Some people come up in conditions that lift them. Mine kept knocking me on my ass.

I was born into a world where survival was not an idea. It was the atmosphere. Money was tight, stress lived in the walls, and violence in the neighborhood was not something you studied from a distance. It was something you learned to move around.

Family was love and pressure in the same breath. The kitchen, the apartment, the car, the block, the schoolyard: all of it got into my body before it ever became a thought. I was not analyzing conditions. I was reacting, scanning, hiding, fighting, joking, exploding, surviving.

Elementary and middle school were rough. I was a fuck-up. Not a secretly perfect kid waiting for the right adult to unlock me. I was impulsive, angry, defensive, ashamed, behind, and hard to reach. A lot of teachers had no hope in me, and honestly, I gave them reasons.

That does not mean I was the problem in some simple moral sense. It means my nervous system, my home life, my school life, my pride, and the neighborhood were all tangled together. I did not know how to explain any of it, so I became difficult before anyone could see I was drowning.

I do not want to pretend every adult failed me or that one heroic mentor fixed the plot. That is too clean. What happened was messier. A few people, at different points, stayed in the room long enough for me to borrow structure before I had my own.

Sometimes that looked like after-school help. Sometimes it looked like someone expecting more from me than my record suggested. Sometimes it was just enough friction against the fall to make a different next move possible. Not guaranteed. Not linear. Just possible.

During my first run at Berkeley, a false accusation of sexual assault and the public story around it detonated the path I thought I was on. I lost the scholarship. I lost the future I had been rehearsing. I lost trust in rooms I once believed would hold the truth carefully.

I am not telling that part to relitigate it, and I am not using pain as a product. I am telling it because that season nearly ended me. I came close to ending my life. What kept me here was not a motivational quote. It was the concrete reality of younger siblings watching, and the unbearable thought of teaching them that collapse gets the last word.

I joined the Marine Corps at twenty because I needed to rebuild from the ground up. I needed a place where the story I had been handed could be tested against something harder than shame.

Boot camp, the fleet, the field, the brotherhood, the small moments where you find out what you do under load: all of it gave me evidence. Not that pain makes a person better. Pain can distort you. But structure, repetition, accountability, and a team gave my nervous system a different kind of order to fight inside.

I chased one of the hardest paths I could find. I failed. I tried again. I failed again. Eventually, after more preparation and a different structure around my effort, I made it through.

The lesson was not that wanting it badly enough solves everything. The lesson was more honest: discipline matters, but discipline works differently when the conditions change. The third attempt was not magic. It was scaffolding, preparation, humility, and the refusal to confuse a failed attempt with a final identity.

Berkeley was not a neat intellectual awakening. I came back older, carrying military structure into rooms full of people who had lived very different lives. Sometimes I felt sharp. Sometimes I felt out of place. Sometimes I was learning. Sometimes I was just trying not to disappear.

Social welfare, management, leadership, psychology, behavioral science, and social work did not hand me one clean explanation. They gave me fragments: person-in-environment, stress, scarcity, identity, incentives, regulation, systems, design. Over time, those fragments gave me a rougher, truer way to understand what I had been living.

Behavioral health work, human risk, AI, wellness, research, and lived experience all brought me to the same place: I care about capacity. Not hype. Not optimization theater. Capacity to regulate, choose, connect, plan, recover, trust, imagine, and act on what matters.

That is where AWI Studio, Operation Break Free, The Sh*t We Carry, Wellness Verified, and the rest of this ecosystem come from. I am building the kind of structures I needed when I was stuck: honest tools for making invisible forces visible and expanding what real freedom can actually mean.