The sun had already begun to set when I heard the voice outside my door. I had been expecting someone, a new friend. So, I had my door open a bit.

"Where’s Bruce?"

I stepped out into the dim hallway to find a woman on the stairway leading to the second floor staring up one of the fellow tenants named Danny who lived upstairs.

Without hesitation, I answered, "I’m Bruce."… instantly realizing that this was not the person I was expecting. This was a white woman and my friend that I was expecting was black as was my girlfriend who might not have known which apartment I had been in - I had changed apartment rooms.

Before I could process what was happening, she stormed past me, into my room, slamming the door behind her and locking it.

We were alone.

Then she attacked.

Her fists crashed into my face with terrifying speed and force. My glasses flew off. I stumbled backward onto the couch, blood pouring from my nose and from cuts to my cheeks, filling my mouth with the sharp taste of iron.

For a brief moment we were separated and then she screamed, "Why do you keep calling me?!"

Through the haze of pain and shock, I managed to ask with utter incredulity : "Who are you?"

Outside, I could hear muffled voices—other tenants, witnesses. Yet, the violence continued. I didn’t fight back. I just wanted to survive. Plus, I was programmed not to not hit females… but then again, I had NEVER been physically attacked in my entire life by anyone of any gender.

Adrenaline took over as I dragged her to the door, my hands slick with blood. I had a few brief moments in the chaos to wipe my hand across my face. My hand smeared blood on the door and I left a bloody thumbprint on the doorframe as I tried to steady myself.

I fumbled with the lock, forcing the door open, pulling her out. I was actually worried about hurting her!

But she tried to force her way back in.

I slammed the door shut. Locked it. My heart pounded. What the hell just happened?

With shaking hands, I dialed 911.

"We are sending the police."

I refused paramedics—I needed the police to see my injuries, to understand the brutality of what had just happened… to get photographs of just how brutal this attack was.

Joachim, just another tenant, told me to go look at myself in the mirror.

Looking in the mirror, I had in utter disbelief at the extent to which I had been bleeding. Not only was I bleeding from my nose but I could long cuts across both cheeks and a bloody swollen mouth.

It was October 1, 2004 and a warm day. I had blood on my face, blood covered my dark green shirt, my light colored shorts, my socks and my sneakers.

As I spoke to others, Joachim asked, “So you don’t know her from Adam?”

“No, I have no idea who she  is.” Looking around, no one seemed to have any idea as to her identity.

When the officers arrived, I was still covered in blood. They listened as I described the bizarre incident that had just occurred. They questioned the witnesses.

I insisted they take photos of my injuries before treating me.

Then just as they were about to leave and I was resigned to the idea that they would probably never find out who had done this to me, I heard a phone ringing. It was not my phone. Behind a pile of books, I noticed a phone—her phone. She must have lost it during the assault.

I handed it to the officers.

"Maybe this will tell you who she is."

They left and I was still in shock.

That should have been the end of it.

But then, maybe an hour later and near sunset, more police cars arrived.

A female officer appeared in the doorway, watching me.

Over their radios, I heard the words that would change my life forever.

"A woman was sexually assaulted here."

Prior to this moment in life, I NEVER would have imagined such a scenario… but it was clear that they were talking about me.

The victim was now the accused.

The nightmare had only just begun.

Injustice and the Burden of Toxic Shame

The woman who attacked me was Ana Ensaf Amador-Rizo, the wife of my landlord. This was beyond bizarre! She had turned from perpetrator to victim in the eyes of the police.

I had lived my life with integrity, dedicated my career to helping others recover from trauma, only to become the target of false allegations.

But it wasn’t just the legal system that turned against me.

I had spent years battling toxic shame, social anxiety, and self-doubt—struggling to overcome the fear of how people saw me. All these struggles had occurred prior to being falsely accused of a violent crime.

If life had been difficult before, how much harder would it be now, with the weight of an accusation I could never escape?

This book is not just about what happened that night.

It’s about how injustice follows you. It’s about the prison that exists beyond the walls of a jail cell—a life sentence of stigma and suspicion.

It’s about the fight to rebuild after the world has destroyed you… to find self-esteem and overcome toxic shame without justice.

And it’s about what happens when the truth doesn’t matter.

My name is Bruce, and I'm caught in the midst of a grave injustice. As you explore the events of October 1, 2004, it might be useful to know a bit about my life. I sat in the dimly lit interrogation room, the air thick with suspicion, as the police detectives bombarded me with relentless questions. They seemed utterly disinterested in the details of my past or the experiences that made me who I am today. Yet, shouldn't these things play a crucial role in determining someone's guilt or innocence, especially in a violent crime? But then again, maybe it's naive to think they'd care.

The question of what a person is capable of doing is on our minds and yet not so when considering crimes where opportunity, alibis, and means are all that matters.

Let me offer some glimpses into my life and the experiences that have shaped me, though capturing the entirety of who I am in this book feels both necessary and futile.

My earliest memory is of water. Learning to swim.

I am four or five. The indoor pool at the Y. The warmth of the water against my skin. The vastness of it—stretching beyond my reach.

I remember floating near the wall, small and weightless.

Then, a moment of panic. I lost my grip.

The deep end swallowed me whole. My arms flailed, my breath caught in my throat. Then, I saw her.

She was close—my instructor, a girl in her late teens or early twenties, afloat in the deep end.

I don’t know what gave me the courage, but I leapt.

I wrapped my arms around her, clinging to her like my life depended on it. She steadied me, her arms firm, unshaken.

My heart pounded against her shoulder, but she didn’t let go.

I was safe.

But something else lingered. Not just relief. Something deeper.

Something I wasn’t meant to have. I wasn’t supposed to know what it felt like to be held. To be protected. To be cared for.

And even at four or five years old, I knew that.

That is the birth of shame.

The First Lessons in Isolation

When I was a toddler, I was terrified of firetruck sirens on the firetruck that my parents bought me. My parents told the story often—laughing as they described my panic. I don’t remember them ever soothing me.

I have no memory of them saying, "It’s okay, you’re safe." I suspect they didn’t.

Now, decades later, I find myself instinctively comforting my own cat when he startles at a loud noise. I kneel down, stroke his fur, whisper, "It’s okay, everything is okay."

Something in me knows what I never received. I give to a pet what was never given to me.

The House of Unspoken Rules and Child Abuse

I don’t remember my parents ever holding me like that.

I was abused, physically. I was assaulted. That didn’t start right away when I was very young.

In my family, affection was something distant, implied rather than given. Love was duty. Gratitude was expected. Respect was mandatory and not earned.

My father, Bruce Sr., was a man of unshakable silence. He believed actions spoke louder than words, but his actions were cold efficiency—he provided, and that was enough. My mother, Kathy, was a storm you learned to anticipate, never knowing when lightning would strike.

But there was a chill in the air, a tension that wrapped around me like a vice. It was the kind of silence that demanded submission, not understanding.

I never looked directly at my father’s face. I kept my gaze down, or slightly averted, as if instinctually avoiding something dangerous. The thought going through my mind was that I should not expect an easy explanation of what I did wrong. I was wrong.

I felt that I was being met with a general sense of disapproval for being.

Later in life, I would become incredibly skilled at reading people’s body language. I had so much to learn because I was purposefully choosing to avoid observing the looks of general disapproval.

Our maternal grandparents were our refuge, our shield.

I remember Grandma standing up for me—her frail voice telling my parents, “Don’t hurt Bruce.”

That small moment, that whisper of resistance, was the only time someone tried to intervene.

Grandpa would worry about me lifting too much when I joined him to take out the garbage once a week and stack the garbage pails in a way that would ensure that dogs couldn’t get into them.

And then they died.

With them went the thin barrier between us and our parents’ unchecked cruelty.

What haunts me more than any specific moment of cruelty is the void—the absence of tenderness.

We went on vacations to Disney World. We had an in-ground pool. Yet, I have no memories of joy with my parents. They did things for us, but never with us.

It was not love. It was obligation. And obligation demanded respect, not warmth.

The First Vow: To Never Be Like Them

With no one left to shield us, the full weight of their anger fell upon me. Each harsh word, each slap, each moment of being made to feel small carved deeper into me.

I made a vow in the quiet of my childhood bedroom:

• I will never become like them.
• I will never lose my temper.
• I will never let anyone feel unsafe because of me.

I would spend my whole life keeping that promise.

The arrival of a protector

Paul and his family moved into the neighborhood in 3rd grade. He and I became friends. And I saw him increasingly as a protector. I had come out of my shell for a while in school during 3rd grade. Laughing and joking.

When Donna said she liked me in 3rd grade and kissed me, I felt like I had to put on a show that I didn’t like girls. Obviously, these rules change later.

By junior high, I didn’t have Paul in my classes but I hung out with him in the neighborhood.

I did have another protector in junior high school. Thomas from the neighborhood where we lived earlier said that the 9th graders might pick on the 7th graders and I should tell him if that happens.

No one really did pick on me. There were a few minor incidents that were handled by Paul. I didn’t have to go to any great effort to convince him to help me.

It might have been a few years later but Paul even sensed my fear when a dog came out to chase us on our bikes as we were going riding and peddling up a hill, moving slowly. I must have appeared frozen with fear. Paul got off his bike and chased the dog across the yard that was the dogs home! This was the dogs territory and yet it was running away in fear.

The Arrival of Family – And A Deeper Shame

In junior high, something changed.

My mother and her estranged sister suddenly reconciled, and a world I had never known opened up: extended family.

I met my first cousins—Linda, Sharon, and Karen. They were adults, but their children, Barbara and Dan, were my age.

I was drawn to Barbara.

I told myself it was because I preferred talking over roughhousing.

Dan played tackle football—a game of brute force. I didn’t want to tackle or dominate or crush someone to win. Winning had never felt good to me.

Even in childhood games of kickball, I remember the uneasy feeling in my stomach when my team won, because it meant another had lost.

The elation of victory never came.

Yet, I wondered: was something wrong with me?

The world told boys to compete, to fight, to dominate. But I wanted connection—not conquest.

And so I gravitated toward Barbara. We talked. We laughed. We hugged.

And then, shame crept in.

It came in the form of my mother’s jealousy.

"Do you think they’re going to let you live with them?" she snapped, her voice dripping with scorn. She was referring to Karen or Sharon who were the only cousins who could have taken me into their home.

I had never thought about it before, but now the thought seemed… wrong.

She planted a seed—a toxic, gnawing thought that I was a burden.  That I was wanting too much.

I had already learned that needing comfort was shameful. The pool memory had taught me that.

Now, I learned that even wanting closeness with my own cousins was wrong.

And so I learned to doubt every warm moment, to question every innocent connection, to second-guess every embrace.

Another aspect of the family get togethers that I truly enjoyed was the opportunity to spend time with the kids. Dan and Barbara were the first cousins once removed that were about my age but Tracy, Jaime and Wayne were little kids, relative to my age. I would be available to watch them and spend time with them… somehow I gravitated into this role. If the kids needed or wanted to go outside (maybe go for a walk or go somewhere nearby) and no one else was available to go with them or watch them.

I suppose I was always meant to be a parent. Even while I was just a teenager, a child myself, it was evident.

Had the events of this book not come to pass the way they did, I would have surely found a way to be a parent. This was on my mind later in this story.

An Invisible Shell: The Complete Silence of Selective Mutism

By junior high, my selective mutism was complete.

At school, I couldn’t speak. Who knows what I feared. Perhaps the scared part of me that hid behind my chair in Kindergarten instead of walking up front with the milk money. What was it that I feared?

That part of me that was hidden in my unconscious knew. Later in studying psychology, I would learn ideas like the wounded inner child, ego states, and parts that were frozen in time. Growing up, I just didn’t speak.

The silence was suffocating.

Speaking felt like exposure. Like a spotlight on shame itself. And so I withdrew.

I wandered the woods, hiked Ragged Mountain, disappeared into nature.

I was aware of the yearning for contact when I saw my cousins..

And yet, in the neighborhood, I had a paper route. I could talk to customers. I worked at the Medical Mart for my neighbor, where I had to speak to strangers.

Outside of school, my voice existed.

Inside school, it was buried beneath layers of shame.

As I grew, I became aware of the power I had—the power to hurt. When I fought with my sister, I would raise my hand or my foot to strike her—but something always stopped me.

Then later, I saw her fear. And that changed everything.

I made another vow:

• No one will ever fear me.

In a home where fear was a weapon, I rejected it.

With my mother’s jealously over my desire to prefer my cousins and aunt over my parents, this created a toxic sense of shame in which I had to second guess how things might look.

But it wasn't just physical touch that I craved. I relished in playing with our youngest cousins, dreaming of being the loving parent that I never had.

After my elementary school years with Paul in the same class with me all day, I existed inside an invisible shell. My selective mutism was complete at school. I often retreated into the woods, spending so many hours alone, hiking, enjoying the view from Ragged Mountain, throughout my childhood through age 18.

Despite this, I did gain a degree of limited confidence in the neighborhood.

I had a paper route and had to collect payments from customers in the large and extended neighborhood. I shared this with my friend Paul and my sister Carrie. I developed a confidence that allowed me to do this.

I also got a job working for the Medical Mart - a store owned by my neighbor Jack Donlon - it was a family business. He and his wife lived directly across the street from us.

I did come out of my shell as required for this job. I had to meet with customers and deliver products to them.

I also nurtured a very strong bond with my cousins.

This was the opposite of what my family created for me. I had been coming out of my shell.

I also learned that I didn’t want to be like my parents. I knew that fear of a parent is different from respect.

My mother revealed her jealousy over my preference for my cousins and aunt then my parents. She asked if I thought they were going to let me live with them. Kathy would also say, “they have their own lives” making me feel less valuable or less worthy of being included in the lives of my cousins and aunt.

This would have been occurring in my later teenage years.

The Final Realization

My mother called me a house devil and a street angel.

She meant it as an insult, but she was right. At home, I was silent, tense, wary.

Outside, I was kind. I saved my kindness for those who deserved it.

Because I had wanted parents.

Just not mine.

As I packed my bags for college, the weight of leaving everything familiar behind weighed heavily on me. I felt a sense of dread in my chest as I thought about leaving behind the only family I truly connected with - my aunt and cousins. But what choice did I have? My high school offered no guidance or insight into potential careers, leaving me to blindly choose my path.

The idea of engineering seemed like a safe choice, but deep down I had no idea what it truly entailed. Yet, when acceptance letters from prestigious engineering programs arrived in the mail, I got the impression from my father that Georgia Tech was the most renowned among them all. UConn had an engineering program but I got the impression probably from my father, an engineer, that it was insignificant in comparison.

Perhaps, part of me believed that I could earn their respect and pride.

My parents always preached about the impact of every decision, but little could anyone know just how transformative my life at Georgia Tech would be.

As my parents drove away from Georgia Tech in Atlanta, Georgia, leaving me behind in the unfamiliar campus, I realized that I felt free from their presence - both physically and emotionally. My parents had been indifferent, limiting contact, but what little contact I had made me always want to get away.

My mother’s explosive anger had been hard to predict. That had forced me to climb tall trees for the freedom of being hidden or I had hiked or hung out in the woods if I was not with friends.

What I missed now were my cousins, Barbara, Dan, the younger cousins, my aunt, my aunt’s daughters (my first cousins).

When I first came to Georgia Tech and started to engage in the orientation progress, I became radically aware of my loneliness. It’s not like I had left behind close friends. There was Paul. But he had moved away and we had not being hanging out like in the past.

Somehow the loneliness was oppressive. Frightening. Was it because I couldn’t hide in the woods?

I had an inner dialogue of thoughts, trying to make sense of things, trying to figure out what I was feeling. This inner dialogue was forced upon me. I was curious to figure out what I was feeling or experiencing.

With what I know now, I could say that I had been engaging in dissociation. I was detaching from thoughts and feelings. I couldn’t figure out what had prompted the sudden reflection and examination of my thoughts and feelings.

I wrestled with the fact that I had been alone quite often. It was partially true that I didn’t have the comfortable escape into the woods. College would be much more complicated and challenging than high school.

Right? Yes, Georgia Tech accepted only the best of the best from high schools across the US. It was easier for residents of Georgia to get into Georgia Tech but staying and graduating was another matter.

I needed to have some connections. People I could talk to. Plus, I was an adult now. If I wanted a normal life with my own family, I needed others.

Why had I been more aware of not being able to find anything to say to others during orientation? Wasn’t I used to that?

After the thoughts about how people must have thought I was weird during the orientation rafting adventure, I had similar thoughts about how weird I was walking alone through the quiet dorm. This wasn’t a big spread out neighborhood like where I grew up in a town with people spread out. People were right outside hanging out together.

People hung out together naturally, or so it seemed, at the end of the day when the scheduled activities ended. What if someone came back into the door or walked downstairs to the empty TV room and other empty activity rooms. What would they think of me, the weirdo, all alone?

Ironically, it was good that I felt so uncomfortable. This would push me to join a fraternity and to seek counseling.

I didn’t have to look far, I immediately sought help at the Counseling and Career Planning Center.

I had a sense of purpose and determination. The urge was inescapable. I had been comfortable being alone in the past. But now, I was determined to change that.

However, it took enormous courage for me to make that first step towards counseling. I didn’t believe I deserved or needed help - a belief instilled in me by my family who constantly shamed and scapegoated me. The counselor gave me the MMPI test to assess my mental health and it revealed a distorted result due to my upbringing.

I had always been made to feel like there was something wrong with me, so if the test showed no abnormalities, I would have dismissed my own struggles as insignificant compared to those with "real" problems seeking help and I projected my own beliefs onto this psychologist that I was just getting to know.

I moved from one engineering program to another as I learned more about each of the different engineering majors and then landed in electrical engineering, with a specialization in computer engineering and a minor in psychology.

While I did remain in counseling with the same psychologist for the full five years, it didn’t take long before I noticed radical changes in my ability to communicate, connect with others, make friends.

I had joined a fraternity thinking that this would help me fit in with a group and create opportunities to make friends - connections.

Nearly a year and a half into my program at Georgia Tech, I was walking with David, deep in conversation with a friend who lived in the room across from mine. We talked about our future goals and aspirations, and he revealed a hidden desire to work in restaurant management. Though he had been told that an engineering degree from Georgia Tech was more prestigious, his heart longed for something else.

As we continued to talk, I suddenly had an epiphany dawning on me like a beam of light. In a moment of clarity, I asked him a simple yet profound question: "Do you truly want to do engineering for the rest of your life?" It was the first time I had actively thought about choosing a career based on personal passion and fulfillment rather than societal expectations or financial stability.

Through this conversation, I came to realize that our professions and occupations didn't have to be just a means to an end. They could bring us joy and fulfillment on their own. My friend's response showed me that he wasn't truly happy with his career in engineering. He made the courageous choice to leave Georgia Tech and chase his dream of managing restaurants. This experience taught me that it's possible to be in the "wrong" job or career if it doesn't bring you satisfaction and purpose in your daily work life.

Halfway through my engineering program, after having come a very long way in developing social skills, learning to communicate, building self-esteem, and in overcoming my social anxiety, I told my psychologist/counselor (I would have that same psychologist for the entire five years at the University), that I didn’t think I was in the right field.

Growing up, my father had told me that childhood was the best time of our lives because we had none of the stressors he faced. So, I had no idea that one could enjoy what one was learning and what one would do in their career. Why had this never occurred to me that the actual activities that people do on their job could be enjoyable and could be matched to our interests.

So, my counselor gave me a career interest inventory. This matches one’s interests with those in various fields. This considers how one might enjoy spending their time, the activities that we find or might find interesting.

I scored highest with careers in two themed areas: first Social careers, and the second highest theme area based on my scores was Creative. Engineering, I noticed was grouped in “Realistic” themed careers, which made sense. The “design” aspect of engineering was not reflected in the actual tasks of an engineer.

The experience of therapy while attending university was both transformative and eye-opening for me. The psychology courses I took only deepened my fascination with the human mind and behavior. I was amazed at how much understanding psychology had provided during my sessions with my psychologist, and I felt a strong desire to use this knowledge and my empathetic nature to assist others.

My passion for social work went beyond just the academic aspect. It aligned perfectly with my personal values and desire to help those in need. Growing up in Atlanta, I couldn't ignore the poverty and homelessness that plagued our city, and I saw social workers as the ones making real change in these communities. It was more than just a career choice, it was my calling.

But I was already deep into my studies and changing my major or transferring schools seemed impossible. My parents were funding my education and switching to an English degree, while enticing for my love of creativity, would extend the time and cost of my education which my parents did not support. Plus, I knew a Master's in Social Work could be pursued with any undergraduate degree. I felt torn between following my heart and sticking with what was practical.

The improvements I made were massive. I was becoming an extrovert in many ways. Yet I hadn’t been able to find a girlfriend, just like everyone else seemed to effortlessly do. But instead, I had only been on two ambiguous dates with young women, unsure if they were even “dates.”

The most profound transformation I experienced at Georgia Tech was not through engineering or academic success. It was clawing my way out of paralyzing social anxiety and building essential social skills. Though some may argue I still suffered from selective mutism, unable to speak in large groups like classrooms, and I only had two “dates” - if that is what they were. This perpetuated the notion that everyone had someone more important in their lives than I was.

The lingering feeling of inadequacy haunted me and made me feel that I would never be good enough - good enough to be the first choice for someone. I still felt like it was true what my parents had said about my cousins, that they had their own lives - lives that were more important than what I could offer.

I also discovered a profound capacity for empathy. I would have to learn to control that. During the last year that my best friend was at Georgia Tech (a friend that graduated before I did) he had mononucleosis (aka mono). Towards the end of the quarter, I started developing the symptoms of mono. I was certain of this and just laid down to sleep on the couch in our room. I woke up a few hours later and I was symptom free.

I had developed an empathic reaction and taken on the symptoms that my friend had been experiencing throughout the quarter.

I didn’t have a job upon graduation, and I thought it was understood that I was going to go to graduate school for social work. My father had said that he understood that engineering was not a good match for me. I imagined that he would have understood that it would be very unlikely that I would get a job as an engineer upon graduation but their support in paying for my undergraduate education was helpful.

I didn’t expect my parents to pay for graduate school but they had a large home with a free room upstairs, and I didn’t eat too much. I somehow had not fully appreciated how toxic my family was.

My life took a sharp turn when I met Celta, a person who would change everything. With no job prospects, I had no choice but to move in with my parents after graduating from Georgia Tech, a decision that almost immediately seemed like a big mistake.

My mother's relentless pressure to find employment weighed heavily on me, her constant reminder that I could go to school at night if only I had a job as an engineer. But it wasn't just her words that stung - for the first time, she actually wanted to spend time with me, only to use it as an opportunity to criticize and belittle me. The toxic atmosphere that pervaded our home left me feeling ashamed and unworthy. No wonder I avoided spending time with my own mother.

I didn’t eat too much food and so I was not a major extra burden on my parents. I wasn’t asking them to pay for graduate school.

I thought I would have a chance to prepare for the next phase of my life. Despite having 6 psychology classes, I knew I had much more to learn, more growth was necessary, and experience in something close to psychiatric social work.

I graduated in 1989 from Georgia Tech, moved in with my parents in North Augusta, South Carolina near Augusta, Georgia. I found out that there was a state psychiatric hospital called Georgia Regional Hospital in the nearby town of Augusta, Georgia. I approached the volunteer department and told them I was planning to get a Master of Social Work degree and wanted to get relevant experience and was willing to volunteer.

I was connected with the lead social worker on the intake unit and I explained that I wanted to get some experience in the field because I was coming from an engineering program which was a radically different type of background.

By the first part of January of 1990, I was a volunteer at Georgia Regional Hospital on the intake unit working for the social work team. I wasn’t just observing or doing busy work. I was doing the psychosocial intake assessments that the social work team did. I was learning what social workers did in a setting like this and I was learning about how diagnoses are made.

I continued to develop my capacity for empathy, my active listening skills, and I noticed that people were opening up to me. This setting created even greater challenges due to the nature of various mental illnesses.

I had met Celta early in 1990 in this same setting. She was in hospital due to her health. She had anorexia. One of the medical school interns had suggested that I could maybe talk to her to understand about anorexia because I had a cousin with that.

Later in my career I might have known and worried more about boundaries. I had not been assigned to do a psychosocial assessment or anything related to my role on the staff as a volunteer.

When I met Celta I explained that I was not approaching her as part of the staff or as part of my role on the social work team. The moment I approached her, she smiled before I could even explain these facts.

Celta and I never talked about her health. She was in the hospital for just over the first three months that I knew her. She would write diary entries of all her observations and she would share these inner personal thoughts with me when I saw her or she mailed them to me.

After her release from the hospital she stayed for a short while in Augusta but then I took her to stay with her mother in Athens, Georgia - an hour and a half away from me. Her father then put her up in an apartment.

I would see her every weekend. I also spoke to her everyday on the phone. It was almost like magic because I couldn’t imagine that love could develop so quickly and in such an unlikely way.

It was not long before I was telling her “I love you” and hearing those words back on every phone call, everyday. I felt such a sense of joy. Something that had always been missing was being fulfilled.

