Pain to Purpose: My Truth About My Family

My Pain to Purpose This is not a Facebook post anymore. What I shared publicly was only part of the story. This is the deeper truth behind it — the childhood, the family relationships, the silence, the anger, the faith struggle, the people who hurt me, the people who loved me, and the reasons I am finally able to turn pain into purpose. Blood relatives on BOTH my maternal and paternal sides get angry with me whenever I speak openly about the treatment I’ve received and endured from people who call themselves my “family.” But everybody wants to react to me speaking. Nobody wants to be honest about WHY I have something to speak about. On both sides of my family, people have been able to find me on social media. On both sides, people have had access to my phone number. I have never been impossible to locate. So in my 33+ years of life, I have questions. How many calls did I receive simply because somebody wanted to check on me? How many texts? Holidays? Celebrations? Family gatherings? Invitations? Birthdays? How many times did somebody get in their car and come visit ME? For years, I was the one traveling. I was the one reaching out. I was the one trying. That one-sidedness is part of my story. And it started early. My biological father was absent. I grew up knowing that drugs and the streets were repeatedly chosen over being present in my life. I remember my mother BEGGING my father to just come pick me up. Not asking him to move mountains. Come get your son. Spend time with him. Be his father. I remember the promises. I remember believing them. And I remember sitting by the front door. Waiting. And waiting. And waiting. Thinking maybe every car I heard was him. Thinking, “He’s just late.” Until eventually I realized he wasn’t coming. Again. A child does not understand every adult excuse. A child understands, “My daddy said he was coming.” I fucking lived that. Nobody needed to teach me disappointment. Every broken promise did that. There is another part of this history I refuse to let anybody rewrite. My biological father gave up his parental rights to me. For years, there was a written letter to the judge that I personally had to look at. I saw it. I read it. I knew what it represented. I remember case workers visiting me as a child and asking me about the relationship between me and my father. Nobody coerced SHIT. Nobody forced me to say a damn thing. Nobody put words in my mouth. I had eyes. I had ears. I had memories. I knew whether my father was showing up. I knew when promises were broken. I knew when I was sitting by that fucking door waiting. Nobody needed to convince me that my father was absent. His absence did that. And absence was not the only thing I remember. I WAS THERE. I was a child, but I was not blind. I witnessed the way my biological father treated my mother, including what I experienced as abuse toward her. I saw my biological mother and father fight in front of my own eyes. Some of the memories that stayed with me most strongly were from periods when my father was using cocaine. Maybe people thought I was too young to understand. I wasn’t too young to know something was wrong. I wasn’t too young to feel fear. I wasn’t too young to remember. There was a child there first. A child waiting by a door. A child watching promises break. A child talking to case workers about a relationship he was actually living. A child seeing a court letter involving his own father. A child witnessing conflict between his parents. A child watching his mother endure things he could not stop. And then somehow I was supposed to go to school and act normal. But home did not become easier when my biological father was no longer the primary father figure in it. Then there was my stepfather, Gurth Bryan. He was married to my mother for more than 20 years. This was not somebody who briefly passed through my childhood. He occupied a major part of my home and upbringing. During those years, I experienced verbal, physical, and emotional abuse from him. But saying those three words alone does not explain what that environment did to me. He made me feel horrible for even trying to ask for help. I learned that reaching out could have consequences. I learned that vulnerability did not feel safe. I learned that if I needed comfort, that need itself could become another source of torment. And one of the most painful parts was feeling like I was not even allowed normal affection with my own mother. Wanting closeness with my mother should have been one of the safest things in the world. Instead, I experienced torment and abuse around that closeness. I felt hated for wanting affection from my own mother. I felt like I could not simply have a good, comfortable relationship with her. His emotional coldness and volatility made me feel extremely disconnected. I was not allowed to cry growing up. I did not feel allowed to show ANY emotion. If I showed emotion, it could feel like there was HELL to pay. So I learned to swallow it. Hide it. Disconnect from it. Tears felt dangerous. Vulnerability felt dangerous. Asking for help felt dangerous. Even affection could feel dangerous. And then people wondered why I was quiet. People wondered why I was guarded. People wondered why I was angry. That turmoil followed me straight into school. Teachers did not necessarily know. Other students did not know. People saw a quiet kid who stayed to himself. And yeah, sometimes they saw somebody who was ANGRY. Because I was. I was fucking angry. I was not walking into school every morning with nothing happening in my life and randomly deciding to have an attitude. I was walking through those doors already carrying everything from home. I was quiet because I did not have a safe space where I felt I could explain it. And