I was born in Brooklyn in 1975; when I was five, my family moved to Queens. We were comfortably middle class. My dad worked for Con Edison, and my mom helped disabled children in the classroom.

My dad could be very harsh at times, and the emotional tension in our home made connection difficult for everyone. On top of that, I experienced significant bullying growing up. I carried a lot of unresolved anger as a result.

By the time I was sixteen, I had become a bit of a bully myself and was getting into frequent trouble. I was drinking heavily and often disrespectful toward my parents. After one incident, they asked me to leave the house. I lived with my uncle in Brooklyn for several months before eventually persuading my parents to let me move back in.

Despite all of my acting out, I was driven by a deep need for approval and acceptance. I learned early to mirror the attitudes and language of the adults and peers around me in order to feel like I belonged.

There were widespread attitudes around race and identity in my neighborhood that reinforced unhealthy lessons I absorbed growing up.

I struggled academically in high school but managed to graduate in June 1993. I had already signed up to join the Navy and waited until I turned eighteen to report to basic training. I trained as a cook and ultimately spent seven years in the Navy, four of them aboard the USS Austin, an amphibious ship that carries, launches, and recovers Marines.

During my service, we traveled extensively throughout the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Bulgaria, and Ukraine. We also sat off the coast of Somalia following the Black Hawk Down incident. I spent my final three years stationed at the Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia.

During my time in the Navy, I gravitated toward people and dynamics that felt familiar to me, even when they weren’t healthy. Politics wasn’t especially important to me then. I was becoming more aware of it, but what mattered most was the idea of a president who could help me make more money. I didn’t yet understand the meaningful differences between political parties.

While still in the Navy, I had a religious conversion and became an evangelical Christian. I had been raised Catholic and attended Catholic school, but my family wasn’t actively religious, so I never felt a strong connection to Catholicism.

Around that time, I met the woman who would become my first wife, and we began attending Amway meetings together. Amway has strong ties to evangelical Christianity. I was drawn to the sense of community and started asking myself what evangelical Christianity was all about.

I attended a large Amway conference in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where one of the organization’s leaders, Bill Britt, spoke to a packed stadium. I remember feeling a powerful sense of belonging, like I was finally part of something meaningful. I was in my early twenties.

I married my first wife in 2000. Over time, I became increasingly self-centered and emotionally unsafe in the relationship. I was unfaithful.

On September 11, 2001, my dad and brother were in Manhattan, and I couldn’t reach them. I had already moved to Virginia, and the fear of not knowing whether they were safe was overwhelming. In the aftermath, I began consuming far more cable news, particularly Fox News, and paid closer attention to the political opinions of those around me.

At that point, I lacked the tools to critically evaluate the information I was consuming. I didn’t understand how media framing or bias worked, and I absorbed messaging without questioning it. I became increasingly angry and accepted Islamophobic rhetoric that framed entire groups of people as enemies.

While working full time in security and construction, I attended Tidewater Community College for two years, then Old Dominion University, and ultimately completed my degree online through Strayer University, which allowed me to balance work and school more effectively.

I graduated in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and continued surrounding myself with people who reinforced the same beliefs I held.

I became a successful branch manager for a security company and married my second wife in 2010. During that period, I grew more rigid and reactive, increasingly shaped by the media I consumed and the social circles I remained in. I also gained a significant amount of weight.

At that time, I held harmful beliefs about race and identity that I had absorbed from my environment, media consumption, and the ongoing need for approval.

My life changed dramatically on May 23, 2015. While riding my motorcycle along a main boulevard in Chesapeake, Virginia, a car brushed my tire, sending me airborne. I broke nearly every bone in my face and suffered a traumatic brain injury that continues to affect my short-term memory. Surgeons placed screws in each quadrant of my jaw and installed a metal plate with twenty screws in my sinus cavity.

According to my neuropsychologist, I experienced impairments in visual-spatial functioning and auditory learning. Long-buried trauma from childhood began surfacing, and I became overwhelmed by anger I didn’t yet know how to regulate.

Over the next year, I cycled through six different jobs while struggling with anxiety and depression. I began therapy, but limited myself to Christian therapists, which restricted how deeply I was able to engage with my trauma.