During my Georgia Tech days, I had friends who were couples. I would be friends with both partners. My best friends were Thomas and JoLee who got married to each other. With each of them, I knew I was not the most important person in their lives nor was I their top priority. I suppose there are echoes of the words from my mother speaking about my cousins and saying that “they have their own lives” and that idea existed with every friend I made while I was away at Georgia Tech.

I had still carried the beliefs from childhood when I was growing up. The truth was, I didn't know what love really was. I had experienced some degree of connection or validation from my friends. In my family, I was an inconvenience—something to be tolerated, not cherished. My world had been shaped by emotional deprivation, shame, and the belief that I was fundamentally unworthy of being seen, let alone loved.

Things were different with Celta. I had not told anyone before her those words “I love you” or heard those words from anyone. Not in the way I was experiencing things with Celta.

Celta and I would have a relationship that was just slightly more than platonic with so much time cuddling together, holding each other, walking hand-in-hand. Looking into each other's eyes. 

With this transformative experience, one event stands out. There was a moment where we were having a picnic at the Botanical Gardens. I was talking about something that I didn't think was very interesting but looking up, I saw that she was smiling with delight as she looked at me, transfixed upon me, hypnotized. 

This was just one of many moments… Moments like this transformed my sense of my value and worth to a person. I felt special finally.

As we took pictures in the park, I couldn't help but notice how delicate she seemed. Her mother suggested a pose where I would kneel and she would sit on my knee. But as we got lost in each other's eyes, she started to sway and almost fell into position, her tiny arms and body barely giving me any sense of how to catch her.

I was only 5’7” tall but with her 4'11" stature and her weight of only 70-80 pounds made me worry about how to catch her. Luckily she didn’t fall far, coming to sit on my leg with my soft gentle arms around her side and back. Luckily, I was instinctually very gentle and using instincts alone, faster than concrete thoughts, was able to find a soft way to catch her.

My friend had recently confided in me about the physical abuse she endured from her husband, even though he was not very big but as a guy he was stronger, she said. Indeed, this difference in size and strength was most profound between Celta and me. I was always a gentle person by nature and the idea of causing harm to someone I supposedly loved was unthinkable, as was harming anyone.

Despite the toxic environment at home, all those moments spent with Celta still allowed me to experience something amazing. She brought me immense joy and a sense of the possibility of love which I had never experienced before, and eventually this would open up opportunities for me.

But at home, I was constantly belittled and pushed into mundane jobs, with my hard-earned degree from Georgia Tech being dismissed as insignificant. The pressure to conform to their expectations and take any job available left me feeling small and ashamed because of my education. I would not judge others the way I was made to feel about myself.

In Celta's presence, however, I felt like a giant towering over the negative voices and expectations from my family.

At no time did my parents ask who was making me happy… What I might want for the future… How might I achieve my goals and plans? They were utterly disinterested in anything that mattered to me or made me happy.

I learned about the death of Celta on New Year’s Day, 1991. I cried more than everyone else at the funeral combined.

For the next year and just over 3 months, I lived with my parents. This time without the support of Celta. I did go to a grief recovery group. I turned 25 in 1991, and the other members of the group were older people, mainly ladies past retirement age.

I had various jobs, with only one related to my software engineering degree.

I questioned how I could help others while dealing with my own problems and how I dealt with the loss of Celta.

My mother introduced me to a professor and poet named Martin Kirby, who became my mentor in writing. Through a temporary job offer, I moved away from my parents for the last time.

These experiences with Celta and working at Georgia Regional Hospital helped me continue to make advances made at Georgia Tech in overcoming social anxiety and would be useful for leading therapy groups as a clinical social worker/therapist in the future. Despite the tragic loss of Celta, I gained valuable personal growth.

After the loss of Celta, I doubted my ability to love again or succeed as a social worker because I had my own problems so how could I help others. What I couldn’t predict was that I wound fall in love and discover just how amazing it would be to live as husband and wife, to love and be loved.

Moving to Wilmington for a technical writing job was what I needed to get back on track.

I was sacrificing the chance for a higher salary as an engineer because I felt compelled to assist others. Engineering held no real value for me, no matter how much money it could bring. The satisfaction of helping people through my work was more important to me than any salary or title. Plus, I would never get hired because I wasn’t an actor and couldn’t convince a would be employer that I was interested in any engineering job.

Because of my increased confidence in my ability to write poetry, I forced myself to attend the first of many open mic poetry readings at the Coastline Convention Center and committed myself that first evening to getting in front of others and sharing my poetry. I was aware that therapists have to lead therapy groups, so I better get used to being the center of attention.

The emcee was Dusty who was like a mother figure to me - kind and welcoming - this might have made it easier. After that first event, I started attending the readings and sharing my poetry every Sunday.

I started reading poems about the grief and loss of Celta and didn’t think I would ever find love again. I wrapped myself in the warmth and comfort that was created on these Sundays. This reflected my personality and desire to nurture experiences like this for myself and others.

Life should be like that for everyone - welcoming and nurturing.

While attending these events, I felt a new breath of confidence that was new. I wondered if it had to do with the experience of being loved by Celta. Despite the loss, the memory of someone seeing me as that special was transformative.

I met someone who interested me. I somehow found the courage to ask her out to attend a large poetry reading that was going to be held on Carolina Beach. This was a bigger event than the regular open mic events where I met Lynn. To my amazement she accepted my invitation and gave me her number.

On that first weekend together, at the close of a vibrant 4th of July, when someone she knew casually inquired if I was her boyfriend, she replied, “no, we are just friends.” I swallowed the sting of her words, convincing myself it had to be enough, for fear of upsetting the uncertain nature of this relationship. I let the currents of our connection carry us where they may.

But soon, the tide would turn. Before I even needed to label the relationship as more than friendship, I relentlessly demonstrated my devotion by making myself perpetually available, every single day. She was acutely aware that she was the sole focus of my affections.

Lynn was breathtakingly beautiful, a beacon of light that emerged from the shadows of loss and pain. In the wake of heartache, something extraordinary began to blossom.

Each moment with her was a testament to a life filled with joy, excitement, pleasure, and tranquility. I believed that this profound happiness and serene peace would be mine for ... forever in so much as I could think about that concept. Each moment was like eternity.

The first kiss was electric, searing itself into my memory with a force I could never have anticipated. It happened on the beach, where I had commanded my restless thoughts to silence, urging myself to exist solely in that moment. The crashing waves harmonized with the tranquility we shared, and suddenly, as if conjured by some unseen force, everything changed. There was no need to dissect our relationship status or analyze our feelings; the moment simply unfolded like a spell.

Our faces instinctively turned towards each other, eyes locking in a gaze that spoke volumes, a silent invitation to close the space between us. My face angled slightly to the right, and hers mirrored mine. We inched closer, drawn together by an undeniable force.

Our lips met, and remained pressed together, taking me somewhere I had never been previously. Her arms wrapped around my back, pulling me into an embrace that made the world fade away. If there were others nearby, they ceased to exist in my awareness. This public display of affection felt destined, intensely right.

A year had passed since a forgettable kiss on a date, one devoid of the magic and meaning that Lynn and I discovered in that fleeting moment on the beach. Our kiss was shorter in duration, yet it surged with an intensity that eclipsed anything I had known.

Her mother's retirement home, a sanctuary that was often empty, became our refuge. Even when her mother or stepfather were present, it didn't matter; our connection transcended their presence. Each day was punctuated by intimate and fervent kisses on her bed, an exploration that was both exhilarating and tender, yet never ventured further.

Then came the pivotal moment when I handed her the engagement ring. We had selected it together, a symbol etched into our future. The lady at the jewelry shop, with a knowing smile, mentioned, "Your fiancé can pick this up Monday."

She was already aware that I would have it in my possession when I arrived on Monday. Yet, before I could utter a single word or orchestrate the cherished moment every woman dreams of, I witnessed her face transform, tears of sheer joy cascading down her cheeks. The sight was so breathtaking that it stole the air from my lungs. I was overwhelmed with profound elation, knowing that I had the power to bring HER such unparalleled happiness.

In that heartbeat of a moment, I believed with every fiber of my being that our shared joy and tranquility would reverberate through eternity.

Peace and joy were what I had found. It was as if those two different things (joy with excitement) and peace could coexist at the same moment.

Helping people to heal as a therapist was another dream of mine that I was awaiting. It was obviously different than an exclusive relationship with a life partner but playing a transformative role in the lives of others was part of my dream and part of what I knew I wanted.

After getting engaged, Lynn's mother offered to buy us a house where we could live as husband and wife.

During our years together, it was amazing. I loved giving gifts and sharing my love for Lynn with others, even complete strangers. It felt spiritual. Even though I am shy, I still wanted to share details about my life as if I had discovered something full of awe and wonder and I wanted others to know about how good life could be.

We argued quite often but that was ironically what made this relationship healthy and I had developed a stable attachment style. If I said something hurtful, I would make amends right away.

For years we lived as husband and wife. I never took what I had for granted. I certainly never did anything that could cause Lynn to love me any less than what we were sharing. It never made sense to me the way some people do things to their spouses because they think that they have them and they won’t leave.

This experience of love is a story in itself. I truly couldn’t imagine it ending.

It never made sense to me that those who victimize others were themselves victims. Others like me can empathize with what others have experienced and feel motivated to help them.

Things had changed when I moved to Wilmington, not just in that I found love again but I got my life back on track. I started graduate school at the University of South Carolina - pursuing the Master of Social Work degree.

Upon my graduation, I almost immediately had a job as a Therapist at Brynn Marr Psychiatric Hospital.

I had the first experience of providing a direct intervention for a survivor of rape, who I will call Karen. She looked literally dead when I began the intervention, and at the end of the session, she was smiling. It was the most amazing thing imaginable.

This would not be the last time that I provided treatment for someone who had been traumatized in many ways, including sexual assault and rape.

Eventually, I got what I needed to be credentialed as a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) and I could open my own private practice as a therapist.

I had been able to grow my practice fast despite having been in a “saturated market.”

This was success and joy, beyond my wildest dreams. I had gained name recognition in the field. I had truly come a long way. People were paying me to help them with a wide range of disorders and couples came for my therapeutic support.

This wasn’t just about success in a career but it was rewarding to be able to help others as I had healed so much.

Who could have imagined that the person with no social skills when starting college would some day be doing these things. More importantly, I had discovered love.

I had come so far and overcome so much to achieve a place in life that exceeded my wildest dreams. I had developed confidence, self-love, a sense of connection, support, love, success and a belief that things could work out. However, things were about to change and the impact of how I lost everything would destroy the qualities I would need to face increasingly challenging situations.

There was a villain in the story. Someone named John F. He was like a guru who had not gained any relevant college education, training, supervision, or experience to act as a therapist. He had called himself a therapist but people caught onto him and so he said he was just a support person.

He had started diagnosing people with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) - a condition where people have different personalities or alters. This is a very rare condition. The way he told it, he happened to notice at a 12-step alcohol and drug online community that some people might have this condition.

He found me because as president of the local chapter of Clinical Social Workers, I organized a workshop for clinicians to learn about this condition and how to treat others. I contacted the local newspaper to announce the training but the newspaper wanted to do a full story on this.

Although, I was new in the field compared to other therapists, I got the attention of two local people who wanted a therapist. In addition, John F. referred someone that he thought might have this condition - a Mrs. D. Actually, he had been communicating with these various alter personalities that Mrs. D. had. She had not been diagnosed by any professional when she first came to my office after I told John that I would meet with her.

Before long, John would move down to Wilmington from Pennsylvania or Virginia, bringing a few other women who he diagnosed with DID and who he was “supporting.”

He had decided to move in with the first person that he referred to me – Mrs. D. I started to learn that he was providing treatment to the same clients that he referred to me. Most importantly, they were getting so much worse. 

I had eventually heard that people had made allegations against him for falsely claiming to be a therapist and there were other allegations. From confidential therapy sessions with clients, I learned more about what he was doing. I was shocked and alarmed.

We had a falling out in early 2000 when I realized that the worst claims about him were likely true. I had tried to help a client named Tracy who had come down to Wilmington, NC from New Jersey with John and she started to meet with me for therapy.

She had been afraid after she turned down sexual advances that John made. I thought I could straighten things out and help Tracy. He had admitted on the phone his lack of conscience or remorse. Tracy had left an abusive husband thinking she would be able to get help and now she was being hurt by John.

Tracy did end up escaping and returning back north to enter a shelter for women who are victims of domestic violence.

I had not studied psychopaths or others like John who harm people because they don’t generally come for therapy.

I soon learned that John had composed a grievance letter to my licensure board and had five of my clients sign the identity complaint letter or statement. While Tracy and one other client of mine with DID did not sign that grievance letter, one of my clients who had successfully completed therapy with me had signed onto the same letter!

I also learned that they had filed a civil suit for malpractice. They had a reason to be frustrated because they were getting worse. I had not known how many people were receiving treatment from John.

Everything that I had worked to create as far as a career going back to Georgia Tech in 1984, some 16 years later, was about to be taken away from me! 

This was so overwhelmingly disturbing for me. My greatest passion was to help others cope with mental illness, and this had been rewarding.

I never saw it coming. I was in shock.

On top of that, at the same time, Lynn became very sick and had to be taken to the hospital for inpatient treatment. 

Lynn Becomes Very Sick

From the moment I met Lynn, I knew her life would be cut short by a cruel genetic illness. Cystic Fibrosis – a chronic and terminal condition that used to claim lives before adulthood. Despite advances in treatment, her lifespan was still limited. But I refused to face this reality, clinging onto hope for a miracle cure that never came.

We built a home together, formed a family. Lynn had dreams of pursuing her education in writing. She had hopes beyond her illness.

And then it happened. She was hospitalized for a few days, but this time it was serious. Our newlywed bliss shattered as we faced the harsh truth of her deteriorating health. Memories of our passionate and joyful moments together flooded my mind as I watched her suffer. Our "normal" life had changed, and I couldn't bear to see her in pain.

Now, things were more dire. She couldn’t keep much weight on her, which was a signal that her health was beginning to take a different direction than ever before. Her oxygen saturation was very low. She went into the hospital initially in late July. It had happened so suddenly, and it seemed to be unexpected. 

And when she was finally released after a week, it was only temporary relief before she would have to return again. 

By now, she couldn't even function without being hooked up to an oxygen tank. The sensation of suffocating consumed her every moment, leaving her helpless and unable to care for herself.

There was nothing I could do to stop the unthinkable idea that she might die. As she lay in the hospital for the second time, receiving IV antibiotics to fight the infections, she made the decision to move in with her mother for a cleaner and safer environment. But as I sat by her bedside, I received news of grievances filed against me and a looming malpractice suit, all claiming that I was not skilled enough and that it was my fault that they were getting worse. My efforts to steer them away from John F., who only worsened their condition, fell on deaf ears.

Every moment spent at home or outside felt like a distorted reality, a nightmare that I had not been prepared to face, despite having known from the beginning that Lynn had a serious illness. I knew deep down that these were symptoms of dissociation, my mind trying to protect itself from the overwhelming terror and perceived threat to the existence I had known. The world around me felt unreal, like an illusion, while I myself felt detached from my own body, floating above it as if observing someone else's life.

Everything I had worked so hard for and achieved was being torn away from me without mercy. Love and all its accompanying emotions were foreign concepts to me, yet now they were being ripped away mercilessly from my grasp. It was a hellish nightmare come to life and there was no escape other than to retreat into my mind further.

It had been months since I had any contact with John F. As mentioned previously, he moved in with Mrs. D who spoke to me following that initial conversation that I had with John when he said he thought she might have dissociative identity disorder (DID). It had seemed from the reports I heard from clients who went to that residence that he was setting up a treatment room and was providing therapy. I had a therapy group for people with DID at one meeting Mrs. D brought him.

Somehow he had connected with those clients of mine who had come to that therapy group.

I had last spoken to him when I called on behalf of Tracy who had come down to Wilmington from New Jersey, where she was hoping to find safety from an abusive spouse. John had made her life miserable, and she felt unsafe after rejecting his sexual advances. The way it transpired demonstrated to me that those things that I was hearing about him and reading about him online were true.

With the complaints to the licensure board, the malpractice claims, and everything else that had happened with Lynn, I was forced to suddenly and unexpectedly close down my practice. Lynn’s mother had been selling the house after Lynn had said, “I am not coming back.” There was never any closure. I just knew what was meant by what she said. Neither of us talked about breaking up, or the relationship being over. It was just surreal.

It began with John Freifeld, a wannabee therapist doing bad therapy. He was a psychopath.

After harming vulnerable people, for some reason he became obsessed with me, an actual therapist.

He had written a complaint statement and had five of my clients sign it… alleging things like how I had planted memories of Satanic Ritual Abuse. And how my clients with a serious condition – dissociative identity disorder – were not getting better. Of course, not, with his treatment, they were getting worse.

Much worse!

They forced me to get a psychological evaluation.

Decades later, a psychologist would tell me I should have sued the psychologists who conducted the evaluation for malpractice. But at the time, I just wanted to survive.

I was overwhelmed. The shame was crushing. I was being sued for medical malpractice too.

Being so overwhelmed with everything that was happening, with Lynn staring down death at 34, I even let the claim that I lacked empathy stand when I signed a Consent Decree.

Then as if that was not enough, I was given a citation by the police for court as John F. had accused me and making harassing phone calls - a totally fabricated lie. He just made it up! How crazy is that?

I was ordered to get a psychological evaluation. Decades later, I was told by a psychologist that I should have sued the psychologists for destroying my life and malpractice. They went into the assessment with confirmation biases about the claims that were made. They also NEVER inquired about whether anything at all had happened in my life. I knew enough to ask a question like that long before I started graduate school and only had an engineering degree.

I was overwhelmed with everything happening in my life. I was assigned a lawyer by the company that provided malpractice insurance. My malpractice lawyer encouraged me to sign a Consent Decree where I would surrender my license while explaining that I could present evidence in the future to defend myself against the claims and concerns.

I can’t believe I let the document include the words that I might lack empathy for others. That is not something that I ever doubted – my capacity for empathy. I knew I had seen evidence that I had a tremendous amount of empathy. If anything, I might have had too much empathy because I was too overwhelmed to use the skills I had learned.

Then as if that was not enough, I was given a citation by the police for court as John F. had accused me and making harassing phone calls - a totally fabricated lie. He just made it up! How crazy is that?

I hadn’t even been worried because I knew there was no evidence—no phone records, no recordings. I assumed the case would be dismissed outright. I went along with a public defender who was ready to go to trial right away.

But then, without a shred of evidence, the judge found me guilty.

I was livid when speaking to my court-appointed lawyer. Listening to him speak about getting the phone records…

He hadn’t thought of that? He should have been the one to know that without a shred of evidence, someone could just make stuff up and the victim of a false accusation like this could be found guilty!

When my public defender, unprepared and careless, asked if I wanted him to appeal, I said “Yes,” emphatically. There was no mention of a penalty for being found guilty but it was the principle of the matter.

Why do we even have lawyers when simple things like getting the phone records occur as an afterthought?

He also claimed that I had engaged in something called cyberstalking. The definition of cyberstalking would be something I had to look up. It was broadly defined. The things others had posted about John might possibly have met a broad definition but I wasn’t posting things about him. This accusation had been dismissed.

I was given a public defender for the “trial” in front of a judge. John seemed to represent his story on his own. My lawyer was eager to go to trial right away – he was overly eager and unprepared.

Leaving the Area

I had met some people online - a couple. One of them was one of the victims of John F. They invited me to move up to Durham, NC from Wilmington. This was my home and I didn’t want to leave.

When I lost another job as a result of John calling my employer and mentioning the issues with my clinical license (which was not required for that job), the company had to dismiss me. So, reluctantly, I decided to pack everything I had and drive up to Durham to stay with my new friends.

Feeling so overwhelmed by everything, I moved to Durham with my new friends.

I had previously tried dating, using online sites, but I was still in love with Lynn, and I was in such shock, still traumatized, and not able to connect with others in any real way.

When I moved in with those friends up in Durham, I kept doing the same thing – using dating apps to try to find dates.

I applied to the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) soon after moving to Durham. They encouraged me to pursue a different career direction. It seemed like my mind was in a fog, and I was not in touch with thoughts about who I knew myself to be and what type of career would be a good match for me. If that were not the case, I would have remembered that Web Design and Development was not a good match for me. If it was all about creativity alone, it might be a match.

In the meantime, I started working at Eckerd’s in the photo lab. One day, I was asked to work at the main register. Based on everything that I had experienced, I was dealing with extreme anxiety. I had been traumatized.

On one occasion, I could not focus my eyes very well and thought that the license shown to me indicated that a customer was old enough to buy alcohol. I was wrong and I was given a citation and asked to come to court. The charge makes one think that I was corrupting a minor by buying this person alcohol when I just read the customer’s driver’s license wrong.

It was easy for mail to get lost, and my mind was not focused so I missed court. A warrant was issued for my arrest. I was terified and desperate to avoid going to jail.

There was nothing that could be done.

I was put in jail. I cannot overstate how traumatic that was for me. As a shy person, I carried a great deal of shame, which I will describe in more detail in the next book, which will be part two of this story.

I had reached out to my family for help. They had to understand that I could not cope with this. I had forgotten again just how uncaring they were... how little empathy and compassion they were capable of feeling. My pleas to my parents for help to get me out of jail were met with icy-cold responses.

They had not been there emotionally or psychologically to offer anything resembling support. I didn’t understand why I was the scapegoat of the family. It had felt like if my own family doesn’t care about me, who would care.

I had needed compassion and support like anyone else.

It seemed like my parents had a rudimentary sense of understanding how a person might feel if one loses someone that one loves. I won’t go into details in this book, but it just seemed to me in my mind that they would understand that after all I had experienced, being in jail would be too much for me to cope with.

Beginning with the times when Lynn got sick, they started acting like what seemed like the application of tough love as opposed to understanding how a person in love would naturally feel when an illness threatens the life of the one that you love.

I had been put in jail for failure to appear and the bond was not very high.

I had learned that the appeal that I had asked my lawyer down in Wilmington to file had appeared before the court.

A reasonable person might understand that with all the changes, problems getting in touch with me, I deserved a bit of understanding. It would seem like my lawyer could have found a way to explain how he had not been able to inform me about the case – the appeal – coming before the court and made sure that I was not arrested.

Instead, I was extradited to Wilmington... which had been my home. Now, I was put in chains and put into the back of a vehicle with a metal frame. I was crying the whole way down there. I felt such shame growing and growing in me.

Once I had been the president of the local chapter of the Society of Clinical Social Workers, with name recognition, a successful career with many clients. My colleagues knew me. Now, I was being brought down to Wilmington in chains.

I didn’t have to stay in jail long, but when I was released I had nowhere to go. The days and the skies looked like winter had come far too early this year. I looked up my friend Jean Jones, a mutual friend of Lynn’s whom we both met at poetry readings so long ago.

He guided me toward finding a place to sleep at night in downtown Wilmington. I still reached out to my family for help, hoping that, at some point, they would care. However, nothing that happened to me could arouse parental instincts to protect me from things that were outside my control.

Jean also invited me to join him and his family for dinner on Thanksgiving 2002. I was carrying all my belongings in a bag. I was ashamed of this look. So, I hid the bag and my belongings in the bushes as I joined them. Snow had been falling so very early this year.

I finally decided some days later to get help at the Mental Health Center who referred me to the Department of Social Services to get a ticket back to Durham. I didn’t have a home there, but I had a relationship with VR.

Maybe I should have just stayed down in Wilmington. I think I was just running away from reminders of the joy that I had once known. A few days ago, a police officer, trying to help me, gave me a street sheet. It was the one I had developed during my first graduate internship with the homeless program at the Mental Health Center.

The weight of sorrow, shame, loss, grief, emotional pain, abandonment, isolation, loneliness, trauma, had literally weighed down on me and brought me to my knees.

It was awkward at the Mental Health Center. The worker had recognized me from when I was the president of the local chapter of the Society of Clinical Social Workers. She did acknowledge that fact. There was a sense of me wanting to explain how I could have arrived at this place, this situation. We just exchanged a few words about how I had arranged some workshops for continuing education credit for clinical social workers.

I was then on my way to Durham.

Beginning in late 2002, I moved from one friend’s apartment or house to another, staying temporarily. These were people I met in the therapy group that I was attending through the local mental health center.

I wanted to heal and be able to return to a career that was so rewarding... helping others who had mental illness or emotional problems.

I did date a few women who I met on dating sites. Eventually, I started seeing Shonda, a black lady, on and off. I was not able to connect with anyone in any real sense. I just didn’t feel a connection. We were intimate, and I helped her children with math.

Shonda continued to see me when I was living at 721 Holloway Street in Durham. The place was described as a boarding house. I moved in there because the rent was only week to week, as opposed to monthly rent, where one must come up with the first month’s rent, and potentially a deposit on top of that to move in.

It was early 2004 or late 2003 when I moved in there. Rent was paid to Scott, who lived around the back of the place.

We rented rooms in that building. The front door was not locked much of the time. Only guys lived there. Prostitutes were seen in the building. I had to reject them as they were assertive about selling their bodies. I had never purchased street drugs, but I got the impression that crack cocaine could be purchased for $10, as that was what the prostitutes were requesting.

I had been mugged more than once while walking from the bus stop to the building at night. I saw needles on the side of the street that must have been discarded. More than once, I had to run as fast as I could to get away from someone threatening me.