I was angry because sometimes I just wanted to be LEFT THE FUCK ALONE. I wanted a fucking breath. I wanted somewhere nobody was harassing me, picking at me, trying me, misunderstanding me, or demanding something else from me. Sometimes I just wanted to exist without somebody fucking with me. People were not encountering me at zero. They were encountering a kid who was already exhausted, hurt, confused, frustrated, guarded, and angry. So sometimes my entire mood probably screamed: PLEASE. JUST. LEAVE. ME. THE. FUCK. ALONE. Not because I hated everybody. Because sometimes being alone felt like the only place nobody could add anything else to what I was already carrying. People could see the reaction. They could not see what came before it. Sometimes the quiet kid is not simply quiet. Sometimes the angry kid is not simply bad. Sometimes anger is what hurt looks like when a child has nowhere safe to put it. When I look back at that kid now, I do not see some problem child. I see a fucking exhausted child who wanted peace and did not know where he was supposed to find it. And there is something I need my mother to understand. Mom, you do not have to carry everybody else’s accountability. You spent years feeling like you had to be both my mother AND my father. You should not have had to. You cannot be responsible for the decisions my biological father made. You cannot be responsible for relatives who chose not to call, visit, or build relationships with me. You cannot go backward and erase what I witnessed. You cannot go backward and change everything that happened during a marriage that lasted more than 20 years. I remember you trying to get my father to spend time with me. I remember you begging him to pick me up. I remember you wanting me to have that relationship. And I remember waiting. His absence was not your failure. I know who stayed. I know who raised me. I know who kept trying. And I also know what unconditional family love actually feels like because I HAVE experienced it. Ryan — my big bro. Aunt Miriam. Uncle Damon. My Grandpa Jerry, who passed in ’04. Those were people whose love I did not have to constantly question. I did not have to chase them to convince myself I mattered. Their love was something I could FEEL. And unfortunately, so many of them are no longer here. But losing them also made something painfully clear: Blood can tell me how somebody is related to me. Blood cannot tell me whether somebody treated me like family. Because some of the people who have shown me the greatest examples of family do not share my blood. Momma Rhonda. Alicia Chapman and her family. I can think of moments when they showed up for me when I could barely show up for myself. They did not need shared DNA. They simply SHOWED UP. And then I found another family somewhere I honestly was not sure I would ever be able to find one. Church. Mt. Pisgah. Pastor Lonnie Anderson Jr. and Yvette Breckenridge welcomed me with open arms and have continued showing me love. That matters more than some people will ever understand. Because for YEARS, I struggled with faith. I could not understand why some of the people hurting me the most were also people professing so loudly to be Christians. That contradiction fucked with me. How am I supposed to understand the love of God when some people telling me about God’s love are causing me pain? How am I supposed to understand grace, compassion, forgiveness, family, and unconditional love when some people using those words are not showing those things to me? Especially because of what I experienced surrounding my grandfather Joseph and people on my father’s side, I struggled to separate Christianity from the behavior of Christians who hurt me. Eventually I realized something: Maybe part of my struggle was not whether I could believe in God. Maybe part of my struggle was whether I could trust people who told me THEY believed in God. There is a HUGE fucking difference. Mt. Pisgah gave me another example. Pastor Lonnie, Yvette, and my church family did not erase my past. They showed me love through ACTION. They helped me begin separating the failures of people from the faith those people claimed to represent. There is something powerful about people helping you heal something they did not fucking break. And that brings me to my late grandfather Joseph. His death does not erase my experience with him. For years, I experienced his behavior toward me as verbally and emotionally abusive, especially behind closed doors. I experienced lies, denial, and a relationship that repeatedly hurt me. And illness made the one-sidedness of that relationship even harder for me to ignore. I am currently battling cancer for the second time. The first time, I battled leukemia. This time, I am battling kidney cancer. During periods when I was sick, I could still go to my grandfather’s house feeling terrible, even vomiting, and I was still the one checking on him. I drove to him. I visited him. I made the effort. And I cannot remember him returning that effort to me. I do not remember him making visiting me a priority. I do not remember him consistently checking on me because I was sick. Once again, it felt one-sided. Then he was diagnosed with cancer and was dying, and suddenly everybody was expected to visit him. And part of me kept asking: WHY? Where was that urgency when other people needed him? Where was that effort when I needed him? Why were people expected to show up at the end for somebody who, in my experience, repeatedly refused to show up for us? There are also parts of our family history I refuse to pretend did not happen. My experience was that my grandfather repeatedly denied or obscured parts of his own family history, including his relationships to Uncle Damon, Aunt Lynn, and Aunt Allison. I remember paternity