Before We Begin
Before you read another page, I’d like to ask something of you. Don’t read this book looking for heroes or villains. Don’t read it searching for someone to blame. Read it with curiosity.
Because this story isn’t really about addiction. It isn’t about homelessness. It isn’t about success. It isn’t even about failure. Those things matter, and you’ll find them in these pages, but beneath all of them lies a quieter story.
It’s the story of a man who slowly became the person he believed everyone else needed him to be, until one day he realized he no longer knew the man beneath the roles.
Perhaps your life has never looked like mine. Perhaps you’ve never hidden behind alcohol, slept in a homeless shelter, or watched a career, a marriage, or a carefully built life unravel. But maybe you’ve worn masks. Maybe you’ve smiled while carrying fear no one could see. Maybe you’ve measured your worth by what you accomplished, how much you produced, or how well you carried everyone else’s burdens. Maybe you’ve looked in the mirror and quietly wondered, “When did I stop recognizing myself?”
If you’ve ever asked that question, then before this becomes my story, it has already become ours.
This memoir isn’t an attempt to explain away my failures or rewrite my past. It’s an invitation to walk beside me as I slowly discovered that truth is rarely the thing we should fear. More often, it is the first step toward finding our way home.
I don’t ask you to admire my journey. In many places, I hope you don’t. I ask only that you be willing to notice where my story quietly brushes against your own.
Because somewhere between achievement and exhaustion, between responsibility and fear, between the life we build and the life we quietly live, many of us lose sight of ourselves without ever realizing it. I certainly did.
The pages that follow are the story of how I slowly found my way back. Not back to a career, a marriage, or success. Back to the person I had almost forgotten was there.
So come walk with me. Not because our stories are the same, but because beneath all of our different stories, I believe we are searching for many of the same things: to be known, to stop pretending, to tell ourselves the truth, and perhaps to finally come home.
Chapter Zero: The House That Built Me
Movement 0.1: Before I Had Words
Before I had words for compassion, I lived inside it. I didn’t know that then. In our house, life had a rhythm. Dinner happened. Bedtime happened. People were cared for. Children who needed a place to belong were given one.
My first memories of love were not speeches or grand moments. They were quieter than that. They sounded like dishes in the kitchen and smelled like dinner on the stove. They looked like my mother moving through the house with quiet purpose, making sure everyone else had what they needed before she ever thought about herself. They looked like my father coming home from work, tired from a day spent building with his hands, yet stepping into a home where responsibility never ended at the front door.
I didn’t know I was watching a covenant being lived, or that I was learning love is less something we feel than something we practice. I only knew that, in our house, people mattered, especially the ones who needed someone to make room for them.
That was normal to me. I assumed every home made room, and that every child grew up believing you gave extra care to whoever needed it. No one announced it. It was what the house did.
Looking back, I can see those ordinary days shaping me. Some of the deepest truths we carry are written into us long before we know how to read them.
Movement 0.2: The Boy Who Taught Me First
Before Krista came into our lives, there was Adam. My parents were foster parents long before adoption ever entered the picture. Adam came to us as a baby with significant disabilities, so his parents could have the kind of relief families sometimes need when love alone doesn’t make the demands any smaller.
I don’t know the full story of why he came to us, and I’ve never wanted to fill in the parts I don’t know. What I do remember is that his parents came to our house to see him. They loved their son. Even as a child, I understood that much. I don’t remember anyone speaking about them as though they had failed. I don’t remember anyone asking why they couldn’t do more. Adam needed care. His parents needed help. Our home had room. At that age, apparently that was enough explanation for me.
I was too young to understand the machinery of foster care or the impossible decisions parents sometimes have to make. I only understood what was directly in front of me. There was a baby in our house who needed things, so I helped.
I watched my mother and learned that some things had to be done slowly and with gentler hands. You couldn’t hurry Adam simply because you wanted to get on with whatever you were doing. His needs set the pace.
