This is extremely personal to me because it involves events that have happened very recently and have changed both my understanding of myself and my understanding of my relationship with my parents. It's weird to say this, and it's probably stupid to some people, but after 33 years, I hadn't actually realized the amount of abuse that I was given by my parents growing up.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't hate my parents. I think that they make mistakes like any parent does, and that it's important for the offspring to understand where those limitations are so that they can go out in the world and find those people and find those experiences that can actually change them and grow them in a way that their parents never could.
The headline is deliberately blunt. It gets your attention, but it cannot carry the whole story. I believe human beings should be able to defend themselves, including physically when they need to protect themselves. I'm not asking anyone to go and hit their parents. What follows is my account of what happened, what I felt, and what I've been trying to understand about my family and myself.
When I describe my opinions about the law or what I thought was happening in court, I’m describing my understanding at the time.
Understanding myself
After a series of revelations that I had about traumas in my past that had caused me to become far more depressed than I realized, I realized something extremely personal to me that hurt really bad. And I don't know if this is the case for many gay people, but it may be the case for some, as it was the case for me. I've been "gay" since I was about 18 years old and I came out. This happened immediately after the rejection of a straight girl who I really liked, and I thought she was my last hope of being straight. Again, I don't know why I felt this, but I was 18 and really stupid and naive.
She was also the person I trusted enough to open up to about being gay. If the way I handled all of that caused her confusion or trauma, I’m sorry. I still think she’s a very special person.
I had not had a real relationship history up to that point because I had been "in the closet" the entire time, and I came out of the closet to explore sexuality with men first. My parents weren’t anti-gay. They were a little apprehensive at first, but they eventually accepted me for who I claimed I was, and I deeply appreciate that. A lot of families I know did not accept the people who came out to them. It wasn’t that I felt I couldn’t be myself. I just hadn’t explored enough to really know who I was, and I was making assumptions based on half-understandings or a minimal understanding of myself. The environment, my parents’ expectations, and the pressure they put on me were factors in keeping those things secret.
I've come to realize that I'm attracted to women just like I'm attracted to men. And I thought that being attracted to men automatically meant that I was gay. But as it turns out, you can just be attracted to everyone.
I've grown enough, and I've had sex with enough people now, that I realize that judging by race, by age, by all of these weird factors that we judge people on is really not fair. And I'd rather use sex as a social thing because sometimes it just helps people, and we make such a strange stigma about it. It doesn't make any sense to me. Going back, I realized that I actually am basically pansexual, and that I don't want to judge someone before I know them, and cut off anything, including sex. Good souls are good souls, and it doesn't matter what package they're in. This is a very significant revelation to me.
You see, I had two people at the job that I worked at, AddOn Networks, or Halo, in Tustin, that I basically worshipped the ground they walked on.
The first was a 28-year-old rocker guy who was showing off his new tattoos. He is without a doubt one of the most naturally attractive men I have ever met in my entire life. We did get to hear his band’s music at work once, and it is absolutely badass. I can understand why he worked so hard on it above all else. I did try to see him perform live once, but I was super late and kind of bummed.
At one point, he boasted that his new girlfriend said he was better than a pro footballer she had dated previously. And I was like, "I'm not surprised, dude. You're probably way more real than he is, and I bet you can really satisfy a lady." I must have wasted a lot of time imagining giving him head. That is a detail I did not include in the ICT case study.
The other person at the office was about the same age. I didn’t really like him at the time. He could be a hothead and had gotten in trouble with his supervisor several times for being rude. Still, he had an incredible confidence, rizz, and that gave him a magnetism that was pretty shocking. And all of his confidence and everything in his orbit was oriented around being a new dad. He loved being a dad, and he would boast about it all the time.
Looking back, I really like how important his kid's life was to him. But at the time, I was just jealous. I was just sad, because as a gay man, I saw that that opportunity was going away. And I hadn't realized how much my heart actually ached to be a father. My parents had already given up on the idea of me having a kid, and that really hurt me.
This is something I think comes from my mother's side of the family. They may not be the most educated or the most brilliant people in the world, but they really wear their hearts on their sleeves, and I think of them as having an ancient DNA with a deep love within it. Both of my parents are from the Southwest, and my mother has a significant amount of Native American blood. I believe some of that ancient love comes from that heritage. And that kind of love and nurturing is something I really want to pass on to my kids. I don't think my mom really had the opportunity to fully do this, because she still harbored resentment towards her alcoholic father. But I'm not going to go into that here.