being denied and family relationships being treated like they could be erased. Uncle Damon was his son and my uncle. When Damon was going through cancer, I remember Damon wanting his father to visit him. In my experience, my grandfather still would not show up. And when Uncle Damon died, my grandfather did not attend his funeral. When my big bro Ryan died, I also remember my grandfather not attending his funeral. Those absences mattered to me. My Aunt Miriam is another part of this story. My understanding of her childhood and her relationship with my grandfather is that she carried deep emotional wounds connected to how she was treated growing up. I watched what I experienced as my grandfather refusing to take accountability for the harm she associated with that upbringing and denying that he had been abusive. That denial was painfully familiar because I experienced him as verbally and emotionally abusive toward me too, especially behind closed doors. I know what was said to me. I know how those interactions made me feel. I know the difference between the version of somebody everybody else sees and the version you experience when nobody else is around. I also watched him give his wife Renee love and attention that, from my perspective, he often refused to extend to the family he created. It felt like there was a huge divide between our family and Renee’s family. Those worlds never felt truly interwoven to me. And after years of all of that, this is the part some people may be most uncomfortable hearing: When my grandfather died, part of what I felt was relief. Not celebration. Relief. Relief that I no longer had to wonder what lie was coming next. Relief that I no longer had to prepare myself for another hurtful interaction. Relief that I no longer had to keep trying to earn something from a relationship that had already taken so much out of me. No more abuse from that relationship. No more lies from that relationship. No more hoping maybe this time it would somehow become different. Death does not automatically rewrite history. It does not turn lies into truth. It does not erase hurt. If somebody else had a wonderful relationship with my grandfather, that is their experience. They are entitled to it. But their experience does not erase mine. I can grieve the grandfather I wish I had while acknowledging the grandfather I actually experienced. I can mourn what could have been while also recognizing relief that a painful relationship can no longer continue in the same way. Both can be true. And that is where all of this brings me today. I am not “going through something.” I am finally giving words to things I spent years swallowing. I am finally understanding why that child was quiet. Why he was angry. Why he was guarded. Why affection could feel complicated. Why asking for help could feel terrifying. Why faith became difficult. Why blood alone stopped being enough for me to call somebody family. I was there. I remember. I lived it. My biological father’s absence affected me. Waiting by that door affected me. The broken promises affected me. The court letter and case workers became part of my childhood. What I witnessed between my biological parents affected me. What I experienced from my stepfather affected the way I understood emotion, affection, safety, vulnerability, and asking for help. Being misunderstood at school affected me. The one-sided relationships on both sides of my family affected me. My relationship with my grandfather affected me. The contradictions I saw between professed Christianity and the way some people treated me affected my faith. But the people who actually loved me affected me too. My mother stayed. Ryan loved me. Aunt Miriam loved me. Uncle Damon loved me. Grandpa Jerry loved me. Momma Rhonda showed up. Alicia Chapman and her family showed up. Pastor Lonnie Anderson Jr., Yvette Breckenridge, and my Mt. Pisgah church family showed me another kind of love. And that matters because this story is not only about who hurt me. It is about who showed me what love was supposed to feel like. It is about learning that family is not merely blood. Family is effort. Family is presence. Family is consistency. Family is accountability. Family is making somebody feel safe enough to cry. Safe enough to ask for help. Safe enough to show emotion. Safe enough to love. And safe enough to be loved. I am done confusing blood with loyalty. I am done confusing silence with respect. I am done confusing pretending with healing. I am done allowing somebody else’s profession of Christianity to outweigh the way they actually treated me. I am done protecting a version of “family” that did not protect me. And I am done carrying everybody else’s comfort at the expense of telling the truth about my own life. This is not revenge. This is not me waking up one morning angry and deciding to attack people. This is me taking ownership of my own story. This is me taking everything that once made me feel voiceless and finally putting words to it. This is my pain becoming purpose. For years, other people’s decisions helped shape my silence. They do not get to shape what I do with my voice now. I know who showed up. I know who did not. I know who loved me. I know who made me question whether I was loved. I know who talked about love. And I know who actually SHOWED it. Sometimes the family you spend your entire life looking for is not necessarily the family whose blood runs through your veins. Sometimes it is the people who finally make you realize: This is what being loved was supposed to feel like all along. I am telling my truth because it is mine to tell. I was there. I remember. I lived it. And after spending so much of my life carrying things in silence, I can finally say: I’m free. And now I’m turning the pain into purpose.