We often bury our ugliest memories.

Even when they are responsible for making us feel like shit about ourselves our entire lives. Even when they keep us from believing others when they tell us something different.

Several years ago, I sat in the Amazon jungle, on plant medicine, when a memory surfaced from 50 years earlier.

Me as a young boy of about five years old. My jacket was tight around my neck. My feet not touching the ground. I couldn’t breathe. My father was strangling me and I didn’t know why. That incident defined how I felt about myself my whole life.

If my own father wanted to hurt me, the only explanation was that there was something wrong with me. I was bad. From then on I believed that to be true, and I assumed everyone else knew it too.

That night in Peru, I realized I hadn’t done anything wrong at all. That was the moment I finally let it go, and it changed how I treated myself from that day on.

You don’t have to go to Peru or take plant medicine to do the same thing, to look back at your own pain and decide to stop letting it define you.

That’s what I want us to do together.

Here’s where we start

Ungarnished: the things we bury or avoid because they're too hard. We don't realize how they alter the course of our lives. For me it was hiding that I was gay for half my life. It was also constantly chasing a place to call home. Yacht galleys, a farm in Nicaragua, a tiny boat in Florida.

Unmasked: your neurodivergence has always been there and always will be. It's not who you are, but it's in everything you do. Discovering it doesn't make the shame go away, it just makes it more obvious. I have a lot of shame and embarrassment about how I perceive and react to things. Rather than letting those moments define us, we can identify and reconcile them.

Handwritten (coming soon): the shortcut of letting AI write for you, because you don’t think you have what it takes to write it yourself. For me it was ADHD and thinking that if my written voice was anything like the one in my head, or the one coming out of my mouth, no one would understand what I wrote.