I didn’t resent that, and I didn’t admire myself for it either. That distinction matters to me now because I wasn’t serving a disabled child. I was helping take care of Adam.
At the time, none of this seemed unusual. Children don’t enter a home carrying definitions of what a family is supposed to look like. We learn that from the people already inside it.
And the definition handed to me was remarkably simple: If someone needed help, you helped. If caring took longer, you slowed down. If someone couldn’t do what you could do, you didn’t ask them to earn their place beside you. You made room.
Nobody sat me down and taught me those things. Nobody needed to. I was watching them happen.
Then Adam passed away.
Death was still something I understood mostly as a word adults used when someone wasn’t coming back. I couldn’t possibly have understood everything his parents were carrying. I certainly couldn’t understand what his short life would eventually mean to mine.
But at his funeral, his family asked me to carry Adam’s ashes. I remember knowing it mattered. That’s about as honestly as I can describe it.
I was a little boy carrying the remains of another little boy. I didn’t have words for grief, dignity, trust, or the strange privilege of being invited into another family’s sorrow. I only knew to hold him carefully.
Years later, I would understand there had been another kind of weight in my hands that day. His parents had trusted my family with their son while he was alive. And after he died, they trusted me to carry him one last time.
I wish I could say I understood the meaning of that moment as I walked. I didn’t. I was a child. But maybe some lessons don’t require understanding before they become part of us. Maybe we carry them first and understand their weight later.
Adam was one of those lessons for me. Long before recovery taught me about compassion, long before homelessness put me beside people the world often walks past, a little boy had already taught me most of it.
A human being does not have to accomplish something to matter. They do not have to prove their usefulness or make your life easier. Sometimes they simply need you to slow down, be gentle, and carry them carefully.
Adam taught me that before I knew I was being taught.
I wouldn’t discover how deeply it had settled into me until decades later, during one of the darkest seasons of my life, when a voice I never expected to hear again would bring that little boy back to me.
Movement 0.3: The Child Who Never Spoke
I don’t remember the day Krista came home. I was too young for that memory. As far back as I can reach, she was simply there. My sister.
Long before I understood words like anencephaly, prognosis, or disability, I understood something much simpler. Krista belonged. She had a room. She had a place in our family. She had people who knew what she needed. She had brothers who learned how to be careful around her. She had parents whose lives quietly reorganized themselves around loving her. Most importantly, she had a name. Krista.
As a little boy, I never measured her against other children because no one in our house taught me to. She couldn’t run through the backyard with us. She couldn’t chase a baseball. She couldn’t tell jokes around the dinner table. She couldn’t call for Mom from another room. She couldn’t say my name. But I don’t remember standing beside her wondering about any of those things. I remember my sister. That was enough.
My parents never explained why Krista’s life mattered. They arranged the entire house around the answer.
Her care changed our family. Vacations disappeared. Schedules changed. Hospital visits became normal. Medical equipment settled into the house until we barely noticed it anymore. Plans sometimes depended on what Krista needed that day. Some friendships drifted away. Our family learned to move at a different pace.
But here’s what I remember most: Our home never felt organized around tragedy. It was organized around a person. Krista. And loving her well.
As children, we didn’t call any of this sacrifice. We called it Tuesday.
We learned how to help reposition her, how to be gentle without being told, and how to be patient. And somehow, needing that much never made her worth less. It made us pay closer attention.
I think that’s one of the greatest gifts my parents gave me. They never taught me to look at Krista and begin with what was missing. So I didn’t.
The world would eventually teach me to measure people by achievement, intelligence, productivity, income, status, and independence. What can you do? What can you produce? What can you contribute? But those questions arrived much later.
Krista got there first. And without ever speaking a word, she gave me a completely different measuring stick.
She could produce nothing the world would call success. She couldn’t earn money, build a career, win an award, or take care of herself. She couldn’t even tell us she loved us. And none of that reduced her value by one ounce.
