THE PAGES I DONT SPEAK OF

Drawn in silence. Buried in sketchbooks. Never meant to be seen until now.

YOU WANNA SPIRAL?

KEEP READING

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHAPTER I — THE MASK

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE MASK COMES OFF?!

What would happen if everyone just stopped playing the game?

If we all collectively said,

“Actually, I don’t have to pretend I’m okay anymore.”

The world would probably fall apart.

Because once you notice the mask you wear in every room,

it gets a lot harder to keep it on.

I was raised in the high desert

on the outskirts of LA.

Little to no crime,

mostly middle-class white kids.

I talked like them, moved like them,

lived in that bubble.

But underneath that,

there was this quiet, heavy thing:

a collective belief about kids like me.

Sometimes it wasn’t even unspoken.

A kid would walk up to me on the playground and say:

“We’re not allowed to be friends with you.

My parents think you’re a bad kid.”

They’d say it casual, then run back to their game,

and I’d be the one left standing there holding the sentence.

That kind of thing doesn’t just sting in the moment.

It makes you feel radioactive.

Like everyone else got handed a future,

and you got handed a warning label.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHAPTER II — WHEN THE WORLD BREAKS

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Then my brother died.

A part of me went with him,

a piece of myself I wouldn’t find again

until my daughter was born.

Any light I had left in the world felt sucked out in the years between.

Drugs as anesthesia, not rebellion.

The story underneath all of it was simple:

“You’re not going to amount to anything.”

When enough people believe that about you,

it starts to sit in your bones.

Part of me started to believe it too.

So in this twisted way,

I got stuck on a mission to prove them right.

To get back at my dad and everyone else

by becoming exactly what they expected:

a failure.

That’s the sick part of collective consciousness:

when everyone around you is convinced you’re doomed,

you start confusing self-destruction with control.

So I wore the mask they handed me.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHAPTER III — SURVIVAL MODE

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

When I became homeless,

that older version of me died fast.

Survival doesn’t care

who you thought you were.

To steal food,

I put on the “good white kid” persona:

clean, harmless, trustworthy.

To buy drugs from a tent,

I became someone twice my age:

hard, tired, big.

Those weren’t moods.

They were masks.

And they became weapons later.

The first half of my prison sentence was rough

because I wasn’t in the know.

I didn’t understand the politics, the rules, the system.

I moved like prey

and got treated like prey.

I carried myself weak

and learned the hard way what that costs.

For about five months,

I was their “torpedo,”

the one they sent to handle

whatever needed doing.

I didn’t know my own strength

or capability until then. Safe to assume,

another mask was forged.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHAPTER IV — THE SYSTEM SHAPES YOU

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

When I got released,

I went straight into rehab

and this drug court program.

(fancy probation with extra humiliation)

Court every two weeks,

for two years straight.

Standing there, apologizing again and again:

“Yes, your honor.”

“It won’t happen again.”

Another mask was built:

the show pony.

The compliant one.

The survivor.

Underneath it,

what I was really building

was resilience.

In that program,

I landed a sales job way out of my league.

Even my probation officer told me,

“If you fail, don’t take it to heart.”

That was enough

to make me obsessed

with proving everyone wrong.

I saw success early.

Six figures my first year.

Twenty-plus thousand in a single month

closing in-home home improvement.

I was a dog

Selling 50k roofs to people who cant afford it.

That job showed me something dark:

we are all different people

depending on where we are.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHAPTER V — THE COST OF THE MASK

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

At home.

At work.

In the car, rehearsing the pitch.

Sales became about becoming

exactly who that specific homeowner

needed me to be

so they felt safe signing.

Body language, mirroring,

micro-expressions, silence, tone.

I studied all of it.

I realized how twisted the system was.

Yet I still played it better than most.

I turned 21 in rehab.

Never even been to a bar.

Then I started drinking

“Every so often.”

Here and there.

A month apart.

Every other weekend...

Drug court didn’t care about the spacing.

They terminated me.

It didn’t just hurt.