Having that realization but not really having much that I can do about it, seeing myself as only gay, I became highly depressed while I was working that job. And that's despite the fact that I was building the ICT, and it was giving me a lot of purpose because I was doing, as I saw it, the work of God by freeing these employees from having to do really menial, stupid things on their computer that I don't think humans should waste time doing.
I want humans to be with their family and their kids and having incredible experiences that help them grow. And I realized that now with remote work, you can be a workaholic and still be in your child's life in a way that was not possible before. That possibility exists for a new generation of incredibly nurturing parents who are involved in their community and building things on their own. They can pass that information on and be incredible parents to their children.
Really take this opportunity and explore those remote roles if you can. I'm looking at becoming a new father and that to me is such an exciting opportunity.
For whatever reason, even though I've been basically a gold star gay since I was 18, lately I have been absolutely craving pussy. And I think part of that comes from the understanding that if I can find the woman I love, not to marry her, but love her for her personality and her depth and everything, that she can provide for me an egg that when combined with the sperm will create a beautiful little human that I can help guide through this world.
Guiding is not getting them to avoid mistakes. They must make big mistakes, but they must learn from those mistakes.
I went to jail this week for slapping my father and I did so very willingly. Let me tell you the story of how it happened.
Learning from my life
I've had a series of revelations lately, and this actually happens every time I have a strong bout of clinical depression, and I come out of it into a much happier and more level state. Sometimes that comes with a little hypomanic intensity, and I've spent years learning how to deal with it. I'm still learning how quickly that intensity can catch me by surprise.
It's taken me years of working with therapy and psychiatrists and medication and reflection and building new hobbies and building new skills to build myself up and realize that my past is not a past of mistakes, but it is a past of learning. I've learned such an incredible amount in my life, and it's given me such an advantage over my peers who have been too afraid to do the same.
You must go through the fire because it forges you as a person, and I cannot emphasize this enough.
I don't think vicarious learning is all that effective. I don't think following the holy message or the good book is really going to get you to where you're going to be happy, because I've seen a lot of people try, and I know a lot of people who still aren't that happy. There's a good message in there, but it's not complete. You must live a life where you make these grievous mistakes or you won't appreciate how wonderful life is. You will just end up stunting your own growth.
Alcohol and the future I want
One of the realizations I had was the effect of alcohol on my life and my family's life. I've been a big whiskey drinker since I was 21 and fell in love with Laphroaig Scotch, sitting outside a little restaurant in Campbell with my sister, brother-in-law, and parents. It reminded me of the incredible bonfires I used to enjoy when I was a student at UC Santa Cruz. And that deep smell of smoke is something that you just can't create any other way.
I enjoyed Scotch and whiskey for many years, not really thinking about the fact that every time I drank, it really, really affected my body in ways I didn't expect. I now think a lot of that has to do with my autism. And alcohol, in most cases, is just not a good thing to be putting in my body. And so personally, I abstain at every opportunity, but would drink socially if I thought the appropriate situation had come up.
My mother doesn't share this view. She drinks almost completely alone. And she drinks straight whiskey. And she drinks a lot of it. By the time the night comes around, she's typically slurring her words. And she will often escape to her room where she can enjoy books and not have anyone around her.
This to me feels isolating and sad. I don't want to pass judgment because maybe this is really what makes her happy, but it's certainly not something that would ever make me happy.
I've come to see alcoholism as a disease, truly, truly a disease. People need to exercise incredible judgment in our modern age with all the choice and all the dangers that are around us. And having something that impairs judgment when you're driving a car or anything else is just so absurdly dangerous. My understanding is that an inherited vulnerability to alcoholism can make control difficult, and that some people need environments where alcohol is carefully controlled.
Through friends who have gone through full programs, and in AA meetings that I have sat in myself, I have seen the power and the attractiveness of this drug to make people make really foolish decisions.
For me, my health and now the health and safety of somebody who is more important to me than me, my potential future child, I don't want that exposure. I don't want that to be part of their life. I don't want them to think that that's okay because my mom does it or because it's socially done by so many people here in the OC region.
Now that doesn't mean that my child will never drink. If I put some limitation on it, it's very likely that they'll want to go out and explore on their own. And honestly, that's okay. I think everyone needs to explore everything as long as it doesn't kill them. So they just have to be careful about that part. You can't come back from death.
