My story doesn't begin with comfort, celebration, or the warmth of being wanted. It begins in the shadows — in the places where a child should never have learned to live. Those early years left marks I never asked for, wounds I didn't have the language to describe, and memories that still press against me when life echoes too loudly.
I was abused. I was locked away. I was abandoned.
That's the truth, but it's not the whole story — because the details of what happened to me are far less important than what those years created inside of me.
They shaped the way I love.
They shaped the way I protect.
They shaped the way I see the world — quietly, gently, intentionally.
My beginnings were filled with pain, but they forged the tenderness I carry today.
The Kindness That Grew From Hurt
People sometimes ask why I'm so gentle, why I care so deeply, why I try so hard to make others feel safe.
The answer is simple: I know what it feels like to grow up afraid.
I learned early that cruelty doesn't make a person powerful — it only reveals their brokenness.
So I chose the opposite path.
Where there was fear in my childhood, I chose to become peace.
Where there was silence, I learned to listen.
Where there was hunger, I learned to give.
Where there was neglect, I learned to show up.
Kindness wasn't taught to me.
It was carved out of the emptiness I lived through.
Surviving a Winter No Child Should Face
By seventeen, I was alone in the world.
No home. No bed. No one checking if I was alive.
I survived a Michigan winter by learning how to breathe through the cold, how to keep going when my body begged to stop, how to keep believing that life had more for me than the circumstances I was handed.
I should't have survived — but I did.
And that season gave me two things I still carry:
- A resilience I don't always recognize in myself.
- A deep compassion for anyone who is fighting battles in silence.
I know what it means to sleep where you can, pray for warmth, and fight for a future you can't yet see.
It made me someone who notices the struggle behind people's eyes.
When Achievement Arrives in an Empty Room
I was well-educated, not because I was supported, but because I refused to let my circumstances decide my future.
I earned a black belt.
I earned hundreds of medals.
I pushed myself through tournaments across states, competing on global stages.
No one from home showed up.
Not once.
And yet, the absence of applause taught me a truth that shaped my entire adulthood:
Success means more when you build it without witnesses.
Those lonely victories didn't break me.
They shaped a man who celebrates others fiercely because he knows what it feels like to stand alone on a podium with no one in the stands.
The Friend I Lost Too Soon
When my training partner—my closest friend—died in a DUI accident, part of my youth died with him.
I was in the car with his parents.
I remember the quiet more than the chaos.
The disbelief. The way grief can feel heavier than the air you're trying to breathe.
His loss taught me that life is fragile, unpredictable, and painfully short.
It also taught me why relationships matter so deeply to me now — why I hold on tightly, why I love fully, why connection is sacred.
When you lose someone that young, you learn early that tomorrow is not promised.
Why the Past Still Echoes
I don't talk about these things to gain sympathy.
I talk about them because they explain the parts of me people sometimes misunderstand.
Why certain moments still trigger old memories.
Why rejection cuts deeper than it should.
Why raised voices make my heart race.
Why I lose composure when someone reminds me of the life I fought to escape.
Why I am so protective of peace.
Why I love with intensity.
I'm not reacting to the moment — I'm reacting to years of surviving things I never should have faced.
Healing is not forgetting.
Healing is learning to breathe through the echoes and remind yourself that you are no longer that child.
What My Beginnings Truly Made Me
My childhood could have hardened me.
It could have made me bitter, angry, or cold.
But somehow, God held onto the pieces of my heart that the world tried to break.
He shaped my pain into compassion.
He shaped my loneliness into presence.
He shaped my hunger into generosity.
He shaped my wounds into wisdom.
He shaped my silence into a voice that speaks gently, because it remembers what it felt like to be unheard.
This is where my story truly begins —
not in what was done to me, but in what those years built within me.
A resilience I didn't know I had.
A kindness deeper than the hurt.
A heart that still loves, still hopes, still believes.
The beginning of my life wasn't beautiful.
But it was the soil where something beautiful began to grow.
"The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." - Psalm 34:18