She didn’t earn her place in our family. She had one.
That distinction would take me decades to fully understand because somewhere later in my own life, I would forget it applied to me too. I would begin measuring my worth by what I could build, what I could solve, how many people needed me, how much responsibility I could carry, and how successful I could become.
I would spend years trying to earn something my little sister had demonstrated in front of me every day of my childhood. Worth isn’t wages paid for performance. It comes before performance, before achievement, before usefulness, before anything we can offer in return.
Krista knew none of this, of course. She never taught me with words or explained dignity to me. She simply occupied her place in our family and was loved there.
Years later, people would ask where my compassion came from. Recovery certainly deepened it. Psychology gave me language for it. Faith helped me understand it. Losing nearly everything tested whether I actually believed it. But none of those things planted the first seed.
That happened much earlier, in a quiet house in Minnesota, beside a little girl who never spoke a single word.
My parents showed me how to care for her. Krista taught me why.
And perhaps the greatest irony of my life is that I understood her worth long before I learned to recognize my own.
Movement 0.4: The House That Made Room
When I think back on my childhood, I don’t remember a house that felt extraordinary. I remember one that always seemed to have room. Room for one more chair, one more story, one more meal, one more child who needed a family.
As a little boy, I never questioned why there were babies with special needs in our home, why nurses sometimes visited, or why wheelchairs and medical equipment blended into the furniture as naturally as the couch or the dining room table. That was simply our life.
My mother had an incredible gift for making difficult things feel ordinary. She never announced sacrifice. She never said, “Look what we’re doing.” She simply got up every morning and loved the people God had placed in front of her.
My father did the same. He worked long days, came home tired, and somehow always seemed to have enough left to carry whatever the evening asked of him. I understand now that they weren’t trying to impress anyone. They were simply living the life they believed God had called them to live.
Children notice far more than adults realize. I noticed my mother’s gentle hands. I noticed my father’s quiet steadiness. I noticed that nobody complained when caring for someone took longer than expected. I noticed that helping wasn’t assigned. It was assumed.
No one explained compassion to me. The house explained it every single day, and most of the lesson arrived on ordinary Tuesdays.
Years later, I would spend my career designing homes where families gathered, kitchens where conversations lingered, and spaces that invited people to stay just a little longer. For a long time, I thought architecture taught me those things.
It didn’t. I learned them in a little house where love wasn’t measured by what people said, but by the room they made for someone else.
Movement 0.5: The Day They Said Yes
Every family has a moment that quietly changes its future. Sometimes it arrives with celebration. Sometimes with heartbreak. And sometimes it begins with a simple word: Yes.
I was too young to understand everything that decision would require. I only knew that our family had grown. Krista wasn’t visiting. She wasn’t staying for a while. She belonged with us.
I see now what I couldn’t see then. Every “yes” carries a thousand smaller yeses inside it. Yes to interrupted sleep. Yes to rearranged plans. Yes to expenses no one anticipated. Yes to the quiet sacrifices that rarely receive applause.
My parents never treated those sacrifices as burdens. They treated them as promises. They didn’t wake up each morning asking whether the work would be difficult. They woke up already knowing the answer.
The question they answered instead was much simpler: What does love require today?
And then they simply lived the answer, day after day, year after year. Not perfectly, but faithfully. As children, we learn far more from what our parents repeatedly do than from what they occasionally say. Without realizing it, I was watching love become a habit rather than a feeling or a grand gesture. It was a way of living that made room for another person, again and again, long after the excitement of saying “yes” had faded.
The decision my parents made wasn’t measured in a single day. It was measured in thousands of ordinary days that followed. And somehow, those days began building the foundation beneath my own life.
Movement 0.6: The Greatest Inheritance
For most of my life, I believed my parents had given me a wonderful childhood. That is true, but it isn’t the greatest thing they gave me.