The landlord was James Vecchione, Jimmy. He had me working on an adult dating website in exchange for not charging me the weekly $100 for rent. It was not earning money fast enough. I had been working at various jobs doing the best I could. I had applied for Social Security Disability Insurance which would be backdated to cover this period. I wasn’t just being lazy.

VR had paid for me to get a certificate in Web Design, and they were paying for computer equipment for me to start my own business because that seemed like it would work better than a traditional job.

Jimmy decided that the adult dating site was not coming together fast enough so he dropped the entire idea. He took me to court when I couldn’t pay the rent. I appealed the decision. I was hoping to get financial assistance from various sources that existed including VR.

I mentioned that Shonda was black because we were getting close to the time when I would be victimized by a woman. The woman who would attack me was clearly white.

I had been homeless on and off in every sense of the word from 2001 up until now. I had even slept outside or spent many a night awake outside.

My paternal grandparents were not living in their home. I am sure they would have wanted me to have a place to stay as they had paid off the mortgage. That was in Burlington, which was very close. I would have never imagined that I would find myself living so close to where they lived, having grown up in Connecticut.

Any kind of support to ease my suffering would have helped prevent so many things from happening. It would have taken away the stress of living as a homeless person with no stability.

Anyway, about the rent and the eviction... Jimmy would have gotten paid. There are resources to get a person caught up. VR was offering to help me out. I point this out because I would come to learn that his wife was the one who would attack me on October 1st, 2004. I am getting ahead of the story.

As someone who was homeless and dealing with very low financial resources, I got to know other people who came to the Urban Ministries to stay overnight, for financial assistance, or for meals. I made friends with several people that I met there.

Sadly, twenty years later, I don’t remember their names.

I was expecting one of my friends to meet me the next day, October 1, 2004. I couldn’t imagine things could get any worse for me but I was about to find out that things could get more terrifying and nightmarish.

This section dives into one of the most harrowing experiences of my life: not only surviving a violent assault in my own home but also the devastating aftermath of being disbelieved by the very people sworn to protect me. Here, I recount the assault by Ana—a sudden, unprovoked attack while I was simply minding my own business—and the surreal nightmare that followed when I found myself treated as a suspect rather than a victim.

That night, instead of feeling reassured by the presence of law enforcement, I faced an interrogation that felt more accusatory than investigative. It was a disorienting experience, one I could barely process as it unfolded. In my naivety, I assumed the detectives were simply gathering information to understand what had happened. I believed they would approach the situation logically, with an open mind. Instead, I quickly learned how skewed their perspective could be.

Adding to my confusion and frustration, there were witnesses—people who saw Ana enter my home and leave just moments later, unscathed. They weren’t in the room when she locked the door behind her, but they saw enough to corroborate my account. Still, their testimony did little to alter the course of events that night.

This is a deeply traumatic and disturbing story, one that is both painful to relive and challenging to put into words. As I write, I imagine you, dear reader, sitting beside me—offering quiet support as I share this chapter of my life. What you’re about to read marks the beginning of the most terrifying, unexpected, and surreal events I have ever faced.

Losing Lynn rivals the pain of these events, but it was not beyond my imagination of things that can happen in life. Lynn had been born with a genetic and terminal disease and therefore, while it still surprised me how suddenly things took a turn for the worse with her health, it was not beyond my imagination.

The date was October 1, 2004. I had been evicted and appealed the decision. I just wanted a place to put my belongings. I also was aware of ways in which I could get financial assistance to pay the landlord, Jimmy, what he was due. Back then, everything was not up there in the cloud.

Every written and drawn item from Celta was priceless to me. Every photograph of her and of Lynn and the life we shared... all these things were on film and on CDs. All I had were memories.

I was teetering on the edge of homelessness once again.. My search for shelter led me to what was referred to as a “boarding house” at 721 Holloway Street in Durham, NC. The area had a reputation-it was known as a drug-infested, crime-ridden part of town.

Even Eric Peters, my Vocational Rehabilitation counselor, had reservations about the move. He cautioned against starting a home-based business there, but I had no other options. The boarding house was affordable: we paid weekly, and little to no security deposit was required. That was all I could manage at the time.

Living there quickly proved as precarious as its reputation suggested. The building lacked basic security—doors to the outside were rarely locked, leaving everyone vulnerable. One evening, I made the mistake of allowing a woman into my room. She crossed a line immediately, behaving inappropriately and bending over to expose herself. Snapping to my senses, I asked her to leave.

What followed was surreal and frightening. As I walked to the store, she followed, shouting threats and warning me about someone who would come after me if I didn’t pay her. Pay her for what? I had nothing to pay for.

Discarded needles were on the street in front of the building. I knew it was some form of drug paraphernalia. I have NEVER used illicit substances myself.

I had to run for safety when getting off the bus when I was being harassed on a recent occasion. I was robbed at knifepoint while living there. I had someone indicate they had a gun in their pocket at night on a different occasion.

I had confided in my sister about needing help after being robbed multiple times, but she didn't seem to understand. It would have been difficult to explain to her the concept of not having a car and living in a dangerous city like New Britain, which was closest to our hometown in Connecticut.

She had only experienced leaving work and walking to her car; she couldn't comprehend the struggle of living in a high-crime area because it was all I could afford. Like my sister, I never imagined myself living in such conditions, relying on public transportation instead of owning a car. Mentally, I was in unfamiliar territory and completely unprepared for the challenges I faced.

Despite all the threats I faced and the repeatedly frightening experiences, I had not been physically assaulted, yet.

Not yet!

Jimmy, The Landlord Wants to Know About Dissociative Identity Disorder

There are a few other important facts to know. One is that I had a conversation with Jimmy, the landlord, in which he was asking about my experience treating people with dissociative identity disorder (DID). This used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD). He, Jimmy, didn’t want to know about the incredibly disturbing trauma that people with this disorder experienced or how emotional and traumatic it was for me to help any victim to cope with this because of my capacity for empathy.

I just mentioned that people with DID have personalities that have different names. I recalled that as a child, my grandpa called me Brucie. Using that example, I said that if I had DID, which I don’t, I might name a child personality or have a child personality named Brucie.

I had the opportunity to see Jimmy’s wife partially when she was inside his pickup truck. It’s important to note that I did not recognize her as the attacker, but I am getting ahead of the story.

This detail is very important - the conversation about what DID (pronounced D, I, D) is all about. I would hear about this conversation later.

I did meet a friend of the family named Grace. I would join her and her two children at Durham Bulls baseball games, and I helped her with her computer. She was a safe and decent person. I once thought Jimmy was decent. She was very attractive, far more so than anyone directly associated with the landlord, which is only relevant to her later encounter with the police.

I had been dumpster diving near the library up the street and had acquired many books, which other homeless people appreciated.

I had books in piles all over the room. My apartment was just a room in the house.

The room is about 18 feet wide by 18 feet from the front door to the back of the room. A wall is set back about eight or nine feet from the door to the apartment room. The wall has an opening on the right and the left as you investigate the room from the door. Behind the wall is a mattress on the floor where I slept.

There was barely enough room in the apartment today. My computer was set up on a desk against the wall, to the right as you entered the room.

About six to eight feet from the door, there is a couch.

I was waiting for a friend to arrive today. She was a black woman, and the woman I was seeing romantically was also black. Let me describe the apartment building better before I explain what is about to happen. Looking at the house from the street, there is a front door and a driveway to the left. Around the back, there is an apartment. Scott stayed there. He got a discount on rent, just like I was getting free rent for working on Jimmy's website. We paid our rent weekly to Scott, and he gave us a receipt.

There is a door on the side of the building that leads inside from the driveway. If you go through that door, you will see the kitchen, which is a common area for cooking meals. Past the kitchen is the bathroom with a shower. An apartment was also down that hallway.

Turning right, you would come to the vending machines that Jimmy kept stocked with sodas and snacks. Before you came to my apartment room, there was an apartment on the right and another two apartments on the left.

Across from my room was the stairway that leads to four apartments upstairs. Next to the foot of the stairs was another apartment.

It was an all-male boarding house, but females were there offering sex for money. I mentioned an unsuccessful attempt by one woman to get me to accept her service(s).

I had come to feel like the perfect victim. It’s not untrue that people can sense vulnerability. The urban scowl is something a more confident person might use during the day to walk quickly and with purpose if they found themselves in a potentially dangerous part of town. I had sensed danger at night and had run as fast as I could to my “home” - imagining that getting inside this boarding house at 721 Holloway Street would be safe.

However, getting inside was not always safe. In addition to the encounter with the prostitute, I had seen the police use tear gas to get a gun from a resident.

My door was open as I expected my new friend to arrive.

I learned about a phenomenon called the "cocktail party phenomenon" years ago. When you hear your name, it can penetrate the cacophony of other sounds. We can hear our name if it is called out, even in a busy and somewhat loud room full of people talking. Something causes us to immediately turn in the direction where we heard it.

I noticed this instant attention-grabbing effect years ago after I first learned about it. I was walking to class, deep in thought, when I heard "Bruce." Immediately, my attention was caught, and my head turned in the direction of where someone had called out my name. The person must have been a couple of football fields away.

That is what happened next. With my door partially open, I heard the words, “where’s Bruce?” coming from outside my room.

Without thinking, I opened my door, stepped into the hallway, and said, "I'm Bruce."

A woman stood a few steps up the stairway leading to the second floor. She was NOT the person I was expecting. She was standing half-way up the stairs, asking Danny who was just another tenant that lived on the second floor. Other than her being white and not who I was expecting, there was nothing distinctive about her, and I had no idea who she was or why she was looking for me.

Time froze for about one second… enough for me to register my confusion and to wonder who is this person that seems to know me?

Her eyes locked onto mine and she charged at me, coming down the stairs and around a corner as if propelled by a ferocious determination. I was frozen in shock, unable to react before she burst past me, entering my apartment.

I stumbled after her, walking past her and into the room just as she slammed the door shut and turned the lock, trapping us both inside. Before I could assess the situation, her fist collided with my cheek in a brutal punch that sent me reeling.

The blows kept coming, one after another in a flurry of violence that sent my glasses flying across the room. I could feel blood beginning to flow down my face as she continued to unleash a relentless assault on my face, leaving me battered and disoriented.

I was dazed and shocked. I staggered backward with each blow. There wasn't much room between the door and the couch where I fell. I was shocked by the fact that a woman would lock herself in the room with me, then attack me (someone who I didn’t even know), and I was shocked by the blows to the face.

She shouted, "Why do you keep calling me?"

I answered, immediately, "Who are you?" with genuine shock in my voice. I was wondering who the heck was attacking me. And why?

I was hurt badly. Blood was pouring out of my nose and across my face almost immediately.

Was she high on drugs?

I managed to get to my feet and noticed that there was a distance between us. I used the opportunity to move forward and unlocked the door that she had just locked. Then, I pulled her toward the door, trying to get her out of the room.

At some point, I brought my hand to my face and noticed my hand was smeared with blood. As I pulled her toward the door and outside, I touched the door frame for balance and I left a blood-smeared thumbprint on the door frame with my right thumb.

She didn’t have a scratch on her. I had not even hit her at all or defended myself in any way. I had always been non-violent, peaceful. I had never been attacked at all much less in such a bloody way.

One might ask why I didn’t fight back? There was something instinctual in me about not hitting girls or women. I never had to consider a moment like this.

At this point, I had no idea that it would be crucial to know that she was not bleeding at all. She was all perpetrator and attacker. I couldn’t defend myself if I wanted to do so.

I had no idea that none of her blood being anywhere in the room or on the property would be important.

In fact, as I was trying to get her outside, I was worried about hurting her!

This happened so incredibly fast and could not have taken more than 60 seconds. I wanted to establish safety from this crazy person so I could call 911.

As I tried to shut the door, she was pushing the door to get back inside!

I couldn't close the door.

I couldn't believe it. What more did she want to do to me?

I reached my hand to try to push her away. My hand connected with her face, and it might have been partially closed into almost a fist.

This was the closest thing to acting in self-defense. It seemed like all I had accomplished was pushing her away from the door so that I could lock it and finally feel safe inside my apartment room. Here I was worrying about worrying about hurting her because she was female! Those rules were probably not meant for situations like this.

I had not used anywhere near enough force for it to be considered self-defense.

Like every victim, I immediately picked up my phone and dialed 911. I then waited for the police… still bleeding profusely.

My mind flashed back to what had just happened. The door had been open partially in case my friend had shown up and didn’t know what room I was in. But she was black. My girlfriend sometimes showed up to see me. She was black as well.

The person I encountered halfway up the stairs was white. Who was she? Who was this attacker and why did she do this? Was she high and had she mistaken me for someone else?

Some of the guys who lived in the house had been returning from work. The voices outside must have given me the sense that she had left. Some had witnessed the commotion from outside my apartment room. Unfortunately, they would not have seen what happened after she locked the door.

There were several people in the hallway or on the stairs who looked with shock at me. These would be witnesses. Someone advised me to look in the bathroom to see how badly I was bleeding.

Another tenant, Joachim, told me to go look in the mirror. He was the most friendly guy I knew at that residence along with Danny.

I was shocked at how profusely I was bleeding across my face. I wondered why I was not bruised as opposed to seeing my face sliced up like this. I was trying to stop the bleeding.

The lacerations were not deep. The cuts were more like the way one gets cut up when shaving… I was not getting nauseous or feeling faint like after being accidentally cut with a knife in the past or on a glass window - occasions which had made me feel faint.

Joachim asked me, "So, you don't know her from Adam?"

"No, I have no idea who she was," I answered.

I registered some comments by the residents. I heard the words, “Why would you let her inside your apartment if you didn’t know her?”

I was pacing between the bathroom to look at my cuts, the hallway to talk to the tenants and my room. In the room I saw my blood on the floor and another place where my hand had smeared blood from my face onto the wall, in addition to my own bloody thumbprint on the door frame.

Obviously, she didn’t leave any bloody marks or any evidence to help the police find her! She had done all the violence. She had left without a cut or scratch!

Joachim and Danny could see my blood in my apartment room, places where my blood was on the floor, my bloody thumbprint on the door frame.

Looking in the mirror, down the hallway, in the bathroom, I was shocked by the extent to which I was cut. I was still bleeding from cuts on the left and right sides of my face. I had never been assaulted in this manner in my life. I had never known any violence in my life, only threats of violence.

Blood was also coming from my nose and mouth. I believe I was in such a state of shock that I was not aware of feeling any pain. I knew that the mind had dissociated from feeling anything at all physically or emotionally.

It was hard to stop the bleeding with so many cuts. I was wearing a dark-striped, green short-sleeved shirt; it was covered in blood. I was wearing shorts, and those were covered in blood as well. Even my socks and shoes were bloody. Within just a few minutes, my shirt, shorts, socks, and shoes had soaked up blood that had drained off my face.

I had not asked for an ambulance to come. What was on my mind was being able to show the police just how badly I had been attacked.

I also was worried that I might have gotten some of her body fluids on me. I had not hit her in any way that would cause her to bleed, but I had no idea who she was and what diseases someone in this neighborhood might have.

I lived near the Durham police station, so the police arrived quickly.

Within about 20 or 30 minutes, the police arrived in response to my 911 call.

I heard sounds outside my room and realized that the police were entering from the front door to the building.

The first police officer held out his hand, saying, "Don't come too close." I understood what he was concerned about. He didn't want my blood on him.

There were two police officers that arrived.

At this point, I was not considering how bizarre this event might seem to the police because quite frankly, the police didn’t show any sense that they didn’t believe what I had said.

The police officers started taking my statement about what happened to me. I did recall hearing a question by a police officer about why I let her inside. I could only say that it happened so fast, and I was taken by surprise.

Next, the police officers started taking witness statements. They were all consistent in stating that everything happened very fast. No, no one had any idea who this person was.

In my account of what happened, I said that I had been expecting someone who might not know which room I was in. I had heard the words “where’s Bruce?” and came out to see a stranger.

No, I had no idea why anyone would do this to me.

I could hear the witnesses speaking to the police officers and no one had suggested that they had any idea who this person was. While they didn’t see what happened inside my room, at least one person noted that she had left without a scratch.

I explained to the police that she had said something bizarre that made no sense. She had nearly yelled "why do you keep calling me?"

I explained that my immediate reaction was to ask her, "who are you?" but she never answered that question.

I was confused that they had not done this on their own. Why were the police not taking photographs of me and the room where I was assaulted?

Before I knew it, the ambulance had arrived and they were attending to my cuts and injuries before the police had taken photographs. The police had NEVER taken any photographs during the entire time they were there.

I had little hope for justice since we had no idea who attacked me or how to find the person.

Then I heard a phone ringing in my room. I had not noticed previously that she was carrying a phone. She must have dropped it or accidentally thrown it while assaulting me. That was why she had been trying to get back into the room.

The phone was behind a pile of books on the floor. My phone was in my hand. This had to be the perpetrator’s phone.

I gave the phone to the police officers saying, "this might help you to find who did this to me."

Having given the police her phone there was hope that maybe I could get some justice. Maybe they would find her.

There would not be anything else with which to identify her! She was the attacker and left without a scratch. The only bloody markers in my apartment room were from me - it was my blood. It was my bloody thumbprint on the door frame.

She had not fallen and tripped herself leaving her own blood anywhere.

I felt a deep sense of confusion; this was beyond bizarre. I figured this was just another very bad experience in a bad neighborhood. The lack of curiosity by the police could be explained by the notion that they must have heard and seen people do crazy things in this part of town.

I didn’t expect these police officers to answer a question like, “What woman locks themselves inside a room with a guy and then attacks that person? Repeatedly punching the person?”

I had not noticed anything that would indicate why she was able to slice open my face and cause me to bleed so profusely. On the one hand, she was acting like she was high on drugs which might explain the sudden eruption of violence, but why would she ask for me in particular? Plus, a woman who is in the habit of using drugs would not have had a ring on her fingers.

The paramedics were able to get the bleeding to stop, and then they left at about the same time as the police left.

The story is about to get much stranger, though.

If this was a normal story about victimization, I would not be telling a story about this twenty years after the fact.

This story is far more complicated, and the nightmare was only beginning. It seemed obvious to everyone so far - me, the police, the witnesses. I was the victim of a violent crime, and with the perpetrator leaving behind her phone, the police would find the perpetrator.

That is how this story should have proceeded.

Please, dear reader, let me imagine you are with me as I tell my horror story and try to imagine the comfort that I need when I am so scared, like now. Just telling this story decades later is terrifying.

Within just more than an hour, with the sun getting low now, the police showed up again. The most disturbing nightmare of my life was about to begin. It wasn't enough to violently assault me. The perpetrator of this crime had done something far worse, and I was about to find out about that.

I noticed lights outside. The police were back.

Then in my next memory, there was a female police officer in the doorway of the building next to the stairway that led to the second floor.

It was a warm day, October 1, 2004, so I had not changed out of the bloody shorts and t-shirt. The door to my apartment was about 8 feet away from where this officer was standing.

I heard something repeated on the police radio that this police officer was wearing. The words I heard were that a woman had been sexually assaulted out here!

What! Oh, my God!

On any normal day in my life I would not have considered that they could possibly be talking about me… not in the context of hurting another person.

This is not happening! No, no, no.no.

The police were just here. They knew what had happened. They witnessed the extensive nature of my injuries… my cuts. How badly I was bleeding.

I was thinking, your fellow police officers were just here. They know what happened.

Time moved at an excruciatingly slow pace. I was waiting to speak to someone and clear all this up. Surely, they would know what had really happened.

Part of me wanted to talk and get this cleared up immediately.

Another part of me was utterly terrified. I had already seen how the justice system works when John F. had claimed that I called and threatened him. That was characterized in this book earlier as harassing phone calls. I left out of this book that he falsely claimed that I threatened him. It was not relevant. It never happened. There were no recordings and no phone records.

I may have left out of this narrative that when my public defender got the phone records, he had proof – according to him – that John had fabricated the story for one of the two days when I was alleged to have called John. He never could explain why he couldn’t get the phone records for one of the days, including the day prior and after, but he couldn’t get the records for the other day which was just within the same week.

So, part of me wanted to talk to this police officer in the hallway watching over me, but most of me was dissociating from the reality of this. When I said, “This is not happening” to myself, I was being literal.

The physical assault was experienced as less of a threat to my survival than the notion of what it would mean to be falsely accused of a crime of this nature - my freedom and my sense of self as a person in a social world were threatened.

I had known about derealization and depersonalization. When Lynn was suddenly at risk of dying, I had experienced both derealization and depersonalization. I had entered a dream-like state (derealization) and as I remembered those events, I was at times floating outside my body and looking down at Lynn (depersonalization). More specifically, in my memory, I am talking to Lynn in the doorway to our bedroom and I am looking down at Lynn as if from somewhere near the top of the door and the ceiling.

To be clear, I had NEVER fully taken on the symptoms of dissociative identity disorder, where I would have amnesia and another personality would take control of me. This is relevant to the events that occur next. I NEVER had a dissociative disorder of any type but briefly during traumatic events, I did dissociate.

At this point and for some time after, I was not feeling anything. I was detached. I was not angry at Ana for making this up, nor was I angry at the police for ignoring evidence from their own fellow police officers who had just been out here.

It seemed like time was frozen. I was desperately waiting for some opportunity to clear this up. However, I was simultaneously frozen and shut down like a zombie, and the zombie part of me was more in control.

I was repeating the words in my mind "this is not happening." "This is not happening."

I remember another police officer who entered the building.

I struggled to speak. My mouth was dry, and I could barely draw a breath. I wasn't sure my words were being said out loud, “No, I was attacked, I am the victim.” I don’t think that was vocalized.

The male police officer explained that he was going to have to put me in handcuffs.

I was terrified beyond belief. I wasn't shaking, but I was frozen. I felt dazed and confused. Aware and not aware of the shame of walking to the police car in front of the house while in handcuffs.

This public humiliation, even in this neighborhood, of being in handcuffs required that I detach from the reality of what was occurring.

I walked as if somehow on autopilot.

I noticed that I was shaking as I was led into the police car. He placed me in the front seat.

I was thinking about the last time I was in handcuffs, which at that time involved chains in addition to handcuffs, when I was taken from Durham to Wilmington – which had once been home, which had once been only associated with good things… falling in love… being the president of the local society of clinical social workers… being recognized at the mental health center as that person worthy of respect.

Could life get any worse? These events proved that there were no limits to how bad life could get.

It was hard to believe that I was on top of the world just four years ago. I had a sense of being part of a family with Lynn. Her cousin had two little girls, and I was like a big brother or uncle to them… All excited, taking the younger girl in my arms out into the ocean… because “of course, why would you not trust me” to take care of the little girl. That is what I still remember at this very moment while walking out to the police car and being led into the police car.

I was still in a fog as I had been for the past few years. I could recall the wife of the couple I moved in with when I first moved to Durham. She was offended that I was considering getting onto Social Security Disability Insurance when I had never been brutally tortured as a child as she and others with dissociative identity disorder had been.

On the ride with the policeman beside me, I noticed my phone ringing.

It was the friend I had been expecting that afternoon or early evening.

My hands were shaking as I tried to pick up the phone, which had bounced out of my pocket onto the floor of the police car. My heart was beating so fast, and I was fumbling with the phone. My voice was shaking as I said, "Hello."

I began to explain what happened to me. I wanted the police officer to hear me and the sincerity of my words.

I told my friend on the phone, "Earlier today, just a few hours ago, I heard a woman ask where Bruce is, and I thought that was you, but when I looked outside my door, I saw a white woman."

I continued talking to her, “I said, I am Bruce, even though I knew it was not you.” I then described how she walked right into my room, locking the door behind her, and then she started punching me in the face.”

I told her I wanted to see her soon and that this would get all straightened out, but I didn't know about tomorrow. Part of me held onto the hope and belief that this would get straightened out once I explained things. Another part of me remembered the many hours that turned into days and weeks while I waited for things to get cleared up in the past when that never happened.

My friend was shocked. I can imagine that she was desperately out of words to say to comfort me.

Choking on my tears, I said, "I'm scared. I don't know how this happened to me."

She knew some things about me, so she recognized the concern in my voice. I heard compassion in her voice as she said how sorry she was that this was happening to me. I would never see or hear from her again, but the moment of comfort she offered me was unforgettable.

I then hung up the phone.

She had heard the utter desperation in my voice, which the police officer should have heard and understood as well. Yet he was inhumanly unresponsive… seemingly devoid of humanity, like a robot programmed with pre-existing instructions.

The police officer was a large white man who seemed incapable of emotions. Humans are not perfect but this guy driving the car was especially lacking in human reactivity. The police officers that took me down to Wilmington a couple of years ago seemed to lack a capacity to understand that they didn’t need to treat me like an animal as I was offering no threat when they put me in the back of their metal cage.

The inhuman police officer, who I would soon learn was a detective, parked his car and led me into the building - the police station.

Immediately upon entering the doorway, I saw the woman who had attacked me, and I said in a matter-of-fact tone, "She's the one who attacked me."

I was still holding onto reality or rather I was holding onto the truth and verbalizing it.

He led me down into the building, and we turned left. Then, I was directed to sit down in a chair outside a room.

