The World
Between Us

In 1999, during my first semester at CalArts, an instructor screened a battered Japanese VHS with no subtitles. I knew almost nothing about Japan, and my animation compass still pointed firmly toward Disney. Yet somewhere along the way I stopped asking what the characters were saying and simply entered their world. Years later I learned that the film was My Neighbor Totoro. That small mystery followed me through India, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and eventually Japan: why could an unfamiliar world feel immediately human, while people in the so-called real world could become almost unintelligible to one another the moment culture, hierarchy, institution, or fear entered the room?

I spent much of my working life moving between systems that were ingenious in their own way and occasionally convinced that their way was the way. Animation, cinema, technology, entrepreneurship, academia, and cross-cultural storytelling taught me extraordinary lessons about invention—and equally memorable lessons about how quickly difference can be mistaken for deficiency. I paid a personal price for some of those failures: lost possibilities, damaged relationships, and a life trajectory that did not go where I had imagined. VNE grew from that collision. It is my attempt to make something useful from the wreckage: to understand how meaning survives difference, to repair what can still be repaired, to recalibrate what I thought I knew, and to find a more honest role for myself in the space between worlds.