The Places That Made Me

Places and seasons

I was born in Wichita, Kansas, under flat gray skies where the horizon never pretends to be anything other than unbroken wheat, power lines, and pale limestone. The landscape is austere enough to make small changes feel consequential. A storm building fifty miles away is visible before it arrives. Winter strips everything down. Summer bleaches the ground. Distance becomes part of the atmosphere.

When I was small, my family moved to Slidell, Louisiana. The open prairie gave way to thick humidity, moss, Gulf air, and water everywhere. Kansas was exposure; Louisiana was enclosure. One place taught me to look outward across distance. The other taught me that a landscape could press close around you.

We returned to Wichita by the time I was ten. Moving back at that age permanently shaped how I perceive time. Kansas does not offer eternal spring or easy warmth. It forces you to witness the four seasons in their absolute brutality and beauty: the biting cold of January when frost sits deep in the soil, the violently green thundershowers of May, the baking dry heat of August afternoons, and the quiet amber turn of October.

Nothing stays.
Everything returns.

In our household, certain expectations were not open for negotiation. Being on time was not simply a courtesy. It was proof that someone else’s life had value to you. Showing up when you promised mattered. Being present when spoken to mattered. Looking people in the eye mattered. More than that, I was taught to say what I actually felt instead of reaching for whatever smooth answer made the room comfortable. Convenient lies rot a house from the floorboards up. Hard truths hurt, but avoidance usually hurts longer.

I did not always live up to those expectations. In some ways, my adult life has been one long confrontation with the distance between the standards I inherited and my ability to meet them consistently. But those standards remained. They became the floor I kept trying to find again.

Learning to understand myself

As a child, I was an avid and voracious reader, constantly pulling worlds out of paper because the world around me could feel too flat, too quiet, or suddenly too loud and cruel. I built elaborate pretend scenarios and fantasy worlds. Imagination made the horizon feel less fixed. It also gave me somewhere to go before I had language for what made me feel different.

I was awkward, flamboyant, stubborn, hard-headed, and desperately insecure. I was a queer kid in the center of the country trying to make sense of myself before I had the tools to do it. Even when I screwed up, I wanted badly to make things right. That impulse has survived every version of me, including the versions that caused real harm and the versions convinced they could never change.

The turning points in my life did not arrive as polite nudges. They arrived as fractures that required total reconstruction.

One fracture was diagnosis. In my early twenties, Bipolar II and ADHD gave clinical names to patterns I had spent years experiencing without explanation: a mind that could accelerate into hyperfocus or collapse into exhaustion, a working memory that could lose a thought mid-sentence, and a nervous system that seemed to alternate between too much and nothing at all. Diagnosis did not solve the problem. It gave me a map, then left me to learn the terrain.

Another fracture was the loss of my grandmother, my Meece. She was a backbone of the family and a constant presence in a life that had often felt tumultuous and in motion. Her death introduced a kind of grief that did not feel dramatic so much as structural. The world continued, but one of its load-bearing walls was gone. Years later, a conversation about no longer remembering a grandmother’s voice brought that grief back with full force. It also sharpened something I already knew: every ordinary moment with the people we love is temporary, and therefore priceless.

Building a life together

The largest pivot began with my decision to enlist.

The military tore me out of Kansas and brought me to Texas, then to San Antonio, where my life cracked open. My service took root there. I met my husband there. I received my diagnoses and eventually my medical retirement there. Even though my military career was cut short, enlistment changed the entire route of my life. It unlocked the GI Bill, brought me through community college and eventually to the University of Texas at Dallas to study Public Affairs, and carried us north to Dallas.

San Antonio is where the future stopped being abstract. It became a person, a household, and a set of commitments. Marriage taught me to become a better man, sometimes through tenderness and sometimes through the painful discovery that good intentions are not the same as reliable action. Love required more than intensity. It required presence, follow-through, honesty, repair, and the willingness to see another person’s internal world even when my own mind was loud.

Dallas became the place where that lesson kept repeating. It has held school, financial strain, recovery, relapse, therapy, routine, failure, and restart. It has held periods when my executive function felt nearly unusable and periods when a clean apartment, completed assignment, or sober week proved that movement was still possible. It has also held ordinary happiness: errands together, walks in the park, cleaning while a record plays, new patio furniture, plants repotted, home-cooked meals, and quiet time in bed when nothing needed to be solved.

Our life has never been only one thing. It has been connected and turbulent. Both can be true.

Returning and remembering

Sobriety belongs in this story too, not as a completed triumph but as repeated evidence that change is real, difficult, and rarely linear. There have been stretches of clarity, relapses, promises, broken promises, and renewed attempts. The most useful principle to emerge has been reflection over perfection. Shame can identify a problem, but it cannot build a stable life. Change requires honesty about what happened, a concrete next action, and enough grace to try again without pretending the failure did not matter.

Home now is my husband first, then our boys: George, our dachshund, and Alfie, our corgi. It is the patio plants I water after waking up. It is holidays at home or with family. It is migas, picadillo, skillet tortillas, lemon chicken, pasta bowls, and the relief of a clean kitchen. It is coming back from Wichita after a tiring family trip, unpacking, doing the essential chores, and bonding with the dogs because being home feels different after being away.

Life often returns to the same beautiful smaller scenes. Cooking dinner together. Cleaning the apartment. Falling asleep beside each other. A trip that is exhausting but still worth taking. Walter making the house feel like a home. My mother visiting Dallas, going thrifting with us, bringing family photographs, and buying me a watercolor as an early birthday present. These moments do not look like turning points when they happen. They become the substance of the life the turning points made possible.

That is also why this archive exists.

My memory does not always preserve life as a continuous personal story. Details disappear. Emotional states replace timelines. Photographs and journal entries can feel like artifacts from somebody else’s life. Writing is not merely self-expression. It is external continuity. It is evidence that the day happened, that the person in it was me, and that all these versions belong to one life.

I got here through luck, damage, love, diagnosis, service, and the consequences of my own choices. I also got here through hard work and sheer determination to become better. To look twice. To look inward. To see my faults without deciding that my faults are the whole person. To recognize that perfection does not exist, responsibility still matters, and grace does not require denial.

A sentence I wrote to myself this month has become the clearest summary I have:

I should never forget my capacity for real change, no matter how impossible it may seem.

The record proves that I have changed before. The record also proves that change has never been clean. Wichita taught me that seasons are brutal, visible, and temporary. Slidell taught me that the atmosphere can change completely. San Antonio taught me that one decision can open an entirely different life. Dallas has taught me that reconstruction happens in ordinary rooms through ordinary actions, long after the dramatic fracture is over.

Nothing stays.

Everything returns.

The question is what I do when it does and so I try to make every moment count.