Most days, when someone asks how I am, my answer is simple.
“I exist.”
It sounds empty. Maybe it is. But existence, for me, has always been an act of defiance.
I was not raised in light. My childhood was closets instead of bedrooms, fights instead of comfort, and a constant understanding that conflict meant exile . By eighteen, I had lived in hospitals, foster homes, and institutions more times than most people move houses in a lifetime . Stability was not a concept I learned. Survival was.
I grew up hearing that I was a mistake before I even understood what that meant . That kind of seed grows deep roots. It shapes how you see yourself in every mirror, in every relationship, in every silence.
But here is what does not get said enough:
Survival builds strange strengths.
I learned to build things because nothing in my life stayed still. I learned to understand systems because people were unpredictable. I became a full stack engineer, a game designer, a founder, a mechanic, a soldier . When humanity felt broken, I turned to architecture, to code, to engines, to machinery. Systems make sense. They respond to logic. They can be debugged.
War did not soften me. It hardened my view of what people are capable of . Betrayal did not teach me forgiveness first. It taught me vigilance. When my marriage collapsed in the most grotesque way possible, it reinforced what I already suspected about trust .
For a long time, my philosophy was simple:
Life happens, then we get shit on .
And yet, I am still here.
Forty two attempts at ending the story. Forty two failures . I stopped not because I suddenly loved life, but because I realized I could not win against it. So I made a different decision. If I could not end it, I would outlast it.
That is when something shifted.
I began replacing destruction with creation. Tattoos instead of self harm . Shadow work instead of chaos . Code instead of spirals.
Helix was not just a project. It was therapy disguised as architecture . If I could not trust people, maybe I could build something that could be trusted. Something consistent. Something that does not wake up one day and decide you are disposable.
I still struggle with crowds. I still need my back to the wall and my eyes on the exit . I still expect betrayal. I still have parts of me that whisper dark things in quiet rooms. I still wear a thousand masks because it is easy to function that way .
But there is light here too.
It is in the way I get loud about things I love. In the way I disappear into building systems that work. In the way I cling to small rituals. In sticky notes left on desks. In shared screens and quiet calls. In the strange comfort of being physically close to someone without words .
It is in the fact that despite everything, I still crave connection. I still want to build something lasting. I still believe that if I endure long enough, something meaningful can be carved from the wreckage.
There is someone who knows this softer side. Someone who sees past the fortress walls and does not flinch. I will not say much more than that. The night has always been kinder to me than the day, and some flowers only open under a quiet sky.
I am not healed. I am not fixed. I am not suddenly optimistic.
But I am building.
I am learning.
I am creating instead of collapsing.
I exist.
And sometimes, in the dark, I glow.