The Shape of What Remains

The world cannot tell you who you are. That privilege, dear reader, is yours and yours alone.

Dean Bowman writes from limina, documenting longing for days that won’t return and worlds that survive only in memory. As a Showa-era, Japan-born American, he exists as an emergent phenomenon, unauthorized by any time, place, or culture.

The Shape of What Remains is his autofictional exploration of threshold spaces—essays that blend memory with invention, observation with imagination. Some pieces emerge from encounters with clients navigating major life transitions. Others are fragments: travel notes, philosophical meditations, moments of displacement.

The central figure, Dean, is both real and constructed. What you read here is true in feeling, if not always in fact. Names change. Details shift. Chronology bends. What remains is emotional truth.

Through this work, I ask: Who are we in the spaces between? What do we do when the world refuses us? What do we become when we refuse the boxes others assign us?

If you need certainty about where the line between real and imagined lies, this project will frustrate you. If you’re willing to trust the uncertainty, to let the work hold multiple truths at once, then this is for you.

For all the dear children of circumstance—may you find your way.

What You'll Find Here…

Content for my autofiction project is organized as follows:

Entries: Personal observations, philosophical reflections, and narrative fragments from the threshold spaces I inhabit. The primary chronicle.

Cases: A subset of my journal entries featuring my work as a consulting analyst. Here, I help others by uncovering the patterns of grief, identity, and the structures we mistake for fate.

Lexicon: Reference articles that provide context for the specific concepts, frameworks, and terms I return to throughout my work.