My Story

If you only knew how many times I’ve tried to share my story — how many versions, how many chapters, how many masks I’ve worn to make the chaos sound digestible. I used to reshape pieces of my past to fit the audience: inspirational enough to be admired, broken enough to be understood. But the truth isn’t tidy.

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My story spans every flavor of homelessness you can imagine — sleeping in a car with frost warning me I might not wake up, pitching a tent in places people pretend not to see, hiding under a bridge like a ghost watching life go on without me, bouncing from couch to couch until you realize “temporary” has turned into identity. And when shelters or rehab centers became the only four walls around me, they felt like the punishment for diseases no one cared to diagnose.

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I didn’t set out to become a criminal — addiction did that for me. Survival mode makes you do things “normal people” will never understand. And the drugs? I tried them all. Not to get high, not to party — but to quit hurting. To feel something different. To quiet the mind that wouldn’t let me be okay.

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Because all of this started with something I never asked for: a brain wired for war. Mental health handed me battles before I learned how to walk. My family didn’t understand it — so they walked away. The church tried to pray it away — until my symptoms got too real, too messy, too unholy for their comfort zones. Professionals valued my talent but never saw the internal fire that kept burning down everything I built.

I grew publicly while dying privately - and that is the suffocating nature of not owning and managing your own bullshit factor. 

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