Before anything else, there was peace.
You may remember a version of yourself like this too. A time before life hardened you. Before your nervous system learned to brace. Before you learned to stay alert instead of present.
I remember that time clearly. A quiet before the storm. A life where safety felt natural, where love wasn't conditional, where my body didn't yet know fear.
Then my father entered the picture — and everything changed.
Violence teaches without words.
It teaches control, unpredictability, silence. It teaches you to scan rooms before you speak, to read moods before you move, to prepare for impact before it arrives. I watched my mother endure pain no one should ever have to carry. I learned early that safety could disappear without warning, that love could turn, that staying vigilant mattered more than staying connected.
Beatings became normal. Fear became familiar. My body adapted long before my mind could.
I was moved from school to school. More than four before high school. Always the new kid. Always trying to work out the rules. Always learning where I stood. By the time I was ten years old, I was already working — not because I wanted independence, but because survival had already taught me responsibility.
At one point, my father left me in a factory.
Abandonment doesn't always arrive loudly.
Sometimes it just tells you, quietly,
that you are on your own.
Eventually, I made a decision no child should ever have to make. I ran. That decision saved my life — but it also shaped it. For years after, I didn't realise my body never left that state of alert. I grew up. I achieved. I succeeded. I built a life. But internally, I was still bracing. Still scanning. Still surviving.
So when the world told me who to be, I listened.
I followed the path laid out in front of me. Study. Work. Progress. Recognition. I climbed the corporate ladder. I sat under bad managers. I navigated toxic cultures dressed up as professionalism. I became my own boss. I did everything I was told would make me feel free.
From the outside, my life looked fine. On paper, it made sense. But inside, something felt off.
I wasn't bitter. I wasn't angry. I was becoming aware. I could feel it in my body before I could explain it in words — I was living on a frequency that wasn't mine. I had abandoned myself in exchange for approval, security, and definitions of success that were never designed for me.
Not failure. Not laziness. Not weakness.
A state of misalignment.
The drift is what happens when a capable man
builds a life without first building himself.
It wasn't a dramatic breakdown that woke me up. It was silence. For the first time in my life, I spent Christmas and New Year alone. No noise. No distraction. No one to perform for. That loneliness hurt — deeply. But it also created something that had been missing for years.
Space. Stillness. And in that stillness, the truth became unavoidable.
No one was coming to save me. I had to take responsibility — not just for my outcomes, but for my self-worth, my attachments, and the ways I had been escaping myself.