I was asked to wait and wait and wait.

I did try to call a lawyer. I had a subscription to pre-paid legal which I NEVER imagined needing for a criminal matter. I couldn’t process what the person who answered the phone was saying and ended up not asking to speak to a lawyer.

Anyway, this was still October 1, 2004.

I had never imagined a scenario even remotely like this in my worst nightmares.

I was naïve enough to still think that the police wanted to find out the truth.

I was directed to sit at a table with one police detective on the left and one on the right. The room was rather dark.

After that fact, one might ask me if I was aware of a camera or a two-way mirror. At this moment, I didn’t register the existence of a camera or if there was a two-way mirror.

“Let’s talk about what happened,” I heard.

Fine, I thought, finally. I not only described what happened with my apartment room door open but I re-enacted this. The door to the room was not locked, so I could re-enact precisely what happened.

One of them said, “That is not what happened.”

I wanted to argue because I was there, and they were not there.

Instead, as if we were not speaking the same language, I repeated the same exact statement as if they had not heard what I said. I even re-enacted everything precisely as it happened. I opened the door to the room with the police officers with my face looking in the direction of the woman on the stairs and said, “I’m Bruce.” … just as it had happened.

Again, I heard those words, “That is not what happened.”

I was so frustrated that I wanted to scream, “Why are you saying that? You were not there!”

At this point, I was not thinking that they wanted me to confess to a crime. It honestly felt like I was leaving out some details about the crime that had been committed against me.

One might think that I should be aware that I was believed to have sexually assaulted a woman, but my mind didn’t go there. I knew precisely what happened. I was there. It had just happened. They were not there, so how could they possibly know what had happened better than I?

This was beyond bizarre. I was still wearing the bloody clothing from earlier, from the assault. Did they think I kept blood-stained clothes around for moments when I wanted to claim to be a victim?

Their questioning continued. At no point did anything they said seem to get us to a point where I would be brought down here in handcuffs.

At some point, I had briefly seen her in Jimmy’s pickup truck, but when she showed up and attacked me, I didn’t recognize her, I told them. To which one of them said that he would not forget someone who looked like her. In my mind, I thought about Grace who was a friend of the family, or I thought Grace was a friend of Jimmy, and Grace was someone that a person would not forget – she was attractive. I couldn’t figure out why they thought Jimmy’s wife, Ana, was attractive.

It is many years after the fact as I write this but honestly, I don’t think my mind ever was consciously able to process what was happening. I had been in jail and the shame it caused was so memorable. This was experienced as traumatic, and my mind was doing what so many clients of mine had described. I was not consciously aware at that moment or consciously choosing to do this, but I was using derealization. This means that I was not overly responsive.

I did not feel anything either.

Police officers asking me questions in a dark room after hearing the words about a woman being sexually assaulted when I was at the house… Nothing in life had prepared me to offer an intelligent response to such a line of questioning.

The only possible reaction for me was derealization – to experience this like a dream, or a nightmare might be more accurate.

However much it might seem to not be happening and just a dream, I was simultaneously awake and so not everything slipped by without conscious awareness. I was aware of feeling a profound sense of shame that would go along with anyone accused of a heinous crime.

I was aware of how much I did not want to spend another second in jail. Symbolically, these were both the antithesis of all the reasons and events that had led me to experience the courage to be noticed, to gain name recognition in Wilmington.

All the countless times I wrote down answers to the question of what was the worst thing that could happen if I left my proverbial shell as a shy person..., I suddenly was being smacked in the face with the worst possible answer to what was the worst possible thing that could happen - the most shameful type of event that someone like me could not have dreamed up if I had tried.

At some point, I registered the words “and things got out of control?”

I responded with a bewildered look while thinking, “yes, when she suddenly entered the room, locked the door behind her, and started punching me in the face, things were out of control, but what are you talking about?” I didn’t say that, but I was thinking about it.

After I told them what had happened, it became increasingly clear that the truth did not matter.

This would have characterized the hours that passed with the two detectives trying to get me to tell them something they wanted to hear but since I had no idea what they thought happened, I could NOT satisfy them. My responses were characterized by me despondently shaking my head “no” or saying nothing more than “no.”

It was like some surreal game of “guess what we want you to say?”

My initial impression that the truth would emerge when I got a chance to talk, that the police were genuinely interested in finding the truth — that belief had evaporated at some point.

Then I heard one of them ask to speak to "Brucie."

I was speechless at first.

Now, I knew that Jimmy and his wife, Ana, had devised an intricate plan that was well thought out.

I suddenly remembered how I had spoken to Jimmy, the landlord and husband of my attacker, just a few weeks ago. I remembered how I had discussed dissociative identity disorder (DID) and used the example where if I had DID, maybe one of my personalities might be named "Brucie."

In my conversation with Jimmy, I used the name my grandpa called me as a child. In this interaction with police, logic and rational thinking were absent and it felt like a disturbing game. The detectives were not benevolent like my deceased grandparents, but playing out a sick and perverted game at my expense.

Therefore, I said, "I'm Brucie" in a soft voice that a personality that was a child might have. I was not trying to be play games. It was just a last-ditch effort to make these two detectives happy. At this point, I would have done whatever these authority figures were asking me to do.

When that didn't satisfy them, they showed me a statement that one of them on the left had created. They wanted me to sign this.

I looked at what was written, and I was shocked. He was asking me to sign a confession.

I asked both of them, and I was sincerely incredulous when I asked them, "That is what you think happened?"

"I'm not signing that," I answered. "That did NOT happen."

I could easily rebut everything and explain how it was impossible… I could direct them to their fellow officers, who would have known that what they thought happened could not possibly have happened. Now, we were getting somewhere.

Unfortunately, it was too late, or so it seemed. Why didn’t they just tell me what she had said and what they thought happened hours ago? The only thing that frustrated them now was the fact that I would not sign the statement.

The statement of confession did explain why they were so frustrated throughout the questioning. Since I had no idea what they wanted me to say or what they thought happened, I could not have said anything that came close to what they thought happened. This statement was a giant leap from anything that they asked me or anywhere the questioning had gone.

Any account of any interrogation by the police will point out the hours that police detectives are willing to go at the alleged perpetrator trying to get a confession. I write this fact as someone who has had 20 years to listen to stories about the ways police detectives conduct themselves. However, in almost every other interrogation, it seemed like the person being questioned would have a better understanding of what the police thought happened.

It was just after midnight and now Saturday, October 2, 2004, when I was handed the statement by one of the detectives that they wanted me to sign.

They could not have considered any other evidence. I don’t remember where they left the room, but this questioning had been going on for a long time, so I might not have noticed, nor would I have remembered every tiny detail.

I had assumed that their fellow police officers who initially responded to my 911 call would have spoken to them. However, if they had spoken to the police who first responded to the call, that I made after Ana assaulted me, the questioning would have had to go differently.

I learned what they thought happened, and then the discussion was over.

The next thing I remember was that they brought me in front of a magistrate. I felt a feeling of horror unlike anything I had ever experienced. Do I need to remind you, dear reader, of every experience from trying to overcome shyness to the shame that went with being in jail to the sense of how unending that had seemed, and now this was so much more serious?

I was taken in front of the magistrate, and I learned what the charges were. I was being charged with second-degree kidnapping and second-degree sexual offense. This was so terrifying that I could not process the events that were transpiring.

I was the innocent victim, and now they were charging the victim with a crime - no two different crimes!

I still didn't know the extent of Ana's lies.

They were arresting, charging, and jailing the victim of a brutal crime!

These two detectives surely had ignored every single iota of evidence collected by their fellow police officers who arrived in response to my 911 call because one could not square what the first responding police officers saw with what these two detectives thought happened.

This was serious! Second-degree kidnapping and second-degree sexual offense.

I was barely processing how strange this was. Doesn’t kidnapping involve seizing a person and bringing the person somewhere else?

Now, I was thinking about how long I would be held captive. I had seen fights the last time I was in jail for missing a court date in Wilmington after I had demanded that my lawyer appeal the ruling where John F. falsely claimed that I made harassing phone calls. This was Durham, with gangs, and I had already been robbed, as I mentioned earlier.

I wanted help, so I couldn’t think of anything other than declaring that I was suicidal. However, stating this didn’t help me at all.

They only heaped on more humiliation.

I was stripped down and put into a strange, padded outfit that I guess is for people who are suicidal, which barely covered my underwear. This seemed like a purposeful effort to shame and humiliate me. The only thing missing was a chance to taunt me.

This was like a crucifixion. The Romans had designed this method of punishment as a form of humilitation to add to the punishment of the condemned.

The next thing I remember was being taken to the hospital, where they drew blood. I wasn't worried about that. However, I was deeply and profoundly filled with shame because I was in the garb of a person coming from the jail in handcuffs.

However, I was thinking that the blood evidence would have confirmed and supported my account of being the victim. She had left without a scratch. The lack of blood evidence on her would mean that I was NEVER standing over her. It seemed like they would have to account for that.

I didn’t know all the evidence that they were considering or how long it would take. If they had investigated the crime scene, they would not have found any of her blood in there. So, having my blood should have only helped my case.

This section of the book covers the time period in which I was held like kidnapping victim. I was kidnapped by the state under the false belief that I was the perpetrator when in fact, I was the victim.

It was horrifying. The guards were like inhuman robots not unlike the police officers that arrested me.

I was desperately needing to trust my lawyer to fight for me. I should have known he was doing nothing at all to show he cared about my case. This would become very obvious when I discovered that despite knowing that I was innocent, despite knowing that I was the victim, he threatens me to accept a plea deal as if I had done something wrong.

The early morning hours were a blur as I was hauled off to jail. I walked on autopilot, my mind unable to process the reality of what was happening.

The truth—the only thing I had left—felt like it was slipping through my fingers. The truth collided with the reality of my situation. The police, who were supposed to protect me, now held me captive. Just hours ago, I had been the helpless victim of a brutal attack, begging for help and justice against the ferocious creature that attacked me. And yet here I was, locked away behind bars, treated as if I were the one at fault.

The cell door was cold and heavy, closing with an echoing clang like I was sealed within a steel coffin. I was still wearing the padded suicide outfit, a degrading garment designed to strip away any remaining shreds of my dignity. While I am not a deity, I can use the word crucifixion because of the humiliation and punishment despite having down no wrong.

It seemed like the nightmare I couldn't wake from was now my cruel reality. I vacillated between numbness, having gone away in my mind, and bitterly weeping. Sleep was nearly impossible, and hopelessness was a heavy weight on my heart and lungs.

Shattered by Shame

Although I couldn't fully comprehend it at the time, I knew that eventually I would feel anger towards Ana for her actions. However, in this moment, all I could feel was an overwhelming sense of shame and disbelief. She had deceived others and ruined my reputation, making me into a villain rather than a victim. The detectives had bought her lies without hesitation, and she had manipulated reality to make it appear as though the opposite of the truth were true.

In the morning, a guard escorted me to the medical area of the jail, where I received my prescribed medications. But what stuck with me most was my meeting with the social worker. The words she spoke replayed in my mind over and over like a cruel refrain: "No matter what happens, there will always be people who believe you're guilty." The finality of her statement weighed heavily on me.

Even if the truth of my innocence and victimization were proven, the accusation would always leave a stain that could never fully be washed away. It would be forever etched into criminal database records, following me wherever I went.

The Arraignment

I was shuffled into a courtroom with others awaiting arraignment. The scene was chaos—lawyers rushing from one defendant to another, prosecutors skimming over cases they knew little about. I tried desperately to catch the attention of one of the public defenders, a woman I thought might help. I tried desperately to get her to listen to my story: how I had been covered in blood, how I was the victim, how none of this made sense.

She barely looked at me. “Tell this to your lawyer when you’re assigned one,” she said briskly, moving on to someone else. I was left standing there, hollow, and helpless. My voice didn’t matter here. My innocence didn’t matter.

How many times must I be victimized? First it was by Ana, then the detectives, now this lawyer who is supposed to represent those who are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.

Abandoned by Family

I clung to the hope that my family would save me. Surely, my parents—flawed as our relationship was—wouldn’t let me face this alone. I called them, my voice shaking with desperation. “Mom, Dad, please help me. I can’t be here. I can’t cope with this.”

Their response was chillingly detached. My father’s voice was flat and emotionless: “No, we can’t afford it.”

I pleaded, explaining the charges, the $75,000 bail, and what this would mean for my future. Nothing moved them. Not my pain, not my fear, not my utter desperation. Even strangers might have shown more compassion than my own family.

I thought of the scene in Return of the Jedi, where Luke, writhing in agony, cries out, “Father, please help me!” Even Darth Vader, a symbol of evil, had been moved to act to save his son. But my family? They left me to rot.

Reality vs. Truth

After returning to the jail, I learned about the reason for the charges against me: kidnapping and second-degree sexual offense. I saw Ana’s statement, her lies crafted into a version of events that didn’t come close to matching reality. And there had been witnesses. They were not in the room after she locked herself inside with me, but they would have seen and heard enough.

She claimed I had pulled her into my room and attacked her. But none of it made sense. Witnesses saw her enter willingly. The layout of my apartment didn’t match her story. The physical evidence—my blood covering the room—contradicted her every word. And yet, none of that seemed to matter.

In jail, the truth was meaningless. Reality was what the system decided it to be, and that narrative would replace the truth.

The Weight of Fear

The broadcast news made things worse. Inmates get curious about why someone is there. Since I was not being treated as the victim that I was, the news reporters in my part of the world had no obligation to protect the identity of the accused.

How much more insanely terrifying can a story get? News reporters would feel obligated to protect the identity of a victim, even though the so-called victim was actually the perpetrator. The news reporters had no such obligation to protect my identity as a victim because I was falsely assumed to be the perpetrator.

They reported on the case, referring to Ana as “a girl,” as if she were some innocent child instead of a 26-year-old woman. The narrative painted me as the predator and her as the helpless victim. In jail, the word “sexual offense” carried weight. It marked me as a target.

I shared my story with some of the other inmates. I was already in so much shock that someone had to explain that they had to protect me because the news had made it appear that I had sexually harmed a child.

I might have faced violence in the jail for having been believed to have harmed a child sexually. Some of the inmates knew the truth and protected me from potential harm.

I couldn’t help think that so many women are actual victims of sexual violence. It is a heinous crime. I had helped them heal. And Ana had targeted me!

How evil is that?!

This added to the complexity of this case and the reversal of truth and justice.

My case defied so many expectations and the normal way in which women are usually the victims. Yet, she was most definitely the violent perpetrator and I was the true victim.

With the news falsely characterizing her as a girl, this put me at risk and added to the threat that I actually faced and the perceptions I had of threats.

My body was stuck in survival mode, my heart pounding in my chest as my mind zigzagged between panic and despair throughout the day.

I found myself surrounded by dangerous individuals, people who had committed violent crimes, when I unexpectedly encountered a man who had been on death row.

In an eerie twist of fate, I had previously crossed paths with the sister of his cellmate on death row back when I worked as a Social Worker III, essentially a therapist, at the mental health center in Duplin County. This man, whom I met at the Durham County Jail, was here for a new trial. Somehow, I discovered that his cellmate was Johnny Street Parker.

In the tight-knit community of Clinton, NC, news spread quickly, and everyone knew one another. It felt almost inevitable when one of my clients, the sister of Johnny Street Parker, walked into my office wearing oversized sunglasses, her shoulders slumped, as though she wanted to disappear. Her brother, according to what I had read, had brutally murdered a man with an axe—a crime tangled with drugs. The victim, who was gay, had been emasculated; the details of how this was accomplished with an axe were unclear, but the victim's mutilated body part had been left at the bottom of a staircase.

I could sense the heavy burden of shame weighing on my client, the deep embarrassment of being related to someone known for such a horrific act.

Years after my time at Duplin-Sampson County Mental Health, I found myself face-to-face with this man who had spent time in a cell alongside Johnny Street Parker. On death row! He had kidnapped a guy with his girlfriend who killed the guy to impress him. He was here for a retrial.

I felt like an outsider, lost in a place that was like I had been kidnapped.

As I sat alone in my cell, my mind was a storm of conflicting thoughts. I had never been in a fight—not once. Yet here I was, caught up in a situation based on a lie. I had used a punching bag before, for exercise and to manage stress, imagining scenarios where I stood up for myself. But in reality, I had always shied away from confrontation, afraid of causing harm.

Memories of living with Lynn came flooding back, along with the times I hit the bag after an intense argument. Lynn would often follow me, insisting, "I am not done talking," as she entered the garage. My reaction was always the same—immediately halting my punches, driven by an instinct that occurred faster than conscious thought, terrified of even the slightest chance of hurting her.

Unimaginable! Of course, I loved her and didn't want to harm her, but the instinct to stop was more profound than love—it was an innate aversion to violence. The same instinctively gentle hands held Celta, who was even more fragile than Lynn. I remembered the moment we posed for a photo, and Celta began to fall. In a fraction of a second, before my mind could plan, my body moved to catch her without causing harm.

The notion of me as someone who could inflict pain was almost laughable if it weren't so tragically real. Yet, it was this very idea that now defined my current predicament, leaving me caught between my peaceful nature and the harsh reality surrounding me.

So many days and nights consisted of me in my cell alone wondering if I would receive medications. If I was actually let out of my cell, if the nurse did not forget my medications when she came, I could ask for a pain killer or another medication that existed as a prn. medication.

The mere existence of this ability to request prn medications for unusual distress was an anomaly in the circumstances that were characterized by indifference. It is an understatement to say that this did not reflect the notion that people are innocent until proven guilty.

It may have been good or bad, it’s hard to tell. The time when I had a blister that made walking painful. I must have gotten my socks and shoes wet coming from the shower. Eventually I was taken to see the nurse and given something for the pain and the blister was treated. 

Desperation and Questions

Would I ever be free? Would I ever find someone who could love me, knowing the accusations that would always linger? Would anyone see me as more than this false image Ana had created? The questions consumed me.

I was writing letters to my assigned lawyer, pouring out my side of the story, hoping someone—anyone—would listen. The waiting felt endless. The truth felt useless. And the system, like my family, seemed intent on leaving me to fend for myself.

“The truth was all I had, but it wasn’t enough. The system had already decided who I was, and nothing I said or did seemed to matter. I was left alone with my thoughts, the toxic shame of my past colliding with the weight of this new betrayal. I was no longer a person—I was a case number, a defendant, a shadow of who I used to be. Would justice ever find me? Or would I be forever trapped in this lie?”

In the early months of my captivity, I fiercely rejected any suggestion of being taken to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. The mere thought of using mental illness as a defense for my actions made me sick. I wasn’t going to allow it to be said that there was validity to what Ana claimed but there was an explanation.

Despite Ana's accusations, I stood firm in declaring my complete innocence and victimhood. I refused to succumb to her manipulative tactics and never wavered in my claims of being mentally sound and guiltless. To even consider entertaining such an idea would be to admit defeat and give Ana exactly what she wanted – power over me.

No, I would not allow her or the detectives who questioned me to strip me of my agency and reduce me to a mere pawn in their twisted game.

I wrote in a letter to my lawyer that I did not have a dissociative disorder. I told him that I had not been trying to play a game with the detectives. With Ana’s lies they were the writers and directors of a sick game.

My landlord, with a sinister smile on his face, had taken away all of my possessions, leaving me with nothing… as if I had never existed, never collected anything that I might want to keep forever.

My precious memories in the form of photographs and letters from those I loved were now lost forever, buried under the weight of my shattered identity. Every cherished reminder of the life of joy and success was gone!

I was left with nothing - no clothes, no mementos, no sense of self. It was as if my very being had been erased.

Alone, Abandoned and Scared

When I was in my cell, I would desperately try to catch the attention of the guards to be taken to see a nurse or doctor. But I was just another inmate in a sea of faces, drowning in my own extreme anxiety. Every moment felt like an overwhelming wave crashing over me, suffocating me with its intensity.

The guards, cold and unfeeling as machines, would pass by our cells without a hint of empathy or compassion. In their eyes, I was nothing but a number, a nameless entity locked away in this hellish prison. They didn't see me as a person, let alone an innocent one who was suffering in distress.

Their robotic footsteps echoed through the halls, sending chills down my spine. It was as if they were inhuman creatures, devoid of any shred of humanity. And trapped in this environment, my body began to react in strange ways. Panic attacks would grip me with such force that I thought I was going to die. My heart raced and my breaths came in short, labored gasps.

I would frantically push the button in my cell, pleading for someone, anyone to come and help me. But my cries fell on deaf ears. The guards saw me as nothing more than a nuisance, an inconvenience to be ignored and dismissed.

My captivity was slowly breaking me down, piece by piece. But no one seemed to care about my suffering. To them, I was just another prisoner in a cell, forgotten and discarded by society.

Moving to Protective Custody

After two or three months, I was transferred to a different part of the jail called protective custody. I wasn't entirely clear why.

There were three inmates who were not only in this area called protective custody but they only left their cells for about an hour to shower and never when anyone else was out. They were going to testify against fellow gang members.

During my stay in protective custody, I met an older man who was also being held there. He had been caught printing photographs of young children, possibly both boys and girls, in various stages of undress – perhaps even nude. The crime was heinous and unforgivable. I couldn't bring myself to feel any sympathy for him.

What kind of person does this to innocent children? I was curious about the details of his crime, but I knew better than to ask him directly. Unlike me, he was not adamant and ready to explain how he would never harm anyone.

I also crossed paths with a man whose intellect was severely lacking. He had strangled his wife or girlfriend to death. His parents were very supportive. He always had money in his canteen, and he would share something if I didn’t have anything. His family kept his canteen stocked with cash, unlike the indifference offered by my family.

I thought they would offer me a place to stay when I was released. Who knows if that was a good idea, but it never panned out. 

I remained in this section of the prison for several months until I was finally released in May 2003. The Protective Custody unit was smaller than the general population area and most cells housed only one person, making it a safer environment.

I also discovered new things about my gender and how we think of gender. I met a very effeminate person who went by the name Lulu. She was born male but identified as female.

She was a striking African American woman, born into a man's body. While I couldn't help but know that she must be male, it was her soft and feminine legs and face that caught my attention. In one particular moment, none of my prior beliefs about sexual orientation mattered. I just needed human contact, someone to be close to. And she was kind, so sweet and understanding as I sat next to her on a couch in the shared open area.

As our hands touched, fingers intertwining and arms pressed together, I couldn't deny the comfort and connection that I felt. But this was no secret encounter - we were in plain view of anyone who happened to pass by. Despite the comfort she provided me in such an unbearable situation, there was no escaping the harsh reality of what was going on. Every second felt like an eternity as my entire life hung in the balance, consumed by fear and desperation.

Lulu may have been a small flicker of light amidst the darkness, but there was no changing the fact that I was trapped in this hellish place with no end in sight. My pleas for help to my "family" went unanswered, leaving me to wonder how long they would have left me here to rot. It became clear that they had no intention of coming to my aid - I was completely alone in this fight for survival.

Toxic shame had been an outfit I began to wear four years ago. It began with losing Lynn, the love of my life, and continued as I lost my career, my license, and ultimately my home. Being alone in the world for so long only compounded this toxic shame, making me feel like I was fundamentally flawed.

I felt like I had been turned into a creature deemed unworthy of basic human treatment. My situation was degrading and dehumanizing.

I had prayed without ceasing (still a believer back then). I repeated the plea to God, “you know I did no wrong. Please do something. Show me something today.”

The fact that my sister sent me books was a source of support but deep-down parts of me wanted her to do more. Convince Mom and Dad to act like parents.

I didn’t even get visits from my family at all! No words of comfort. Never did I feel a sense that I had a family that was in any way concerned with my circumstances nor did they seem to care about my chances for a normal life later.

If they were not going to act out of concern for me, I knew that appearances mattered in my family. I carried the same exact name as my father. This name would now be emblazoned in stone for historical reference and associated with a heinous crime!

They had acknowledged that I could not possibly have done what I was accused of doing.

Despite that, their silence, their lack of support, could not help but make me feel worthless, a pathetic person who deserved to experience shame.

I was not now, nor would I ever be in a position where I could forgive or forget the decision made by my parents not to pay bail to get me out and to pay for a good lawyer. This experience would always remain in my mind as something so shockingly painful that it would never be possible for me to excuse the inaction of my family.

I spent seven months in jail! Seven nightmarish months.

I was released finally, in May, to await the trial. My lawyer got the bond or bail removed so that I could be released without having to pay anything but with an expectation to return for trial and other court appearances. 

Of course, my so-called family had not even tried to get any clothes at all for me to wear when I got out. They had known that every single item of my own was gone other than the bloody clothing I wore when I was assaulted seven months earlier.

It’s May 2005.

I stepped out of the jail into the late morning light, wearing only the dark green shirt, shorts, and socks I had on the night Ana attacked me. These were the same clothes, still stained with my own dried blood. The moment I crossed that threshold, I felt exposed—marked. I pulled my book bag close to my body and tried to move quickly, avoiding the gaze of anyone who might see me leaving the jail, as if shame itself were chasing me down the street.

The first thing I needed was clothing and a meal. My only option was Urban Ministries, the homeless shelter. I knew if I was lucky, I’d get a bed, but space was never guaranteed.

