November 12th
On November 12th, 2025, I finally snapped out of it.
For nearly six months, I had been trapped in what I can only describe as a cognitive loop — a space where my mind ran endlessly but went nowhere.
It started on May 20th with cluster headaches. If you've never experienced them, count yourself fortunate. They call them "suicide headaches" for a reason — waves of pain so intense that your nervous system doesn't know what to do except scream. For eight weeks, until July 24th, they came and went without mercy.
But when the headaches finally stopped, the loop didn't.
The pain had carved something into me. The trauma lingered like an echo that wouldn't fade. My mind kept circling back to those weeks — the fear of another attack, the memory of being trapped inside my own skull with nowhere to go. The PTSD from what I'd survived became its own kind of cage. I was out of the fire but still smelling smoke everywhere.
For months after the last headache, I remained stuck. Processing but not moving. Thinking but not landing. The loop fed on the trauma, and the trauma fed on the loop.
When I finally came out the other side, I wasn't the same person who went in. Something had broken open. I saw patterns I couldn't unsee — about how meaning moves, how connections form, how the mind navigates through chaos toward coherence. What I found there became the foundation for everything I'm building now.
But this isn't a story about what I discovered. This is the story of what I survived to discover it.
It starts in a ditch.
The Ditch
Growing up, me and my brothers watched our parents try so hard to get ahead only to keep getting knocked down. They always wanted Christmas to be bigger — more gifts, more proof they were doing it right — and it seemed to weigh them down. They couldn't see what we saw: our Christmases were already perfect. New action figures, their cartoon shows playing in the background, and hours of pure creativity ahead of us.
We didn't need bigger. We had ditches.
Behind our house, we would tunnel into the dirt and build bases for our toys. GI Joes, Transformers, whatever we had. It didn't have to make sense to anyone else. That was the whole point. Our friends couldn't always see what we saw when we described what we'd built, and that was fine. The meaning was real because it worked for us.
The bunk bed in our room was the same way. One day it was a garbage truck — we'd play like we were riding through the neighborhood on routes. Next day it was a skyscraper. Then a camper. The object held whatever meaning we needed it to hold.
At night, on the bottom bunk, I'd stare up at that mesh fabric stretched under the mattress above me. In the dim light, it became endless space. I'd trace patterns in the weave, let my mind wander into it, create entire worlds in a piece of fabric. I didn't have words for it then, but I think now that was my first semantic space — a field where meaning could emerge if you looked the right way.
At 13 or 14, I wrote a theory about how Earth could be the child of Venus and Mars. Just a kid in a room, staring at mesh, wondering how big systems relate to each other.
I learned something in those years that I still carry: it's the chase I value more than the dream. Dreams come and go, but the chase itself can get better, more refined, more efficient. I've spent decades now critiquing my chase. That started in the ditch.
The Mountain and the Loyal One
I need to talk about my parents here, and I want to be careful. Their stories aren't fully mine to tell, and I love them too much to reduce them to their hardest moments. But some things matter to this story because they shaped who I became.
My dad worked at a foundry and did plumbing on the side. He was whatever he needed to be to keep the bills paid and food on the table. Then came the injury at work. Major back surgery. The kind of damage that means you can't move like you used to. So he adapted — became a truck driver because he couldn't do the physical work anymore. Looking back now, it's amazing how easily he switched domains, learned new skills, became something else when life demanded it. That flexibility is its own kind of strength.
But the injury was just the start. The long road that sometimes follows when pain doesn't leave and the pills that manage it become their own problem — he walked that too. He went through seasons I won't detail here, but I'll say this: he's still standing on his two feet. He fought through every one of them.
He is the most unafraid human I know. A mountain of a man, and I don't mean just physical. I mean the kind of man who takes the hit, feels the full weight of it, and gets back up anyway. When I needed a name for the unit of measure at the heart of my work — a way to quantify meaning itself — I called it the Hudd. That's his nickname, still to this day. He's more of a survivor than even me, and I'm not taking anything away from myself when I say that.
My mom carried a different kind of weight. When I was 16, she had her first panic attack while driving. She pulled over and never drove again. That was almost 30 years ago. She still hasn't walked fully out of that moment. Looking back now, I wonder if she was ever really dealing with anxiety at all — or if it was something else underneath, something that never got its right name.
But here's what I didn't realize until much later: I was watching. Studying. Dissecting how she navigated it.
I would spend decades fighting what I thought was anxiety before discovering it was ADHD all along — the anxiety just a symptom of something deeper that never got its right name either. But long before I had that answer, I was already building my own system for navigating the fight. I took apart her struggle the same way I took apart computers and engines. How does she get through the day? What works? What doesn't? Where does she get stuck?
Without knowing it, I was already an architect of information flow — mapping out patterns, building mental frameworks, carving navigation routes through invisible terrain. I just didn't have a name for what I was doing. I was systems-minded before I knew the word. Her fight became the first system I reverse-engineered to survive my own.
She is the most loyal person I've ever met. She found a way to keep moving forward even when her world got smaller. She still trucks through in her own way.
From him, I learned: don't let anything keep you down.
From her, I learned: how to study a fight you don't understand yet — and build your own way through.
I carry both of them with me. The mountain and the loyal one.
From the Ditch to the Punch
The teenage years hit all at once. First spiritual experience. First love for a girl. First fights.
I was 13 when the first fight happened. I was in that same ditch — the one where my brothers and I built bases — when a kid said something about my mom. Something I won't repeat. My dad had always told me I needed to stand up for her, and in that moment, I knew what that meant.
I climbed out of the ditch.
