Life’s Intersections
The Art of Moving Mountains
Corey Neal has a story worth telling — not because his life has followed a perfect path, but because it hasn’t. At 55, Corey has arrived at a defining point where experience, family, faith, health, disappointment, love, loss, wisdom, and personal authority have all converged. He calls that place the Intersection.
The Intersection is more than a moment. It’s a philosophy about what happens when you stop letting circumstances, expectations, institutions, family systems — or even a medical diagnosis — have the final word about how you live. It’s about taking authority over your own life while still honoring the people, experiences, and lessons that shaped you.
Where It Began
Corey’s journey began in a family where love was present, but stability was often complicated. His mother, Rita, worked relentlessly — sometimes two or three jobs at a time — to provide for Corey and his sisters. Because she was so often working, Corey was raised within a broader network of family, particularly his grandmother, moving between homes and learning early how to adapt to different environments and expectations.
Those experiences planted the earliest seeds of the man Corey would become: resilient, observant, loyal, independent, and deeply connected to family — even when family relationships were complicated.
Building a Life in Charlotte
After a short time in college, Corey married Elana, his teenage sweetheart. Together they built a life in Charlotte, North Carolina, and became parents to two sons, Steven and Kendall, whom Corey loves deeply. Their family became firmly rooted in church, and Corey was absorbed into Elana’s larger religious family ecosystem. For roughly two decades, Charlotte was home.
The marriage held many good years, but it also carried challenges — including the pressures that emerge when marriage, extended family, religion, and expectation become deeply intertwined. Eventually, after about twenty years together, Corey and Elana divorced. It was the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.
Coming Home to Annapolis
Leaving Charlotte was difficult. Corey had built roots there, raised his sons there, and shaped an identity around the life he’d known for decades. Yet he decided that returning to Annapolis, Maryland offered a chance to reconnect with another part of himself — his extended family, particularly his paternal grandmother, aunt, and uncle.
His uncle had built a successful business in Maryland, and Corey was welcomed into the company and the family dynamic surrounding it. At first, the opportunity seemed to represent something much bigger than a job — a chance to reconnect with his father’s side of the family, spend precious time with the grandmother who had been so pivotal in his early life, and perhaps build something that could one day create opportunities for his own sons.
But Corey soon discovered an important truth: all that glitters is not gold. Behind the appearance of success were complicated family and business dynamics. He began to see aspects of the organization and family structure that he did not want to pass on to Steven and Kendall — and he felt pressure to conform, sometimes accompanied by the sense that refusing to fall in line could cost him his place within the family itself.
How much of yourself are you willing to surrender in order to belong?
Rebuilding on His Own Terms
After years of navigating those dynamics, Corey fell in love again. He found the confidence and footing to leave the family business and build a career in a different corporate environment — one that offered greater autonomy, independence, and freedom.
Slowly, he began rebuilding. He purchased a beautiful home. He surrounded himself with four dogs he adores. He strengthened his relationship with his sons. He rediscovered love. And he began to understand that success is not simply about money, titles, family approval, or appearances. For Corey, success increasingly became about agency.
Another Mountain
Then his body presented him with another mountain. Corey had already survived cancer, and it has remained in remission for years. But surviving came with an unexpected consequence, and today Corey lives with a serious heart condition. His relationship with his health is not theoretical — every day is a reminder that life is finite, and that being alive and truly living are not necessarily the same thing.
Corey refuses to make illness the defining headline of his story. Instead, his health has become another catalyst. He listens to his care team and respects conventional medicine while also exploring nutrition, movement, mindfulness, and other approaches to understanding and supporting his body. Rather than seeing those worlds as mutually exclusive, he has become fascinated by what happens when they meet. That meeting place is what he calls the Intersection.
Standing at the Intersection
Over the past year, Corey has come to recognize that much of his life has been leading him toward this realization. Cancer, divorce, family conflict, corporate life, fatherhood, love, financial independence, health, and personal reinvention are not disconnected chapters. They are roads that converge at the same place. And standing there, Corey has made a decision: he intends to take authority over the life he has left.
That doesn’t mean pretending challenges don’t exist. It means becoming an active participant in his own life rather than a passive recipient of circumstances. Asking questions. Learning. Listening to his body. Establishing boundaries. Choosing relationships intentionally. Loving his sons. Enjoying his home and his dogs. Traveling. Laughing. Building. Writing. And refusing to postpone living until life becomes easier.
What Comes Next
Years ago, Corey wrote a book largely for himself called The Art of Moving Mountains. The title reflected something he already understood: mountains are inevitable. The real question is what we do when we encounter them. Now he is ready to return to that work with decades of additional perspective — evolving it from a personal reflection into something larger, a story and philosophy centered on the Intersection.
Corey has survived cancer. He has navigated divorce. He has raised and loved two sons. He has experienced complicated family systems, faith, business, corporate life, reinvention, and love. He has learned that wealth does not guarantee peace, that family does not always guarantee belonging, and that surviving does not automatically mean living. At 55, he is still learning. Still evolving. Still loving. Still questioning. Still building. Still here.
Find your intersection. Take authority. And live.