A Lawyer Who Didn’t Fight

I met with my lawyer briefly after my release and I may have seen him or one of his representatives only two times during the entire seven months I spent in jail. He looked me over, taking stock of me, and said something that left me reeling:

"I’m going to have to put you on the stand. No one will believe you’re capable of anything violent."

I had expected that he would have known that I could only be a victim in this matter but I was terrified. We all know how well the first time I told those detectives what happened. What had he done for me all these months?

I wanted him to prepare me but he said “no.” I was thinking, “really, the last time I tried telling the truth, we know how that went?”

I brought up the bloody clothes, explaining that they would prove I was the victim. The evidence was right there—the blood was mine, no one else’s.

Surely, that mattered?

"We can’t use them," he said, dismissively. "You wore them after leaving jail."

My stomach dropped. Of course I had worn them—I had nothing else! He had seven months to secure the clothes, to preserve them as evidence, to do something that would have helped me. I had written to him over and over, desperate for help. He had failed me. Everyone had failed me.

Survival on the Streets

The shelter wasn’t always available. On the nights I couldn’t get in, I wandered the streets, noting where small groups of homeless people settled.

One night, some of us found a quiet space near a church, though I wasn’t sure we were even allowed to be there. It didn’t matter—I just needed a place to disappear, to sleep, though sleep rarely came.

The shame weighed on me constantly. Some days, I couldn’t even get a shower or a shave. I felt like my humiliation was written across my face for the world to see. To escape, I started spending my days at Duke University’s libraries, hiding among the students.

I rode the campus buses between Duke East and West Campus, hoping I didn’t look too out of place. I found odd jobs that helped me get small amounts of money—just enough to eat. Sometimes, my parents and sister sent me a little money, though what I really needed was for them to step up and help me find a real lawyer. But I accepted what little they sent, because

I had no choice.

I had yet to reclaim the most minimal self-love that would have caused me to be outraged by the breadcrumbs that my family was offering.

At night, I noticed that some of Duke’s libraries stayed open 24 hours. One of them had a computer lab next to a quiet room with couches. I started sneaking in, napping there when I could. But it was never real sleep—just a restless, uneasy dozing, my body always tense. What if someone found me?

What if I was thrown out? I was in my 30s, but I wasn’t a student. I was homeless.

The uncertainty of the trial loomed over me, a shadow stretching into every part of my life. I was terrified.

Wearing a Lifetime of Toxic Shame

What I was experiencing wasn’t just about this moment—it was about a lifetime of being made to feel wrong.

I had grown up in a toxic family, where I was cast as the scapegoat. No matter what I did, I was the problem, the burden. The one who was too sensitive. The one who made things difficult.

It was only later, after everything, that I came across a book that made me understand: Adult Survivors of Toxic Family Members by Sherrie Campbell. It described exactly what I had lived through. The way narcissistic families paint themselves as saints while blaming the scapegoat for everything wrong. How they turn the victim into the villain. How they make sure the scapegoat never truly feels like they belong.

I had escaped it for a time. First, in college, where I built friendships that gave me my first taste of real validation. Then, with Celta and Lynn, I had found love—love that made me feel worthwhile.

But then I lost Lynn. And the world took everything away from me. And now, I was back in the role they had always cast me in.

I was the scapegoat. And this time, the world wasn’t just shaming me—it was trying to destroy me.

I carried that shame everywhere, like a second skin or a shroud.

A Family That Left Me to Rot

I was angry—so angry.

Because I knew. I knew that if something serious happened to my brother or my sister, the family would rally. They always had. I had seen it firsthand.

But when it came to me?

I was an afterthought.

It was a cruel, maddening contradiction—the source of my deepest confusion and my deepest pain. On one hand, I was fed the words, We love you.

You’re part of the family. On the other, they stood by and watched me drown, offering nothing but silence.

I didn’t want to see it for what it was. I couldn’t. So I gaslit myself, twisting their indifference into something that resembled care. I clung to the scraps of their attention, desperate to believe that they loved me, that I mattered to them. Because facing the truth—that I was truly alone—was a horror I wasn’t ready for.

But the cracks had been there for years. I just hadn’t wanted to look.

The Call That Changed Everything

My brother. John.

There was a time when he was my best friend. The bond between us felt solid—something that would never break. We laughed together, celebrated holidays together, shared memories that felt unshakable. I had no reason to believe anything had changed.

But it had.

One Christmas visit home, I met my niece Emily for the first time. She was shy at first, peeking at me from behind the couch. But as the night went on, she began to warm up, her tiny hand finding its way into mine.

I was charmed by her innocence—until she said something that sent a chill through me.

I noticed a mark near her eye. Gently, I asked, “What happened?”

Without hesitation, she answered. “Your brother did that.”

Not Dad. Not my father. She said, Your brother.

It was so small—a detail that might have slipped past me. But it didn’t. And then, I saw it with my own eyes.

Later that night, I witnessed my brother’s temper erupt. He grabbed Emily Whealton, my neice, lifted her off the floor, and shoved her against the wall. The thud, her small cry—it’s burned into me.

My blood ran cold. I had to report the suspected abuse of Emily Whealton by John Stephen Whealton. It was up to the people at Child Protective Services to determine whether John Stephen Whealton was abusing his children or not. It was not my job to make that determination.

The Consequence of Doing the Right Thing

I made the call.

Child Protective Services. Because that’s what you do. That’s what we swore to do as social workers—err on the side of the child. Report suspected abuse. Not judge, not decide—just report.

I wasn’t the enemy. I was the protector.

But to my family, I became something else entirely.

The police came. And with them, the family’s mask slipped. They closed ranks—not around Emily, but around John. It was a “private family matter,” they said. I was a traitor. The police, failing to uphold my anonymity, let everyone know who had made the call.

And just like that, I was cut off. 

John Stephen Whealton, my own brother, didn't want to clear his name in my eyes. So, it seemed that he was fine with the label of child abuser.

Gaslight and Silence

John at least had the decency to make his feelings clear—We’re done. And we were. Forever.

But my parents and my sister? They never said those words. There was no confrontation. No fallout. Just… nothing.

And that was worse.

Because everything they did—or rather, everything they didn’t do—was cloaked in this cruel ambiguity. There were no accusations. No fights. Just a quiet, chilling absence where care should have been.

And through it all, they still sent mixed signals—birthday cards, the occasional phone call, just enough to keep me doubting myself. I told myself, If they hated me, they wouldn’t reach out at all, right?

But when disaster struck me—when I was brutalized, arrested, thrown into a nightmare—I discovered the truth.

There was no rallying around me.

No lifeline.

No questions. No concern.

The Disaster They Ignored

When I lost Lynn—my wife in every way that mattered—it felt like my world had collapsed. My career had been ripped from me. I was drowning in grief, homelessness, and injustice.

But it wasn’t just hardship. It was catastrophe. The kind that levels a life.

The kind where you reach out—not for a handout, but for human connection. For family.

And I had none.

They could have done so much. It didn’t even have to be money—though my grandparents' house, sitting unused and empty nearby, could have been a refuge from homelessness. Of course, I was not thinking about that at the time.

I needed to believe that they cared because I had no one else. I also didn’t have any self-worth or self-love. Not yet.

But no.

No visit. No phone call. No lawyer. No belief.

No love.

The True Face of Gaslighting

And here’s where the madness of it all becomes clear.

I never once heard, We’re angry at you for what you did to John. They never connected their betrayal to anything I had done.

On the surface, everything seemed fine—We love you, we care about you, you’re family.

But their actions—or their silence—told the truth.

That’s the thing about gaslighting: it doesn’t have to be words. Sometimes, it’s the absence of words. The void. The unbearable dissonance between what you’re told and what you live.

And when you live in that space long enough, you lose yourself. You question every instinct. You start to believe that maybe you’re the problem.

The Hardest Truth

It wasn’t the abandonment that shattered me the most. It was the coldness.

Because even if they had said:
“You broke our trust.”
“You hurt the family.”
“We can’t forgive you.”

At least that would have been real.

But there was no anger. Just absence.

I wasn’t even worth hating.

And when you’re left with that, how can you not believe—deep in your bones—that you are worthless?

The Final Question

I was left to rot.

Not because they couldn’t help.

But because they chose not to.

So tell me…

If your own family won’t stand by you—who will?

The Trial That Hung Over Me Like a Death Sentence

Every second outside of jail was spent in the waiting. Waiting for my name to be called in court. Waiting to find out if my life would be destroyed.

I spent my days playing mental chess, reliving every moment, trying to understand how this had happened. How Ana had set this trap so perfectly.

How she knew that all she had to do was say something, and the system would make it true.

And I wondered—how much more of my life would they take? Would I ever get a job again? Would anyone ever love me again? Would I ever get to be me again?

Or had the system already decided that I didn’t matter?

When I speak of waking up after a suicide attempt, I am referring to the sense of having been detached from truly living life. I would get married to Elnaz Rezaei Ghalechi in 2010 and it is not hard to understand that aspects of this marriage were problematic. 

I didn’t approach this as a true chance at happiness but more of a desperate desire for connection… to share a life with someone else. To find someone who cared about ME.

Despair weighed upon me as I wandered the dark Durham night. The shelter was full, so I tried to sleep on the grounds of Duke West Campus. No signs warned against trespassing. I didn’t feel comfortable so I left and taking a shortcut I scaled a 4-foot rock wall, unaware of doing anything wrong.

Then, as if summoned by fate, a police car appeared.

A block down the road, its lights flickered in the night. The car slowed, then stopped. My stomach clenched as the officer stepped out, approaching me with a cold authority.

“License."

The request made no sense. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

Why were they stopping me?

And then, those dreaded words. Words that had already shattered my life once before.

"Warrant for your arrest."

Time collapsed. My thoughts spiraled. A warrant? For what?

Then came the explanation—something about using someone’s credit card without permission.

I couldn’t breathe.

A credit card?

Panic surged through me. How? I hadn’t even had the chance to meet anyone with a credit card since my release from jail. How could I have committed a felony without even knowing it?

I barely had time to process the accusation before cold metal closed around my wrists. Handcuffs. Again.

As they led me away, my mind raced to make sense of the impossible.

How the hell did this happen?

A Rabbit Hole of Betrayal

To understand this new nightmare, we have to go back—back to a time before Ana, before jail, before my life unraveled.

I had once been part of therapy groups in Durham, trying to build a community, trying to heal. That’s where I met Kathy.

She knew I had worked with people diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—once called Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)—a condition made infamous by movies like Sybil. It was rare, misunderstood, and yet, here it was, again, threading itself into my story.

Before my time on Holloway Street, before the assault that would alter my life, I had briefly lived in a spare room offered by a friend, Elaine. During that time, Kathy and I became intimate.

Then, one night, everything changed.

In an instant, she transformed—her voice, her body language—childlike.

It was as if I was suddenly in the presence of a child in an adult’s body.

I freaked out. I pulled away and got dressed immediately.

It didn’t matter that she was an adult. It felt like I was with a child.

Kathy soon returned to her boyfriend and Elaine wanted to live alone. I moved into the home of Kathy and her boyfriend —sleeping in the same room as her son, on the bottom bunk. But our relationship had become twisted, toxic.

She demanded my attention, needed me to play the role of therapist. I had already explained how inappropriate that would be after what had happened and I wasn’t licensed and practicing at that point.

Some of her other personalities were angry at me.

Some were obsessed with me.

Some were jealous—especially when I spent time with my girlfriend, Shonda.

The situation was untenable.

And then came Christmas.

The Credit Card That Would Ruin Me

December 2003—less than a year before Ana’s attack.

Kathy wanted to give me a gift.

She offered to pay for my website domain renewal—the same poetry website I had started with Lynn back in 1995.

The life I had shared with Lynn felt so close, and yet, like an entirely different lifetime.

We sat together as she entered her credit card details into my GoDaddy account. It was her choice.

Neither of us thought much about the card being saved on file.

At the time, it meant nothing. But that decision—the smallest, most mundane act—would later become my undoing.

A Dangerous Shift

Tensions escalated.

Kathy became more unpredictable, more hostile.

One night, things turned dangerous.

I felt threatened—physically and sexually.

I ran.

Outside, hands shaking, I called Shonda. She offered me a place to stay, a bed in the back of her family’s store.

Then, I called the police.

The authorities came. They didn’t arrest Kathy, but the report was on record—a crime of a sexual nature, with me as the victim.

I should have seen the warning signs then. But I didn’t.

And now, here I was—being arrested. Because of her.

The Forgotten Charge

Fast-forward to 2005, after Ana, after my release from jail.

I had forgotten about the GoDaddy domain.

My cards on file had no funds, so Kathy’s was automatically charged.

Instead of asking for her card to be removed, instead of seeing this for what it was—a mistake—she pressed charges.

The charge? Felony credit card fraud.

The amount? $15.

Fifteen dollars.

And I was back in a cell.

Trapped in the System Again

This time, I spent a month in jail, mostly in protective custody.

The same lawyer—the one handling my pending trial—was assigned to this nonsense case.

"I’ll enter a plea to misdemeanor larceny," he told me when he got around to contacting me at all, after I had been there almost a month!

"You’ll be released right away. No court appearance necessary."

I should have been furious but I was in such a state of shock during this period of time. I was detached from feelings and living life as if in a bad dream.

Misdemeanor larceny? Over a clerical error?

A System That Doesn't Care

I was too numb and detached to feel the anger that I feel as I write this almost 20 years later.

I was too beaten down, too traumatized to feel the full weight of my indignation.

But looking back?

This shouldn’t have happened.

A competent lawyer—one who actually cared—would have had this dismissed immediately. Instead, my public defender took the path of least resistance, pushing me through a legal system that wasn’t about justice, only efficiency.

I just wanted out.

So, I did not protest when he told me what he was going to do. As soon as I was free, I left Durham—straight for Chapel Hill.

Because even in homelessness, I had learned: some places were safer than others and Chapel Hill was safer.

As I was awaiting trial, I could barely process the horrifying thought of what could happen if the trial did not go my way. In a brief encounter with my lawyer that I mentioned previously, after I got out of jail, the only thing he discussed was his sense that no jury would be able to imagine that I was capable of harming anyone. 

I was overwhelmed and traumatized by everything that had happened. I had been homeless or on the verge of homelessness before the assault by Ana that landed me in jail for 7 months. I had been homeless in Durham after my lawyer got me out of jail to “prepare for trial.”

At no point during the one meeting with my lawyer had I discussed the potential prison sentence that I could receive if found guilty of these charges - 2nd degree kidnapping and 2nd degree sexual offense. 

I was existing in a state of trauma. I could have diagnosed myself, if I was thinking clearly, with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I could have recognized that I was using a form of dissociation, that is called derealization, as a coping mechanism. This is the brain's creative way to cope with overwhelming stress or trauma. 

My mind was experiencing life as if I was living in a dream-state. This was a living nightmare! 

Ever since the assault and during the months of captivity or while living homeless in Durham and then Chapel Hill, the topic of spending years in prison never entered my consciousness! It was too overwhelming to imagine.

After spending that month in jail while awaiting trial, I would find and secure a bed at the homeless shelter in Chapel Hill. For a brief moment in time, I experienced a miraculous event where I had a chance to connect with a lady.

It was a rare reprieve, a brief glimpse of something tender before I was thrust back into the cold, both literally and figuratively.

Homeless in Chapel Hill, Holding Onto Hope

At the Interfaith Council (IFC) shelter, I started at the bottom—sleeping on the floor, waiting for a bed to open upstairs. Eventually, I got one, which meant a reserved place to sleep. It also meant I had a small storage space downstairs for my belongings, but the space was barely enough for what little I owned.

During the day, we were forced to leave after breakfast. There was no place to simply be.

I tried to find work. Vocational Rehabilitation had funded Web Design training for me, but what chance did I have of landing a job while living in a shelter, marked by a pending trial that would decide the rest of my life?

And yet, I tried.

I still held onto a shred of self-worth, fragile as it was. I still believed, somehow, that I was more than what the system had labeled me.

A Miracle in the Midst of Chaos

Then something unbelievable happened.

I met someone.

It was November, and I had been on a dating website, though my self-confidence had been shattered. What woman would want a man who was homeless? A man who had been cast as the villain when he was, in fact, the victim?

But she did.

She listened. She believed me.

She invited me to Thanksgiving dinner.

I was stunned. A woman I had only recently started talking to wanted to meet me. She even bought my train tickets to visit her in Sanford, NC.

"I am a respectable lady," she told me. "You should not expect anything sexual to happen."

It didn’t matter. Just being wanted, just being seen, was enough.

I packed a few changes of clothes, enough to look semi-presentable, and boarded the train. Thanks to the shelter, I was able to shower, shave, and brush my teeth before leaving. That, in itself, was a luxury.

A Moment of Connection

We had a wonderful evening and weekend.

Dinner was warm and filling. We watched the Superman movie together. That night, we shared a bed, though nothing sexual happened.

But I still felt close to her.

I remember laying in her lap, my arms wrapped around her.

I remember the softness of her lips. I remember her whispering, "Give me your tongue," as we kissed.

She was beautiful—a stunning black woman—and for that brief moment, I felt lucky.

For a single night, I wasn’t a homeless person. I wasn’t an accused criminal. I was just me, holding someone close, feeling warmth against my skin instead of the cold, cruel world pressing in on me.

But then I ruined it.

A Stupid, Simple Mistake

Some of my clothes had gotten wet on the train, so she kindly washed and dried them for me.

But in my absentmindedness, I had left my return ticket in my pocket.

When I realized my mistake, my stomach dropped.

"Oh my god."

My chest tightened with frustration, anger, self-loathing.

"How could I be so stupid?"

I knew I had just created a situation where she would have to buy me another ticket home. The thought filled me with shame.

I clenched my fists and, without thinking, slammed my hand down on the bed—not out of anger at her, not in any way directed toward her, but in sheer frustration at myself.

But it didn’t matter.

The second my hand hit the bed, I felt it—fear.

It was my fear that she might be afraid of me.

The Shadow of False Accusations

I hadn’t even been near her.

What if she thinks I could be dangerous? What if she wonders about Ana’s accusations?

It didn’t matter that I knew I was the same person who had those soft gentle hands - the only hands and arms that could have been there with Lynn or Celta before her. Celta who had anorexia and was all skin and bones.

The fear of what she might think consumed me.

This wasn’t like with Lynn, where I could wake up from a nightmare and simply ask her, "Did I hit you in my sleep, or was that just in my dream?"

With Lynn, there was trust.

But this was different.

I left the next day, hugging her goodbye. But I felt ashamed. Because of the shame that I began to carry, I didn’t think to ask for another moment with her.

That moment was the beginning of a new fear—the fear that someone might imagine that I could be violent. It would take many years, maybe a decade and a half for that fear to evaporate.

I was so frustrated that I had but one short glimpse of hope, connection, and closeness.

Back Out in the Cold

On my way back to Chapel Hill, it started snowing.

The ice and wind cut through my coat, through my skin, through the fragile layer of my dashed hopes that I had carried with me on that train that first brought me to see a lady.

I arrived in downtown Durham, exhausted, stressed, and desperate to get back to the shelter in Chapel Hill. But the buses that would go to Chapel Hill weren’t running.

I had no choice but to take the Durham bus as far as it would get me to Chapel Hill and then walk.

Carrying my two bags, I took bus 10 to the farthest point it would go on Highway 15-501, then walked for miles, uphill, through the wet, heavy snow.

At some point, another guy was walking in the same direction. He seemed safe, and we walked together, sharing the quiet misery of the storm.

But when we reached the border of Chapel Hill, I saw the Red Roof Inn and made a decision.

I would call my parents.

I would beg for a warm bed.

I entered the motel and asked for phone to call my family.

"Dad, please. I’m soaked, I’m exhausted. I just need a place to sleep tonight."

His response was cold, emotionless, detached.

"No."

I was numb.

Not from the cold outside, but from the realization that nothing I said would ever make him care.

I had no choice but to keep walking.

Blisters formed on my wet feet. My hands were numb.

Every step felt heavier than the last.

When I finally arrived at the shelter, I knocked on the door, praying they would let me in.

They did.

For a few precious hours, I had a warm bed.

But as dawn came and breakfast ended, I was back out in the cold.

Alone. Again.

I arrived in Chapel Hill still haunted by the weight of what had happened. The trial loomed over me like a surreal nightmare that could always get worse—each day darker than the last.

It felt like I had one foot in the Upside Down, that decaying alternate world from Stranger Things—gray skies, black vines coiling through every structure, flakes of ash suspended in the air like frozen sorrow. A world where sunlight never broke through, and something monstrous always lurked just out of sight.

That was my emotional landscape. A place of trauma, fear, and numb detachment. One version of me walked Chapel Hill’s streets. The other was trapped in that shadow world—haunted, hunted, unseen.

I had started seeing a therapist, one I would continue seeing for years. But in those early days, he could barely reach me. I was too far down. Healing felt impossible when my future was uncertain, and every breath I took carried the suffocating fear of what awaited me in court—because no matter how implausible Ana’s story was, sitting in front of two detectives in bloody clothes had not been enough to convince them of the truth.

At night, I slept on the floor of the homeless shelter. During the day, I found temporary refuge in the libraries on UNC’s campus. I’d sit at a computer, pretending to research or write, anything to keep my mind from spinning. I still didn’t allow my mind to go to the place where the charges existed, didn’t understand the sentence I was facing, and my lawyer hadn’t explained any of it.

I was moving through fog, without a map, without a compass.

The Call That Changed Everything

It was sometime in July 2006 when I called my lawyer from the UNC campus. He picked up, abrupt and urgent.

“Come to court. Now.”

No explanation. No context. Just: Now.

I asked how long I had, but he didn’t care—just that I needed to get there fast.

My pulse spiked. I grabbed my things and rushed to the bus from Chapel Hill to Duke. From there, I walked toward the courthouse in a panic, nearly running.

My heart was racing—not just from the exertion, but from the deep-rooted fear I had lived with since being charged. I had already missed a court date once, and the shame and terror of that mistake still sat in my bones. I could not afford another one.

By the time I reached the courthouse, sweat clung to my skin. I was gasping for air—not just from the walk, but from the dread clawing at my insides. No matter how implausible the charge was, my only fear that morning was being late—getting in trouble, being punished for missing something. I had no idea this was a turning point, a break in the case that would define the rest of my life. I was terrified of being arrested for failure to appear—not of walking into a courtroom where my lawyer would ambush me and unravel my future in minutes.

The Ambush

The moment I stepped into the courthouse, I saw my lawyer—standing in the hallway. Not in a private room. Not even in a quiet corner. Just… there. And beside him, the prosecutor.

My stomach sank. The whole setup was wrong. It felt staged.

I barely had time to catch my breath before he said:

“They’re dropping the sexual offense charge. You’ll plead guilty to second-degree kidnapping. No additional jail time, just time served and probation.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

My lawyer had once told me, “No jury will ever believe you capable of this.”

Nothing had changed. No new evidence, no new testimony. No revelations.

He had known I was innocent. From everything I’d ever told him. From every conversation. He had never doubted I was the victim.

But now, standing in front of me, he was threatening me.

“Take this deal, or you could face 10 years in prison,” he said. “We discussed this.”

We hadn’t. That was a lie.

He had never told me what the potential sentence might be. Why would he? If he truly believed no jury would convict me, there was no reason to warn me of prison time. The implication had always been that we’d win. That truth would matter.

Now, I was being railroaded. Ambushed. He was cornering me—and doing it with the prosecutor present.

I was frozen with fear. And in that surreal moment, something happened that still stuns me to this day:
I looked at the prosecutor for comfort.

She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t reassuring. But she wasn’t threatening me either.

My own lawyer was the one making threats.

That moment—me looking toward the prosecutor because my lawyer frightened me—sums up everything.

Walking Into a Lie

I must have nodded. Or maybe I said nothing at all. But the next thing I knew, we were walking into the courtroom.

My mind was shutting down. I wasn’t in control anymore. I had entered freeze mode—a full trauma response.

The courtroom blurred. I was barely registering anything. I was aware that something terrible was happening, but I couldn’t stop it. It was happening to me.

Everything moved too fast.

I stood before the judge. The room felt like it was tilting.

When asked if I was satisfied with my counsel, I said, “I don’t know.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to say, No, this man is betraying me! He’s lying!

I wanted to tell the judge that I had been ambushed, that I hadn’t been given time to process, to think, to weigh my options.

When asked if I was on medication or had any mental condition that might prevent me from understanding the plea deal, I wanted to say, Yes!

I had PTSD. I had depression. I was terrified. I was not thinking clearly. I was on medication.

But I was too detached and in a state of traumatic shock to speak or to summon air that is needed to form words that one might hear.

A Last, Desperate Attempt

As I stood before the judge, I knew I had to slow this down.

I had to fight—even if I could barely form words.

When asked if I was satisfied with my counsel, the only thing I could manage was:

"I don’t know."

What a fool! My mind screamed at me. Tell the judge the truth! Tell him this lawyer has failed you!

I searched for a way out, a moment to speak up. When asked if I was on medication or had any mental condition that would prevent me from entering a plea deal, I hesitated.

Every part of me wanted to say yes.

"Yes, I have a trauma disorder. I have Major Depression. I have an anxiety disorder. I am not thinking clearly. I am on medication."

