I know what it's like to feel crushed.
"We've been crushed by the world, then sold detours around the pain — and we don't even know it." — Gary Lougher
I spent years taking those detours.
Self-help. Spiritual practice. Optimization culture. They gave me the language of healing without the actual healing. Insight without movement. Comfort without freedom.
I was released from a psychiatric facility for severe alcohol abuse. I got sober. And then I spent the next several years doing everything right — reading the books, following the programs, doing the work — while something essential quietly kept going missing.
The detours were convincing. They sounded like healing. They had the vocabulary of transformation. But they were routing me around the actual wound rather than through it.
It wasn't until I went through trauma recovery coaching certification in 2024 that everything broke open.
Not because I learned something new. Because I finally saw what had been running the show — the conditioning, the adaptation, the invisible loops that had been operating beneath every decision I thought I was making freely.
That's when the explosion happened. The writing. The books. The programs. The Rebel's Playground. The Heroic Kids work.
All of it — in under two years.
Not because I became someone new.
Because I stopped abandoning who I already was.
I know two worlds intimately — alcohol abuse and functional burnout. And the two-way relationship between them that almost nobody talks about.
Functional burnout drives people toward numbing. Alcohol is one of the most socially acceptable, immediately available forms of relief there is.
And managing a drinking problem while maintaining a functional life creates its own exhaustion — the performance of being okay, the shame loop, the energy spent hiding and rationalizing before the workday even starts.
Two conditions that mask each other, feed each other, and make each other worse — while the person in the middle blames themselves for both.
That's not a niche. That's the human condition.
And it's where I work.
Today I am 19 years sober. I am reunited with my first love after 34 years apart — and we are living what I can only describe as the greatest love story ever told.
I have an 11-year-old little brother through Big Brothers Big Sisters named Jerrick. I coach his soccer team. He has become one of the most important people in my life and Tess's.
I play pickleball badly enough to stay humble and well enough to be dangerous.
I have written four books. I wake up most mornings genuinely excited about what the day holds.
At 57, I am more alive than I have ever been.