The Story I told Myself
A boy who decided he wasn’t worthy
Youngest of nine. My father worked grueling hours just to keep us afloat, and I read that absence as proof I wasn’t worth his attention. He never said it. I wrote that story myself, then spent years hunting for evidence to prove it true.
By eleven, porn magazines rewired what I thought normal was. I started measuring my changing body against standards no real body meets. Now the verdict had proof. Not enough. Never enough.
The Reckoning
A decade of anxiety, and the way out
The story didn’t stay in my head. It moved into my body. My twenties became a decade of severe performance and sexual anxiety, paralyzed by fear in the exact moments meant to bring ecstasy and joy. It was nearly impossible to maintain an erection with new partners. I blow to my manhood and masculinity, and yet more evidence that I wasn't good enough. I tried to out-achieve it, control it, bury it. Nothing worked. So I did the one thing that did. I stopped hiding. I took my relationship with my body and my shame apart piece by piece. I stripped down on nude beaches on Spanish islands and made myself stand in the raw reality of how ordinary real bodies are, until the anxiety broke. Not because I fixed myself. Because I ended the war with myself.
The Unraveling
Successful in Spain, empty behind the door
Then, on paper, I made it. A thriving business in Spain. A marriage that was, in a lot of ways, a fairytale. Underneath it I was still that boy proving he was worth something, and the proving was choking the life out of me.
So I made the hardest call of my life. I walked away from the marriage to choose my own alignment. A conscious divorce, no villains. At 4 I hit the floor. Closed the business. Faced real debt. Started over from nothing. Buried in debt, I returned to the United States after 15 years with no wife, kids, family, home, savings, but I had three suitcases, a backpack and a dog.
The Turn
Through my own darkness, and back
Then I went into the deep work. Men’s work, where I could drop the mask and still be met. Tantric practice. The long job of integrating the shadows I’d spent decades running from.
I have faced the shame of sexual anxiety. I have faced the grief of a conscious divorce. I have faced the terror of financial collapse. I walked through my own darkness and came out whole. That’s why I can sit with yours without flinching. I don't know which path will get you "out of the darkness," but I will be at your side guiding you out of it...relentlessly.