When Danger Becomes Your Identity

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I did not grow up with a normal playground.

I had rivers, cliffs, cables, caves, rope swings, broken bones, and just enough freedom to

turn every bad idea into a full-scale experiment.

By the late 1980s, we were living around Horse Creek, California, and my world had

expanded far beyond the backyard on 33rd Street. Everything felt bigger up there. The

trees were taller. The rivers ran colder and faster. The caves went deeper into the dark.

Even the consequences felt sharper.

And honestly?

I loved it.

That is the part I can admit now without pretending otherwise. I loved the edge of things. I

loved the feeling of almost losing control and somehow pulling it back at the last second.

In Chapter 12 of After the Trident, I write, “Every kid tests limits. I tested gravity, darkness,

fear, and fracture.”

That was not me trying to sound dramatic. That was just my life.

At the time, I thought I was being tough. Creative. Fearless. Resourceful. But looking back

now, I can see something else was happening underneath all of it.

Danger was becoming part of who I thought I was.

I worked constantly up there.

I shoveled gravel at Quigley’s General Store. Split cords of firewood. Dug irrigation

trenches into rocky mountainsides. Climbed roofs to line up satellite dishes. If somebody

near the river needed labor, I usually found my way into the job.

My body hurt all the time.

But it was the good kind of sore. The kind that made me feel capable. Like I could survive

hard things. Like I could outwork whatever life threw at me.

Work gave me one kind of pride.

Scheming gave me another.

I started caretaking summer homes for wealthy people who only came through a few

months out of the year. They would leave me lists: stack firewood, clean the kitchen, prep

the house for winter. I did those things. But I also padded invoices. Added repairs that were

never needed. Charged extra labor. Built believable stories around the number I wanted to

make.

If I wanted sixty bucks, I found a way to make the paperwork say sixty bucks.

And the strange part is, I never really felt like a criminal.

I felt clever.

Like I had figured something out other people had missed.

Every fake charge, every inflated invoice, every little manipulation gave me this weird shot

of pride and control. Like I had bent reality just enough to make life work in my favor.

That should have bothered me more than it did.

Not long after we moved to the Klamath area, I was out in the river practicing treading

water when my little sister Maria floated by on a kickboard.

She lost her grip and grabbed onto me.

We both went under.

I still remember the panic of it. Her weight pulling me down. My lungs burning. The river

swallowing sound. And this absurd thought flashing through my head: I cannot believe my

little sister is going to kill me.

Then everything went black.

A camper on the bank saw us struggling, dove in, and pulled us out.

That was the first time I almost drowned.

For most people, an experience like that probably creates caution.

For me, it created obsession.

I wanted to master the water after that. I started practicing holding my breath longer,

swimming deeper, forcing myself to stay calm when my body wanted to panic.

That became a pattern in my life.

Something scares me almost to death, and instead of backing away, I move closer to it. I

study it. I try to dominate it. I try to prove I can survive it.

At the time, I thought that was courage.

Sometimes it was.

But sometimes it was just compulsion wearing courage’s face.

The river almost got me again one winter.

There was snow on the ground, and the current was running hard and fast. So naturally, I

decided it would be a good time to test a homemade raft built from empty milk cartons

zip-tied to a sheet of plywood.

Boots. Gloves. Heavy coat. Rope tied to shore.

Perfect plan.

At first, it actually floated.

Then the river surged, the plywood twisted, the rope snapped loose, and I flipped straight

into the freezing current.

The winter gear dragged me under immediately.

I remember fighting the current, trying to claw my way toward shore, freezing so badly my

body barely wanted to move. By the time I crawled onto the opposite bank, I was miles

from home and shaking uncontrollably.

When my dad finally picked me up, I was nearly frozen through.

He did not yell at me.

He did not need to.

I had already suffered enough.

But even then, I did not really learn the lesson most people would have learned.

I did not think, Never do that again.

I thought, Next time, figure out how to survive it better.

That tells you a lot about who I was becoming.

The rope swings up north were on another level entirely.

We tied ropes to trees all over Horse Creek. Some swung out over the river. Some swung

over roads. Some launched from ridiculous heights that would make any sane adult shut

the whole thing down immediately.

One swing arced over Highway 96.

Another launched you so high over the valley floor it felt like flying for a few seconds before

gravity remembered your name.

Then Noah and I built the zip line.

We found a logging rig on the next mountain over and stole hundreds of feet of thick cable

using bolt cutters from my dad’s garage. We dragged it over the ridge, strung it between

massive pine trees, rigged a pulley system, and turned the mountain into our own personal

death trap.

