed something that was difficult to categorize within the conventional language of streetwear: apparel designed not merely to be worn, but to be examined. To be interpreted. To provoke curiosity. To leave just enough beneath the surface for the viewer to become part of the discovery.

A quiet, insider like rebellion that never needed to announce itself. A message concealed well enough to remain invisible, yet deliberate enough to be recognized by the eyes it was meant to reach.

Another one of those more defined and sturdy branches that operates in an entirely different category is the Fated Stars Collection, a zodiac inspired aromatherapy candle line.

This is no ordinary zodiac candle collection destined to get lost in the sea of others scattered across online marketplaces, where the only thing seemingly separating one from another is the label or branding. Fated Stars extends far beyond those parameters.

Each candle is a unique composition. No two jars are poured from the exact same recipe because no two people carry the exact same celestial blueprint.

That may seem like an unusual principle to build a product around, but its uniqueness is not something invented for the sake of marketing. There is no guesswork involved when the inspiration comes from something that was already written in the stars.

Fated Stars harnesses the idea of celestial alignment by taking something uniquely encoded within your birth chart and translating it into something tangible.

Your birth chart becomes the map. From it, the planetary positions and placements are interpreted, and their corresponding herbs, flowers, crystals, symbols, scents, and other elements become the ingredients selected for your individual candle.

Rather than simply placing a zodiac sign on a mass produced fragrance and calling it personalized, Fated Stars takes the celestial blueprint and transforms it into an entirely original composition, complete with a keepsake embedded within the wax as the candle is layered and poured.

The result is something that appeals to more than the senses.

There is an almost otherworldly pull to discovering a candle that was composed specifically around you, particularly when the meaning behind each element is not immediately revealed.

Hidden within the wax are little pieces of the story waiting to be discovered, including a keepsake you may not have known you needed until the moment you found it.

And perhaps that is the most fitting part.

Because anything believed to have a hand from the universe in its creation carries a strange familiarity, as though it was not simply made for you, but somehow had been waiting for you all along.

Fated Stars is the Cosmic Conspiracy of your creation, transmuted into a candle.

Then there is the educational branch, though I prefer to think of it as something far more expansive: the Library of Uncited Knowledge & Insight.

A library that, in a sense, does not hand everyone the same map.

The material can certainly be purchased by anyone, but possessing access to the information does not necessarily mean possessing the perspective required to fully uncover what it means.

The intention is that you leave with more than something you have read. You leave changed, with an entirely different view of the subject you came to understand, almost as though something within you has been pulled back and Xposed, allowing you to absorb something that even many accomplished writers and creators never manage to accomplish with the written word.

The library itself has expanded dramatically since the completion of its first full book.

It was never supposed to become what it is now.

When it first debuted, its purpose was much simpler: one educational resource created after I had attempted to learn AI for myself and began noticing something that bothered me.

Everywhere I looked, the educational material seemed remarkably similar.

Different covers. Different authors. Different wording.

Essentially the same information.

And considering how rapidly AI was beginning to evolve, I found myself wondering why so much of the education surrounding it seemed to stop short of revealing its full potential.

There was a hesitation I could feel between the lines.

Perhaps it was intentional.

Perhaps some creators simply could not see beyond the limitations of what they already knew.

Perhaps there was also an unspoken reluctance to completely reveal what AI could do when there was money to be made from possessing the knowledge first.

Whatever the reason, once one formula appeared to work, others followed it.

The result was an expanding collection of resources that often taught people how to use AI without truly teaching them how far they could take it.

I decided I wanted to do the complete opposite.

My original objective was simple.

Educate people about the benefits of using AI, teach them how to actually use it, and show them how a newly acquired skill could become something they could monetize.

I never intended for that first resource to become an entire library.

But the more I learned, the more I noticed.

One gap led to another.

One unanswered question exposed another.

I would find myself reading something, learning something, or attempting something and suddenly recognizing what was missing.

Sometimes it was information.

Sometimes it was application.

Sometimes it was the connection between two things that had been taught separately.

And eventually, I stopped merely noticing the gaps and started feeling compelled to fill them.

Years later, what began as a single educational resource has evolved into something that can almost be described as a personal sized library, although even that description feels modest when considering the range of territory it covers.

Its collection moves deliberately from one lane to another because I have never traveled in only one lane myself.

Wherever my curiosity, experience, experimentation, or creative work took me, I eventually noticed something missing there too.

So I built into the gap.

That is what much of the library became.

Not a collection created because I decided there should be a collection.

A collection created because something was missing and I could not leave the absence alone.

What you would find if you walked through the library is, in many ways, a considerable amount of me infused throughout every title.

The growing collection of guides, workbooks, educational resources, and practical tools were intentionally designed to become the thing I was looking for when I could not find it elsewhere.

Not simply information.

Not another watered down version of something that already existed.

Something that could take a person from “I was looking for this” to “I did not realize I needed to understand all of this.”

That distinction is the foundation of the library.

The goal was never to create more things for people to read.

It was to create things that could make people see differently once they were finished reading.

That evolution is ultimately what my brand collectively represents.

It, too, has no longer been confined to the original definition of what the business was when it first began.

The services may have expanded, the mediums may have changed, and the storefront may now exist largely in the digital world, but the underlying idea has remained remarkably consistent.

To create things that reveal more than what is immediately visible.

No matter the branch it grew into.

