September 2026

 

September 1

I've had a headache behind and above my right eye for two days. Of course, whenever I get a headache like this that lasts more than two days, I start researching brain tumor symptoms. Who knows, maybe this time...

 

September 2

I’ve been thinking about how who we are changes over the course of life. Not in the dramatic ways people like to talk about, but in the quieter shifts. The ones that happen because of where we’ve lived, what we’ve survived, and who we’ve had to be in certain seasons.

I’ve moved through so many places and so many versions of myself that there are people out there who know entirely different men. Some knew me when I was young and restless. Some knew me when I was trying to rebuild a life. Some knew me when I didn’t know who I was at all.

And then there are the people who met me when I moved back to Texas after escaping my abusive marriage. They met me at one of the darkest points in my life. A time when I was hollowed out, trying to stay upright, trying to understand what had happened to me. That’s the version they carry. If we ran into each other today, that’s the person they’d see. Not because I’m still him, but because memory freezes people in places long after they’ve changed.

But I’m not that person anymore.

It’s strange to think about how many versions of ourselves are still walking around in other people’s minds; versions we’ve outgrown, versions we’ve shed, versions we’ve had to leave behind to survive. They’re still out there, living quietly in someone else’s recollection, while we keep moving, keep changing, keep becoming someone new.

There’s something both unsettling and comforting about that. Unsettling because it means we’re misunderstood more often than we realize. Comforting because it means we’re allowed to evolve. We’re allowed to grow past the moments that nearly broke us. We’re allowed to become someone we weren’t capable of being before.

The work of becoming yourself—your current self—is slow. It’s interior. You notice it in small ways: in how you respond to things, in how you hold your boundaries, in how you speak, in how you breathe. You notice it in the quiet.

And maybe that’s the point. We don’t get one self; we get many. And each one helps us to become who we’re becoming.

 

September 3

My ex‑wife carried childhood trauma she couldn’t acknowledge. She didn’t talk about it, and she couldn’t let herself see it. That was the center of everything. Almost every evening, she slipped into a dissociative rage. Sometimes something triggered it; sometimes nothing did. The anger wasn’t directed at me, but I was the one standing in front of her.

Instead of facing her trauma, she ignored it. However, she could recognize the pattern of people leaving. So, she learned how to keep people close through manipulation and control. And she was good at it. The first months of our relationship were deliberate. She knew exactly who to be, how to be it, and how to draw me in. As time went on, she learned how to manage the relationship: limiting access to our bank account, holding on to my legal documents, narrowing my world until my connections were thin and monitored.

          After years of that kind of control, you wake up one day and realize what you’ve given up. And what you’ve given up is yourself. What’s left is a shell: the outline of a person you used to be.

One night, during one of her rages, I reached a breaking point. I locked myself in the bathroom with the intention of harming myself, terrified and overwhelmed, and unable to see a way forward. But something in me cleared, just enough, and I called the police instead. When they arrived, I was still on the floor behind the door. Of course, though, they spoke to my wife first. I don’t know what she told them, only that it was some fiction of what happened. There was a knock on the bathroom door, and when I opened it, several guns were pointed at me.

I was arrested and taken to the hospital for evaluation. I spent that night on suicide watch with an officer outside the door. The next two nights were spent on suicide watch at the county jail. They stripped me of my clothing and gave me a ‘turtle suit,’ a green cloth shell attached by two black shoulder straps and Velcro. I was alone in a room that seemed made of a massive piece of stainless steel. They gave me no mattress, no pillow, no sheets, blankets, or comforter. It was just me, my turtle suit, and a cave carved from steel.

I didn’t ask for a phone call. I felt safer in that cell than I did at home.

Before they moved me to a regular cell block, they told me my charges. That’s when I learned what she had told the police. I spent two more nights surrounded by people with their own dark but intentional histories before the charges were dropped and I was released. I went back home and stayed with my wife another eight months before I finally escaped.

The next ten years taught me that time doesn’t heal everything.

Eventually, the anger, shame, fear, anxiety, and emotional shutdown became too heavy to carry. I needed something different. I started meditating, and then I started looking inward during meditation, learning how to acknowledge, sit with, and explore the trauma from my marriage and from earlier parts of my life. Slowly, I learned to accept what happened and how to rebuild myself from the inside out.

It’s the work of becoming whole again. The work of presence, clarity, and choosing who you want to be after surviving who you had to be.

 

September 4

I was driving to the grocery store this morning on a two‑lane back road. Over the last ten years, a few housing developments have gone up along it. It used to be quiet. I could drive that stretch all day without passing another car. Now it’s fairly heavily trafficked.

A bird landed in my lane. A car was coming toward me, but I had plenty of space to ease into the oncoming lane, avoid the bird, and continue with my morning. The guy in the dark SUV wasn’t pleased. As we passed, he was animated, irritated, reacting to whatever story he’d built in his head. He wasn’t responding to what happened; he was responding to what he imagined might have happened.

I know exactly what his irritation was: You’re going to risk getting into an accident—risk your life—to avoid hitting a bird? That’s stupid. But that’s the problem. We’re so focused on the fantasies in our heads and less on the reality in front of us. Would I have swerved into oncoming traffic if I didn’t have time? Of course not. That’s fucking stupid. But we’re capable of making adjustments, of responding to what’s actually happening. It's also a lot to have to guess how people might react not only to what's actually happening, but when their behavior depends on their fantasies as well?

I think about driving behavior every time I’m out. The way people accelerate without thought until something slower forces them to adjust. The way someone will sit on your bumper, less than a car length away, even when they know a stop sign is coming up. We don’t see cars as people, as occupied by people. We see them as obstacles, things in the way, things to confront.

It’s a strange shift, this loss of awareness. How easily we forget there’s a human being in every vehicle, each one carrying their own morning, their own stress, their own interior world. And how rarely we’re focused on what we’re actually doing.

 

September 5

It’s a shame that the American mindset doesn’t leave much room for growth; for change, for experience, for the work of letting new information reshape how we see policy. What’s strange is that every major affiliation seems to disapprove of it. Growth is natural. Change is inherent. Even something as simple as a shift in mood can alter how we see the world, yet we’re discouraged from letting critical thought or lived experience do the same.

I know change is possible. I know it’s possible to hold conflicting thoughts about the same issue at the same time. Abortion is one example. Long conversations with a friend in my youth shifted the viewpoint I grew up with. I still feel the weight of the moral question, but I also know I’m a man, and that there are limits to what I can understand about pregnancy and the realities women face. That recognition shapes how I think about policy. It reminds me that some decisions belong to the people who live the experience, not the people who observe it from the outside.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about transgender issues too. I can’t know what it feels like to experience a disconnect between one’s internal identity and one’s body. I’ve never lived that, so I can’t pretend to understand it like so many people do or try to. If an adult feels compelled to make changes to align their body with their identity, I believe they should have the space to do that. At the same time, I know adolescence is a turbulent period. A time when identity feels unstable, when self‑discovery is uncomfortable and confusing, especially now with the internet amplifying everything. It’s easy for young people to mistake the normal chaos of becoming themselves for something else entirely, and that's a very real distinction many are avoiding.

What I keep coming back to is the idea that growth shouldn’t be punished. Thoughtfulness shouldn’t be treated like betrayal. We’re allowed to evolve. We’re allowed to hold tension. We’re allowed to let experience shape us, even when it complicates the neat categories people want us to stay in. I wish more people weren't so rigid in their ideologies, unwilling to hear things because it might be uncomfortable.