As the years unfolded, life stripped away many things I once believed could never disappear: pride, success, and the certainty I had built my identity upon. Through recovery, loss, countless questions, and the slow work of rebuilding, I began to understand something I couldn’t have recognized as a little boy.
My parents hadn’t simply given me beautiful memories. They had given me a way of seeing.
Long before I learned words like empathy, studied psychology, encountered Radical Acceptance, or found language in neuroscience for trauma and healing, I had already spent years watching two ordinary people answer the same question: What does love require today?
Sometimes the answer looked like another meal, another sleepless night, another doctor’s appointment, or refusing to allow another human being’s worth to be measured by their limitations.
They never taught those lessons from a podium. They taught them while washing dishes, changing bandages, preparing dinner, holding tiny hands, and making room around an ordinary table.
As children, we assumed every family lived that way. We believed every home measured success by kindness, every kitchen welcomed people, and every life carried dignity. Only much later did I realize how extraordinary those ordinary days had been.
Even during the years when I lost sight of myself, those lessons never disappeared. They waited quietly, like embers beneath the ashes. I have often wondered why, after everything I lost, I still believed there had to be a way home. I think I finally understand. Long before I ever became lost, someone had already shown me what home truly was. Not a place built with lumber, concrete, or nails, but a home built one act of compassion, one ordinary day, at a time.
And without ever realizing it, my parents had already begun building me.
Movement 0.7: The Explorer
Before I was an architect or a business owner, before I filled journals with questions, I was an explorer.
My poor mother probably wondered if I planned on spending any part of my childhood with both feet on the ground. If there was a tree, I climbed it. If there was a hill, I rode my bike down it. If there was a creek, a patch of woods, or an unexplored trail, I disappeared into it.
Saturday mornings usually followed the same pattern. Breakfast disappeared almost as fast as I did. Somewhere outside there was another adventure waiting, another mystery to solve, another place to discover. Home was my launching pad, not my destination.
I wasn’t trying to get away from home. I was trying to see what was over the next hill. Curiosity pulled harder than fear ever could.
That curiosity came with consequences. I fell out of trees more times than I could count. I broke my wrists four different times. I broke a leg. By most reasonable standards, I was probably every emergency room’s favorite repeat customer.
My mother would patch me up. My father would shake his head with the kind of smile only a parent understands. And before long, I’d be outside again. I don’t think I was reckless. I was captivated. The world was one giant puzzle waiting to be explored.
When I wasn’t outside, I was usually building something: model airplanes, cars, anything with tiny parts spread across the table. I could lose hours studying instruction sheets, carefully fitting one piece into another until something remarkable slowly emerged.
Later came radio-controlled cars, and then my beloved Transformers. Most kids loved playing with them. I loved figuring them out. How could one thing become something completely different? How did all those pieces fit together so perfectly?
I didn’t know it then, but I wasn’t just playing. I was learning to see design. I was learning that hidden beneath what something appears to be, there is often another form waiting to emerge.
Years later, I would spend my career designing homes, then businesses, then experiences. Eventually, I would spend years trying to understand people the same way I once studied model kits and Transformers. How does something broken become whole again?
I don’t think that question began in adulthood. I think it began on my bedroom floor, surrounded by tiny plastic parts and instruction sheets, or halfway up another tree, wondering what I could see if I climbed just a little higher.
The irony isn’t lost on me. Today, heights make me nervous. Life has a way of changing us.
But I don’t think it ever took away the explorer. He simply traded trees for questions, blueprints for journals, plastic models for people. The adventures became quieter. The curiosity never did.
When I look back at that little boy now, with scraped knees, missing front teeth, glue on his fingers, dirt on his shoes, and another impossible idea already forming in his mind, I don’t see a child who was accident-prone. I see a child who believed the world was meant to be explored. Failure never convinced him to stop climbing. Pain never convinced him to stop wondering. And although I would lose sight of that little boy for many years, buried beneath responsibility, fear, shame, and addiction, he never truly disappeared.
He was simply waiting for me to come looking for him.