But I didn’t say it.

I couldn’t say it because I lacked the capacity to draw in air and force it across vocal chords that would utter words of truth.

Forced to Speak a Lie

Then came the final question.

“Are you in fact guilty?”

Everything in me screamed No.

Instead, I pointed at my lawyer and said, “That’s what he told me to say for the purpose of this plea deal.” That was it.

That was my plea.

Not a “Yes, Your Honor.” Not a confession. Just a statement that I was parroting what I’d been coached to say. My lawyer had spoken for me almost the entire time.

He entered the plea. He confirmed everything. He led me—like a lamb to slaughter.

I shook his hand afterward. Why? I don’t know. Trauma does strange things. I should’ve pulled away, but I didn’t have the strength.

Suborning Perjury?

Here’s what I’ve always wondered.

If a lawyer knows their client is guilty—because the client confessed—and still allows them to lie on the stand, it’s called suborning perjury. That’s how we define “knowing.”

But what if it goes the other way?

What if a lawyer knows their client is innocent—and still coaches them to say they’re guilty?

Isn’t that just as wrong?

Even if the law doesn’t see it that way, common sense does.

To any layperson, this feels like the same thing. It is the same thing. Morally. Rationally. In every meaningful way.

My lawyer knew I was innocent. Not suspected. Not assumed. He knew. And yet, he stood beside me in a courtroom and helped me plead guilty to a crime that never happened.

A Crime That Never Happened

As I was led away, a court officer pulled me aside to draw blood for DNA records.

I tried to protest. “This plea deal makes it sound like I committed a crime.” He didn’t care. No one did.

No one ever talked about what actually happened that day in 2004. No evidence was reviewed. No facts were examined. No truth was spoken.

Just a quick hearing. A rushed judgment. A courtroom full of people too ready to move on.

And a handshake with the villain who had silenced me.

That’s all it took to permanently alter the course of my life.

All because the system wanted a win. All because my lawyer, who knew I was the victim, coached me into silence.

All because no one—no one—listened.

Why the Rush?

Why the urgency? Why couldn’t he have warned me on the phone? Why couldn’t I have had a night to think, to speak to someone I trusted, to feel the weight of the decision I was being coerced into making?

Because letting me think was the last thing anyone wanted.

My silence was convenient. My trauma, my fear, my confusion—they all served the system better than my voice ever could. If I had been given time—even the hour-long trip to Durham—I would have been ready to say no. No, no, no! I would have realized that an actual prison would be no worse than the virtual prison created by this plea deal.

But this—this was by design.

I wish I could tell you this story had a resolution, that justice was served, or that time healed what had been broken.

But this story doesn’t end that way.

For thirteen years, I existed in a world without color, a purgatory where the days are now a blur and one day was like any other, lifeless and heavy. I wasn’t living—I was drifting, an observer in my own life.

It is tragic to say but something bad was on the distant horrizon. It would mark a second climax to this story. I would not be able to endure this forever. I am getting ahead of the story.

I struggled to pay bills, buy groceries, and watch as weeks turned into months, as seasons changed outside my window while I remained unchanged, unmoved. It wasn’t sadness, not exactly. It was worse.

My life was characterized by emptiness.

I waited—for what, I didn’t know. Maybe for something to change. Maybe for someone to notice. Maybe just for a reason to believe that my life still mattered.

But nothing changed.

Hope was completely gone.

There were moments—brief flashes—when I almost reached out.

A phone call I never made.
A letter I never sent.
A conversation I avoided.

But I always stopped myself.

Because if my own family didn’t care, why would anyone else?

And so I stayed in the shadows.

Counting the days. Counting the years.

Toxic shame is the kind of shame that speaks to one’s sense of self and it’s not about anything one did. The tragic thing about this shame was it cut me off from human connection and support.

The Slow Disintegration

The trauma didn’t just leave scars—it rewired me. I lost parts of myself, the parts that had once fought to be seen, to be valued.

I was not the same person who had once built a career, who had once loved and been loved, who had once believed in something beyond mere survival.

I withdrew. Growing up, I had withdrawn into hiding. This was different. I believed I had to embody the false self that Ana had created with her lies.

Sleep was fitful, filled with nightmares of not being believed and the horrifying results of not being believed by those in authority, those who are supposed to protect victims. And when I woke up, it wasn’t relief I felt—it was exhaustion. Because another day had begun.

Another day of this.

There were disturbing events as well. Beyond the despair and hopelessness, and the remnants of trauma there were new traumatic events.

It was the middle of 2006.

I was 40 years old, and the last two years had been a brutal fight for survival—homeless, betrayed, falsely accused, and now forever marked as a criminal. Although my status as a homeless person was on the verge of changing, everything else remained a bleak constant.

The Division of Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) had funded my certification in Web Design. This was before Ana's vicious attack… before I was thrown into jail… before I was cornered into accepting a plea deal. I was already crushed, having lost my career, my home, my clinical license, and so I numbly went along with the suggestion we stumbled upon together. I admit I was something of a geek, with a faint curiosity about technology.

Yet, I had no desire to work in that field. That's why I used my engineering degree as a stepping stone to earn a graduate degree, a Master of Social Work. Web design and development felt like a tedious, soul-crushing task of writing code for a lifeless machine. I was too shattered by the harrowing weight of seven torturous months in jail to grasp these realities then.

I had moved forward like a docile child, surrendering my clinical license and following their suggestions. Now, with an indelible stain on my record, a violent crime etched into eternity, I wrestled with the grim reality that no one would ever trust me to work in a helping profession… in a role where trust is essential.

The most agonizing part is that the crime I was wrongfully convicted of can never be erased or expunged—not ever.

I thought you could trust me, no matter who you were. Yet, Ana had spun an entirely different tale, and the detectives bought into her fabrications completely. My life seemed split into two opposing forces—truth and reality. The truth was the essence of who I truly was and had always been. Reality, however, was a social construct, woven from tales told by others. None of the stories about me were penned by anyone who genuinely knew me.

Let's step back a moment. After I was released from jail, I found myself with a web design certificate but nowhere to call home in Chapel Hill. Eric, my VR counselor from Durham, continued to support me. He was still there, alongside a job coach, trying to guide me through the tricky terrain of job applications, where every form demanded whether I had a criminal record. Each application was a harsh reminder, a trigger I never anticipated. I never thought it would end up being a consideration I’d have to face. Eric's advice seemed to imply I should acknowledge guilt while pleading for a second chance. Perhaps he meant well. Maybe he thought it was unrealistic for me to expect every employer to disregard my recent conviction. Yet, I felt torn; I couldn't bring myself to follow his guidance.

I couldn’t do it.

I had already lost so much—my freedom, my reputation, my career, my dignity—but I clung desperately to the truth. Eric's advice mirrored the beliefs of many about the justice system, where pleading guilty equates to committing a crime. However, the plea deal and my courtroom responses had been arranged without my input, as if my lawyer had made all the decisions for me, as you might recall from my earlier account of these events.

It was a tangled mess, and I was caught in the middle, struggling to reconcile the truth I held onto with the reality imposed upon me.

Guilt had never been made concrete and real when I seemed to plead guilty in front of the judge. I literally lacked the ability to summon up air to vocalize my truth.

VR had determined previously, with my input, that a traditional job would be difficult for me. A home-based business was the plan. But what good was a home-based business when you had no home?

Initially, the debate centered on whether VR should purchase equipment for use on Holloway Street in Durham. This particular area had garnered a notorious reputation, known far and wide as a drug-infested, crime-ridden section of town. Eric, though not one to articulate every detail of what he knew about the neighborhood, was acutely aware of its infamy. He didn't need to witness the discarded needles littering the streets or be approached by hookers desperate for their next fix. Nor did he need to experience the fear of being mugged or threatened on Holloway Street firsthand to understand its perilous nature.

Given the well-known facts about Holloway Street, I always wondered why the detectives weren't more suspicious of Ana's story about being there merely to collect rent. The case might have been concluded, but I couldn't help but marvel at the detectives' apparent naivety as they listened to Ana's account.

During the brief period between the plea deal and securing stable housing, I was guided by a job coach and Eric at VR to find any form of employment. However, this situation was on the brink of transformation.

A Chance at Stability

My heart had once blazed with an unquenchable fury for social justice. That was still a part of me even as I found myself ensnared in the very existence I sought to obliterate for millions across the United States. Homelessness and poverty clawed like savage beasts that were unleashed by the indifference of my own family, and all of this was demanding immediate action. I had sought refuge at the IFC (Interfaith Council for Social Services) shelter in Chapel Hil staying at their homeless shelter.

I also participated in meetings to address homelessness. The federal government doled out block grants to the state, and communities gathered putting their heads together to try to do what they could with the limited funds from the federal government.

I attended these gatherings not as the mental health professional and clinical social worker I once was and would have been, but as a homeless individual, stripped bare of the life I had meticulously planned. Since I was not the social worker I had envisioned that I would be at this time in my life, I imagined that I was limited in how much I could contribute. Hopefully my own story would help inspire others to look for solutions.

It was in this time of transformation that I met Vanessa, a formidable representative from the local mental health center. She held a high-ranking position at the agency, a beacon amid the chaos. The early 2000s were a time of violent upheaval in mental health services, with agencies where I had once worked being reduced to mere administrative skeletons. The government heralded this as efficiency.

The social worker within me screamed in silent agony, tormented by the countless people abandoned as society's outcasts. People society had discarded, branded as if they deserved their plight. Patients discharged from psychiatric hospitals were hurled into communities woefully unprepared to support them, with funding grotesquely inadequate to meet the surging tide of needs. I was ensnared in a maelstrom, torn between the seething passion that had driven me to earn my Master of Social Work degree and the visceral urgency to simply survive in a barren, hope-starved reality.

That passion within me was well below the surface. I had been in the habit of dissociating from those things that would cause me pain - such as the realization that I might never work in my field because of the false criminal conviction. My passion for social justice, the life-long drive to make the world a better place, this existed in an exhiled and wounded part of myself. My dissociation was in the form of emotional and psychological numbing - a form of detachment.

And then Vanessa did something no one else had dared—she extended a hand to help! She connected me to a housing program called Shelter Plus Care—a lifeline for those who had been homeless for at least two years and bore a disability diagnosis. Normally, people languished for years waiting for a Section 8 voucher. I had been on Section 8 and had almost abandoned hope of receiving a voucher. At this point in my life, 2 or 3 years felt like an eternity. I could only focus on surviving each relentless day.

Vanessa’s role in my life at this time felt like a strange twist of fate. On one hand, it seemed she could see right through me, recognizing that I wasn't meant for a life on the streets. My vulnerability was obvious to her, and while she couldn't undo the unjust circumstances that had brought me here, she introduced me to a program that sounded promising—Shelter Plus Care. The name suggested I might receive not only housing but also the treatment I desperately needed.

Sure enough, just weeks after that frustrating plea deal, I found myself approved for Shelter Plus Care and a place in Carrboro, an area nearly part of Chapel Hill. Relief washed over me, knowing that at least one person in a position of influence had noticed my struggle and cared enough to help. But even with this glimmer of hope, I couldn't shake the feeling of uncertainty. I knew I needed more than a home.

What hope was there when I had lost my reputation. My name was never cleared. The actual perpetrator had gotten away with everything.

I was understandably scared of something going wrong even with my housing situation. I had a job coach, as I mentioned, and his name was Harold. We rode out to see the place. I said, “I just got convicted of this crime, do you think that is going to affect my chances of getting into this situation?”

Harold said that if he was me, he would “just not mention it. Don’t let anything stop this from happening.”

I felt it was risky and scary. I was afraid to get my hopes up and then to have this taken away from me. Yet, I wasn’t eager to volunteer information about the lies and the false conviction. Did Vanessa know. Probably not. But then again, maybe she did.

Shelter Plus Care seemed to offer a situation where not only was housing provided but there was the care component seemed to imply that the program had additional resources for one to receive treatment for one’s disability - be it physical or a mental illness. The care component was not actually a part of the program. The program didn’t include a grant to fund treatment services. They didn’t create any form of treatment or rehabilitation for the participants in the program. Maybe the original plan had that in mind but the result was something like an expedited form of approval for Section 8 housing.

So, I moved into an unfurnished apartment with very little income. I was able to work at Measurement Inc. again. I was scoring standardized test from students in schools across the US. We were hired as contract employees and for as long as the contract lasted. Often one contract lead directly to the next project without hardly any interruption.

My parents were still a part of my life despite their betrayal when I was in jail. They brought a table with a couple of chairs, along with a few other items.

Declared Disabled by the Federal Government

Cornered and desperate, I found myself thrust into the grueling process of applying for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), a journey that had begun even before Ana's brutal assault. The relentless trauma of repeated victimization in Durham, followed by an unjust imprisonment after being preyed upon, shattered me beyond recognition, leaving scars so profound they defied words. The torment of disbelief cut deeper than any knife, amplifying the oppressive shadow that haunted every moment of my existence.

I enlisted the aid of a disability lawyer, acutely aware of the systemic cruelty where initial claims were routinely tossed aside—not out of skepticism about one's disability, but as a perverse test of stamina. Even the most glaringly evident cases were rejected, not just once, but twice, as if enduring this torment was an initiation ritual.

Lawyers thrived on this vicious cycle, claiming 30% of the backpay once the case was finally approved. It was logical—they couldn't be expected to work for free. Yet, the entire ordeal felt like a grotesque performance. If one could withstand the excruciating waiting game, after two soul-crushing denials, the case would eventually reach a judge, who would finally grant approval. Unlike the evasive Section 8 vouchers, limited in number, disability approvals had no cap. But the path to that approval was a battlefield of endless struggles and waiting, a brutal testament to sheer persistence.

I find myself torn, not wanting to dive into a rabbit hole or veer off-topic, yet feeling compelled to address the past. Before the state held me hostage, my friends—those who initially supported me and offered me housing when I first arrived in Durham—believed I didn't deserve disability benefits. This belief was based on our understanding of what I had endured at the time. They themselves were battling for these meager government allowances despite their own harrowing experiences. Both of my roommates suffered from dissociative identity disorder (DID), which was believed to have stemmed from horrific crimes, torture, and abuse in their early years of life.

My application process began in 2004, prior to the traumatic events and unjust imprisonment, and was backdated to 2003. Fast forward to July 2006, I found myself entering a courtroom alongside my disability attorney, facing a judge. I walked out, conflicted, yet knowing I had been approved! Having worked tirelessly since I was 16, by the year 2000, I was earning a six-figure salary—a stark contrast to the $30k salary I had when I graduated from my master's program in 1996. Perhaps my income with an MSW and some clinical training was even higher. In 2025, such roles would easily command $70k, and private practice in North Carolina could reach $200k, not just $100k.

The crux of my internal struggle lies in the fact that I had led a normal life, with significant earnings to show for it, up to a certain point. One might assume that someone retiring or transitioning to SSDI could live comfortably. Yet, the reality is they evaluate the entirety of a person's earnings history. Having done little work after age 34, my monthly benefits would barely keep me above the poverty line. It wasn't as dire as SSI—Social Security Insurance—which is entirely needs-based and reflects true poverty, but my monthly checks would hover just above that threshold. This reality leaves me deeply conflicted, caught between the life I once led and the limitations I now face.

My disability lawyer, distinct from the criminal lawyer who had pressured me into accepting a plea deal, presented my case focusing on Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. However, this approach ignored the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that has defined my condition going all the way back to 2003 or earlier and up to the present day in 2025. At the time, I was relieved to be approved. Yet a nagging feeling told me something was amiss.

In the interest of expediency, he omitted the most significant truth—I wasn't just depressed; I was deeply traumatized. Back then, it never crossed my mind, nor did anyone suggest, that I could reopen the criminal case and challenge the plea deal. In hindsight, doing so right after the plea deal disaster would have carried far more weight. The looming specter of "statutes of limitations" has haunted me for nearly two decades—it’s now 2025, and my friend Sarah still clings to the notion of justice, envisioning a new court proceeding nineteen years after the plea deal in 2006. There are rational, albeit not legal, remedies to this situation. Being declared disabled as far back as 2003 should have nullified the plea deal since there was a government-recognized reason why I couldn't have reasonably entered into it.

Ironic, isn't it? The criminal lawyer I had trusted became a villain in my story due to the threats and pressure he exerted over the plea deal. In hindsight, I am torn, wondering if I should have approached my disability lawyer to see if overturning the recent plea deal was possible based on the circumstances I described. During the plea deal, the judge inquired if any mental health conditions could compromise my ability to agree.

My lawyer must have signaled or somehow prepared me to deny any such conditions, despite my lack of awareness. What I said wasn’t a lie, but rather a reflection of my ignorance. Yet, that ignorance now leaves me questioning every decision made in those fraught moments.

I would continue to question whether there was any way to overturn the plea deal.

I could have called the prosecutor as a witness if any lawyer had been there on my side during this time. Or if I had a family and not the illusion of a family that cared things might have been different. A real family would have cared enough to help me navigate these challenges.

I had been victimized multiple times—first by Ana, then by the police, then by the courts, and finally by a world that refused to believe me.

PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) would be added to my medical records later, but by then, the damage was done.

The federal government ruled that I was 100% disabled.

100% unable to work.
100% discarded by society.

The financial payout came in (the backpay for every month and year since 2003 - around $30,000 - a lump sum for the years I had already suffered. That was just my share. My lawyer would have gotten about $10k. I didn’t begrudge him that payment. After that, I would receive a monthly check which was slightly above the federal poverty level.

This lump sum payment was more than I would ever see again in my life. More than even the share of the inheritance from my mother’s death in the 2020s which would help me get a car for the first time in over two decades.

It was survival money, not a future.

No amount of money could undo what had happened.

A Life I Never Imagined

I possessed not one but two prestigious college degrees. That meant NOTHING.

I had meticulously crafted a life, a thriving career, a profound purpose—only to witness it all obliterated in the blink of an eye. That meant NOTHING. The world, a twisted version of reality, demanded I simply accept it. Swallow it whole and let it work for me. Accept it!

Abandon your hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Here's a paltry $30k, now deal with it! A pathetic farewell token from the US. This is the pinnacle of their generosity towards its citizens! It declared, "Here's $30k, and here’s a home - a parting gift." This is just my reconstruction of events. No apologies were offered. No acknowledgment of mistakes made. Instead, it felt as though reality, woven from deceitful narratives, painted me as a criminal, yet I was still owed something. Yes, reality, built on a foundation of lies, painted me as a violent figure when, in truth, I was as gentle as a butterfly landing softly on your arm in a serene meadow.

To be clear the disability matter did not examine the factors that had caused me to be disabled. No connection was made between the criminal matter and this disability claim. This fact, that the matters were unrelated, explained why there would be no apologies and no admission that mistakes were made.

The fact that I had been suicidal and spent time on a psychiatric ward helped my disability case on the grounds that Major Depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder were threatening my ability to survive but nothing was done to connect the depression and anxiety to the trauma I had experienced.

In this twisted reality, truth held no weight. Here, the innocent were imprisoned while the violent were shielded! I would relay this statement to my therapist over a decade later, finally confronting my seething anger.

I never envisioned a future where I'd be branded a criminal. Where I'd be labeled as disabled. Where I'd be condemned to live shackled by a lie I could never erase.

A roof over my head was granted, but I remained ensnared.

Still haunted by ghosts that would follow me forever.

Still fettered to a past I never chose or deserved.

I was forced to look for and find any way to cope and to live. But despite having a home, despite receiving a check monthly, despite the illusion of stability, the brutal truth persisted:

I had already lost everything that ever held meaning.

And I had no clue how to reclaim it.

I might have had a home. I might have had a hefty lump sum of cash, but the thought of connecting with anyone felt like an impossible dream. The concept of being loved was beyond my grasp. How could I connect with anyone after everything that had torn me apart?

My self-worth lay in ruins—obliterated by injustice, crushed under the weight of loneliness, and suffocated by the relentless branding of something I wasn’t.

Then Amanda crashed into my life. A street person just like me. The sequence of events might be muddled in my mind, but I met Amanda before the $30k lump sum disability payout found its way into my possession. I remember that because once the money arrived, I tried to sever ties with the suffocating identity of homelessness. It took me far too long to realize she was trapped in the clutches of a crack addiction and that she was a sociopath in disguise.

At the men’s shelter, where the air was thick with desperation, three meals a day were served. There, I encountered a cast of characters etched in the harsh lines of survival. Mike stood out, seeming more like a volunteer than a fellow wanderer of the streets. His full story remained a mystery, but he carved a different role amidst the usual throng seeking sustenance. I saw him repeatedly at meetings where companies, agencies, and the community grappled with the behemoth of homelessness.

Janet was a fixture there too, clinging to her camper as a makeshift home, desperately parking wherever she could. Wanda, another regular, came for meals, her own car an elusive dream for me until my mother passed. Bob lived out of his van. And then there was Eddie.

Once they caught wind of my good fortune, everyone seemed poised to become visitors or overnight lodgers. They never asked how long they could stay, but the truth was, there were strict limits on how long someone could actually reside with me. I had been given a house to rent, and my share of the rent was determined by my social security income. The rules forbade me from having others live with me, even if I entertained the idea of transforming my new dwelling into another homeless shelter. Yet, I couldn't forget the haunting familiarity of being homeless myself.

As for Amanda, I had crossed paths with her at the homeless shelter before. It hadn't dawned on me then that her slender frame was maintained through the use of crack. Only in hindsight did the pieces fall into place. Was she interested in me? I wasn't certain. Then, in an uncharacteristic moment of impulse, I leaned in to kiss her one afternoon. It wasn't romance, nor was it connection. It happened there on Franklin Street—a bustling street teeming with students and passersby. The kiss wasn't forceful; it was driven by a hunger—a longing for closeness, for validation that I was still human, capable of feeling something beyond the numbing ache of isolation. She seemed slightly surprised.

I had dabbled in dating during the early 2000s via online platforms, but the gravity of the charges against me led me to believe I was only deemed acceptable to society's outcasts. With a new home in the safety of Carrboro, VR was set to help me embark on a home-based business. Yet, life felt devoid of anything I truly desired. I had left engineering behind long ago. Sure, I was a geek who marveled at technology, but that didn't mean I wanted to create anything that ran on a computer or the web. The excitement was there, but it didn't translate into a desire to be part of the creation of new technologies or the latest websites.

At this juncture, I was just going along with what I thought might bring me joy. I had to craft my own hypnotic scripts to convince myself that I enjoyed this path and that I could find success and happiness. But deep down, I was torn, uncertain if this was truly what I wanted. I should have known that working with computers or writing software for websites was not a good match for me at all. I had learned that about myself long ago.

I can’t forget the lump sum payment of $30,000. By inviting Amanda into my life with her drug addiction, little by little I was being drained of that money. She was good at scheming and manipulation. She always had some lie about why she needed money. Of course, I didn’t know this at first.

I clung to a false notion that there was something positive about the relationship with Amanda, completely oblivious to the fact that she was draining me, like a parasitic vampire, exploiting my vulnerability and loneliness to fund her own destructive habits. I clung to this relationship because I saw myself as wretched and marked with a scarlet letter and so even an unhealthy relationship or connection was better than utter isolation.I was drowning in internal pain, overwhelmed with isolation and loneliness.

Yet I was never like Amanda. I was not someone who used and hurt others. That was part of her character and I wish I had seen it earlier.

Desperate to create the illusion of a better life, I splurged on a few luxuries. I remember heading to Best Buy with conflicted joy to pick up a large wide-screen TV and speakers designed to flood my living room with surround sound. The Geek Squad even came in, setting up speakers—running wires to each speaker, running lines through the attack to speakers mounted on the ceiling—and even fitted it with a booming sub-woofer that promised an immersive experience.

But as I gathered with Bob and a few other friends, crashing on my couch and watching King Kong in 4k with that surround sound extravaganza, a bitter part of me wondered if I had merely traded one kind of emptiness for another. I cursed myself for not keeping some of that money secure in savings, for not making a more pragmatic investment like buying a car. Ironically, it took the long shadow of losing my mother some 15 years later for me to finally purchase a car—the care package I’d denied myself back then.

I couldn’t understand why, after receiving the $30k, I had not invested in a car which should have been a priority.

My yearning for connection was a double-edged sword. I desperately opened my home to people, perhaps too freely, letting them assume it was theirs to use without any regard for my own wellbeing. I’d tasted the pain of homelessness, and I clung to the belief that everyone deserved a home.

Yet I was constantly reminded of the rules—warnings from Vanessa in particular—that no one was allowed to live there. Whether those rules came from Section 8 or the local Shelter Plus Care program, they were clear: visitors were fine, but no one could stay beyond a mere two weeks. And here I was, making decisions, failing to speak up or consider what I needed.

My couches became beds for those who would otherwise sleep in their cars or vans. At different times it was Wanda on one couch, Bob on another. And Mike somewhere else. Bob had his van and so he just brought inside his own portable bed. I was completely passive during all this. I felt compassion for everyone and a certain obligation to share my good fortune of having a home with those who were not given this.

I wasn’t thinking about either what I had to do or what I wanted.