No harness.

No safety system.

No backup plan.

You grabbed the rope and let gravity rip you downhill through the trees. At the end, the

momentum launched you out over the valley.

If you let go too late, you smashed into the tree.

Too early, you hit the rocks.

That was our version of recreation.

Other kids had coaches, uniforms, referees, and practice schedules.

I had the entire forest and the brain of a kid who genuinely enjoyed figuring out how far

things could go before they broke.

Including myself.

At one point, I tried to swing from one rope to another like Tarzan.

I almost made it.

The second rope snapped across my hands, I lost control, and I woke up later with both

arms broken and casts running up to my shoulders.

A few weeks later, I cut the casts off myself and climbed right back up.

That probably tells you everything.

Pain never registered to me the way it should have.

Pain made me feel real.

Fear sharpened everything.

Danger forced me fully into the moment.

And that feeling—being completely present because your survival depended on it—became

addictive.

That is really what Chapter 12 is about for me.

Not rope swings.

Not rivers.

Not caves.

Not broken bones.

It was about chasing the feeling of being fully awake.

And the more alive I felt near the edge, the more I started needing the edge to feel alive at

all.

About ninety minutes north of our house were the Pluto Caves near Mount Shasta. Lava

tubes. Pitch black. Freezing cold. Tight crawlspaces that got narrower the deeper you went.

We loved them.

We always brought three light sources because you never trusted just one. Flashlights.

Matches. Chemlights.

We would crawl deeper and deeper into those tunnels until we could not go any farther.

Then we would shut off all the lights and just sit there in total darkness.

No sound except breathing and heartbeat.

And I loved that feeling.

No one could get to you down there.

One time, Noah and I brought two friends. One of them got stuck in a narrow section and

started panicking. He could not move forward or backward. Full claustrophobic meltdown.

And I remember being strangely calm.

While he panicked, my brain slowed down and focused.

I worked the problem.

Eventually, I crawled around him, braced myself against the cave wall, and slowly forced

him free.

He came out scraped up and crying.

And afterward, what stayed with me was not the fear.

It was the realization that I liked being the person who stayed calm while everybody else

lost it.

That identity started becoming important to me.

Looking back now through the lens of the Holistic Change Model, I can see this chapter

differently.

This was no longer just behavior.

This was identity being reinforced.

People reacted to me as the fearless one. The one who could handle pressure. The one who

would try anything. The one who stayed calm. The one who went farther than everybody

else.

And when the world keeps reflecting that image back to you, eventually it stops feeling like

behavior.

It starts feeling like truth.

That is the danger.

Because once intensity becomes part of your identity, calm can start feeling foreign. Even

unsafe.

You stop asking whether the pattern is healthy because the pattern feels like proof of who

you are.

Proof that you are tough.

Proof that you are different.

Proof that fear does not apply to you the same way it applies to everyone else.

But sometimes what feels like proof is really just repetition.

Maybe your story looks nothing like mine.

Maybe you never crawled through caves or launched yourself over valleys on homemade

zip lines.

Probably for the best.

But maybe you still know what it feels like to build your identity around intensity.

Maybe you are the person everyone calls during emergencies.

Maybe you are calm in chaos but restless in peace.

Maybe you keep yourself overloaded because slowing down feels uncomfortable.

Maybe conflict sharpens you.

Maybe pressure wakes you up.

Maybe danger, stress, urgency, or drama have become the only things that make you feel

fully present.

If that sounds familiar, I want you to hear this clearly:

You are not broken because intensity feels normal to you.

But there comes a point where you have to ask whether the thing making you feel alive is

also slowly exhausting you.

Here is what I know now.

Hard work can build character, but pain should not be the only way you know you are alive.

Being calm under pressure is useful, but if pressure is the only place you feel comfortable,

that deserves attention.

Danger can make you present, but it can also trap you in a cycle where ordinary life starts

feeling emotionally flat.

And identity is tricky. Sometimes the world applauds patterns that are quietly destroying

you.

That kid in Horse Creek was not trying to ruin his life.

He was working hard. Building things. Chasing adrenaline. Freezing in rivers. Flying

through forests. Crawling through darkness. Trying to feel something real in a world that

often felt numb.

That is why I wrote After the Trident.

Because before we can change the patterns that hurt us, we have to understand what those

patterns once gave us.

Mine gave me presence.

They gave me recognition.

They gave me the feeling that I was tough, capable, and hard to break.

For a long time, that felt like proof.

But real proof came later.

When I finally learned I did not need to stand at the edge of disaster just to feel alive.