Shock Collar · Eye of the Mountain

This looks pretty grim when laid out like this. Took me a damn long time to be able to look at it without collapsing. The fact that I can do that now says more than all the words below. But the words, they are essential too.

Chapter I - The Wound

The Blackness of Darkness

This essay recounts my earliest experiences of physical and emotional abuse — and how those wounds shaped my nervous system, relationships and sense of self. It’s an unflinching look at what happens when love and violence fuse in a child’s world and how those patterns echo across a lifetime. This is not a story of blame but of understanding — of tracing the lineage of trauma so it can finally stop repeating. It ends where healing begins: with self-parenting, gentleness and the slow reclamation of safety.

Murder of Innocence

When I was twelve, two tiny pet rats taught me the truth about cruelty. This story is one of the hardest I’ve written but it was also a turning point in how I began to understand my father — and myself.

Chapter II - Survival

Taming the Dragon

Living with Borderline Personality Disorder felt like trying to survive a hurricane inside my own skin. This essay explores the overwhelming intensity, fear of abandonment, shame, splitting and emotional volatility that shaped my inner world for years — and how writing publicly about it became part of my healing. More than a diagnosis, this is a story about complex trauma, the desperate search for connection and learning how to stop organizing my life around fear.

Write It in Blood if You Must

This piece is an intimate guide through the landscape of suicidal despair — written by someone who has walked that path and survived it. I write not to shock but to accompany: to show that even in the deepest darkness, there is a way through. With unflinching honesty, I describe years of living with suicidal thoughts, the paradox of endurance and the quiet grace of surrender that eventually led to healing. It’s a letter to anyone who has ever felt the pull of oblivion, reminding them that they are not alone and that their presence still matters deeply in this world.

Chapter III - The Edge

A Brush with Death

High on the side of a mountain, I came face to face with mortality — but what terrified me most was not death. It was the possibility of fully inhabiting my own life. This essay explores fear, dissociation, risk and the strange clarity that emerges when survival strips away distraction. The mountain became a mirror for the deeper edge I had been standing on all along: the choice between self-protection and aliveness.

Rites of Initiation

This essay explores the role of initiation in healing, masculinity and transformation. Through mountains, collapse, pain, discipline and embodied practice, I reflect on what happens when life itself becomes the rite of passage we were never given. At its heart, this piece is about reclaiming strength without domination, learning to face fear without abandoning sensitivity and discovering that real transformation is not self-improvement — it is the slow integration of courage, grief, responsibility and love.

Deconditioning Everything I Was

Rock bottom was my altar. A broken spine became my teacher. In the ashes of exhaustion, I found ignition. This is the story of how I stopped trying to heal into safety and started living into power — how the man who once begged not to wake up learned to walk, dance, build and burn again. It’s not about crawling out of the cave; it’s about launching from it like a rocket. This is the moment my life stopped being a trauma narrative and became a myth in motion.

Chapter IV - The Return

The Eye of the Mountain

On a vision quest in the wilderness, stripped of distraction, certainty and comfort, I encountered a symbol that would come to guide my life: the eye of the mountain. This essay explores initiation, silence, fear, hunger and the search for meaning after collapse. It is a story about discovering that suffering is not random — and that transformation begins when we learn to see ourselves as part of a larger unfolding.

Frozen Scream

This is one of my most revealing pieces, a descent into preverbal trauma, terror and helplessness. It shows what happens when we finally stay present with that pain instead of abandoning it again. It’s about love meeting the oldest wound.

Chapter V - Towards Relationship

Performance Won’t Earn Belonging

For most of my life, I believed love had to be earned through usefulness, insight, achievement or emotional performance. This essay traces how trauma transformed connection into a survival strategy — and how the very adaptations meant to secure belonging ended up hiding me from others. It’s about the exhausting search for worth, and the liberating realization that relationship cannot be built through performance.

The Practice of Imperfection

Perfectionism once felt necessary for survival. Mistakes meant danger, rejection, humiliation. In this piece, I explore how trauma turns self-expression into self-surveillance — and how healing begins when we allow ourselves to be unfinished, awkward, visible and real. This is an essay about reclaiming play, humanity and softness after a lifetime of trying to get everything right.

The Practice of Being Seen

For years, I thought being extraordinary would finally make me visible. But performance can create admiration without contact. This essay explores the painful difference between being seen and being known and the ways trauma teaches us to substitute authenticity with emotional performance. At its core, this is a story about learning to stop hiding behind depth, insight and transformation — and discovering the courage to simply exist in relationship.

Chapter VI - Towards Participation

Crossing the Desert

Healing the wound is one thing. Learning how to live without organizing your identity around the wound is another entirely. This essay explores the strange emptiness that follows healing — when urgency fades, old coping mechanisms dissolve and the familiar desert of suffering no longer defines you. It is a story about relinquishing rescue fantasies, stepping beyond trauma identity and slowly learning how to participate in ordinary life again.

The Tragedy of My Life

This piece explores the split at the center of trauma: the hurt child frozen in terror and the protector who learns to prevent pain at any cost. I trace how early abuse shaped my nervous system into patterns of freezing, fawning and disconnection — and how the longing for contact survived beneath it all. At its heart, this is a story about the tragedy of protection becoming imprisonment and the slow thawing that becomes possible through warmth, safety and relationship.

I survived by disconnecting from myself and healed by risking connection again.