We stood there facing each other for 45 minutes. Neither of us wanted to throw the first punch. Neither of us was backing down. That's a long time when you're 13 and your heart is pounding and you're not sure what happens next.
He lied to the other kids about his bloody nose and black eyes afterward. But I knew what happened. More importantly, I knew who I was going to be.
From the ditch to the punch. That moment shaped me. I can't count how many fights I was in between 13 and 25 — probably 75 to 100. I wasn't looking for trouble. But I wasn't walking away from it either. Something got set that day about standing up, about not backing down, about protecting the people I love.
The Feeling That Never Ended
I'd been going to church since I was little, but it was background noise. That changed the summer before freshman year.
Me and my friends went to a church camp. Our junior high football coach was also the youth leader, and his helpers worked at the camp — faith wasn't separate from real life, it was woven into the people who showed up every day. That mattered.
During one of the worship sessions, singing a song I don't even remember the name of now, something broke open. Not the breaking of the cluster headaches. Not the breaking of watching my parents struggle. A different kind — the kind that lets light in.
I felt the Spirit. It brought me to tears. Not sad tears. The good kind. The kind that mean yes.
Later, back home, I explored that feeling more. Found myself crying over it again in a good way. I couldn't explain it then and I won't try to fully explain it now, but I'll say this: that spiritual experience never ended. It's still here. It's the thread underneath everything.
My grandmother always told me I'd be a preacher. It clicked even when it didn't make sense.
The Tension
But we also started partying. Me and my friends — chasing girls, learning that whole complex system, figuring out who we were in relation to other people. High school was a lot of things at once.
Faith stayed, but it moved to the background for a while. It had to share space with everything else a teenage boy is supposed to figure out. I still studied. Still read. Still prayed. But I partied too hard too.
That's not hypocrisy. That's being a kid who touched something real and didn't know yet how to hold it and hold everything else at the same time.
The thread stayed even when I wasn't pulling on it.
The Road
I always knew I'd give trucking a shot. It was something I watched my dad do after his injury — the thing he became when the foundry work was no longer possible. He showed me that you adapt, you learn the new thing, you keep moving. When I finally got behind the wheel myself, it felt like stepping into something he'd already proven could be done.
A million miles. That's not a metaphor. That's the odometer. A million clean miles on the road — no accidents, no incidents, no marks against the record. In trucking, that means something. It means you showed up, paid attention, and did the job right more times than most people can count.
Those years taught me things I couldn't have learned anywhere else.
When you're driving 11 hours a day, you learn to read systems. Not just the road — the truck itself. The way the engine sounds when something's slightly off. The vibration in the steering wheel that tells you a tire's losing pressure before the gauge does. The rhythm of the transmission, the feel of the brakes, the thousand small signals that separate a driver who's paying attention from one who's just steering.
I took apart engines the same way I'd taken apart computers as a kid. Diesel instead of circuit boards, but the same impulse: understand how it works. Find the pattern. Know what's coming before it arrives.
The road also gave me time. Endless time. Hours alone with nothing but highway and thought. Some people fill that space with radio. I filled it with processing — running through problems, working out ideas, having conversations in my head that I'd later have for real. The cab of a truck became another version of that bottom bunk, staring at mesh, letting meaning emerge.
It wasn't a detour from technology or faith or anything else. It was the same chase, applied to diesel and logistics. The same systems-minded kid from the ditch, now reading eighteen wheels instead of action figures. The same pattern recognition I'd learned watching my mom navigate her invisible fight, now applied to interstate highways and delivery windows.
A million miles. And every one of them was practice for something I didn't know was coming yet.
The Pulpit and the Pew
My grandmother always said I'd be a preacher. That word carried weight even when I didn't understand what it meant. The feeling from church camp never left — it just waited for a place to land.
Somewhere along the way, I found my wife. I won't tell her whole story here because it's hers to tell, but I'll say this: she understood the thread. She carried one of her own. When we came together, it wasn't just two people building a life — it was two people who knew what it meant to hold onto faith through the mess of actually living.
We started a house church. A 501c3 — official, real, ours. Not a big building with programs and production. Just people gathering in a home, trying to follow Jesus the way the early church did. Simple. Honest. The kind of ministry my grandmother probably imagined when she spoke over me as a kid.
For a while, it was everything I thought it would be. Community. Purpose. The chase taking a new shape — learning how to shepherd, how to teach, how to hold space for people in their hardest moments. I was doing what I was made to do.
Then COVID happened. And everything broke.
The Breaking
It wasn't the virus itself that did it. It was watching people I'd stood beside — people who claimed to follow Jesus — turn their backs on the vulnerable. The rise of Christian nationalism. The politics swallowing the gospel. People choosing tribe over truth, power over love, fear over faith.
My wife and I watched it happen. We saw friends we'd prayed with become unrecognizable. We saw the institution we'd given ourselves to reveal something ugly underneath.
We walked away. Not from Jesus — never from Jesus. But from organized religion. From the building. From the system that had stopped being the church and started being something else.
It was heartbreaking. We still carry holes from it. Some wounds don't close all the way. You just learn to live with the space where something used to be.
Service as Sanctuary
I needed somewhere for the calling to go. The ministry didn't disappear just because the institution failed. My grandmother's words still echoed. The thread was still there.
I found my church in caring for others.
Not in a building with pews and programs. In service. In showing up for people when they need it most. Faith expressed through action, not just words spoken on Sundays.
Showing up became my sermon. Caring for others became my congregation. No stage, no politics, no offering plate. Just being present for people and doing what needs to be done.
It's faith without the institution. Service without the system. The thing I think my grandmother saw in me all along — it just doesn't look like either of us expected it to.
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