As soon as I published the last entry, I could swear I heard a collective gasp—or maybe it was just both dogs laying next to me having gas. Either way, it felt like a strange moment. A shift. A reckoning.

To address the obvious: yes, my misdeeds are known. They’re a matter of public record. I did, with a great deal of pain and anguish, come clean—so to speak. While I haven’t been very public about it, the story exists. And I’ve carried it every day since.

What follows isn’t a plea or a performance. It’s just the truth as I’ve lived it—fragmented, uncomfortable, but real. In the time since everything broke open, I’ve thought a lot about what it means to fall and keep going. These are some of the things I’ve learned, or at least tried to understand.

The Myth of the Redemption Arc

In the world I grew up watching on TV, mistakes were neat little things. They came wrapped in 22-minute episodes, tied off with an apology and a group hug. Whether it was The Brady Bunch or Leave It to Beaver, the message was the same: say you’re sorry, mean it, and all is forgiven. Everyone smiles. The music swells. Everything’s okay again.

But real life doesn’t follow a script like that.

In the real world, saying sorry doesn’t guarantee absolution. Sometimes it guarantees silence. People don’t always want to be seen standing next to the guy who confessed. Even when your apology is genuine—and trust me, mine was—there’s no healing soundtrack playing in the background. Just the sound of people stepping back.

We want to believe in redemption arcs because they promise there’s a path back. That we can be fixed. That we can be let back in. But sometimes there’s no return. There’s just the quiet, unglamorous work of moving forward—even when no one is clapping.

Redemption, if it’s real at all, might just be how we carry ourselves when no one’s watching, and no one’s ready to forgive us.

Life After Being “Known”

There’s a strange shift that happens when your name starts to mean something else to other people. When you’re no longer just you—you’re that person. The one who did the thing. The one whose story got around.

People don’t always say anything out loud, but you feel it. In the way they hesitate, or don’t. In the way they look at you, or don’t. Even the kind ones aren’t always sure how to hold it. You become a cracked vase: still valuable, but don’t bump it too hard.

The hardest part is that you’re still you. Still trying. Still making dinner and walking the dog and laughing at dumb jokes. But the version of you that people carry? That one might be frozen in time, defined by a single moment.

And while you’re living in the present—trying to grow, trying to make peace—some people only interact with the past. It’s lonely in that space between being seen and being understood.

There’s no real coming back. There’s just moving forward, quietly, honestly, and a little more alone than you used to be.

Health, Stress, and Moral Judgment

It didn’t take long for the question to come up: Did this happen because of what you did?

They didn’t always say it outright. But the suggestion hung in the air. As if my body collapsing, my strokes, my declining health—was some kind of divine invoice for moral failure.

We want life to make sense. We want bad things to happen for good reasons. But according to every doctor I saw, my health didn’t unravel because I did something wrong. At worst, the stress may have hidden symptoms I should have caught sooner. But this wasn’t karma. This wasn’t punishment.

Still, even I heard that voice in my head: Maybe this is what you get.

That’s how deeply we internalize the myth of earned suffering. But pain doesn’t work that way. Neither does the body. Terrible things happen to people who don’t deserve them, and grace sometimes lands in the laps of people who do. That’s not justice. It’s just life.

The only thing we can control is how we move through it—how we carry the pain, and what kind of person we become in the middle of it.

Who Stays, Who Goes

Some people you expect to stay, leave. Some you expect to vanish, stay.

That’s one of the hardest lessons of all this: relationships shift. Some quietly fade. Others fall away all at once. I don’t blame them. I really don’t. Everyone has the right to decide what they’re close to. I understand the instinct to back away, to protect your reputation, to keep your distance.

But it still hurts.

There’s a strange kind of grief in being ghosted by someone you thought knew you. You start to wonder if they ever really did. Or if your worst moment just gave them an excuse they were already waiting for.

But there’s clarity, too. When everything falls apart, you learn who sees you as a full person—and who only sees the headline. The ones who stay don’t always know the right thing to say. They might not even understand what you did. But they stay. They show up in quiet ways. They ask how you are and mean it. That kind of presence is rare. Sacred.

Not everyone is meant to walk the full road with you. Some people are chapters. Some are footnotes. A few are lifelines. You learn to bless the ones who had to go—and hold close the ones who chose to stay.

Owning the Story Before It Owns You

There comes a point where you get tired of flinching at your own name.

For a long time, I let the story shape me. I let other people’s versions get louder than my own. I stayed quiet, hoping silence might earn me a kind of invisibility. But it never worked. The story kept growing in the background, shaped by other people’s assumptions and edits.

Eventually, I realized: if I don’t own this story, it will own me.

So this is me owning it. Not to rewrite it. Not to clear my name. Just to tell it in my own voice. Because no one else can do that. And if I wait too long, I’ll stop recognizing it at all.

This is what happened. This is how it felt. This is who I am now.

I’m not looking for applause. I’m not asking to be redeemed.

I’m just telling the truth—before it gets told for me.

As always be the kind of person your dog and your mom hope you are.