In September 2016, I reached a breaking point. My wife told me she was leaving and took our two daughters. In a moment of despair, I put a 9mm pistol in my mouth. Thankfully, thoughts of my daughters interrupted that moment and caused me to put the gun down. I admitted myself to a VA psychiatric ward, where I stayed for a week before being discharged with medication.

Shortly afterward, I went on disability through Social Security and the VA and stopped working in October 2016.

This all unfolded shortly before the 2016 election. I was still closely following politics and strongly supported Donald Trump. I knew little about his background beyond his business persona and television presence, which I found appealing. His blunt, confrontational style resonated with unresolved parts of me more than his policies did.

I held deep resentment toward Barack Obama and was especially angry about the Affordable Care Act. I accepted conspiracy theories around Obama’s citizenship and supported hardline immigration rhetoric without examining its implications.

As an evangelical Christian at the time, my connection to Trump and the MAGA movement deepened. I supported efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and viewed his unconventional approach to foreign leaders, including meeting with Kim Jong Un, as a sign of strength and effectiveness.

Meanwhile, my therapy and church involvement followed a familiar pattern. I would commit for a year or two, then become disillusioned—particularly when leaders presented themselves as infallible. Once I saw their humanity, I would move on, searching again for something that could save me from my pain.

My second marriage ended in 2018. I met my third wife, also an evangelical Christian, in late 2019, and we married in June 2020.

Almost immediately, I began experiencing intense emotional pain and was questioning the marriage. I became increasingly angry and controlling, repeating patterns I hadn’t yet learned to interrupt.

When Trump claimed the 2020 election was stolen, I believed it. I was deeply immersed in MAGA rhetoric and struggled to accept his loss. At the time, I felt conflicted—disturbed by the violence surrounding January 6, yet still influenced by messaging that framed extreme actions as justified.

As Joe Biden took office, I pulled back from constant political engagement and began focusing on addressing my unresolved trauma. This marked the beginning of trauma-informed therapy, where I finally started feeling emotions I had avoided my entire life. I grieved the childhood I never had and the life I had lived.

Through that work, I developed empathy and compassion. My wife and I had a son, and during a baptism gathering, I shared doubts about my beliefs with the pastor who had married us. She suggested I might be experiencing religious deconstruction, which became the starting point for a profound shift.

I began questioning everything I had been taught to believe. I explored Buddhism, Hinduism, and other philosophical traditions. I read Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and immersed myself in long-form conversations and podcasts. Gradually, I moved away from Christianity.

This process extended into my political beliefs as well. I began unlearning the racist and homophobic conditioning I had absorbed and gained clarity about how deeply shaped I had been by culture, media, and fear. Over time, my attachment to Trump, MAGA, and far-right ideology loosened.

I also recognized how certain media consumption patterns were negatively affecting my mental health. After stepping back from constant news exposure, I slowly began re-engaging with a wider range of sources more intentionally.

As my perspective evolved, I reassessed Trump’s behavior and credibility, taking seriously concerns I had previously dismissed. By the time he entered the 2024 presidential race, I was finished supporting him.

This shift created tension with people close to me, including family members and my ex-wife, many of whom continued to support Trump. Even as I moved away from MAGA, I felt the pull of familiar identity. Still, I voted for Kamala Harris, marking the first time I voted for a Democrat.

After Trump returned to office for a second term, I grew increasingly concerned about the direction of his administration and how it aligned with my evolving values. As I learned more about proposed policy agendas, I became uneasy about their potential impact on vulnerable communities, particularly around immigration enforcement and the risk of dehumanization.

Paying closer attention to executive actions and responses to judicial oversight, I began noticing patterns that concerned me from a democratic governance perspective. It was unsettling to see how normalized these dynamics had become.

Today, I rely on tools like Ground News to better understand media bias and reliability. I follow independent voices and remain cautious with major networks, while still engaging thoughtfully with a range of perspectives.

I experienced a slow awakening to the broader impact of Trump-era politics and the MAGA movement. I now consider myself a liberal-left independent and engage in local civic conversations focused on democracy, accountability, and community well-being.

My journey has been long and difficult, but I am far more at peace now than I was when I lived in survival mode.

                                                                                                                                                                                             —November 2025