When Everything Broke Open

YEAR: 2020

OPENING

Some years enter your life as dates. Others divide it into before and after. For me, 2020 became one of those years. What happened did not begin there. That distinction matters. The childhood I have already written about came first. The bars before sunrise.

The intoxicated drives. The adults who saw and did not intervene. The years of learning that people could be physically close to me and still fail to protect me. My father's death came later. Then movement. Los Angeles.

Pacific Beach. The mountains. Work. Relationships. Trying to build. Trying to keep moving.

Trying, in ways I did not always understand, to outrun things that had never really stopped traveling with me. Then came 2020.

2020 did not create every wound in me. It was the year they all broke through the surface.

WHAT 2020 DID NOT START

It would be easy to tell this story as though one terrible year suddenly changed everything. That would be cleaner. It would also be false. By 2020, I was already carrying years of unresolved damage. I had learned young that danger could sit beside you while everybody acted normal. I had learned that silence could look like peace from the outside while feeling like abandonment from the inside.

I had learned how to keep functioning. That is not the same thing as healing. For years, I could move forward without fully understanding what I was carrying. I could work. Build. Learn.

Love. Hike. Dream. Make plans. The fact that a person is moving does not always mean the weight is gone. Sometimes it only means he has learned how to walk while carrying it.

THE YEAR THE DAMAGE BROKE THROUGH

In 2020, I got COVID. My fever reached 104.7°F . At the same time, I was dealing with a major back injury. I was physically weak. I was exhausted. I was already under emotional strain.

I had a doctor's note telling me to stay home. Whatever else was happening in the world, my own world had become very small and very physical. Rest. Pain. Fever. Trying to recover.

Trying not to make an injured body worse. Trying to get through the day without another thing falling apart. There are moments when a person does not need inspiration. He does not need a speech. He does not need to be told to work harder. He needs basic human decency.

I needed space to recover. I needed compassion. I needed the people around me to recognize that I was already down. Instead, the pressure increased.

THE FIRING

During that period, someone I was working with fired me. That is part of the factual sequence as I remember it. So is what followed. I remember being threatened with violence if I did not provide information I did not have and did not believe I owed anyone. I also came away from that conflict believing that things had been taken from me that were mine. I am writing this as my account of what happened—not as a courtroom finding and not as an invitation for strangers to identify or retry the private dispute behind it.

What matters here is what the experience did to me. I was sick. I was injured. I was frightened. I was financially vulnerable. And in the middle of that, somebody close enough to be called family became another source of pressure instead of protection.

That landed somewhere much older than 2020. It landed in the same place where the child from Chapter 01 had once waited for an adult to say: Enough. I will protect him. I had grown up. The need to be defended had not completely disappeared.

THE SECOND WOUND

The conflict itself hurt. What happened afterward went deeper. I went to my sisters. I went to other family members. I did not pretend I was fine. I was visibly struggling.

I was sick, injured, scared, angry, and unraveling. I wanted somebody to look at the situation and stand beside me. Very few did. From my perspective, many of the people I expected to support me chose to maintain their relationship with the person I believed had harmed me. That choice changed how I understood family. At the time, I became convinced that usefulness, access, convenience, status, and self-interest mattered more to some people than what I was going through.

I cannot know every private motive inside another person's head. I can say what their actions communicated to me. My pain was negotiable. That was the message I received. And it shattered something.

WHEN BLOOD STOPPED MEANING SAFETY

I had spent much of my life wanting to believe that family would eventually act like family. Not perfectly. Not without disagreement. But when something truly serious happened, I still believed blood would mean something. I believed there would be a line people would not cross. I believed that when I was clearly hurt, the people closest to me would care more about truth than convenience.

In 2020, that belief changed. I began separating words from actions. Family was a word. Loyalty was a word. Love was a word. The question became simpler:

What did people actually do when standing beside me carried a cost? That question has followed me ever since.

MY MOTHER

The hardest part for me involved my mother. I experienced her continued relationship with the person at the center of the conflict as another refusal to defend me. That reopened something very old. When I was a child, I had wanted an adult to stop what was happening. Now I was a grown man, and once again I felt as though I was asking the people closest to me to see that I was hurt and choose me clearly.

When that did not happen in the way I needed, the injury was larger than the immediate disagreement. It connected the present to the past. That is one of the reasons 2020 became so destructive for me. Nothing was happening by itself anymore. The present was pulling old memories into the room with it. The child who had not been defended was standing beside the adult who felt undefended again.

Those two versions of me collided.

2020 THE PRESENT DID NOT STAY IN THE PRESENT.

Old wounds recognized the shape of what was happening long before I had language for the collision.

