Before I knew who I was.
Every story begins somewhere. Mine began on August 18, 1980, in San Antonio, Texas.
I was born into a military family, with parents Joel and Pam. Growing up meant moving, adapting, and learning to live in different places. My childhood took me through Louisiana, Germany, Minneapolis, and Radcliff, Kentucky. Home was never just one place on a map. It was something that kept changing around me.
I didn’t know it at the time, but those early years would shape much of the person I would become. Constant change teaches you to adjust. New surroundings teach you to observe. Different people and environments teach you to figure out how to fit in, even when you aren’t quite sure where you belong.
A Different Way of Experiencing the World
I was diagnosed with ADHD at just three years old. That diagnosis explained some of what the adults around me were seeing, but it didn’t explain everything about how I experienced the world.
My autism went unrecognized.
I didn’t have the language to explain why certain things felt difficult, why I sometimes struggled with transitions, emotions, communication, or everyday expectations. I didn’t understand why things that appeared simple for other people could take so much effort for me.
I only knew that I seemed to experience life differently.
As a child, I found comfort in the things I could understand and explore. Electronics, video games, imagination, and figuring out how things worked gave me places where curiosity could take over without the same social pressures I experienced elsewhere.
I could explore a system, learn its rules, and discover how its pieces fit together. There was something reassuring about that.
People, relationships, and the unwritten rules of everyday life were considerably harder to figure out.
Learning to Adapt
When you grow up feeling different, you begin watching the people around you.
You notice how they speak, how they react, what makes them comfortable, and what causes friction. You start adjusting your own behavior to make situations easier.
I didn’t know I was learning to mask. I thought I was learning how to get along with people.
I thought that if I could understand what everyone else seemed to understand naturally, perhaps I could finally feel like I belonged.
But there is a difference between learning to navigate the world and learning to hide parts of yourself so that the world will accept you.
I would spend many years becoming very familiar with that difference.
Sometimes I appeared to be managing just fine. Sometimes I could adapt to a situation, make people laugh, carry on a conversation, or find a way through something difficult. What wasn’t always visible was the effort behind it.
I didn’t have the words for executive functioning, sensory overload, processing differences, or the exhaustion that can follow constantly adapting.
I simply knew that life could feel heavier than it looked from the outside.
Discovering Myself
By the time I was eight or nine, I was beginning to recognize that I was gay.
It was another part of myself that I was learning to understand in a world where acceptance wasn’t always something I could take for granted.
At thirteen, I came out. My father was supportive, and that acceptance mattered.
But understanding my identity was only one part of a much larger journey.
I was also carrying experiences that a child should never have had to navigate, including sexual abuse. Those experiences affected my understanding of trust, safety, relationships, and belonging.
I didn’t have the perspective or the support to make sense of everything happening around me.
Like many young people, I wanted to be loved, accepted, and understood. I wanted somewhere I could feel safe being myself.
I wanted a place where I didn’t have to keep figuring out how to become the person everyone else expected.
When Childhood Changed
Around twelve, my relationship with my mother changed through estrangement and emotional distance. By thirteen, I had become a ward of the state.
My life moved into boys’ homes and foster homes, where I remained until I was nineteen.
Those years were a significant turning point. While other young people were navigating adolescence within familiar family structures, I was growing up through systems, changing environments, and circumstances that were often beyond my control.
I was still a kid.
I didn’t understand all the decisions being made around me, and I didn’t always have the ability to understand or explain what I needed.
I learned to adjust. I learned to start over. I learned that the people and places around me could change, sometimes without warning.
There is a particular kind of independence that develops when stability isn’t something you can count on. You learn to keep moving because stopping doesn’t necessarily mean things will get easier.
But adapting to change isn’t the same as being unaffected by it.
Those experiences became part of the foundation I carried into adulthood.
Stepping Into Adulthood
At nineteen, I left the care system and entered adulthood independently.
There was no magical moment when everything suddenly made sense. No instruction manual arrived explaining how to manage relationships, responsibilities, finances, emotions, or the complicated business of building a life.
I had to figure things out as I went.
I was trying to build a future without fully understanding the way my own mind worked. My ADHD was known, but my autism remained unrecognized. I didn’t have the framework to understand why certain parts of everyday life required so much effort or why some challenges kept following me from one stage of life into another.
When things went wrong, I often looked inward for the explanation.
Why couldn’t I manage this the way other people did? Why did I struggle with things that seemed straightforward? Why could I handle one situation and then become completely overwhelmed by another?
I didn’t know how much of my experience was connected to the way my brain processed information, managed attention, handled change, and regulated emotions.
I interpreted my life using the understanding I had at the time.
The Years of Becoming
For much of my life, I believed growth meant becoming stronger, more independent, and better at handling whatever came my way.
I learned to adapt. I learned to read situations. I learned to make adjustments and keep going.
But surviving and growing are not always the same thing.
Sometimes what looks like strength is a person who has learned there is no other choice. Sometimes what looks like independence is someone who never had enough dependable support to feel comfortable asking for help.
And sometimes the habits that help you survive one part of life become the very things that make another part harder.
I spent years trying to become someone who could fit into every room, every relationship, and every expectation. I didn’t always recognize how much of myself I was setting aside along the way.
It would take many more years before I began to understand that the things I had struggled with were not simply personal shortcomings. My unrecognized autism, alongside ADHD, had influenced how I experienced the world for as long as I could remember.
That understanding didn’t erase my past. It didn’t undo the losses, the difficult experiences, or the consequences of years spent without the right explanations and support.
But it gave me a different way to look at the person I had been.
I wasn’t a child who simply needed to try harder. I was a child trying to understand a world that often didn’t make sense to him.
I wasn’t a teenager asking for too much by wanting acceptance and somewhere to belong.
And I wasn’t a young adult who had all the tools needed to navigate independence simply because the system said it was time to leave.
I was growing, even when I didn’t recognize it.
The Beginning of a Story Still Being Written
When I look back, I see a life shaped by movement, change, unanswered questions, adaptation, and the search for belonging.
I see the child who found comfort in imagination and curiosity. The teenager trying to understand his identity. The young adult stepping into a world without a complete understanding of himself.
I see someone who spent years trying to become what he thought the world needed him to be.
And I see the beginning of a much longer journey: learning that belonging should not require disappearing.
If I could give that younger version of myself one message, it would be this:
You don’t have to become someone else to deserve love, acceptance, or a place in this world. You are allowed to be yourself, even when you are still figuring out what that means.
This is where my story begins.
Not because everything before this was simple, and certainly not because everything afterward would be easy.
But because every chapter that follows grew out of these beginnings.