It shattered me.

Mind you,

I was a rock climber,

had money in the bank, working full time,

and was the healthiest I’d ever been.

Thinking about that version of me

makes me sick.

Thought my effort would achieve something.

Get the shiny piece of paper that says congrats you did the bare minimum!

Nope back in jail.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHAPTER VI — POWER & PARANOIA

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

But we’re forward three years

from my last sentence.

I wasn’t the same kid.

I knew the game now,

and I understood human psychology

at a level most people

honestly shouldn’t.

Inside that system, I leveled up.

I became a master courier

in the jail hierarchy.

I became “the rep,”

in charge of the white car

in Theo Lacy.

On paper, I was sitting pretty.

I was reading The 48 Laws of Power in there.

One law hit me hard:

Never outshine the master.

Another:

Always say less than necessary.

I should’ve listened.

One wrong decision

and my position was gone.

I had to either fight for it

or step down.

I can’t even fully blame them

for turning on me.

I was the only one

who never had to go to work,

making men in their 60s

get up at midnight

and grind till sunrise.

That’s the job.

It just looked insane

because I was so young.

Another mask forged:

authority, power,

and the paranoia that comes

with holding it.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHAPTER VII — THE COLLAPSE

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

When I got out again,

I stayed in the same industry,

but switching back into the

“happy young sales kid” persona got harder.

Because by then, I left

the person I had a child with. Then she started denying me the right

to see my daughter.

That kind of loss, the emptiness,

doesn’t sit quietly in the background.

I was violently depressed.

I could still smile,

but my chest hurt the whole time.

My pitch got lazy.

My energy went flat.

I became draining to talk to,

and in sales,

that’s a death sentence.

They shifted me

into a production manager role.

Comfortable schedule.

Safer position.

But my brain was stretched thin.

Too much on my plate,

not enough of me left.

I crumbled.

I couldn’t pretend

I was okay anymore.

They fired me.

That pushed me

deeper into despair.

I went back into sales again

at another company.

Gave it a few grinding months.

Same story:

I broke there too.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHAPTER VIII — RAW BREAKTHROUGH

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The moment I realized

I was done with that world

happened in one house,

one afternoon.

My little brother

had just left for college.

It hit me how much of his life

I’d missed,

how much better of a brother

I could have been.

I walked into that home

carrying all of that

and tried to do my job.

The homeowner looked at me

and simply asked,

“Are you okay?”

Something snapped.

I stepped outside,

and tears just streamed

down my face.

No script left.

No persona left.

Just raw.

I was so desperate for money

that I tried to pull myself together

and go back in,

tried to salvage the pitch.

I couldn’t.

I ended up just sitting

with that man in his house,

crying,

both of us knowing

I was too damaged

to sell him anything.

That was the last time

I ever went in-home

for that job.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHAPTER IX — THE ARTIST EMERGES

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Around that time,

I went headfirst

into my artwork.

I finally jumped.

And I’ve never felt so free.

Now I want something

bigger than a career.

I want to start a movement

away from these social costumes

we’re forced to wear

just to survive.

I want a world

where my kids are raised

in a structure

that actually supports the youth,

where we have systems

that let people process their emotions

without their whole life collapsing

the moment they admit

they’re not okay.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CHAPTER X — THE TRUTH

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

So let me say this clearly:

I am not okay.

And it is okay

to not be okay.

You are allowed to hurt.

You are allowed to cry.

You are allowed to feel deeply, hurt deeply...

why.

Humans are built

to feel deeply.

We translate our insides

into something outside of us:

paintings, poems, music, sketchbooks,

messy handwriting on ripped scrap paper...

That’s how we survive ourselves.

Create art.

Live through your art.

Don’t judge the outcome.

Don’t panic if it’s not “good enough.”

The finished piece

is almost just a side effect.

The real point

is what happens to you

during the act of creating:

the tiny, invisible ways

your brain and your heart rearrange

while the paint is still wet.

That’s the part that matters.

That’s the part

that might save your life.