My thinking is that a little bit of drinking isn't necessarily going to kill you. And I'm sure it'll happen because they were in a household that didn't allow it. And they may need to make that mistake themselves.
But regardless, my view is I don't want to start with it. With the right kind of nurturing and growing, they may not actually find it all that interesting. I can be an incredible person around my friends and in social circles, and I don't need alcohol to do that. I'm hoping that my offspring could get to that same point.
The conversation we never had
With this series of revelations, I sent my parents two text messages. The first said, "I don’t want alcohol in my child’s life." I was planning to visit them. Partly because they hadn’t replied, I sent a second message saying, "I would pour it out or smash them," referring to the alcohol bottles. I now realize that second message was, from their perspective, unnecessarily aggressive.
My dad told me they were terrified about what would happen when I arrived. With them already in that heightened state of alarm, the situation was much more likely to escalate. Mom and Dad, I am deeply sorry my messages frightened you.
What I really wanted to have was a heart-to-heart conversation with my parents about how alcohol could affect my future child. And how them being disconnected, neglectful parents really screwed me up as a child. But we never even got to have that conversation.
I came into their house uninvited because my outreach had been ignored. I have a key, and they trust me. I was really hoping they would at least call. Instead, they pulled back and were afraid. At the time, all I could think was, “Just talk. I’m your son, Jesus Christ.” Looking back, I wasn’t making it easy for them to feel safe enough to have that conversation. I still struggle to understand why they didn’t reach out. Whatever my child had done, I would want to hear from them and find a way to talk it through. To me, that would be part of my role as their parent. And I came in where they were watching football and I believe they had been all day. And I turned off the TV and I said, "We need to talk." And instead of my dad saying, "Okay, what’s wrong? Let’s talk. Don’t get aggressive. Calm down," like a father should, he instead got immediately pissed and started acting as though this couldn’t happen in his presence.
Now you have to remember this condescending tone because for me it's different than it might be for other people. It's really a sensitive trigger for me because I've realized that I adopted his condescending tone, which is despicable. And I've used it in many past relationships to no success.
I had a condescending tone with my roommate the other day. It didn't work with her either, and it shut down the entire conversation when I was trying to speak about defending one’s self. It was a terrible approach. Everyone hates the tone universally.
Ultimately, this condescending tone has no place and I needed to grow out of it. And it pissed me off. It really got under my skin to hear my dad go into that tone with me.
He will soon turn 70 and I, 34. I am not somebody who's going to sit around and listen to that tone from my father who's been neglectful and abusive to my mother with that tone, and has been abusive to me, my sister, and others in his life with that tone. And I thought it was acceptable because I had seen him do it.
Even close friends, exes, extended family say, "I hate how you talk to your mother." And they're totally right. I adopted this stupid tone and it's really screwed up my life in a lot of ways that I had never really realized, and it made me a terrible partner.
That was the history I brought into the room that night, but I was trying to explain too much before I could put it into words. We were already on edge. It isn’t fair to talk about my dad’s tone without acknowledging how often I’ve mirrored it. I came in with a lot of energy, and my tone added to their fear and helped escalate things. I’m sorry for that.
When I got in and I shut down the TV, my mom was actually already seated with her hands together staring at me in a way that seemed like she was ready to talk. I was actually feeling like, okay, maybe we can get somewhere here.
But then my father, who derides my mother for getting involved in things that are not her business, jumped in front of the conversation with that condescending tone. And I thought to myself, that is an old man and he needs to stop being such an asshole. One of the things he said that night, in that condescending tone, was, "And what's this shit about you having a child?" I completely lost it when I heard that line. It hit right at something I was already deeply wounded by. To me, it felt like he was saying, "I don't want you to have a child," or, "You couldn't possibly have a child."
So I got up and I slapped him three or four times. I slapped the crap out of him. At the time, it felt good. That's part of my account, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
I saw him on the couch, red-faced and angry. Sometimes my dad is so convinced he’s right that he stops listening. I have that same problem, and I learned some of it from him. Recognizing it in him means I have to recognize it in myself, too.
After I slapped him, he said, “He’s hitting me. He’s hitting me.”
My mother, whom I saw as unstable and suspected had been drinking, went to the kitchen and grabbed a 12-inch knife out of the knife block. I thought her judgment was impaired.