At some point, Eddie, whom I met at the IFC shelter where I went for meals, promised to pay rent to me to use the room that had once been a quasi-office. Now, as I write this, it serves as my bedroom. For a while, that space was where Eddie stayed, complicating my ability to run the computer web design and development business with him sleeping there. Despite being homeless, Eddie had an uncanny confidence with women, a trait I lacked. So, it wasn’t just Eddie in that room but also his girlfriend(s). This was the same room that housed the essential computers for my home-based business.

Then there was Mike, who somehow inserted himself into the new home-based web design venture. He didn’t have any particular skills, yet it seemed web design and development didn't require a 4-year degree. My web design certificate was just that—a certificate, not even as comprehensive as an Associate's 2-year degree. Initially, I welcomed Mike’s involvement. At first.

It’s not like we didn’t get any business. How about that. I said “we,” but with VR’s support, it was, as far as they knew, my business. I/We called it Future Wave Designs, initially, then Future Wave Web Development. The shift to Web Development involved more technical aspects like hosting websites on Linux-based servers. Web Development also required deeper involvement in coding—from CSS, to JavaScript, to server-side PHP coding. Throughout all this, I was torn. On one hand, I had long known my true passion lay in social-oriented careers and creative pursuits, learned as far back as the 80s. Yet, here I was, caught in this web of software and servers, unsure if this was where I truly belonged.

Web design seemed like it should satisfy the creative side of me, but I couldn't quite grasp it. The software and tools felt overwhelmingly complex, and I didn't genuinely enjoy the process. Yet, I found myself making self-hypnosis recordings to convince myself to embrace this new reality—a reality where I supposedly found joy in software engineering. Engineering used to be about creating tangible things, but with the internet's rise, design shifted towards the aesthetics of a website. It was more artistic, yet web design or design in general required mastery of the tools involved. In a way, it wasn't unlike a musician needing to play an instrument.

In this bewildering new world, where I felt increasingly lost, I thought perhaps I should rely on my programming skills, or "coding," as it was now called. My background in electrical engineering and computer engineering, with all its rigorous programming, might be my saving grace. Maybe it would earn me the respect of my family, a respect I had once deemed unnecessary. There had been a time when I could see my family clearly and had abandoned the desire for their approval. But now, I felt adrift, as if I were nobody. That was a different life, a different reality. I was being compelled to embrace something else entirely.

I was caught in the struggle to reshape my entire existence. Who I was and what I yearned for seemed futile. I once had love, dreams, hopes, and ambitions, but now I labored under a burden of shame I never deserved. Rationally, I knew I had done nothing wrong, yet realistically, I knew others would see a different narrative. If I wanted my clinical license back, they would see my criminal history. If I wanted to work in the helping professions, they would see my criminal history. It felt like a stain that would never fade. I was in a constant battle to program my mind to accept this grim reality, yet part of me resisted, unwilling to surrender entirely.

There was a suffocating despair that things would never improve or change. The justice system is a cold, unyielding machine that disregards the potential for revisiting and rectifying errors. Sure, if I were locked away in a physical prison or languishing on death row for a crime I hadn’t committed, there might be a glimmer of hope in the form of appeals. But honestly, I wasn’t even sharing my story back then like I am now. Maybe it would have made a difference when witnesses’ memories weren’t yet shadows of the past. The crushing weight of undeserved shame forced me to suffer in silence.

Eddie had wreaked havoc when he left, sowing chaos with a malicious grin. He deceived the police into believing that some of my possessions belonged to him. In those early years after the conviction, I was a pariah in Carrboro. The police, complicit in Eddie's treachery, assisted in the theft of my belongings—a bike and several other items he falsely claimed as his.

Then, in a twisted act of malice, Eddie went to the magistrate with an insane accusation that I was consuming my cat’s feces. It was a claim so absurd it might have been laughable if it hadn’t been so gravely serious. I was nearly driven to the edge, contemplating giving up my next cat because it dared to defecate indoors. My stomach was a fragile fortress, crumbling at the mere attempt to clean the foul mess. Anyway, my ordeal at the Emergency Room was brief. Mike, still a steadfast ally in my life, stood by me throughout the nightmare. Time has blurred the exact details, but I do remember the harsh reality: once a commitment order is issued, you’re trapped, waiting for a psychiatric evaluation. If someone merely suspects you’re suicidal, it doesn’t unfold like this. With a commitment order from the police, they slap handcuffs on you, shove you into a police car, and haul you to the Emergency Room.

After what felt like an eternity of humiliation, they finally released me, and I trudged home, each step heavy with the weight of injustice.

Probation and the Shame That Lingered

The plea deal I never wanted had left me with two years of probation. I couldn’t leave the state for that long. I met with my probation officer just as scheduled, once a week, speaking as little as I could, swallowing my shame in silence. My silence mirrored the deeply embedded shame and low self-worth that permeated my entire being.

One day, they came to my home for a home visit. "This is for your safety," they said, as they put handcuffs on me in my own home.

No one else was there to witness my humiliation. That was the only mercy.

They searched my home, looking for… what? Some kind of proof that I was the monster the system claimed I was? Who knows. It didn’t have to make any sense.

They found catnip. I had a cat that I named Buffy, after Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I suppose the catnip looked like pot. I said, “that’s not… it’s catnip.”

One of them responded with statement of disbelief, “Where’s the cat.”

I had plenty of photos of Buffy and so I pointed to a photo of my cat and deadpanned, "See? Cat."

I was drowning in shame.

But at my last probation meeting, something shifted. Supervised probation was ending. I looked my probation officer in the eye and finally told her the truth.

"I never did any of the things I was accused of." I expected skepticism. I expected dismissal.

Instead, she just looked at me. And in that moment, I knew—she believed me. Maybe not enough to change anything. But enough to see me.

And that was more than most ever had. Perhaps because I wasn’t giving anyone a chance. I was too ashamed.

The end of things with Amanda

Amanda could insinuate herself into my life because I was desperate for a connection.

I wasn’t just lonely.

I was terrified of being alone.

I should have paid attention. Amanda wasn’t around much. It would take me a while to realize that she had been out somewhere getting high all the time. For a while, Mike was the most consistent fixture in my life. He played a role like that of a business partner. He was a hulking person at 6 and a half feet or more. Eventually, he would become a threat to me.

There was a moment when it all hit me. Amanda was using me. She had no real interest in me—only what I could give her. And I gave too much. I was ashamed that I had not seen this earlier. Amanda was never around. The realization hit like a slow, sickening wave. I don’t even know what was the wake up call.

One would seem to be able to remember that but the truth was that I had not really been able to connect with anyone during this time because I assumed no lady would be interested in someone with a violent criminal history - even if it was all lies, even if I had been the victim. So, maybe I just told myself that there was something positive about having Amanda in my life.

What the hell was wrong with me?

At some point after I knew that Amanda was out of my life, I saw a photo of her in a newspaper. It was about the homeless in Chapel Hill. Mostly good people but the photograph mostly drew me to her eyes. This would be the inspiration for one of the poems in a collection that I wrote with Scott Urban who was living down in Wilmington. Scott wrote dark poetry that was infused with the imagery from the horror genre. I’m getting ahead of my story here.

The Break-In

Amanda left my life as unceremoniously as she had entered it—by telling me how much better her new boyfriend was in bed. I felt pathetic for ever letting her in. I had not cared about her, I just wanted a connection and human contact. She didn’t tell me she was leaving but somehow I learned that she was heading to Florida.

Then, one day, I came home to find my house broken into.

The front bedroom window was shattered.

The home office I had set up for my web site design and development business was where she entered the home. I didn’t have to wonder who did this. The only thing missing was the laptop and perhaps a few other items. The police dusted for prints. This was unusual. Often the police avoided getting involved in minor crimes that didn’t involve grave physical harm or the theft of expensive items.

This window would have offered some concealment from the neighbors. The important fact was that Amanda had stolen my laptop. The police weren’t going to go looking for her but at least they dusted for fingerprints. It wouldn’t matter. She had left the entire state.

The Setup That Could Have Destroyed Me

Early 2008.

I was half-awake at 3 AM when I sensed something was wrong.

A movement outside my window.

I went to the side entrance of my home.

Then I saw them—four police officers.

Guns drawn, pointed down, but ready.

They stormed my house, moving from room to room—even searching the attic.

What the hell was happening? This was surreal. How could my life become more bizarre? This was actually happening! It was beyond crazy. None of them were telling me anything.

I sat at my computer, watching as one officer walked up to me and said:

"Look at your Myspace account."

Okay. I can do that.

And what I saw made my blood run cold.

It said I was holding a little girl hostage. That is what it said on my myspace page… if I had written it myself. As if I was bragging about it.

Obviously, Amanda had done this.

Fighting Back

The next day, they came back—with a court order to seize all my computers and electronic devices. The false conviction I never deserved was being used as justification for a fishing expedition. The court order allowed them to look for child pornography. The content of the information on Myspace said that I had a “girl” that I was holding and it referenced the school up the street from me. The plea deal didn’t include the sexual component of the crime that was alleged originally. However, in my mind, that mere accusation stood not as truth but as reality.

Note, that I have described this distinction repeatedly. Truth is about what really is. Reality is what we come to believe about the world and people.

I spoke to my friend Wanda who had coincidentally moved to Florida as well. She had made the phone call to the police. She thought I was in danger. That is why she called the police. But the story took on a life of its own.

This time I had some funds and I hired a lawyer. My lawyer later told me what one officer had asked him:

"How can you represent someone like him?"

That sentence haunted me. This was so crazy. So surreal. I had been transformed into a villain which was the exact opposite of who I truely was. I had been a therapist who helped vulnerable people. I had given up on engineering because all that mattered tome was helping others. Yet, in the eyes of a police detective in Carrboro, I was some villain that no one should want to help. They didn’t look at the hundreds of lives I made better. Ana had erased that and made the actions of Amanda believable.

After many weeks we traced the IP address. It was from a library in Florida and I was able to realize that Amanda had fled after robbing me. It was hard to believe that she had memorized the password to my account. She was using a public computer in Florida.

She had done this. At the same time, on the same day that my lawyer had this proof, the police gave me back my computer, but there was no apology. They had been ready to believe the worst. Eager to believe it.

I felt like no one saw the real me.

They only saw the conviction.

The label.

The lie.

Insight from this latest villain to cross my path

After this harrowing incident, my curiosity about psychopaths and sociopaths exploded into a desperate need. I had encountered at least three malevolent figures who wreaked havoc on my life, and I had grossly underestimated their destructive capabilities. It became imperative for me to arm myself with knowledge to shield against these predatory individuals.

The first psychopath who invaded my world was that insidious John F., masquerading as a therapist with an air of false expertise. He thrived on chaos and the suffering of others. If anyone actually got better they would not need him. He preferred to leave people shattered and spiraling further into despair without a glimmer of remorse or concern for others.

He obliterated my life when I was at my most vulnerable. Then came Ana, the central figure of this book, whose malevolence knew no bounds. Lastly, there was Amanda, another remorseless antagonist. A few other lesser characters also left a trail of damage in their wake. I picked up books about sociopaths and psychopaths. This included books about sociopaths, psychopaths, fear, awareness and the criminal mind. It also included books about infamous psychopaths who were known for their crimes.

I needed to understand evil.

The Web Development business wasn’t paying much but I was working quite often at Measurement Inc. We were hired as readers. All that was required was at least a 4 year degree. It seemed like this was attracting a large number of people. I doubt that many of them were homeless or had been homeless. Some were at retirment age. It seemed like the place to work for anyone who had nowhere else to go. No clear career tragectory.

I saw Bob there. He was the guy who showed up at my home and who was living out of his van. He was quite a character. Highly religious and spiritual. He was someone who appeared completely rational and normal but if you spent any time talking to him, you heard about bizarre spiritual beliefs that even people with schizophrenia did not articulate in such a clear and coherent manner.

That being said, his low soft spoken well articulate voice would sooth me in a hypnotic and peaceful way when I had the opportunity to just listen.

Tragically, the $30,000 had dwindled away as if it was not meant to last. I had not even purchased a car.

With every cent I'd scraped together from work, I made my way back to Wilmington, driven by a longing that gnawed at me day and night. I took the bus. Initially, I got rooms for a night on the weekend at some of the lower cost motels in town. I’d rent a bike and go to Wrightsville Beach.

The beaches called to me, whispering promises of the belonging I'd known once and still craved so desperately, a sanctuary amidst the simmering trauma, dispair and hopelessness of my existence.

In Wilmington, I reunited with Jean Jones and Thomas Childs—two long-time friends from the life I once knew… a life I expected to continue forever with Lynn.

Jean and I were good friends again and in a new way. Lynn and I used to hang out with Jean occasionally. He only remembered the fights that Lynn and I seemed to have all the time. He failed to see the nearly perfect love that we knew. The reality of that part of my life is part of a different story.

Jean was given a normal life like the one I had always expected. Like most people, no one had ever pointed a finger at him and falsely accused him of a violent crime. Ironically, when he spoke about having guns to protect his family, I thought about how with my ultra-pacifist leanings had violently attacked in my own home and then labeled a criminal who couldn’t be trusted. Jean wasn’t always available when I wanted to come to Wilmington and re-connect with people from the poetry scene. So, he helped me to connect with another younger poet named Ryan. He had a couch where I could stay when I wanted to visit the area.

I went with Jean to the aquarium at Fort Pierce, south of Wilmington with his two children. He met me for meals here and there.

There were a few other regulars to the poetry scene that I befriended. I saw David Capps again. He was cool in every way but there was something inscrutible about him that made it hard for me to truly connect with him. I had known him since I first moved to Wilmington back in 1992 but not like I knew Jean, or Jeff and definitely not like I knew Thomas.

Thomas, in particular, felt like a lifeline, as if the years between us had evaporated. Between meeting Thomas down in Wilmington, we spent hours on the phone, our conversations blazing with the intensity of a friendship rekindled, leaving me warmed for the first time in years by the fierce glow of connection.

I ran across Lynn in mid-September, 2008 with the summer still a part of life in Wilmington. She had once been a part of my life that I never imagined losing. I could even argue with her and it never seemed like it would impact the lasting nature of our relationship. With Lynn right there in the same room, I said nothing. Some part of me couldn’t speak even to Lynn. This was unimaginable. I could have spoken to Lynn about anything.

Yet, I froze up, while standing in the same room with her just a few feet apart. Alone in that room as if someone had hoped or arranged for me to take this opportunity to tell her all my feelings. She had known I was going to be there. I should have told her that for what it was worth, I was still in love with her. I guess I couldn’t imagine being rejected by Lynn of all people in the world.

It was my new go-to coping strategy. Silence. In retrospect it was reminiscence of me standing in front of the judge a couple of years earlier in 2006. I had been silent and unable to speak, to protest the way I had been treated by my lawyer.

It wasn’t that I willingly kept silent when standing before the judge in 2006; it was more that I couldn't muster the courage to speak out. But why was silence my default?

Who would have imagined that it wasn't until I began writing this book that I'd uncover a disturbing parallel: the same gripping fear that silenced me from confessing my love to the person who mattered most in my life was the very fear that suffocated my voice two years earlier in the courtroom, preventing me from declaring my objection to the plea deal... from proclaiming that I was the victim?

That is where the parallel somewhat falls apart. While I had lost the earned secure attachment that I once had with Lynn, suddenly and abruptly, I wasn’t concerned about or wearing the shame of a false conviction around Lynn.

The Bigger Picture Here

The most amazing thing about returning to Wilmington was the peace and serenity that came with this and how that materialized. The disability checks and the occasional work with Measurement, Inc. allowed me to come to what was once home to me. I left behind the shame that came with being falsely accused and convicted.

I never had a enough money to buy a car. Not yet. My credit was not very good as one might imagine considering that I had been homeless and my life had been so chaotic.

Yet something amazing was happening down in Wilmington. It didn’t offer me the home I once knew. There are so many things that had happened. There is an entire story that could be written about aspects of my life that had changed beyond the facts discussed in this book on injustice.

What was significant was the sense that I didn’t have to worry about what others would think about me. I told my two best friends down there, Jean and Thomas. We talked a bit about it but I never felt uncomfortable. I never felt the embarrassment that came from wondering if the person hearing my story would doubt my innocence.

I made new friends down there and strengthened other relationships with people from the poetry scene. I might have been shy about the criminal matter but in many ways, while I was down here, in this scene or setting, it seemed irrelevent. This is amazing since I was just getting off supervised probation from the lies told by Ana. Yet, somehow, I managed to place it in a sealed container that wasn’t opened in the Wilmington area.

Speaking of friends and connections, tragically, Dusty had passed away. As the emcee at the poetry readings at the Coastline Convention Center going back to 1992 when I first came to Wilmington, Dusty was a warm motherly type that I could have used at this time in my life.

Indeed, a mother was what any injured person needs. Whether revealed in words or actions, Dusty had once filled that role of a mother figure that I never had. There had been Celta and Lynn who had made me feel special. All that was gone and I had no one who was a source of support during the horrifying moments, that turned into days, weeks, months and years.

The comfort of Lynn’s arms or Celta’s arms existed only as tearful memories of something amazing that was gone. I didn’t have a mother figure or a source of deep love that I had once had. I had to face the lies of Ana and the impact of that injustice all alone. Despite the losses and pain, I might have taken for granted the peace and comfort of not having to worry about what others might think about me. Somehow returning to people who had known me was profoundly peace in a way that I failed to appreciate.

I could have used that attitude to help me cope with the challenges I was facing in every aspect of my other life when I was not down in Wilmington. I was even able to make new friends down there wrapped in the warmth of everything this place was offering me in some way that seemed like magic. I was able to make new friends. There was Ryan who I mentioned above. He let me stay with him every time I visited. I also made friends with Ana Ribeiro from the poetry scene down in Wilmington.

So much was missing and could not be recovered from the injustice and what it did to me. Yet, the peace of being in this place around people who had come to know me… there was something magical about this. Wilmington was a haven and refuge. I had once been forced to leave the area due to the first injustice I experienced with John F. He had made sure I couldn’t work down there and that had sent me Durham back in 2001.

Now I was trying to anchor in positive experiences. This is a term from my training in hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming. From a cognitive behavioral aspect, I could see how certain beliefs about what people would think about me if they found out about the accusations and conviction. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy encourages us to challenge our thoughts and to try to find deeper core beliefs that create very negative feelings - anxiety, trauma responses, depression.

I had resurrected the poetry magazine that Lynn and I started in 1995. Jean became my new co-editor. We had an event down in Wilmington at a new location for the poets in the area - a wine and coffee bar.

I found an outlet in my writing. I wrote a book of poems that was co-authored with Scott Urban who wrote dark, horror poems. I alluded to this book in my earlier discussion of Amanda. In this collaboration, with Scott Urban, I created a collection entitled “Puncture Wounds.” This drew upon the myth of vampires as soulless and without a conscience. Scott’s poems were not based on actual experiences. I was casting the actual villains that I met in my life, including but not limited to John F., Ana (not my new friend Ana but the perpetrator described in this book). I had minimal contact with other sociopaths and psychopaths and was in fact trying to learn about and understand the thinking of these people - these monsters.

I was influenced in part by the series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” which was created by Josh Whedon. I believe he was an atheist but he still found the symbolism valuable as a literary form. In that series a vampire lacked a soul which meant they lacked a conscience and preyed upon others. Writing was a form of therapy and catharsis. As a professional in the field, I have learned that catharsis might not create healing in itself. However, I am unsure if it doesn’t actually help us deal with emotions and the horrors of life.

Many of these characters depicted in my poems were responsible for my legal problems and my inability to get justice.

Like Josh Whedon, I was becoming an atheist and giving up my “faith.” Yet, I am getting ahead of my story. I was still a Christian during this time period when I was visiting Wilmington up to at least 2010 and for a while after that.

Under normal circumstances, I might have been very concerned that I would reveal a dark side of myself with this publication. I had squelched any expression of what might appear to be a dark side to myself or a delight and fascination for evil or monsters. I was afraid that might make me appear capable of harming someone as Ana had alleged. I was also uncomfortable even being able to express justiable anger and righteous indignation. Again, this was related to the overarching concern in life that no one sees me as capable of violence.

I suppose the visits to Wilmington and being around people who knew me or were getting to know me gave me a new perspective and lowered my inhibitions - I was temporarily, during those excursions to Wilmington, inside a safer mindset. Being seen and accepted, having a connection can certainly make a big difference when dealing with profoundly traumatic events.

Otherwise, in other situations away from that protective bubble of comfort that I felt when I was visiting Wilmington, a painful scarlet letter had been branded into my psyche.

And I didn’t want anyone to see me in that way. I didn’t want to re-experience the taunting and humiliation that had occured when I was stripped down and put inside a padded suicide prevention outfit for the infamous mug shot taken in the early morning hours of October 2, 2004, after the detectives interrogated me, the victim who had been brutally assaulted hours earlier when the day was still October 1st.

Just for a while, and easily forgotten in time, I had an escape.

This confidence did in part carry over into my life overall. It wasn’t entirely limited to my life in Wilmington.

Trips to Wilmington used to be a sanctuary for me to connect and find acceptance, but now, they no longer comfort me. I've moved to Carrboro, where I feel like a pariah, excluded from society, grappling with the notion that I might deserve it.

In Carrboro, I tried to build a normal life, seeking meaning, but doubt lingered. I immersed myself in church activities, clinging to my Roman Catholic faith as my last refuge. I yearned for belonging, attended Bible study, and reached out to make friends, yet fear of revealing my past kept me isolated.

Even now, in 2025, I'm shocked that I have a criminal record while the true villain remains free. Shame prevents me from letting anyone associate me with a violent crime, fearing what they might think. So, I bear the burden alone, torn between confessing and fearing rejection.

Marked by Shadows

I knew I was different, and others likely sensed it too. My work status was a topic avoided—I was on disability, not yet brave enough to share why. My passion was social work, helping vulnerable people heal, but this left a noticeable gap in what others knew about me. No one questioned my lack of a car or my reliance on a bike or rides. I struggled to craft a perfect elevator speech, unable to succinctly explain how I was a victim deceived by gender-biased police detectives.

I could verify these beliefs but they were my beliefs.

Another Door Slammed Shut

As I struggled to rebuild my shattered life, I clung to the hope of teaching religion to children at the church. I had always enjoyed children and being something like a big brother. I believed that sharing this light would make me feel alive. Then I heard about the dreaded background check. I was crushed.

The church, haunted by a history of scandals and abuse, built an impenetrable wall of caution. Afraid they would deny me the role, I planned to share the truth with someone connected to the church, hoping someone might see past the false stain of accusation and believe in who I really was.

Instead, I avoided even pursuing this opportunity. This was just another tragedy of a false accusation.

At a raw, vulnerable poetry open mic in Carrboro, I bared my soul to a trusted new friend, recounting the false accusation, the injustice, and the stigma. I yearned for empathy, for someone to say, “I believe you.” Instead, he bluntly remarked, “You can’t expect people to take your word for it.” His words struck like a slap, reopening old wounds and reinforcing a world that had already condemned me, despite my lifetime of non-violence and my nature as a gentle person who healed others.

Now, I must insist: in the twenty years since, not a single accusation has been made against me—a silent testament to my true nature. I had devoted my life to healing others as a therapist, guiding souls through trauma, yet fate turned me into an object of fear. The unbearable weight of rejection eventually forced me to stop trying to prove myself to the church.

It felt like another part of me had been stolen—another casualty of a false accusation and the relentless force of Ana.

My future. My work. My reputation. Now, my ability to be with children hung in the balance.

What made it more difficult was the certainty I had always felt - that I was always great with kids and should have been a parent. I adored the joyful, carefree nature of kids. I had always been patient, kind, someone children could easily connect with.

I longed to mentor, to teach, to contribute something positive to the world. But the world seemed to have decided that I had nothing to offer. And so, I felt that I had lost a part of myself.

The Breaking Point Was Still Ahead

I had been drowning for years, but I was unaware that I was on a collision course with a final, harsh moment of truth.

My entire being would have to be shattered completely before I could piece myself back together.

It would require standing at the brink of my own existence, contemplating the ultimate decision, before I could muster the strength to fight back.

Before I could discover self-love.

Before I could find self-compassion.

Before I could trust in myself.

I didn’t choose to deny myself these things, yet I wondered if I was truly worthy of them.

For years, I had believed I didn’t deserve them.

That belief was partly fueled by my persistent attempts to get my family of origin to understand me and my struggles. To care. To show compassion and empathy. If my own family didn’t care, then who would?

I spent years grappling with why my life had unraveled the way it did. The PTSD diagnosis offered a framework for what I had been enduring. My mind and body were still trappped in many traumatic moments, reliving the past through inescapable flashbacks.

But the PTSD wasn’t new.

The assault by Ana and false allegations had merely been the tipping point—the moment when all the pain from a childhood of emotional neglect, of isolation, of striving to be seen, and then losing the love of my life, my home, my career, and everything else, finally crushed me.

The Major Depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder were just passengers on a journey that had begun perhaps four years before Ana’s assault.

I had lived with pain for so long that I questioned if I even knew how to exist without it.

When I speak of waking up after a suicide attempt, I am referring to the sense of having been detached from truly living life. I would get married to Elnaz Rezaei Ghalechi in 2010 and it is not hard to understand that aspects of this marriage were problematic. 

