There was a night I was 11 years old, alone in a park after dark, waiting for my dad to pick me up from soccer practice. He forgot. That story, that I wasn't quite important enough to show up for, became the operating system I ran for the next two decades without knowing it.
So I did what any good nice guy does. I performed. I pleased. I became a stand-up comedian in LA, chasing validation hits from strangers in dive bars, convinced that if I got famous enough, someone would finally be proud of me. I said yes when I meant no. I smiled when I was dying inside. I was everybody's favorite guy and completely invisible to myself.
Then I got married, and the pattern followed me right in. I told myself I was being supportive by never asking for more. What I was actually doing was swallowing my needs and slowly disappearing. When I finally asked my wife to meet me halfway and she said no, I did the hardest thing I'd ever done. I chose myself. I walked away from someone I was still very much in love with.
Then came the real breaking point. I moved abroad thinking enough distraction would fix what was broken. It didn't. When you stop running, everything you've been running from is right there waiting. The shame. The grief. The mind that never stopped spinning. Sexual trauma from childhood I'd buried so deep I didn't know it was there. A body so disconnected from itself that intimacy never felt safe, something that showed up as psychological ED I spent years covering up with pills instead of asking why.
I wasn't broken. I was completely disconnected.
The shift came in a plant medicine ceremony, sitting with one intention: show me the pain so I can move through it. I saw the people who hurt me most as children carrying their own unhealed wounds. And I understood that staying in victimhood wasn't protecting me, it was keeping me powerless.
Over the next four years I threw myself into the work. Men's circles. Retreats. Somatic work. Training under Connor Beaton and Dr. Robert Glover. I started facilitating circles, and every time I said the thing I was most ashamed of out loud, another man in the room exhaled, like he'd been holding his breath waiting for someone to say it first. That became my mission.
I'm not teaching you something I studied from the outside. I'm teaching you something I climbed out of, and I'm still climbing.
