Every System I Ever Trusted Asked Me to Live a Lie

Every system I ever trusted asked me to live a lie. And for years, I thought the problem was me.

I grew up in chaos: abuse, instability, a home that was anything but. Children's services was called on us constantly, but with a mandate to "protect the family," they never did anything. My parents kept moving over financial problems. Different city, different jurisdiction, different caseworker, same result. I never went to the same school more than two years. My mother kicked me out at 15. I spent the rest of high school bouncing between temporary homes. The only way out was college. My entire childhood was one strategy: hold on until you can get out.

The evangelical church I started in didn't just reject me. They exorcised me. Twice. And I wasn't some kid on the fringes. I was all in. Taught Sunday school, went on mission trips, did everything they asked of me. A model kid. Well-behaved. Devoted. And they still looked at me and saw a gay kid who didn't need saving, he needed a demon cast out and a lifetime of self-denial. For a long time, I believed they were right. I believed something was wrong with me.

A pastor from that same church took me in because "God told him to." I thought it was God finally giving me the family I'd always prayed for, the one I'd worked so hard to be good enough to deserve.

The irony is, the closest I ever felt to God wasn't in a church. It was sitting alone on a park bench outside the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky when a visiting priest sat down and told me, unprompted, that God doesn't care that I'm gay. One moment of unconditional acceptance from a system that otherwise never offered it, and it didn't even happen inside the building. For the first time, I thought maybe the problem wasn't me.

I made it to college. That was supposed to be the way out. Finally, I had hope. A family that took me in, a God who maybe didn't hate me after all. That didn't last.

That experience is what led me to try Catholicism. There was genuine beauty in it: the structure, the liturgy, the spaces, and a tradition that at least tried to keep to its own rules. But a faith that condemned who I loved, punished women for their own healthcare decisions, kept women subservient to men, protected pedophile priests, and demanded obedience without question wasn't something I could kneel to. It wasn't devotion. It was fear sold as love.

ROTC in college should have been a path forward. The first year was fine. I kept my head down, did the work, and DADT was just a policy I didn't think about. It wasn't until I started seeing someone at a different school that everything changed. Suddenly I was lying about everything, covering my tracks, managing every detail of my life to avoid getting caught. I went from honor roll to barely passing, collapsing inside, white-knuckling it until I couldn't anymore. I resigned to end it. They repealed the policy that same summer. Part of me still carries that. The voice that says "if only I was stronger, if only I could have held on longer." The same voice I'd been listening to my whole life.

I scraped by for three more years, holding my psyche together long enough to graduate. I still earned a physics degree, not because it was practical, but because it was the hardest thing I could do, and got published as an undergraduate researcher. But none of that mattered to the part of me that was breaking.

After graduation, I did what the script said to do next. I got a job. USAA felt like a second chance. A way to serve, at least somewhat. A fresh start with a new church that was supposedly welcoming. I clung to the hope that this time, the script would actually work.

I tried Episcopalian, thinking a different denomination might finally be the answer. And on the surface, it was. The priest was kind, I was welcomed, I did the retreats. When I was seeing someone, the priest was even excited about doing a gay marriage, until the reality set in. He'd need permission from the bishop, it would be a parish-wide conversation, and the only other gay wedding they'd done, he'd quietly officiated in a backyard to avoid the whole thing.

Even the welcome came with an asterisk. The relationships never went deeper than Sunday. Underneath the warmth was something hollow: less a faith than a social agreement to keep telling stories nobody in the room actually believed. But I kept showing up because the script said that's what you do.

And when I built a tech career, working my way from developer to system architect over nine years, I found the same deal in a different building. Go along to get along. Stay in your lane. Don't outshine the people above you. I tried to play the role.

The deal was always the same: we'll take you, but not all of you. Conditional acceptance as long as you play the role and wear the mask.

For years I paid it. I did everything I thought I was supposed to do: got the job, the nice partner, the suburban house. I overcame every obstacle to keep to the script, and the script still failed. Everything I was told would make me happy never actually lightened my soul. Successful didn't mean whole.

In 2021, six years into my career at USAA, I decided there had to be more to life. And the only way to find out was to face everything I was terrified of. So I did.

I started in the gym at 300 pounds. Years of sedentary remote work, online games, and a COVID lifestyle of desk to couch to bed had wrecked me. I couldn't walk a block without extreme low back pain. My blood work was a disaster. I was eating a box of Fruity Pebbles as a pre-dinner snack and calling it normal.

