I've been having these conversations my whole life. Before I had any framework for it, I was the person people told things to. The one who saw the gap between what their life looked like and what they actually wanted. The one who stayed present when it got hard. I was never quite inside any group — always at the edge, watching. That outside position, which felt like a disadvantage for most of my life, was where the clarity came from.
I spent a decade in software engineering. I was good at it — graduated first in LSU's College of Engineering, built products, led teams, became VP of Engineering. My focus started with bugs: finding them, fixing them, preventing them. Then it shifted to the process that produced the bugs. Then it shifted again to the people who wrote them. Each step moved closer to the actual problem. When I finally focused on the gap between who someone was and how they were living, the results multiplied. The name isn't a metaphor. It's the career arc.
Despite how well it went, something didn't quite fit. I didn't have a name for what was missing — only the sense that it was. So I wandered, even as I kept working.
I had already served a two-year mission, learning Spanish on the streets of Los Angeles. So, I spent years in and out of South America — Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay — living out of a carry-on, picking up Portuguese, some Italian along the way. I met people in the worst situations a person can face. Language was the first tool. What I learned there wasn't a technique — it was the difference between fixing a problem and seeing the person who has it.
I see the gap between who someone is and how they're living. I use their own language as the mirror. I see it before they know it exists. That's the gift — and I've been carrying it since before I had a word for it. For years I applied it outward, but only where it wasn't threatening to the person I wanted to be. When I finally stopped controlling where it could go, it cost me. Most people I sit across from are in the middle of the same payment — and haven't named it yet.
The first time I ever wrote down a dream, I got two of them.
The first one I kept. I returned to it for years — taken by what it showed me: the hollowness of a rich life without meaning, and the richness of a meaning that persists after life. I held the aspiration, but missed what it told me about where I would find it.
The second one I refused. It was a statement about what I specifically could offer the people around me: find your uniquely solvable part and help others find theirs. I had already committed to becoming an engineer. The dream jeopardized that decision — so I labeled it as wrong, or what I should not do, and clung to that rejection until the dream ceased to exist in my memory.
That was June 27, 2014. My life was on track until that instant.
For twelve years, every project I engaged with was something I could sustain for a time but not forever. Meanwhile, I kept finding myself in conversations I couldn't explain — engrossing, sometimes transformative, impossible to replicate on purpose. Every conversation was an almost. The thing I was supposed to be doing kept appearing at the edges — and I kept walking past it.
Twelve years of personal exile before day finally broke. Ideas, pivots, dead ends, restarts — every attempt at work that actually fit, every conversation that circled the same question: what am I actually for? The answer was always somewhere else. One more step. One more insight away.
On April 28, 2026, I finally opened that journal to formally review Dream 1. Beneath it was Dream 2. By then I had already restored what both dreams contained — painfully, without the maps, through twelve years of finding my way back to what had been given to me that morning. That day I found I had already been gifted both maps before I had even set out — after I'd already gone far enough into both territories, blind and bloody, to recreate the maps myself.
I know two things about lost dreams from the inside.
You can carry one your whole life — feel its pull for years — and still lose it entirely by keeping the vision and missing the instruction.
And you can refuse one so completely that it stops existing. Not buried. Gone. You don't remember there was anything to forget.
Both happened to me the same night.
The twelve years weren't empty.
I practice daily. I've traced my own wounds to their roots, processed them through my body, documented what I found. I'm still doing it.
I lost myself in decades of fiction reading. It grew darker over time — until I caught myself and asked what I was actually looking for. That question led me directly to the hardest situations in recorded history — how people survived them, and when those who did believed the price was worth it, and when they did not — and from there into psychology, philosophy, and religious thought. All of it — the fiction, the non-fiction, the years of YouTube rabbit holes — was both escape and essential preparation. Decades of consumption trained the narrative pattern recognition I rely on every day. But consuming other people's work is also a less threatening version of creating your own. The mask is very good at building that distance.
The mask doesn't go away because you've seen it. Mine still runs. My task is to notice when it's managing me. Those are the days I watch 0-5, maybe 6 lectures, podcasts, random history moments, or weird cat videos on YouTube. When I don't notice, it becomes 30 — and the content worsens over time.
Dreams were my personal door to finally show me what I was unwilling to see. But over the years I've learned many other doors to the same room. Most people are not dreamers — or do not yet know they are — but I can almost always show you what you have rejected about yourself anyway, and the shape of what it has cost you.
I am not a therapist or licensed counselor. I'm a person who has done his own work — and is still doing it — who sees what people carry without knowing it. Doing your own work is the only way to learn to see it in others. That's the credential — not a license.
I know what it looks like when an exile is the preparation, not the punishment. I was in mine for twelve years without knowing it would end. The engineer. The entrepreneur. The nomad. One by one, shed. By the time it did, everything I owned fit in a vehicle.
Yours looks different. The names you're still carrying — or quietly shedding — have their own shape. But the exile does the same work.
My questions are not comfortable. I make contact. I see. I name. I stay.
Once they risk painful honesty, people change.
Every conversation where someone sees the pattern of their own life. Every "huh" that lands when it suddenly makes sense. Every person who finally says out loud what they actually wanted all along.
At that moment — I'm living mine.
Every venture I pursued before this one failed. Every single one was a frame I built to earn permission to be what I already was. This is the one where I stopped needing permission — because I found what I actually wanted.
I live to show others the face underneath.
Whatever your own twelve years looks like — I invite you to spend them wiser than I did.
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