Mistakes Made

Inside all of us are beautiful cities and hidden alleys.

Often I write about AI and the lofty ideas that enter my brain late at night, but lately I have been considering something. While I am passionate and believe deeply in what I have written, it has also acted as a mask while I summon the courage to write from a deeper place within.

I have offered small samples of my heart. Moments when my writing about tech breaks and I let something else breathe: my actual struggle and experience. Almost like a kid who touches his toes to the ocean, then runs back for safety.

As I sat contemplating different concepts that feel important but do not say much about who I am, I realized it was time to let people in a bit closer. To be known as a person, not just a perspective. What is anything, if not the courage to be seen. Imperfect, ill formed, sometimes ugly, but perhaps beautiful in the full expression of who we are.

I think about how much of myself I keep hidden, which feels like a strange paradox. As a sober member of a twelve step community, I have witnessed people lay their souls bare before me. In my work, I have been present for families in moments of both devastation and triumph. I have held their emotions while suspending my own in order to be what they needed.

Sometimes I get lost in that.

I do not sit in judgment of others. In fact, aside from moments of true malice, I rarely cast blame outward. Instead, I have reserved it for myself. Not in an overtly cruel way, but as a relentless taskmaster searching for some elusive sense of worthiness for simply existing.

I did not just want my life to matter. It had to mean something.

The problem is that this desire came from a place I did not understand. A wound I couldn’t see. Because of that, there was never a feeling of enough. I would push myself beyond my limits, believing that if I could just reach the right threshold, I would finally feel whole.

I have come to understand that this is the wrong kind of fuel. Whatever comes from an unseen wound will always result in ego filled instability. It can look like ambition. It can look like discipline. But underneath, it never sustains.

A chip on the shoulder is one thing. A wound that whispers you will never be enough, so faintly that it becomes deafening, is something else entirely.

The Allure of a Mask

Throughout my life, I have worn many masks. I think we all do. We step into versions of ourselves to navigate what we believe the world requires of us.

In the world we live in now, this happens more often than we realize. There are moments where masks feel necessary, especially in a culture that can reduce a person to a single moment and define them by it.

The danger in my life has been when I was not choosing the mask. When I was living inside something without ever knowing, slowly suffocating within it.

I have had to survive situations that did not leave much room for vulnerability. Not because my family failed me, but because of the time and environment I grew up in. Emotions like sadness or fear were often met with discomfort, and that discomfort was usually expressed as anger.

So I learned to contain myself. To live internally.

At eighteen, I was kicked out of my house with no money. Survival became the priority. There was no space to explore who I was. Only who I needed to be in order to get through.

Then came incarceration. Again, there was no room for emotional truth. My heart was breaking in ways I did not have language for, but my survival required emotional silence.

Those patterns do not just disappear.

Even now, as I move through emotional upheaval, I can see the remnants of the boy who needed to feel special just to justify his existence. The part of me that wants to be seen as intelligent, capable and exceptional.

This is my attempt to move in the opposite direction. To allow myself to be seen as I actually am. Uncertain. Flawed. Still learning.

The world feels increasingly divided. People form rigid identities and defend them as if their survival depends on it. We stop listening. We stop seeing each other.

These masks become so familiar that we forget they are not who we are.

So I am trying to remove the mask that has been present in my writing. Not because it was false, but because it was incomplete.

To Invent a Hero

There is a moment in my childhood I think of a lot. A clearly defined moment where everything changed for me. It was the breaking point where my mind created something else altogether. It would be the essence of me and my undoing until I could learn to live alongside it.

I was born with 80 proof blood....at least that is the joke that runs inside my family. Whether you believe in nature, nurture or both...it was clear; I was fucked.

Addiction ran through my family. Both of my grandfathers died from alcoholism. On my mother’s side, it was hidden behind success. On my father’s side, it was visible.

My father found crack cocaine in the mid eighties, and it fractured our family.

When I was very young, he was everything a child could hope for. He was larger than life. He stood 6’8, young and athletic. He was charismatic. Present. He was my first hero.

And then drugs changed that.

The moment that shaped me was not one specific event. It was the accumulation of many. Divorce. Moving. Not knowing where my father was. Feeling responsible for things I could not control. Feeling ashamed and not knowing why. It was the crescendo of all these events cascading into one day that broke an 11-year-olds heart.

I became the new kid at school. I felt blamed for my parent’s divorce by exposing my father’s drug use. I tried to hold everything together by performing well. Good grades. Good behavior.

At home, I numbed myself in small ways. Food became comfort. I would come home and eat multiple bowls of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios to quiet what I did not understand. I lived in the fantasies I created within; my escape from the reality outside.

I was teased for my weight. I responded by fighting back, which only made things worse.

I found myself in a strange position. I was offering emotional support to my parents while feeling completely alone in my own experience.

There was no relief.

I hid how much I was struggling. My parents were dealing with their own reality, and I did not want to add to it.

One day, after being yelled at and punished for something that felt deeply unfair.....I closed the door to my room, began to cry from that deep place where soul pain lives, dropped onto my knees and prayed to God....

“Please kill me God, please just end my life.”

In that moment of feeling completely broken, a thought emerged......”

Life is just harder for you because you were meant to do something special and this is all just training.”

It made sense to me and allowed me to feel special when I felt anything but. I could have never realized how that thought would shift my entire psyche.

I was a weird kid. I was teased mercilessly for it. I couldn’t ride a bike. I wore my shirt in the pool because I was embarrassed by my body. I had tubes put in my ears so I always had to wear earplugs when I swam.

