Let’s get one thing straight right out of the gate. Mental health isn’t just a chapter in my story — it’s the damn backbone, the plot twist, the villain, the hero, and the narrator. It shaped me in ways I couldn’t explain for decades. To be brutally direct, untreated mental health didn’t just cause “struggles.” It caused full-blown chaos, the kind you can’t pretty up for church testimony time. My parents tapped out early. They didn’t know what the hell to do with me. Dad literally left me abandoned in Elkhart after a Christian rehab meltdown. That wasn’t neglect — that was surrender. They were spiritually waving white flags before I was even old enough to understand the war inside my own skull.

Somehow I ended up in prison — not because I was running around as some mastermind criminal, but because my life was a wild cocktail of unusual intelligence, unstable mental health, and absolute inability to keep my shit together long enough to make one stable decision. I wasn’t living criminally. I was living chaotically. There’s a difference, but try convincing the system of that.

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Over 25 years I found myself in four different mental health “timeouts” at local hospitals. I racked up more than 8 arrests for bad checks and bank fraud — not because I was plotting financial schemes like some wannabe mob accountant, but because I literally needed to eat. I once went to jail over a $13.50 Pizza Hut check. Thirteen dollars and fifty cents — that’s all it took to push me into a holding cell.

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Five of those twenty-five years were spent in prison because I treated authority like a personal insult. Every badge, every rule, every clipboard-wielding supervisor felt like they were standing between me and my chaotic creativity. Prison was both the thing I desperately needed and the thing I absolutely didn’t. It forced me to stop, but it did nothing to explain why I couldn’t stop my life from derailing every time it got momentum.

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Even after prison, I kept sliding through life like a pinball machine with the lights broken. Chronic homelessness. Living in vehicles. Couch hopping. Christian shelters. Abandoned houses in Detroit with more ghosts than insulation. I was surviving on instinct and fumes well into my 30s, and still undiagnosed. No answers — just noise.

Then 39 happened.

At 39, my parents were long gone from my life, emotionally and practically. My family didn’t exist for me anymore. My kids had a father in DNA only. I wasn’t living — I was enduring. Day by day. Job by job. Breath by breath. Surviving solely off my God-given intelligence and my ability to sell anything to anyone while my personal world was duct-taped together behind the scenes.

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The first real door that opened — the first crack of light in the tunnel — was the IQ test. Community Mental Health ran it. I scored a 152. Suddenly the insanity of my wiring made sense. That score is the mental neighborhood where people see patterns in chaos, solve problems before others finish complaining, and think so damn fast they need a seatbelt for their brain. Doesn’t mean they can fold their laundry or keep a life stable — it just means the machine is powerful but unpredictable.

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From there came the ADI-R interview for autism. Then the SRS-2. Then the RAADS-R — the test built for adults who learned to mask like professional actors but knew deep down their wiring danced to a slightly stranger beat. Hell, I even had a brain scan. At 39 I finally stopped long enough for the truth to catch up to me. All those childhood trips to Purdue University for “press the button in the dark room” tests? Yeah… my mother wasn’t imagining something. I wasn’t “bad.” I wasn’t “rebellious.” I wasn’t “lazy.” I was undiagnosed. Unregulated. Unexplained. And misunderstood by a host of people who found it far easier to blame me than try to understand me.

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Past 39 — everything changed. For the last eight years, living with stability, proper diagnosis, and mental health support, I have become a man I never believed I could be. I am a blessed husband. A father who continues growing into the role my kids deserved decades ago. A leader who set down every ounce of shame and picked up every ounce of purpose. I volunteer beside my wife in things like Operation Cold. I hold an executive leadership position. I mentor others. I speak publicly. I follow Christ with a fire forged from pain, restoration, and reality. And most importantly — I embrace myself now. All of me.

 

My neurotic hunger for knowledge. My obsessive drive to be better. My weird wiring. My mental health quirks. My autistic intensity. My relentless pursuit of improvement. My ability to outthink chaos because I spent a lifetime surviving inside it. I am not who the world said I was. I am not who my past tried to lock me into. I am not who the system misdiagnosed or misunderstood. I am the man built from the rubble of all of it.