Whether it happened once or many times, I do not remember. But in my heart it is always happening. That is the nature of complex trauma—the wound keeps echoing, reshaping every chapter of a life, even when you can't put your finger on the exact date, time, and details.

I grew up learning early that what was most precious could be broken. My earliest memory is from infancy, believe it or not. Before I had language to articulate pain or anything else, my body learned that the world is not safe, and that I am powerless to resist. Since this brokenness lived inside me, I often broke things around me too—relationships, trust, even my own sense of belonging. From the outside, it looked like a train wreck. Failed attempts, false starts, seasons of addiction, years of searching. At other times, my outward life seemed to have it all—love, purpose, success, while I secretly new I was a fractured, frightened child, hoping no one would notice me. But deep beneath either of those layers, something else was quietly forming at my core: resilience.

In my twenties, I met a homeless man who helped me realize that God was not the one who needed to change—I was. That conversation struck like lightning. It didn’t fix me, but it cracked the ground beneath my feet. From then on, I began to see how remixing practices from my own faith, heritage, and creativity could revive me after failure and rejuvenate me after loss. I started searching for whatever I could find that still carried life when the old formulas no longer worked.

In my thirties, recovery became a rhythm. Eight years sober taught me not just survival but presence. Art became my way of externalizing pain—mountain peaks on canvas holding the tension between despair and hope. Community taught me to tell the truth, to stop hiding behind performance. Divorce, loss, and shame carved me open again, but even there, new streams began to flow.

Every breaking became another threshold. Every season of flow, a reminder that my life could still rise above the surface of what seemed like rivers of sorrow. These patterns—breaking, flowing, breaking again—were not just chaos. They were forming me. And in 2025, I began to see the convergence: a book, a community of practice where trauma and creativity meet, and coaching that walks with others who are caught in the same cycle that had me in its clutches.

I don’t position myself as a finished product. But my life is proof that resilience is not the absence of breaking. It is the willingness to let every fracture become a portal. The second half of my life is not about avoiding pain, but about stewarding it differently—turning wounds into ways forward, and helping others do the same.