I spent all my time drawing and creating stories. They were tales of heroism, but more importantly I got to act out the things I was too afraid to do or say in real life.

I practiced karate moves in my mirror where I would conquer hordes of would be attackers.

When I became fully immersed in my inner world, I would wring my hands uncontrollably; deep stimming where I’d lose track of time. I couldn’t control it. If you know me now...you would know that I still do that, not as often... although I’ve realized most find it endearing.

So I took this odd little cocktail of fantasy and quirks, wildly stepping into autonomy despite anything.

Crafted Masculinity

I grew up on Gangster Rap and Arnold Schwarzenegger like many kids of my era.

Despite having my Dad who was intermittently sober and a stepfather, I found myself drawn to this type of curated manhood.

At this time my mind wanted to push me as far away from the awkward sweet child I was. I was motivated to craft who I was based on the type of man who lived by a code and was without weakness.

The wound I couldn’t see had incepted who I was and what felt like motivation was really just overcompensation from a place of deep pain.

We can’t conceptualize this as children so we see these things in simplistic terms. Like a baby rattle snake can’t control its venom, I lacked control of my emotional nature both outwardly and within. So my perception based in fear gave way to emotion that determined my behavior.

This is just how children live, especially me, especially then.

There is a freedom in that and as children we brutally collide against each other until consequence reshapes us.

I was a kid who loved art, story and writing. Despite that being my true north, I decided to play Football. Finally my anger found a home and I felt a place of belonging.

I remember putting on my pads and lacing my cleats. The smell of the locker and the privilege I finally felt. I looked like the impenetrable titan made manifest that I had crafted in my mind but it was never really me. A part of me and maybe it helped make a part of me, but under all that armor was still a wound walking around in fantasy.

Consequence

That belief did not just comfort me. It shaped who I was as an orientation I couldn’t control.

At first, it gave me something essential…. a way to survive. If I was suffering then that suffering held meaning. A blessing because there were many hard moments still ahead of me. If I felt alone, it was part of a larger story. A solemn undertaking to improve myself for tasks that lay ahead. I think I still carry that today.

But over time, it did change.

What began as survival became identity. Not the kind of identity that one adopts but one that is so central to self it becomes automatic.

I did not just think I might be meant for something. I needed to be. Because if I was not, then all of that pain had no meaning. That was something I could not accept. Grandiosity is outwardly ugly and I knew that, so I kept it inward and that became a malignancy to my inner dialogue.

I became someone who could endure almost anything, but I did not know how to simply exist. Everything had to mean something. Every failure felt like it threatened the entire structure I had built inside myself. So when I felt that I had failed or I wasn’t enough, I would destroy myself with drugs as a combination of punishment and release.

I just needed quiet inside myself.

The same mind that created a hero to survive also created a system to escape.

I do not think the belief I formed as an 11 year old kid was wrong.

I think it was just incomplete.

There is a part of me that wants to create something meaningful. That part is real. I have seen what it can do when it is grounded.

But when that drive comes from a wound, it changes everything. It grows in the shape of false ego and when people speak of imposter syndrome, I believe that to be the core of it.

It means sitting in moments where you do not feel special. Where you do not feel certain. Where you are not becoming anything at all. Writing has been that way for me. Sometimes I write a sentence that matches some rhythm in my head and I feel complete. Sometimes I feel like nothing comes out right. Sometimes I read what others have written with wonder and feel as though I’ll never write like that.....but still I write.

I’m not running from it and it has been a great teacher.

A Different Kind of Meaning

If there is something I am meant to do, I do not think it will come from proving that I am different. I think it will come from understanding that I am not.

The patterns I have lived through exist in more people than we are willing to admit. The need to escape. The need to be seen. The fear of not being enough. The feeling that if we are exactly who we are we will be left alone with our pain.

The moments that have meant the most to me have not been moments of achievement. They have been moments of truth. When someone allowed themselves to be seen without protection. Or when I fell in love with someone who let me be me.

Those moments are what make life full. They break us open in ways that help us see more of who we really are.

They remind us that we are never alone unless we choose to be.

Closing

I have spent much of my life trying to become someone. Stronger. More capable. More meaningful. Growth and effort matter and I think I will always be oriented that way.

I do not regret the belief that carried me through my childhood. It helped me survive when I did not know how to carry on.

But I no longer need it in the same way.

And yet, there is some place within that still feels proud that I think that way. That I chose to construct something at least noble in purpose when I felt broken. I still wish to be a hero in some way and maybe I have been. I’ve also been many other things far less noble.

Sometimes in the pursuit of all this, I have sought the world’s praise over the love and respect of those closest to me. That stings. That feels hollow and it’s not who I want to be.

I find it odd that I thought I needed to be exceptional to reach some abstract destiny. What I’m finding is that it has always been my flaws.

I used to believe that destiny was when you felt called; stepping into a dramatic hero arc. What I believe now is that destiny is actually when the very wounds you hold lead you to develop tools and those wounds, imperfections and tools are exactly what something deeply meaningful calls for.

I can see that this world will move and change in a way that people will not be able to see or trust being told what is real. I think that is already happening to some extent. Maybe that is needed. It forces a return within to intuit what is truth. We’ve been listening outside ourselves for so long, it feels strange to listen within.

Inside all of us are cities with beautiful parks and seedy back alleys. The more I find the courage to allow others to visit them, the more the wound actually heals because now the wound has true meaning. And that is exceptional.