Becoming – Reclaiming Faith, Identity, and Wholeness (Part Two)

There comes a moment, quiet and usually unexpected, when the survival mask begins to crack. Not because you're broken, but because the real you is ready to be seen. Sometimes you can't even control it (there isn't a choice) the mask crumbles whether you want it to or not.

After years of hiding, performing, and trying to earn love by being someone I wasn’t, something inside me whispered: What if you didn’t have to? What if you’re not the problem? What if being fully yourself is the point?

That whisper became a lifeline.

The Journey Back to Myself

My healing didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t a single breakthrough or ceremony. It was almost a decade of hundreds of small, courageous choices: To feel instead of numb. To speak instead of swallow. To listen to the voice inside me instead of the ones that raised me.

I began therapy. I dove deep into inner child work. I studied spirituality outside of the rigid framework I was raised in. I encountered practices and people who reflected a different kind of God (not one who condemned, but one who embraced). A love that didn’t ask me to edit myself.

Eventually, I found plant medicine; not as a shortcut to healing, but as a sacred mirror. In ceremony, I met my younger self. The one who had been so alone, so afraid. I held him. I told him he didn’t have to be anyone else to be loved. I felt the tears he never got to cry. And I began to remember who I was before the world told me to be ashamed.

Reclaiming Faith

For a long time, I wanted nothing to do with God. The word itself felt like a wound. But healing opened a door I didn’t expect — not back to the religion of my childhood, but forward into a spacious, grounded, embodied spirituality.

I started to see Spirit in nature. In stillness. In the gentle wisdom of my own intuition. In the connections that were built on truth, not performance. I realized that the Divine had never left me. It just wasn’t where I had been told to look.

Now, I understand God not as an angry father, but as the Love that lives in authenticity, in connection, in courage. I no longer feel shame for who I am, because who I am is sacred.

Owning My Story

Coming out wasn’t just about sexuality. It was about reclaiming all of me: my softness, my strength, my sensitivity, my story. It was about turning toward the pain, not to relive it, but to integrate it. To gather the pieces and create something whole.

The more I owned my story, the more I realized I wasn’t alone. So many others had grown up in silence, in fear, in families and churches that confused control with love. And they, too, were aching to come home to themselves. Not everyone lived through the pain, either. I hope to honor them by telling my story.

Becoming the Safe Space

That’s what led me to the work I do now, not just as a coach, but as a safe, grounded male presence. The kind of presence I needed and didn’t have. I hold space for people who are finding their way back to their truth. For those deconstructing old beliefs, healing from religious trauma, navigating identity, and longing for connection that feels real.

I’m not here to fix anyone. I’m here to witness. To affirm. To walk beside. To remind you that nothing about you is too much or unlovable.

From Surviving to Living

There was a time when I thought my story was one of rejection and pain. And in some ways, it is. But it’s also a story of resilience, of rising, of radical self-love.

What once felt like a curse has become my calling. I survived. I healed. I became someone my younger self would feel safe with.

And if you’re reading this, and your story echoes mine — please know this:

You are not alone. You are not broken. You are not too late. You are worthy of love that doesn’t ask you to disappear. And you are allowed to become everything you were always meant to be.