Every system I ever trusted asked me to live a lie. And for years, I thought the problem was me.

I grew up in chaos — abuse, instability, a home that was anything but. Children's services was called on us constantly, but with a mandate to "protect the family," they never did anything. My parents kept moving over financial problems — different city, different jurisdiction, different caseworker, same result. I never went to the same school more than two years. My mother kicked me out at 15. I spent the rest of high school bouncing between temporary homes. The only way out was college. My entire childhood was one strategy: hold on until you can get out.

The evangelical church I started in didn't just reject me — they exorcised me. Twice. And I wasn't some kid on the fringes. I was all in — taught Sunday school, went on mission trips, did everything they asked of me. A model kid. Well-behaved. Devoted. And they still looked at me and saw a gay kid who didn't need saving, he needed a demon cast out and a lifetime of self-denial. For a long time, I believed they were right. I believed something was wrong with me.

A pastor from that same church took me in because "God told him to." I thought it was God finally giving me the family I'd always prayed for, the one I'd worked so hard to be good enough to deserve.

The irony is, the closest I ever felt to God wasn't in a church. It was sitting alone on a park bench outside the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky when a visiting priest sat down and told me, unprompted, that God doesn't care that I'm gay. One moment of unconditional acceptance from a system that otherwise never offered it — and it didn't even happen inside the building. For the first time, I thought maybe the problem wasn't me.

I made it to college. That was supposed to be the way out. Finally, I had hope — a family that took me in, a God who maybe didn't hate me after all. That didn't last.

That experience is what led me to try Catholicism. There was genuine beauty in it — the structure, the liturgy, the spaces, and a tradition that at least tried to keep to its own rules. But a faith that condemned who I loved, punished women for their own healthcare decisions, kept women subservient to men, protected pedophile priests, and demanded obedience without question wasn't something I could kneel to. It wasn't devotion — it was fear sold as love.

ROTC in college should have been a path forward. The first year was fine — I kept my head down, did the work, and DADT was just a policy I didn't think about. It wasn't until I started seeing someone at a different school that everything changed. Suddenly I was lying about everything — covering my tracks, managing every detail of my life to avoid getting caught. I went from honor roll to barely passing — collapsing inside, white-knuckling it until I couldn't anymore. I resigned to end it. They repealed the policy that same summer. Part of me still carries that — the voice that says "if only I was stronger, if only I could have held on longer." The same voice I'd been listening to my whole life.

I scraped by for three more years, holding my psyche together long enough to graduate. I still earned a physics degree — not because it was practical, but because it was the hardest thing I could do — and got published as an undergraduate researcher. But none of that mattered to the part of me that was breaking.

After graduation, I did what the script said to do next — I got a job. USAA felt like a second chance. A way to serve, at least somewhat. A fresh start with a new church that was supposedly welcoming. I clung to the hope that this time, the script would actually work.

I tried Episcopalian, thinking a different denomination might finally be the answer. And on the surface, it was — the priest was kind, I was welcomed, I did the retreats. When I was seeing someone, the priest was even excited about doing a gay marriage — until the reality set in. He'd need permission from the bishop, it would be a parish-wide conversation, and the only other gay wedding they'd done, he'd quietly officiated in a backyard to avoid the whole thing.

Even the welcome came with an asterisk. The relationships never went deeper than Sunday. Underneath the warmth was something hollow — less a faith than a social agreement to keep telling stories nobody in the room actually believed. But I kept showing up because the script said that's what you do.

And when I built a tech career — working my way from developer to system architect over nine years — I found the same deal in a different building. Go along to get along. Stay in your lane. Don't outshine the people above you. I tried to play the role.

The deal was always the same: we'll take you, but not all of you. Conditional acceptance as long as you play the role and wear the mask.

For years I paid it. I did everything I thought I was supposed to do — got the job, the nice partner, the suburban house. I overcame every obstacle to keep to the script, and the script still failed. Everything I was told would make me happy never actually lightened my soul. Successful didn't mean whole.

In 2021 — six years into my career at USAA — I decided there had to be more to life. And the only way to find out was to face everything I was terrified of. So I did.

I started in the gym at 300 pounds. Years of sedentary remote work, online games, and a COVID lifestyle of desk to couch to bed had wrecked me. I couldn't walk a block without extreme low back pain. My blood work was a disaster. I was eating a box of Fruity Pebbles as a pre-dinner snack and calling it normal.

So I gutted my diet, cut out the processed garbage, and started moving. At first, the changes were good — genuinely good. I was healing my body for the right reasons.

