CHAOS FELT LIKE HOME—IT TOOK ME YEARS TO SEE IT

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Every hero has an origin story.

Mine starts in a crowded little house on 33rd Street in Normal Heights, San Diego,

sometime in the mid-1970s. It was this old Craftsman place from the 1920s sitting on the

corner of 33rd and Copley, buried behind bamboo and giant elephant-ear plants like it was

half hiding from the world and half daring you to come closer.

That house was more than a house.

It had a pulse.

It was loud and messy and alive. Beautiful one minute, terrifying the next. Full of

imagination, freedom, noise, danger, laughter, fear, and complete unpredictability.

And looking back now, I can see something I never could as a kid:

That house was shaping me long before I had the words to understand it.

In Chapter 2 of After the Trident, I wrote, “Through it all, 4902 33rd Street stood like a

fortress of contradictions…sacred, chaotic, terrifying, and full of magic. It shaped me. It

scarred me. And it still lives in my bones.”

That still feels true.

That house gave me freedom most kids never had. It gave me room to build things, break

things, climb things, test things, and figure things out the hard way.

But it also taught me something else.

It taught me that chaos was normal.

That risk was exciting.

That getting hurt was just part of the deal.

You did not stop because something hurt. You patched it up, rebuilt it, and kept going.

At the time, I thought that was strength.

Now I understand it was conditioning too.

Inside that house, there was almost no space.

Two bedrooms. One bathroom. One phone line. Too many people stacked on top of each

other. Quiet barely existed. Privacy definitely did not.

If you wanted to be alone, you found a corner or crawled under something.

We had exactly one VHS tape: The Sound of Music. We watched it so many times it became

part of the family vocabulary. We sang those songs everywhere—while brushing our teeth,

riding in the car, messing around in the kitchen. We could quote whole scenes without

thinking about it.

That movie somehow became this strange little thread of consistency running through all

the chaos.

Then there was the backyard.

Calling it a backyard almost feels dishonest. It was more like a proving ground for kids with

no fear and very little supervision.

We built three-story treehouses. My dad helped us string up tightropes between trees,

some ten feet off the ground, some closer to thirty. We had rope swings launching from

rooftops and flying over fences into neighboring yards.

Kids from school came over just to try the stuff we built.

We got hurt constantly.

The paramedics knew our address.

And still, nobody took the ropes down.

The treehouses got rebuilt every time they broke.

Pain was part of the process.

Looking back, I realize that whole environment was teaching me lessons long before I

understood I was learning them.

Danger felt normal.

Risk felt fun.

Boundaries felt flexible.

And if something collapsed, you just built it again.

Underneath the house, I dug tunnels through the crawl space.

Hideouts.

Escape routes.

Secret little passageways only I knew about.

Down there, things felt simpler. Cleaner somehow. I could make rules down there. I could

control the space. In a world that often felt loud and unpredictable, that mattered more

than I realized.

Then there was my dad’s garage.

Every woodworking tool you could imagine was sitting in there. Saws. Drills. Sanders.

Blades. Heavy equipment. No safety lectures. No hovering. No trigger guards.

The expectation was simple: figure it out.

So I did.

I learned how to cut wood. Build things. Fix things. Rig things together.

I also learned how to create chaos.

I made booby traps out of scrap metal and cable wire. I strung nets from tree limbs. I

figured out how to disable a car using a chain on the driveshaft just because I wanted to

know if I could.

Then I tested it.

It worked.

As a kid, none of this felt dark or dangerous. It felt creative. Curious. Fun. I was

experimenting with the world.

That is the strange thing about childhood: you do not realize patterns are forming while

they are forming.

You think your normal is just normal.

You do not know it is wiring itself into your nervous system.

A few blocks away was St. Didacus Catholic Elementary School.

Uniforms. Nuns with rulers. Priests swinging incense through the aisles. Religion class

every day. Mass every week. Classrooms that smelled like chalk dust and old church wood.

I sang in the choir. Walked to school with my brother and sister. Wore the uniform. Tried

to play the role.

But somewhere in me, rebellion was already waking up.

St. Didacus taught me sin and shame.

It also taught me how to push back.

By third grade, I was throwing fake rocks at teachers and getting suspended.

By fourth grade, I was flashing stolen money from my dad around school with a Richie Rich

money clip like I was some tiny mob boss.

Suspended again.

Then came fifth grade, where apparently I decided subtlety was overrated.

I poured ammonia into drinking fountains. Smeared Vaseline on stair rails. Salted every

condiment in the cafeteria. Dropped M80s into toilets.

I told one friend.

He told another.

And eventually the whole thing blew back on me.

That was the end of Catholic school.