At that moment, my dad was able to get up immediately, and we both told her, "Put the knife down."
To me, it looked like a mother willing to grievously injure her own child because that child slapped his father. I thought it was an absurd reaction. I don't think being more willing to fight makes my mother's side of the family nuts. But reaching for a knife was, to me, a different level of escalation.
Thankfully, I think my mother was at least somewhat doing this in self-defense. And I think she did realize her mistake pretty quickly because before I even noticed, she was putting the knife back in the block, which she had to go to a different room to get, the kitchen. And I had moved to the kitchen to confront her.
She then turned around and said, "Who the fuck do you think you are?" She was trying to say it to my face, but she’s too short now. And I said, "I’m your fucking son."
I gave her a chest bump, and she fell. I was surprised because it wasn’t that hard of a bump. My dad was going, “What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck?” in the background. They were so freaked out that they couldn’t even find the phone.
At the time, I believed this was a personal matter rather than a crime. I thought to myself, "Okay, well, this isn’t actually a crime. This is a personal matter. But you guys aren’t stable enough to handle this."
So I grabbed the phone out of my pocket and I dialed the police directly. I told them exactly what had happened and I was incredibly calm. I told them I did not believe my dad was grievously injured. I could see him in the other room just sitting there reeling, and I did not believe he was injured in any significant way. To me, he looked as though he had the wind knocked out of him, so to speak. The dispatcher then told me to go outside, get away from them, and stay away from them.
I then waited outside for about 45 minutes, lying on the grass. I knew in that moment that I needed to ground myself, both to calm myself and to ready myself for the incoming storm.
From the house to jail
When the police officer did eventually arrive, almost an hour after I had called, I was kind of pissed because I thought, if my mom had stabbed me, I bet I would have bled out and died in the amount of time it took this guy to come. But maybe an ambulance is much faster. I don’t know. I could be speculating there.
At any rate, I was not super happy to see him, and the first thing I said was, "You know, if you'd been delivering a pizza, it'd be cold by now." He was a cool guy, and I was super calm with him the entire time. At no point did he show any aggression. He was just trying to get his facts straight, and I think he did everything correctly. He also judged that because of my parents’ age, there was a question of elder abuse.
Personally, I've always associated abuse with a repeated pattern; that is my personal understanding, not a legal definition. The pattern I see is my parents toward me. Before this incident, I had never raised a hand to my father, and I had never struck my mother with my hand, although I had just knocked her down with the chest bump I described. At times in my life, she had raised a hand and slapped me directly, often on the face.
She would also chase my sister and me around with a wooden spoon if we weren’t good. She would use it to hit us, usually on the butt, and it would leave marks that lasted a while. And if we said a bad word, she would put soap in our mouths. These are really old, strange parenting techniques. I don’t know why they’re still trying to use them, but I can assure them they’re not effective. They just piss off the kid.
I was taken from their home in the back of a squad car in handcuffs, first to the Rancho Santa Margarita police station to pick up a Middle Eastern guy who was honestly just a whiny bitch. And at one point I told him to shut up after he asked the officer for the tenth time to lower the window so he could breathe more easily. The officer had ignored the previous nine requests. I took it to be stress about being in a cop car.
They took us then to Santa Ana City Jail. And again, I displayed the same stoicism that I think made the cop really happy to work with me, and he was pleasant throughout.
I told them when I was being admitted that I have autism, I have OCD, I have dyslexia, I have ADHD, and these are all things that I've had to discover on my own because my parents weren't helpful in my success from a mental health standpoint. These are discoveries I had to make through drugs, friends, therapists, psychiatrists, and a lot of living life and looking back and asking myself, maybe everything wasn't okay.
The people I met
I won't go too much into the experience of jail now because I actually want that to be its own article/essay. But to say it succinctly, it was not an experience I was expecting at all. Yes, it's extremely regimented, and weirdly, the movie The Shawshank Redemption does an incredible job of capturing what jails and prisons are like even to this day, with much of what that movie shows being identical to what was happening in the facilities where I stayed.
I spent most of my time in the cell block at the Orange County Jail, which in many ways was much, much nicer than Santa Ana City Jail. And it was a place where every time I was there, I was much happier than any time I was in Santa Ana City Jail.
But again, I'll go into all these details in a separate article about why I love or loved my short stint in jail, and I met some of the best people I've ever known in such a short time.