Eventually, each of these bloomed into their own individual worlds.

Some were planned.

Some were seemingly accidental.

Most came from following a thought a little farther than I had anticipated.

With that borderless terrain allowing these thoughts to roam freely and take shape, each one separately followed the same pattern.

They evolved beyond what they were initially purposed to be.

And with that one parallel, another became apparent once everything was connected.

There was something deeper underneath it all.

A root where everything was woven back into one.

Something that stayed safely beneath the surface, bracing the structure as it continued growing up, out, farther, and farther over time.

As I went back to revisit the initial page intended to serve as an unofficial About section, trying to paint the picture with words so you could actually see it as you read it, I realized something I had not been aware of when I began.

This collection did not simply become complicated as it expanded.

It instead…

became me.

Layered. Multidimensional. A little unconventional. Occasionally chaotic.

Full of different directions that somehow keep finding their way back to one another.

My life is perhaps the truest definition of refusing to shrink myself down until I fit somewhere comfortable for everyone else.

Refusing to compress everything I am into one neat little niche simply because that makes me easier to market, easier to understand, or less intimidating to those who would rather I remain within the boundaries they already recognize.

If that is what is expected, cut my rope from the post and let me float out into the sea.

I would rather be unfinished than become something neatly packaged that no longer resembles the person who created it.

I am not even sure there is an ending in sight for where my imagination might take me.

What I can guarantee is that the life expectancy of creating would become remarkably short if I were forced to amputate entire pieces of myself just to make the rest more digestible to people who had already decided how they wanted to misunderstand me.

Because what happens when you allow yourself to question?

To explore random curiosities simply because they interest you?

To retain useless knowledge because, for some inexplicable reason, your brain decided it was worth keeping?

To try experiences you are not necessarily drawn toward, even when there is no obvious financial reward waiting on the other side?

To make mistakes often enough that eventually you stop being embarrassed by them?

To admit those mistakes publicly?

To write about them.

To put them somewhere for the world to read.

To uncover something for the first time and feel almost physically charged by the experience of discovering it.

There is something strangely powerful about leaving enough room in your life for the possibility that you might stumble across something you could never have imagined wanting until you found it.

Something that changes your perspective.

Something that changes your direction.

Maybe even one incredibly unfortunate mistake that somehow leads you exactly where you were supposed to go.

We live in a world that does not exactly encourage this kind of behavior.

We are taught to choose the predictable route. The sensible route. The financially responsible route. The route that can be explained neatly when someone asks what you are doing with your life.

Meanwhile, an entire population of people quietly self medicate with distractions and outlets that slowly detach them from the things that actually matter to them.

So I wonder…

If you knew that stepping into uncertainty could give you an entirely new perspective, would you trade that experience simply because you could not guarantee what was waiting on the other side?

Or would you continue along the path of certainty?

Work.

Eat.

Sleep.

Repeat.

Spend your days staring endlessly at a screen, squeezing in just enough time to fake a smile at the people you feel obligated or responsible to, before crawling into bed at night without ever having to confront the uncomfortable possibility that somewhere underneath all of it, you were yearning for something more.

The answer you choose will ultimately determine something about the kind of life you live.

Maybe that answer is not you yet.

Maybe it never will be.

But maybe there is still time to find out.

Because if there is even a sliver of curiosity somewhere inside you, I would rather incite it than extinguish it.

Retain it.

Follow it.

See where it takes you.

What is life if you never step outside of familiarity long enough to discover what exists beyond it?

What are you waiting to put off until you have the free time?

Until you retire?

Until your body is less willing?

Until your knees hurt, your schedule is smaller, your bedtime is 8 PM, and suddenly the things you kept telling yourself you would do someday require considerably more negotiation with your joints?

Do it now.

Go somewhere you have never been.

Learn something you have no practical reason to know.

Talk to someone you would normally overlook.

Make something without knowing what it is supposed to become.

Follow the strange idea.

Ask the unnecessary question.

Stay curious long enough to discover the hidden desire underneath it.

Because once you begin moving outside the flow of your normal, things start revealing themselves.

People will reveal things you needed to see.

Experiences will expose things you did not know were missing.

Mistakes will redirect you.

Curiosity will open doors you did not know existed.

And then it builds.

One thought becomes another.

One experience becomes another.

One seemingly unrelated idea finds its way back to something you created years earlier.

And eventually, you begin to realize that perhaps none of it was ever as random as it appeared.

Maybe that is what art imitating life really means.

Not simply that life inspires art.

But that the things we create can sometimes reveal parts of ourselves we had not yet consciously recognized.

A life that keeps branching.

A mind that keeps wandering.

A curiosity that refuses to stay in one category.

A brand that keeps doing the same.

And somewhere beneath all those branches is the place where they all lead back to.

The root.

The place where the seemingly unrelated pieces become related.

Where the experiments, the questions, the mistakes, the discoveries, the observations, the art, the products, the stories, the knowledge, the strange ideas, and the things I could never have planned begin to make sense as pieces of the same larger picture.

That place is here.

The Xcerpts.

Not a category.

Not a niche.

Not an attempt to explain everything I am.

A collection of what happens when I refuse to stop asking:

What if?

What if I tried this?

What if I looked at it differently?

What if there is more here than what I was shown?

And perhaps the most interesting discovery of all is that I never really set out to build something that looked like this.

I simply kept following the thoughts.

And they kept leading me here.