WHAT IT COST ME

Since 2020, I have often described myself with one sentence: I have not been the same. Not even close. My happiness changed. My creativity changed. My ambition changed.

My energy changed. I became less outgoing. Less active. Less able to move through life with the same easy momentum I remembered having before. My enthusiasm dropped. My confidence changed.

My mental health suffered. My physical well-being suffered. My spiritual strength felt weaker. The damage did not feel contained to one relationship or one argument. It seemed to spread into the architecture of everyday life. Sleep.

Trust. Motivation. Safety. Hope. The ability to relax without expecting another blow. I am careful with language like this because memory is not a laboratory report.

I cannot reduce a human life to one cause. But I know the difference between the man I remember being before that period and the man who emerged from it. The difference is real to me.

MOURNING SOMEONE WHO IS STILL ALIVE

One of the strangest forms of grief is missing an earlier version of yourself. I remember being lighter. More hopeful. More creative. More ambitious. More social.

More excited by possibility. I remember having more fire. More movement. More confidence that life could expand. Sometimes I miss that man with the same ache people use when talking about somebody who is gone. Except I am the person I am mourning.

I am still here. That makes the grief difficult to explain. There is no funeral for a former version of yourself. No obituary. No gathering where everyone agrees that something was lost. You simply wake up inside a life that still has your name on it and realize that the interior has changed.

Losing part of myself became another kind of grief: mourning someone who was still alive.

WHAT BETRAYAL CHANGED

Before 2020, trust could still feel more automatic to me. Afterward, I began examining it. Who shows up? Who disappears? Who protects the truth when the truth becomes inconvenient? Who benefits from my silence?

Who wants access to me but not responsibility toward me? Who uses the word family as a title while behaving like the title should excuse everything? I became more guarded. Some of that guardedness has protected me. Some of it has probably cost me things too. That is the difficult part about survival mechanisms.

Something can help you survive one season and still become heavy if you carry it forever. I am still learning the difference between wisdom and armor.

ANGER WITHOUT DISGUISE

There is anger in this chapter. I am not going to decorate it until it becomes acceptable to everybody reading. Anger was part of what happened. It remains part of what I have had to understand. But anger is not the whole story. If it were, this chapter would end in 2020.

It does not. The anger eventually forced questions I should probably have asked much earlier. What do I tolerate because I was trained to tolerate it? What relationships exist because of love, and which exist because of habit, fear, obligation, or access? What does loyalty actually require? What does forgiveness mean if it is demanded without accountability?

What does faith look like when I am angry with people I once trusted? What does rebuilding look like when the old structure is no longer something I want to return to? Those questions hurt. They also became necessary.

DOCUMENTARY INTEGRITY

This chapter involves private conflict. I want the website to tell the truth without pretending memory is perfect or that my interpretation is the only possible interpretation another person could have. So I am drawing a line deliberately. I know what I experienced. I know what I remember being said to me. I know that I was sick and injured.

I know I lost work during that period. I know which relationships continued around me. I know how profoundly abandoned I felt. I know the effects I have carried since. Where I describe another person's motive, I will identify it as what I came to believe—not as a fact I can prove from inside somebody else's mind. Truth does not become weaker when I admit the limits of what I can know.

It becomes cleaner.

STILL HERE

There is another part of the story that matters just as much as what broke. I am still here. I did not become everything I had been exposed to as a child. I did not let every betrayal decide what kind of man I would become. Even when my creativity dimmed, I kept creating. Even when my confidence collapsed, some part of me kept imagining a future.

Even when my relationship with people changed, I did not completely lose my belief that loyalty, goodness, faith, and love can be real. I became more careful with those words. That is different from abandoning them. And even during the years when I felt far away from the person I remembered being, something in me kept looking for a path back. Not back to innocence. Not back to pretending nothing happened.

Back to life.

LOOKING BACK

I no longer see 2020 as the year one bad thing happened. I see it as a structural failure. Years of pressure had accumulated. Illness arrived. Injury was already present. Work collapsed.

A family conflict became a crisis of trust. Old wounds recognized themselves inside new events. And the internal structure I had relied on to keep moving could no longer carry all of it in the same way. Something broke open. That breaking hurt me deeply. But once something is open, it can no longer remain completely hidden.

I could not keep pretending that survival and healing were the same thing. I could not keep calling every relationship safe simply because it was familiar. I could not keep assuming that strength meant carrying everything without consequence. The years after 2020 would become a long argument between damage and rebuilding. That argument is still part of my life. But this chapter is the point where I finally understood that the old way of carrying everything had reached its limit.

THE LINE I CARRIED FORWARD

What broke open in 2020 was not one moment. It was everything I had been carrying.