Then I ended my engagement. I'd pushed my fiancé to propose because I thought that would finally make me happy. He was Catholic, nice, wanted the suburban life — the best version of what I thought I was supposed to want. It was just as hollow. Breaking up with him was one of the hardest things I did that year.

Then I wrote the pastor a letter. The man who took me in as a kid and kept me close for 15 years into adulthood. He cared about me. He just never told me I wasn't his. Fifteen years of birthdays, holidays, weddings. He called me his adopted son in a book I helped him edit. He let me build my entire sense of family on something he knew wasn't real. All I did was point out the contradictions between his words and his behavior and ask him to clarify. Three months of silence. He ghosted me through my birthday. I spent the day in tears. When he finally spoke, he told me he knew exactly what I believed the relationship was — and he'd let me believe it because he thought I needed it. He wasn't sorry. He was angry that I asked. Angry that I wasn't grateful for the illusion he'd so lovingly given me. A faith wrapped in its own self-righteousness — too eager to condemn anyone legitimately struggling who didn't fall in line with its political and dogmatic beliefs.

After a lifetime of performing "good" — being what God wanted, what society wanted, what everyone else needed me to be — the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction. I threw myself into everything I'd denied myself. The partying, the sex, the scene, the culture. If the script said don't, I did.

But swinging from one extreme to another isn't freedom — it's just a different kind of reaction. The problem was never the sex or the partying. The problem was running on compulsion instead of intention. I wasn't choosing any of it. I was reacting to everything I'd been denied.

The gym followed the same arc. What started as health became performance — chasing validation, chasing attention, pushing to failure every set trying to build a body someone would finally want. I was constructing a version of me designed to be liked, not a version of me that was real.

All of this while doing some of the best work of my career. One thought kept running through my head: how do I get out of here? This isn't who I am. This isn't what I'm meant for. I was thriving at someone else's game while knowing it was the wrong game entirely.

I didn't find Santa Muerte. She pulled me in. I walked past her statue in a small shop in Chicago and the next thing I knew, two hours had passed. The shop owner had to snap me out of it. Something woke up in me that day that hadn't been awake before. I took the statue home. And my life started changing fast.

When corporate politics finally came for me — not because I was failing, but because I was succeeding in ways that made the wrong people uncomfortable — I had the evidence, the relationships, and the ammunition to fight back. I could have blown the whole thing open.

But I didn't want to fight for that life. All the money in the world is worthless if you can't control your own energy. I didn't want a transfer or a severance. For the first time, I wasn't just holding on until I couldn't anymore — I was choosing to let go so I could go deeper. I wanted to heal. I wanted a life that was actually mine.

The real shift came when I moved from brute force to balance — martial arts, yoga, somatic work. Strength with skill, not just volume. Flow over grinding. Self-respect and real confidence instead of a manufactured image built for other people's approval. Not denying the body, but actually listening to it.

I was diagnosed with CPTSD, Autism Spectrum, and Conversion Reaction as a kid. I don't say that for sympathy — I say it because those three things gave me something most people don't have: a fundamentally different experience of the connection between mind, body, and nervous system.

When I found breathwork, yoga, fascia work, hypnosis, and parts work, I didn't just find relief. I could see the patterns that had been running my life the entire time — feel them, map them, take them apart. I took the same architectural thinking I used to design complex systems at USAA and turned it inward. I went from architecting software systems to architecting my healing, and later a life I actually wanted.

In 2024, I went to Ohio for my sister's birthday. I took flowers to my grandmother's grave and started telling her about my life — about Santa Muerte, about the path I was on. And then I broke down crying about how much God hates me. A man appeared next to me. Asked if he could pray with me. I said no. He did anyway. He told me I was still doing the work, that I came from good stock, and that God still loves me. I didn't understand that moment until now.

And somewhere in that process, I realized I was never running from God. I was running from a system that had corrupted Him — one built on control, division, and extraction, and calling it devotion. A system that condemned the struggling while protecting the powerful. That made the rules, broke them, and punished anyone who questioned why. I never had a problem with Jesus. I had a problem with the people who claimed to speak for him. I never felt whole in any of their buildings. But I found something real outside of them.

That was the first half. Thirty-five years of surviving systems that were never built for me — holding on, performing, breaking, rebuilding, and finally walking away.

This is the second half. No more scripts. No more masks. No more conditional acceptance. I'm building something real — for myself and for every man who's ever been where I was. This is where my life actually begins.

Choose to grow.