Perspectives
Personal writing from inside complex trauma, healing, identity, relationships, sexuality, and becoming.
“We are going to open up inside the experience, not explain it.”
Total Recall
There is a contradiction in asking God to open a door I have spent most of my life leaning against. My shoulder knows the wood. My feet know where to brace. Somewhere along the way, holding it closed became so familiar that I stopped recognizing how much strength it took.
The Lines He Knew
They had spent the evening together. She had laughed at dinner, rested her hand on his knee, kissed him while the coffee brewed. He had been collecting these moments without realizing it, arranging them into an ending.
Inside My Prism
That is what makes the prism so difficult to explain. It lets me see the world in Technicolor. A conversation arrives with shades of meaning, memories, possibilities, and feelings I cannot easily separate. There is beauty in that sensitivity. Music reaches places in me that ordinary language cannot. A small kindness can light up an entire day.
The Darkness I Had to Understand
I had abandoned myself to preserve connection, then carried resentment into the very relationships I was trying to protect. I had wanted to be understood while becoming defensive when someone explained how they experienced me. I had confused being useful with being loved, then felt discarded when nobody needed anything.
Leave Room for Why
And losing compassion is both part of the erosion and something that accelerates it. The less understood we feel, the harder it can become to understand. The more we defend ourselves, the less room we leave for the person asking to reach us.
Does Nobody Ask Why Anymore?
I have spent years making myself useful. Being capable. Showing up. Solving problems. Sometimes giving more than I had, then quietly resenting that nobody noticed what it cost. I have said I was fine when I wasn’t. Made my needs difficult to see, then felt hurt that they went unseen. I have wanted to be understood while struggling to let someone close enough to understand me. That belongs in this story, too. Still, I want to believe there is room for a man to need care before he becomes a crisis. Room for someone to notice that the person carrying everything might also want to be held.
The Abuse Didn’t End When He Stopped
Other forms of self-abuse were easier to hide because they looked like qualities people admired.
The Man Who Never Clocks Out
It can look like mentally rehearsing a conversation that has not happened. Explaining more than I need to because being misunderstood feels difficult to tolerate. Staying alert to everyone’s mood while trying to remain present in my own.
When Understanding Stops Short of Caring
Stops Short of Caring Being understood should feel like a doorway to connection. But what happens when someone recognizes your pain and then judges you for having it? A reflection on empathy, compassion, and the care we owe each other when understanding becomes uncomfortable.
When Hurt Becomes a Verdict
Accountability cannot be one person endlessly studying themselves while the other remains beyond examination. Both people need room to name their hurt, acknowledge their behavior, and decide what they are willing and able to change.
Who We Are in the Quiet
There is a room inside each of us that nobody else can completely enter. Our internal world. Thoughts. Fantasies. Resentments. Judgments. Memories. Desires. Arguments we replay. Conversations we invent. Things we wish we had said. Things we hope someone else regrets. Things we imagine doing. Things we would never admit imagining. Nobody sees most of it. There are no witnesses. No audience. No consequences. No reputation to maintain. We can be generous there. We can also be cruel. We can forgive someone publicly while prosecuting them privately for another ten years. We can smile at someone while silently tearing them apart. We can perform humility while privately believing ourselves superior. We can tell someone we love them while maintaining an entire internal ledger of what they owe us. And because nobody can hear any of it, we can tell ourselves it doesn't matter. They're only thoughts. Sometimes that's absolutely true. A thought can simply be a thought. Intrusive thoughts exist. Fear produces thoughts. Trauma produces thoughts. Anger produces thoughts. The imagination produces bizarre things without asking permission. Having a thought does not make it a belief, desire, intention, or moral failure. I've had to learn that distinction for myself. But there is another distinction that matters just as much. There is a difference between a thought that appears and a thought that I feed.
The Volume Inside
There are moments when my internal world can become so intense that whatever is happening inside me feels considerably more urgent than whatever is actually happening around me.
Bigfoot in the Wild
That realization is both incredibly simple and incredibly painful. Because I have spent portions of my life believing that loving harder might eventually create reciprocity.
The Pornification of My Imagination
On childhood sexual abuse, pornography used in grooming, and the slow work of reclaiming imagination, desire, and masculinity.