At the time, I thought I was just being funny or rebellious or creative. But looking back, I

can see something deeper underneath it.

I was constantly testing limits.

Testing systems.

Testing consequences.

And often, the consequences never fully landed.

That matters more than people realize.

Because when consequences do not stick, risk starts feeling negotiable.

After Catholic school, my mom pulled us out completely.

She said the church had lost its way and announced she was going to homeschool us.

Except homeschooling in our house basically meant:

“Here are some books. Learn or be stupid.”

That was pretty much the curriculum.

And back then, homeschooling was not common. In the 1970s, it felt fringe, maybe even

illegal. My mom was terrified of truant officers.

That fear spread through the whole house.

If someone knocked on the door, we hit the floor.

We crawled under windows.

We stayed silent.

During the day, we became ghosts.

Fear like that gets into your system quietly. It teaches your body to stay alert even when

nothing is happening. It teaches you that being seen might be dangerous.

I remember being at a gas station once and seeing a kid my age. I started asking him math

questions just to see if I was falling behind.

That is how scared I was of being stupid.

Not struggling.

Not weird.

Stupid.

That fear pushed me harder than any teacher ever did.

Now, years later, through the lens of the Holistic Change Model, I can finally see what

Chapter 2 is really about.

This was not addiction yet.

Not collapse.

Not destruction.

This was the foundation underneath all of it.

The early wiring.

Freedom without structure.

Creativity without limits.

Intensity without calm.

Risk without real consequence.

A world where chaos felt like home.

And that matters because most of us do not suddenly become who we become overnight.

We are shaped slowly.

By repetition.

By atmosphere.

By what gets rewarded.

By what gets ignored.

By what feels familiar.

Before I ever chased drugs, adrenaline, achievement, or intensity, I was already being

shaped by an environment where intensity felt normal.

And one of the hardest truths I have ever had to face is this:

We are often drawn toward what feels familiar long before we ask whether it is healthy.

Maybe your childhood looked nothing like mine.

Maybe you did not grow up around rope swings, treehouses, Catholic school suspensions,

crawl-space tunnels, and homemade booby traps.

But maybe you still grew up in contradiction.

Love mixed with fear.

Freedom mixed with instability.

Laughter mixed with tension.

Maybe your house taught you to stay alert all the time.

Maybe you learned to read the room before you learned algebra.

Maybe you learned to become useful, funny, invisible, tough, or independent because those

were the safest roles available to you.

Maybe calm never really got reinforced in your world either.

If that is true for you, I want you to hear something clearly:

You are not broken because you have patterns.

You were shaped.

And once you start seeing how you were shaped, you can finally decide what belongs in

your future and what does not.

Here is something you can try today.

First, think about the emotional environment you grew up in. Not the polished version you

tell people at dinner parties. The real version.

Was it loud? Unpredictable? Tense? Loving? Chaotic? Lonely? Hypercritical? Unstable?

Then ask yourself this:

What felt normal in that environment that maybe was not actually healthy?

Maybe it was yelling.

Maybe it was silence.

Maybe it was hiding emotions.

Maybe it was constant pressure.

Maybe it was pretending everything was fine.

Now look at your life today and notice where those same patterns still show up.

Do you avoid stillness?

Need constant stimulation?

Push things further than necessary?

Fear slowing down?

Expect chaos?

Once you see the pattern, do not shame yourself for it.

Just notice it.

Awareness is where change starts.

One of the biggest shifts in my life has been learning how to look back at that kid on 33rd

Street without only judging him.

That kid was not trying to become self-destructive.

He was trying to survive.

Trying to belong.

Trying to create.

Trying to understand the world he had been dropped into.

That does not erase responsibility for the choices I made later.

But it does create understanding.

And understanding is where healing begins.

That house shaped me.

It scarred me.

It also gave me imagination, resilience, creativity, and grit.

Now I get to decide which parts I carry forward and which parts I finally put down.

Here is what I know now.

Childhood does not have to look tragic from the outside to shape you deeply.

Freedom without structure can feel exciting while quietly wiring you for instability.

Pain should not automatically feel normal, even if it once did.

And calm can feel uncomfortable at first simply because your nervous system is unfamiliar

with it.

That old house on 33rd Street still lives inside me.

I can still picture the trees.

Still hear The Sound of Music playing somewhere in the background.

Still smell the church wood and chalk dust.

Still feel the dirt from the crawl space on my hands.

Still remember the fear of freezing when somebody knocked at the door.

That house was sacred.

Chaotic.

Beautiful.

Terrifying.

Magic.

And it was the beginning of everything.

Not the whole story.

Just the beginning.

That is why I wrote After the Trident.

Because before we can understand what we chase, we usually have to go back and

understand where the chase first started.