Most people remember Christmas as something warm. For me, it’s the day my life split in two. My mom died on December 25th. I was four. That’s not a hook. That’s just where this starts. What followed wasn’t strength or some clean comeback story. It was confusion. Anger. Absence. A father who couldn’t process it. A stepmother who didn’t want me. A childhood shaped more by what wasn’t there than what was. I was tortured, beaten & abused on a regular basis as a kid in her absence. And that absence doesn’t stay in childhood. It becomes a pattern. It showed up later in the military. In trauma. In addiction, not to chase a high, but to shut something off. At some point, I had to face it: The pain wasn’t going to destroy me. But avoiding it might. That realization took me across the world, not to find myself, but because I didn’t know how to live with myself. India. China. The Himalayas. The Philippines. Not a highlight reel. A process. If you’ve ever felt shaped by s...