This is despite the fact that a lot of the people there told me about pretty serious cases involving drug possession and attempted murder, and kinds of rap sheets you wouldn’t believe. They were all trading stories about how many times they had been to jail.
It was obvious to me that this is actually more like a community than it is a phenomenon. It gave me a bunch of realizations about how society is really failing some of our most talented individuals.
These are individuals who are idealistic, strong-minded, physically strong, and physically beautiful. I won't go into too much detail, but some of the men in jail are the most confident, beautiful men I've ever seen. And they really make the average male in the free world look like a needy, fat loser. I knew the guy who had been in the squad car with me wasn't going to have a great week.
Because of the fact that I was there for slapping my father, I told that to anyone who asked. And yes, everyone asks you, "What are you in for?" It's the most common question.
It helped me get more friends, quite frankly, because most of them thought it was incredibly funny. They all said the same thing. "That's a personal matter and your dad is a big baby." And I said, "I know, but this is what I grew up with, so this is what I have to fight against."
The court, and what I took from it
After spending a very long day at court in Santa Ana and then being bussed back to my bed, I was in a terrible mood because I felt like the criminal justice system had completely failed me. I never actually got to see the judge. That was a big part of why I was so pissed: I didn’t even know whether my case had been presented, and I felt like I had no opportunity to find out what was happening. From what I understood, it had allowed these people to get off on much easier charges than an officer had originally assigned. They could make the system work in a way that got justice for them.
I do think this is part of the problem with policing. I think that police have such a bad opinion of people because they assume that all of the potential charges that they give stick. From what I understood, they don’t always.
In my case, I believed my potential charge was a trumped-up piece of nonsense. My reasoning was that I'm not my parents' caregiver and they would never even allow a caregiver.
They're very independent-minded people and very successful and I really praise them for that. I think it's really good.
What frustrated me was feeling that this one confrontation stood on its own, while the years that led up to it were invisible.
From what other inmates later explained to me, the criminal justice system sounded smarter than I had realized. But its transparency with inmates is absolutely awful. This makes the entire experience of jail more stressful than it needs to be, but I don't know. Maybe they think this is a deterrent by not allowing the inmate to know anything about anything.
They'll do strange things like tell you you're going to be released at this time, but then you don't actually have a way of knowing what time it is, and you have no sense of what time has passed or what day it is. So why they use time as milestones is beyond me. It shows just how different their experience is from the inmates'.
Later, I explained my story to other inmates, and they told me, "Yeah, it sounds like it was thrown out." They were the ones who gave me context for how they thought the judge might have seen the situation. That was their interpretation based on my story. I hadn’t seen the judge or heard that explanation from her myself.
What I want my parents to understand is that some of the things that happened growing up made my life harder. I’ve had to recognize those things, understand how they affected me, and grow past them.
My parents have put a lot of importance on appearances: clothes, friends, cars, and what a successful life is supposed to look like. Sometimes I felt there was more room for that picture than for the person I was becoming.
Other people in our family had pointed out some of these patterns to me. I brushed them off because this was the family I knew, and it all seemed normal. It took me a long time to see how much of it I had carried into my own life.
My father’s tone was part of that. In that room, it brought years of anger to the surface. But I brought my own version of that tone with me, and I need to own that, too.
I've learned in my life that we have way, way, way too much of a “you must be nice to everyone” mentality. I don't think being civil should require somebody to submit to abuse. I believe people have a right to defend themselves with their hands when they need to protect themselves. Circumstances matter, and I don't think a slogan can decide every confrontation.
I think my generation has made a mistake in confusing being nice with being unwilling to stand up for yourself. I think that kind of sissiness creates problems and feeds repression within the gay community, too.
And there’s another part of this: escalation. I’ve described what I did, including the slaps and the chest bump. I didn’t use a weapon. My mother reached for a knife, and my father and I both told her to put it down. She did. Police eventually became involved too; I was the one who made that call.
That is the broader problem, as I see it: you can be willing to defend yourself with your hands and still face somebody who reaches for a knife or a gun because they’re unwilling to fight without one. I see that kind of escalation as cowardice. It can turn a confrontation into something you can’t come back from, and I think it’s part of why people are afraid to defend themselves with their hands in the first place. The film Pay It Forward does an excellent job of encapsulating the tragedy of this.