So I gutted my diet, cut out the processed garbage, and started moving. At first, the changes were good. Genuinely good. I was healing my body for the right reasons.

Then I ended my engagement. I'd pushed my fiancé to propose because I thought that would finally make me happy. He was Catholic, nice, wanted the suburban life. The best version of what I thought I was supposed to want. It was just as hollow. Breaking up with him was one of the hardest things I did that year.

Then I wrote the pastor a letter. The man who took me in as a kid and kept me close for 15 years into adulthood. He cared about me. He just never told me I wasn't his. Fifteen years of birthdays, holidays, weddings. He called me his adopted son in a book I helped him edit. He let me build my entire sense of family on something he knew wasn't real. All I did was point out the contradictions between his words and his behavior and ask him to clarify. Three months of silence. He ghosted me through my birthday. I spent the day in tears. When he finally spoke, he told me he knew exactly what I believed the relationship was, and he'd let me believe it because he thought I needed it. He wasn't sorry. He was angry that I asked. Angry that I wasn't grateful for the illusion he'd so lovingly given me. A faith wrapped in its own self-righteousness, too eager to condemn anyone legitimately struggling who didn't fall in line with its political and dogmatic beliefs.

After a lifetime of performing "good," being what God wanted, what society wanted, what everyone else needed me to be, the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction. I threw myself into everything I'd denied myself. The partying, the sex, the scene, the culture. If the script said don't, I did.

But swinging from one extreme to another isn't freedom. It's just a different kind of reaction. The problem was never the sex or the partying. The problem was running on compulsion instead of intention. I wasn't choosing any of it. I was reacting to everything I'd been denied.

The gym followed the same arc. What started as health became performance: chasing validation, chasing attention, pushing to failure every set trying to build a body someone would finally want. I was constructing a version of me designed to be liked, not a version of me that was real.

All of this while doing some of the best work of my career. One thought kept running through my head: how do I get out of here? This isn't who I am. This isn't what I'm meant for. I was thriving at someone else's game while knowing it was the wrong game entirely.

I didn't find Santa Muerte. She pulled me in. I walked past her statue in a small shop in Chicago and the next thing I knew, two hours had passed. The shop owner had to snap me out of it. Something woke up in me that day that hadn't been awake before. I took the statue home. And my life started changing fast.

When corporate politics finally came for me, not because I was failing, but because I was succeeding in ways that made the wrong people uncomfortable, I had the evidence, the relationships, and the ammunition to fight back. I could have blown the whole thing open. But I didn't want to fight for that life. All the money in the world is worthless if you can't control your own energy. I didn't want a transfer or a severance. For the first time, I wasn't just holding on until I couldn't anymore. I was choosing to let go so I could go deeper. I wanted to heal. I wanted a life that was actually mine.

The real shift came when I moved from brute force to balance: martial arts, yoga, somatic work. Strength with skill, not just volume. Flow over grinding. Self-respect and real confidence instead of a manufactured image built for other people's approval. Not denying the body, but actually listening to it.

I was diagnosed with CPTSD, Autism Spectrum, and Conversion Reaction as a kid. I don't say that for sympathy. I say it because those three things gave me something most people don't have: a fundamentally different experience of the connection between mind, body, and nervous system.

When I found breathwork, yoga, fascia work, hypnosis, and parts work, I didn't just find relief. I could see the patterns that had been running my life the entire time. Feel them, map them, take them apart. I took the same architectural thinking I used to design complex systems at USAA and turned it inward. I went from architecting software systems to architecting my healing, and later a life I actually wanted.

In 2024, I went to Ohio for my sister's birthday. I took flowers to my grandmother's grave and started telling her about my life, about Santa Muerte, about the path I was on. And then I broke down crying about how much God hates me. A man appeared next to me. Asked if he could pray with me. I said no. He did anyway. He told me I was still doing the work, that I came from good stock, and that God still loves me. I didn't understand that moment until now.

And somewhere in that process, I realized I was never running from God. I was running from a system that had corrupted Him, one built on control, division, and extraction, and calling it devotion. A system that condemned the struggling while protecting the powerful. That made the rules, broke them, and punished anyone who questioned why. I never had a problem with Jesus. I had a problem with the people who claimed to speak for him. I never felt whole in any of their buildings. But I found something real outside of them.

That was the first half. Thirty-five years of surviving systems that were never built for me: holding on, performing, breaking, rebuilding, and finally walking away.

This is the second half. No more scripts. No more masks. No more conditional acceptance. I'm building something real, for myself and for every man who's ever been where I was. This is where my life actually begins.

Choose to grow.