My life..
:
My Story
My life did not start the way most people’s do.
At just 2 years old, I was taken away from my biological parents and placed in an orphanage. I was too young to understand what was happening, too young to understand loss, abandonment, or why the people who brought me into this world were suddenly gone. But even if I could not understand it then, I think part of me carried that wound my whole life.
The orphanage became home. I grew up around other children who were also missing pieces of themselves, all of us trying to understand why life had turned out this way. I learned independence early because I had to. I learned that crying did not always bring comfort and that life could feel lonely, even in a room full of people.
When I was 10 years old, I was adopted. People often think adoption means everything suddenly gets better, like the ending of a movie. But real life is more complicated than that. You do not stop carrying pain just because your address changes. I still carried hurt, confusion, and memories of things that had already shaped me. Abuse, emotional pain, and feeling different became part of my story. School was not always kind either. I was bullied and hurt by people I trusted, and somewhere along the line I started believing that maybe pain was just something life handed me.
At 18, I moved out and had to learn how to survive on my own. I did not have life figured out. Truthfully, I was still just a hurt kid trying to act like an adult. I wanted what everyone wants—to be loved, to belong, to finally feel safe with someone.
But life had more lessons waiting for me.
I got cheated on, and betrayal cut deeper than most people understood. When you already grow up feeling abandoned, being betrayed by someone you trust does not just hurt—it reopens old wounds you thought maybe had healed.
Then came one of the darkest things I have ever had to carry.
I was sexually assaulted by someone of the same sex. It is not something easy to talk about. It is not something easy to process. It left me with pain, confusion, anger, and questions I did not always know how to answer. Some wounds are invisible, but they still change who you are. That experience stayed with me in ways I cannot fully explain.
After that, I started drinking.
At first, maybe it felt like relief. A way to quiet my thoughts, numb the hurt, silence the memories, and stop feeling everything for a while. But pain has a way of following you, no matter how much you try to drown it.
Then I met a girl.
For the first time in a long time, life felt different. I fell in love. I got married. For seven years, I believed I had finally found my person—someone who would stay, someone who chose me. I built a life around that love. I trusted it. I believed in it.
Then one day, she left for work…
And never came back.
No warning that prepared me. No ending that made sense. Just silence, distance, and eventually the painful truth that the woman I loved no longer wanted the life we built together. The same fear of abandonment that had followed me since childhood suddenly stood in front of me again. Losing a marriage felt like losing a future, losing stability, losing someone I thought would never leave.
And while I was already trying to survive heartbreak, life handed me another challenge.
In September 2024, I was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes.
Suddenly, survival became physical too. Needles. Blood sugar. Fear. Constant monitoring. The exhaustion of managing something that never takes a day off. Diabetes became another thing I had to fight every single day, whether I wanted to or not.
There were other struggles too—times of deep pain, moments of feeling completely lost, battles with drinking, loneliness, heartbreak, and trying to carry trauma while pretending I was okay.
People see a person and think they know the story.
They do not see the 2-year-old who lost his family.
The child in the orphanage.
The boy trying to fit in after adoption.
The young man trying to survive on his own.
The betrayal.
The assault.
The drinking.
The husband who loved deeply and got left behind.
The man learning to live with diabetes while his world felt like it was falling apart.
But here is the truth:
I am still here.
Life tried to break me more than once. Maybe it did break parts of me. But somehow, despite everything, I kept going. I survived things that should have destroyed me. And even though I still carry scars, I am still standing.
My story is not a perfect one.
But it is a story of survival.