Notice too that when I slapped my father, I never balled a fist. I believed that distinction mattered, but I didn’t know whether it had affected the outcome. I did, however, see the cop carefully writing down that detail. Yes, it was aggressive. At the time, I did not believe I had physically injured him.
I think my parents believed sending me to jail would teach me a lesson.
What surprised me was that I loved going to jail. I met people there I never thought I would meet.
I still believe in being willing to defend myself, including with my hands, if I need to protect myself from physical harm. That doesn’t mean beating somebody I love until they learn a lesson. My anger, my family's history, and my belief in self-defense all belong in this story. They don't mean the same thing, and I don't want to pretend that they do.
It reminds me of a story my cousin tells that makes us both laugh. We had a naughty step at my grandparents’ house, where I stayed one summer. There was a time when I slapped my sister really hard and then went and sat on the naughty step myself, very proud of it.
Much later, I understood what my cousin was trying to tell me with that story. Looking back, I see a little kid who thought he was taking one for the team and was willing to accept the consequence himself. That recognition is part of why we both laugh about it.
I had already called this essay finished, but writing it has become a kind of journaling. It helps me put words to thoughts and feelings that have been hard for me to reach. As I’ve taken time to rest and reflect, I’ve started seeing my own behavior more clearly, too.
I associate that confrontation, including the slap, with the end of a chapter. Journaling has helped me articulate what I couldn’t explain that day. Thoughts I had kept inside have become things I can say. I understand myself differently now and feel able to move forward.
The physical part is hard to overstate. I’ve felt an internal tightness that I associate with my experience of autism. Breathing and digestion felt constricted, and my sleep was awful. Now breathing feels easier, and I’m sleeping deeply, with vivid dreams I haven’t had in years. I feel lighter and more at peace in my body. That relief has continued since the episode; I’m still feeling it as I write this.
I’ve noticed changes like this after major emotional blowups before. That’s a pattern in my own life, but I can’t separate out everything that went into this change or tell you what will happen next. I’m describing what I’ve experienced, not a reason to seek another blowup.
And it’s more than relief. I feel more compassion, patience, and capacity for other people. I’m starting conversations everywhere. I was so consumed by searching for answers that there was little room for anything else. Now there is. These are qualities I want to bring to the people I love and to being a father.
Working through the past can bring up emotions much faster and more forcefully than I expect. My mother’s side of the family calls that intensity “hot blood.” I recognize some of it in myself. I still have to take responsibility for what I do with it, and that includes being willing to apologize.
Dad, I’m sorry I hit you. Mom, I’m sorry I knocked you down. I’m truly sorry I terrified you both and for the chaos and fallout. There is no excuse for that.
I mean that apology whether or not you agree with my account. Respecting myself and respecting the people I love have to belong together. Taking responsibility doesn’t erase what hurt me growing up, make the conversation I wanted to have unimportant, or mean I give up the right to define my own life. I can own my mistakes without defending every choice or abandoning what I believe.
I still believe in standing up for myself, including protecting myself from physical harm when necessary. That belief doesn’t make everything I did that night self-defense. The changes I’m describing don’t excuse the ways I hurt and frightened you.
I don’t resent my parents. Those difficulties are part of how I became the person I am, and so is the work I’ve done to grow beyond them. I can recognize that without pretending everything was okay. I went through hell, but I’m glad I survived and grew. Mom and Dad, I’m your son, I will always love you, and I’m here if you want to talk.
Going to jail became one of the most cherished experiences of my life because of the people I met and the chance to reset and reflect. It reminded me that even at a low point, life is worth living and there is still a way forward.
Even that very short time without my freedom made my desire for everyone to be happy and free that much stronger.
I want my child to be able to stand up for themselves. I also want them to know that they can make a mistake, own it, and still stand by the things they believe. I have to be willing to do the same.
I didn’t know these things about myself. I wasn’t questioning myself enough, and I had no idea how much I’d repressed. It took a series of revelations to lay it bare in front of me. I think a lot of people carry pain and confusion they don’t yet recognize, and without questioning what we think we know about ourselves, some of it may never come into view. I’m not sharing this just to entertain anyone. I’m sharing it because I believe others struggle with these things, too. If my honesty helps someone recognize their own struggle and understand themselves a little better, that’s what I hope this story can do.
I want everyone to be happy and free. Nothing more, nothing less.