I didn’t approach this as a true chance at happiness but more of a desperate desire for connection… to share a life with someone else. To find someone who cared about ME.

Marriage came when I was still clawing my way through the wreckage.

I wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t ready for it.

But when it came—when she came—I didn’t turn away.

After years of shame, after a justice system that had labeled me something I never was, I had almost no sense of worth left. I was no longer sure I even deserved love. And yet, when Elnaz—Elee—entered my life, something stirred.

She didn’t just see me. She believed me.

And that changed everything.

A Hypothetical That Became Real

We first connected through poetry.

Elee had been submitting to Word Salad, the poetry magazine I ran with Jean Arthur Jones. Her writing caught my attention—vivid, honest, intelligent. I admired her from afar, never expecting anything real to come from it.

One night, I asked her, “Would you ever marry someone like me?”

It wasn’t a proposal. It wasn’t serious. It was hypothetical.

She was in Iran. I was in the U.S. There were oceans, borders, and eight time zones between us. But in her culture, dating didn’t exist the way it does here. A question like that carried weight. A woman didn’t leave Iran unless it was for marriage.

And she took my question literally.

And I didn’t stop her.

Because deep down, I needed to believe that someone could want me—even knowing the truth about my past.

I told her about the false conviction. The injustice. The years of being treated like something less than human.

She believed me.

She didn’t ask me to prove anything.

She just said yes.

Across Oceans for Love

We built a relationship through late-night video calls and early morning chats. I let myself believe we had “match points,” moments of harmony that could hold a marriage together. We had never met in person, never stood side by side. But still, we talked of marriage.

The only place we could both legally enter was Turkey. So we flew to Ankara and got married.

Looking back, I don’t know if I believed in love or if I just needed to believe in something again. But it felt like a second chance. I should not have needed a second choice because I never did anything wrong. I felt hope and believed it was love. Yet we were going to get marrried when we met each other for the first time.

And then I came home to a message that shattered everything.

Grief That Undid Me

Just days after the wedding, I logged onto Facebook and saw the message: Thomas was gone.

A sudden heart attack. Forty-six years old. My best friend for decades.

I had just seen him before I left. He had smiled and told me, “You’re a lucky man.” I wanted Elee to meet him properly, to know the one person who had remained steady in my life.

We had reconnected like no time had passed—no awkward silences, no judgment, just friendship that endured.

Now he was gone. And I didn’t know how to bear it.

I drank that night—not to celebrate, but to escape the excuciating pain of discovering that my dear friend was actually dead. I drank too much. So much that I couldn’t get on the bus to his funeral. My body rebelled with nausea and shame.

I missed his funeral. I missed saying goodbye.

And I’ve never stopped regretting that. It wasn’t the kind of shame that rose out of my fragile abilty to cope with this loss.

This time, the shame was mine. Self-inflicted. Earned. But it still hurt just as much.

This was a turning point for me. The shelter of Wilmington was fading. Jean Arthur Jones would fade out of my life leaving me with no connections. Just memories of connections to that place. Elee would later think I wanted to go there to remember Lynn. In reality, it was much more complicated. As I stated earlier. Wilmington itself had taken on a sense of being an anchor to a better life before loss and injustice. A safe haven without judgment. Yet, I needed people down there who still knew me.

That was basically gone with the passing of Thomas.

Marriage Meets Reality

When Elee finally got her visa, we were hopeful. But reality doesn’t bend to hope.

She had just graduated medical school in Iran and dreamed of becoming a doctor in the U.S. But the path was steep. She would have to pass the USMLE—in English—and she had never lived in an English-speaking country. People who come from other countries where they studied medicine have to take these exams.

I was on Social Security Disability, scraping by on unstable contract work at Measurement, Inc. It was enough to sponsor her visa, but not enough to build a life on. It wasn’t stable employment.

I warned her: “I don’t have much. I’m on disability. I don’t have much.”

She said it didn’t matter. But it did.

Unspoken Resentments

She studied constantly but never took the exam. I encouraged her gently, but encouragement began to sound like pressure. Years passed. She withdrew. I felt invisible.

We lived in the same apartment, but it never felt like we shared a life. Disagreements weren’t resolved; they were buried. And silence became a third presence in our home.

She had expected a provider. I had a therapist and we talked about how she should have known that I had almost nothing and was living on disability. I had expected understanding.

We both found something else.

In 2018, she left.

I didn’t fight her.

There was nothing left to fight for.

Breadcrumbs and Gaslight

After she left, I turned to the only people I had left—my parents. To be honest, I had been reaching out to them for some time. They had reinforced in so many little ways the fact that they saw me as a failure in life. Someone who would be dependent on others to survive.

I had never asked them for help as an adult. But that had changed when tragedy struck a decade before our marriage in 2010. Sometimes I was genuinely worried about how I would pay the rent and not get evicted or pay the electric bill. They gave just enough to keep me from falling, but never enough to help me rise. A part of me had felt that they owed me support because if they had not watched with indifference as my suffering was beyond words could convey… if they had done anything when I was in jail, needing a lawyer and a real chance to live, then I wouldn’t be in this situation.

“You need us,” they said. “You can’t survive without us.”

And then at other times: “You should be ashamed of needing help.”

It might not have occured in one single conversation but over the decades that was what I was hearing.

It was a double-bind—emotional gaslighting dressed as charity.

I had already been labeled disabled. Already endured injustice. Already lost my career, my home, my freedom. And now, even asking for help became another source of shame.

Not guilt. Not regret.

But toxic shame—the kind that whispers you are the problem and that you’ll never be enough. If so much evil was allowed to triumph over me then there must be something cursed about my being. Like I was never meant to rise from the past in the first place.

Elee decided to leave, even though she had nowhere to go and no means to support herself. Despite eight years in the U.S., her struggle with English persisted, and that day her departure was unmistakably clear.

I had invited Johnetta over, hoping she might help us untangle our unraveling relationship—even though she wasn’t a therapist or relationship expert. Instead, her presence only deepened the chaos.

For months, silence had settled between Elee and me like an impenetrable fog. I wasn’t sure she still cared about our marriage—perhaps I had grown indifferent too. Then Johnetta’s question shattered the tension: “Do you love her?”

The air cracked. Under the weight of the moment, I admitted, “I don’t think I do.” Elee’s face remained unreadable, as if she already expected it. But Johnetta’s reaction was explosive, and before I could comprehend what was happening, Elee was taken away.

In hindsight, I should have seen it coming. We never talked about our problems. While she was busy studying for the USMLE exams, I would fill up sheets of paper with things to discuss to keep the relationship alive and post them on the wall of the kitchen. Johnetta had no knowledge of how long and hard I had tried to work on our problems. It had gotten to the point where literally every day for the past year and a half I repeated the words that it didn’t seem like Elee cared that the love was dying.

When Elee said she is an alone woman in America Johnetta heard something that suggested that Elee should go to the domestic violence shelter. Elee got the impression that if she took out a Domestic violence protective order she could get into section 8 housing. To Elee’s credit when they pulled up my criminal history she rejected and refused to mention that at all in court. To this day she has remained passionately angry at Ana, the court system, my lawyer, everyone involved.

She had to come up with a reason why she was upset and needed a “domestic violence protection order.” The only thing I remember seeing was that I mentioned the Trump Muslim bans and how her family couldn’t visit. It was almost funny to see that on the document in court. After trying to get Elee to talk I went to a protest gathering in downtown Chapel Hill and spoke about my wife from Iran and how her family can’t visit. She knew I had not voted for this president and I vehemently opposed the ban. It was also strange to realize that she knew where I was but I had no idea where she was.

I was thinking that all she had to do is say that she didn’t want me to visit. That was not what she wanted. She just wanted to pretend for the next 12 or 18 months that we were not seeing each other.

I haven’t discussed it yet but I had begun trauma therapy and I was beginning to look at returning to Clinical Social Work. Elee knew this and supported me. I said, “don’t you see how this makes me look? It looks like I could have done the things that Ana alleged.”

She didn’t seem to be able to appreciate how standing in a court room made me feel. Of course, she invited me to visit. She had no reason to fear me.

“Just pretend for a little while,” she said.

Past Trauma and Marriage

Flashback to the early days of our marriage. Sexuality brought with it reminders of my past. Sometimes as a guy one can feel like one is a willing participant in an event. Things had happened long before I met Elee. In early 2001, someone who I had been dating had jokingly spoke of having a gun and she was a prison guard. I didn’t want anything to happen that night but she came over anyway. It had been easy to forget about this incident in all the chaos of that time. Yet, after I got married to Elee flashbacks began.

I had mentioned Kathy earlier in the book. She had different personalities ( like someone with dissociative identity disorder) and one child-like personality had come out during an intimate moment. Later I moved in with her, her boyfriend and her son. I had to ask the police to show up for me to finally leave and to get my girlfriend, Shonda, to help me move out. I hadn’t had a car since I lost my last car in early 2001. So, in early 2003, before the physical assault by Ana, I had left Cathy’s residence. I had felt trapped and there were sexual overtures to what was happening.

Some of Kathy’s personalities wanted me as a therapist, which wasn’t possible, others were child-like. There was one personality that was seductive and sexual and I had felt threatened.

All this was coming up and had caused problems in our marriage. It was triggered by these flashbacks and nightmares. In some way, this drove me toward starting therapy and eventually I would find the courage to reach out to the Orange County Rape Crisis Center where they supported the idea that any form of non-consensual sexual behavior was sexual violence. I had even been remembering my hernia operation when I was five years old.

It’s strange how so many ideas could come together where any one of them might be overlooked or insignificant. 

Talk therapy had never helped.

Too many years of hearing therapists ask:
“How does that make you feel?”
“Have you tried reframing the experience?”
“What would it take for you to move on?”

Move on? From what? From being falsely accused, shackled, humiliated—treated like a danger to society when I had been the one crying out for help? I didn’t know how I felt. Not really.

My emotions were locked behind thick walls. I had spent too many years dissociating from pain. Everything inside me felt numb or vague—a fog I couldn’t clear.

But in late 2018, something shifted.

I searched the Psychology Today directory for “trauma therapist” and filtered by those who took Medicare. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t have the money, barely enough to live. But I needed something to change. I was unraveling.

That’s how I found Andrea Treimel.

A Different Kind of Therapy

Andrea practiced EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. I had used trauma-focused methods myself when I was the therapist. But this was different.

Our therapy sessions would last into 2020 - weekly or more often sessions processing a different trauma each time.

Now I was the one sitting in the chair. Now I was the one trying to hold it together. No lectures. No deep conversations.

Andrea barely spoke at all.

Instead, she guided me into memory.

She introduced me to grounding techniques—focusing on a “safe color” in the room, holding small devices that vibrated in alternating hands, watching her hand or a light move from left to right. These were tools. Anchors. Ways to stay present while entering the dark places.
 

Into the Core Wounds

There were so many memories that haunted me.

Each one felt like it had been sealed away, quietly poisoning me from the inside.

The arrest.
The handcuffs.

The interrogation where my truth was dismissed before I could even speak.

The betrayal.

The loss of my career.

The silence of jail.

The feeling of being labeled a threat when I had always lived my life as a pacifist and so gentle I was incapable of violence. In one session, I went back to that moment with Lynn—the moment I felt I had abandoned her.

She had been gasping for air. I couldn’t help.

I left for work, crying as I walked away.

I told Andrea, “I abandoned her.”

In another memory, I held Lynn’s hand as the nurse inserted an IV line near her heart. Her tears matched mine.

I fought back every instinct to stop them from hurting her. I had to let it happen.

She trusted me to protect her—and I couldn’t.

The shame of leaving the hospital room, dizzy, needing a break…

The moment I slid down the wall in our home, after she had left.

Staring into nothing… in the void.

Feeling like the world had ended.

Andrea had me visualize the grief inside me as dark ash, soot rising out of my body and being locked into a freezer. It wasn’t magic. It was practice. But it helped me name what I hadn’t been able to face.
 

Reclaiming My Anger

I had always feared my own anger.

False accusations had taught me that any strong emotion could be used against me.

If I expressed frustration, people might think I was dangerous.

If I cried out, they might say I was unstable.

But in these sessions, I began to access something I hadn’t felt in years:
righteous anger—not destructive, but clean.

Not rage, but grief with force behind it.

EMDR let me feel it without becoming it.

Andrea watched silently, with compassion.

I clenched my hands—not to strike, but to hold in everything I was finally feeling. This wasn’t about being a therapist anymore.
This was about surviving as a human being.

Yet we had begun to speak about me returning to work as a Clinical Social Worker.

The Interrogation

Eventually, I brought in the memory I had tried to avoid the most:
The interrogation.

I described it to Andrea.

The officer just inside the boarding house, just a few feet from my room. I had already dissociated from the reality and was entering a state where I was on autopilot. Then another police officer enters. He told me I would be handcuffed.

I was just outside my room, I had stopped bleeding when the paramedics came following my call to 911 but I was still wearing the bloody shirt, bloody shorts, and bload soaked socks and even my sneekers had blood on them. I was revisiting that state of being in shock.

Later, in the patrol car, my friend called. I put her on speakerphone, desperate for someone—anyone—to hear my side of the story. I told her what had happened, that I was the one attacked. Her voice was soft and kind, filled with disbelief at what I was going through.

Then I was in the interrogation room.

“That’s not what happened,” the detective snapped at me.

His words landed like a punch.

He wasn’t asking questions—he was correcting me.

I had come to them as a victim, wearing bloodstained clothes.

Did they really believe I staged it? That I kept a set of bloody garments ready for moments like this?

They had already decided who I was.

And I couldn’t fight back.

Because in that moment, I was just a man in handcuffs.

A man being stripped of his dignity.

Later, I was placed in a padded suit. Suicidal, they said. But that wasn’t it.

I was terrified. I was broken. Andrea encouraged me to bring in resources. This could be anything. In this case, I needed protectors. I wanted Jessica Jones, the superhero with superpowers. Pusing and throwing aside police officers and forcing them to feel ashamed about how they were treating a victim!

She always did the right thing. She was there tossing and pushing the bad guys who were hurting me. She shouted at them, “Leave Bruce alone! What is wrong with you!”

In the Shadows

Later sessions blurred into each other.

Sometimes I brought in heroes in addition to Jessica Jones, e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Fictional characters who did what I couldn’t: speak up, fight back, win.

Other times, I relived memories of clients who had confided in me.

Dark, disturbing memories—real or imagined—about abuse, fear, and helplessness.

At one point, I saw John F. in the background of one of my waking dreams.

Not hurting me, just standing there—watching.

It was its own kind of violation.

The Silence of Jail

Jail wasn’t just confinement. It was abandonment. No one visited. No one fought for me.

No one even looked me in the eyes.

I lay awake night after night, thinking:
“This is who I am now. This is how it ends.”

Andrea coached me to find a way to change the way these events shaped the thoughts that I had about myself.

Even now, years later, I can’t fully describe what it felt like to be forgotten.
To know that one’s innocence means nothing to the system.

I Survived

Andrea guided me through all of it.

Session after session.

I called in “resources”—people who had loved me:
Lynn. Celta. My maternal grandparents.

Superheroes. Symbols of strength, protection, nurturance and safety. I learned that I could survive remembering.

I learned that I was still here.

I hadn’t been erased.

And for the first time, I began to believe… maybe I wasn’t lost forever. However, I don’t want to overstate how far I had come in healing. I was still suffering.

What Healing Can—and Can’t—Do

Healing didn’t fix everything. Realistically, that means the healing was not as complete as I needed.

The shame still lived in me.

It always had.

Yes, I was the victim.

But the label of “perpetrator” had been stamped on my life like a brand. And EMDR couldn’t erase that.

I still couldn’t talk about it with most people.

Only a few—Thomas, Elee—had ever heard the full story.

I wanted someone to see me for who I was and to find a lasting relationship. Elee had left and divorce soon followed. I knew I was gentle, calm and loving but I had felt that with the loss of Elee there wasn’t going to be another chance. Regardless of the quality of the relationship, the fact that she believed me, believed in me, and my story, meant the world to me.

But the world still saw someone who had been convicted. And that conviction carried more weight than truth.

EMDR helped me process what had been locked away.

It gave me back parts of myself.

But there were things even healing couldn’t change.

December 2019.

It hadn’t come out of nowhere. That’s the first thing I need to say.

It wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t a breakdown or a psychotic snap. It was more like a slow erosion—a quiet, daily wearing away of hope, purpose, and identity.

It was the accumulation of years spent trying to live in a world where a lie had become the first truth associated with my name.

That day, I had Googled my name. Again. I don’t know what I was hoping for—maybe that the link had vanished, that the internet had finally moved on, that something had shifted in my favor. But there it was, like always. The headline. The charge. The lie.

And this time, it broke me. John F had reposted on his website the article that falsely characterized the perpetrator as a “girl.”

The lie was digital. Permanent. You could search me online and find it: the false narrative, the charge, the slander that said I was capable of something I knew in my bones I would never, ever do. And not just capable—but guilty. My name, next to hers. A violent offense. The words “girl” and “felony” and “sexual assault.” The distortion of it all was enough to make the air feel thinner every time I looked.

She wasn’t a girl. She was the perpetrator. I was the one who bled. And yet, for the past fifteen years, I’d lived under a shadow that didn't belong to me.

I had done everything they told me to do. I had gone to therapy. I had tried trauma processing. I had written the story, again and again, trying to make sense of it. I had tried telling the truth out loud, only to find the words disappeared into a society that didn’t care.

I couldn’t live in a world where people thought I had harmed a woman. That was the mantra I had repeated to therapists, advocates, friends—anyone who would listen. But the thing about mantras is, they aren’t spells. They don’t change the world.

They just echo in your head until they become unbearable.

And in December of 2019, it became unbearable.

I called my legal support service one more time, the Pre-Paid Legal law firm, the only law firm I could afford. I explained the case again, tried to argue that the statute of limitations shouldn’t apply to someone who never truly consented to a plea deal, who had been shut down, frozen, dissociated in the courtroom. I asked whether the website quoting a misreported news article could be taken down. I pleaded.

And they said no. Again. They said in a matter of fact way that the article was true based on the fact that I had been arrested and charged. I tried to argue that it was false in the fact that Ana, the perpetrator who was believed to be a victim was not a “girl.” It didn’t matter. John wasn’t even alive.

“There’s nothing you can do.”

Those words. The final verdict. The end of the line.

What do you do when the lie wins? When justice is unavailable? When the past isn't just haunting you—it’s stalking you, shaping your future, dictating your limits?

I wasn’t in a panic. I wasn’t screaming. I wasn’t even crying. I was... quiet.

The vodka wasn’t for oblivion. It was for courage.

I couldn’t do it sober. The pills in the bottle stared back at me—Effexor, antidepressants meant to keep me from getting to this place. But they hadn’t worked. Not enough. And tonight, they weren’t going to save me. They were part of the plan.

It wasn’t rage. It wasn’t some dramatic gesture. It was simply the only thing that made sense after the law firm said what they did. After the same lie kept rising to the top of every search. After hearing again that John F.’s reposting of a misinformed article—one that wrongly referred to my attacker as a "girl"—was untouchable because it was “quoting a news source.”

Even in death, he had power over my name. Even after all these years, my name was still tangled in something grotesque and false. It didn’t matter that Ana was a grown woman. It didn’t matter that she was the one who assaulted me. The framing had been set, and every new acquaintance, every employer, every curious stranger who Googled me would meet that framing first.

I picked up my phone again and typed out a message to Elee. I told her I was sorry. I told her I regretted bringing her here, to the U.S.—even if I hadn’t made her choices for her. But mostly, I told her what I was doing.

It was late. I didn’t expect her to see it in time. I didn’t expect anything, really. I was just apologizing for her having given up her old life for me. Some time passed. I had come close to falling asleep before taking enough pills to end my existence.

But then came the knock on the door.

Police.

Disoriented, I opened it. My thoughts were scattered, blurry, but not gone. They asked if I was okay. I was tearful. Something in me still wanted to be heard, even now. I told them how much I was hurting. About the hopelessness. About what I had done.

They listened. They didn’t threaten. But I knew—I was going to the hospital.

And I knew I couldn’t take the patrol car.

Even the idea of handcuffs made my chest tighten. I had worn them before—not as a danger to anyone, but as a victim of a system that saw me as something I wasn’t. I told them I would go in the ambulance. Thinking, please, no cuffs.

They agreed..

I lay on the stretcher in the emergency room at UNC, the lights buzzing faintly above. The hospital air smelled sterile, overwashed, distant. It was December 11, 2019, just past midnight.

I wasn’t crying anymore. I wasn’t resisting. I was embarrassed.

A hospital volunteer sat beside me. I couldn’t bring myself to say much. But there was a strange sense of peace—not comfort, but surrender. I wasn’t in control anymore. That pressure was gone.

Part of me thought: Maybe this wasn’t even a real attempt. I hadn’t taken all the pills. I hadn’t lost consciousness. But that’s not what mattered. I had crossed a line inside myself. And I didn’t know if I could go back.

Eventually, they moved me to another floor. I hadn’t seen a psychiatrist yet, just nurses who checked my vitals and asked quiet questions.

I remembered this process. I had once been the one doing the evaluations—visiting patients on medical floors to decide if they were going to be going home or if their suicide attempt was serious enough. Now, I was the patient. And I knew exactly what was coming.

When the psych resident finally arrived—a woman younger than me, calm but firm—I tried to talk my way out of it. I tried to argue that someone with my background would have known what was suicidal. Later I would admit to myself that if I had not nearly fallen asleep, or if I had the chance, I would have continued to take pills until I had taken enough.

She looked at me gently. “You’re going to be admitted.”

There was no convincing her otherwise.

My voice that was mute again in the classrooms growing up had been mute and silent when I found myself standing in front of a judge. Similarly, I hardly said anything to anyone after the devastating events in 2006.

For years, I had carried my shame in silence, believing that no one would ever truly understand. I had wasted time searching for validation from people (my so-called family) who had already shown me who they were—narcissistic, indifferent, incapable of caring. I kept thinking that if I just explained myself the right way, if I just found the perfect words, they would finally see me. They never did.

All that silence had done was bury me deeper in shame. Shame that wasn’t mine to carry. It had never been mine to carry.

Injustice does not resolve itself. It lingers. It poisons. And it does not go away just because the world moves on. I had tried to heal in private, but healing cannot exist in isolation. I could not build a future while hiding from my past. And so, for the first time, I understood—

I had to tell my story.

Someone Saved My Life

I might never have written this book if that conversation hadn’t shattered my isolation and made me question what I thought I knew—that I was alone, unworthy, unlovable.

It was a Sunday night in the hospital, but time meant nothing. The hours blurred together as I paced the dimly lit hallway outside the nurses’ station, sleepless and invisible. I moved in and out of shadows, unnoticed by the staff, wrapped in a quiet desperation.

The suicidal thoughts had returned—not loud or dramatic, but like a slow leak in a sinking ship. The kind of thoughts that whisper, This will never change. You will never be free. Not truly.

In 2006, I had come to this same hospital in crisis—a cry for help, more impulse than intent. But this time had been colder. Calmer. More like surrender.

I had survived, but I didn’t know if I wanted to.

Then came a voice. Soft, tentative.

"You can't sleep either?"

It was Kira—21, sharp-eyed, and clear-souled. She had seen through my silence in a way few had before. I don’t remember exactly what I told her first. Maybe it started with fragments: a false accusation, a life torn away. But she looked at me and said what I never expected:

"Oh, I believe you. 100%."

Those words were like water in the desert.

She didn’t ask for proof. She didn’t shrink away. She believed me.

And something inside me exhaled for the first time in years.

Maybe she just said the right thing at the right moment. Maybe I was finally ready to hear it. But that moment cracked something open—a space I had sealed off long ago.

It made me wonder: What if I wasn’t destined to carry this in silence forever?

A few days later, I found myself in the tv room with a few others. At this point, I was joining others. I had enjoyed Law & Order: SVU but the topic of this episode could not have come at a more appropriate time.

This episode was different. The plot mirrored my own life: a teacher, falsely accused of a heinous crime, his life dismantled by lies. I sat frozen. Every scene struck me like a nerve. The disbelief, the humiliation of a false accusation, these were experiences I knew very well. The story was powerful. The police had soon realized that the teacher was innocent but the damage had been done. He didn’t know if he would be able to work in his field. The character was in tears - doing an excellent job of portraying the intense pain of this accusation.

While it was fictional, I felt like the authors who wrote this story had known of an incident like this. I had to share what I was noticing and how I could relate to this story.

During the commercial break, I stepped out to tell two ladies that I wanted to share something when they returned. I was making it inevitable that I would share my own experience. People by now knew that I had been a therapist and cared about others.

As everyone returned to the room, there were now about 5 or 6 of us.

"I can relate to all of this," I said. I then added, “I was falsely accused of a violent crime many years ago. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to work in the field again; it destroyed my life. That is why I am here.”

Then someone spoke. "I’m so sorry that happened to you, Bruce."

It seemed like it would be easy to understand how this would harm someone.

Those words, so simple, so human, broke something loose. Not because they erased the past—but because they reminded me I wasn’t beyond compassion.

Later that week, I joined a group activity. I encouraged another patient to attend. We were given words to represent our feelings and paints to express them visually.

I chose words like misfit, outcast, invisible, and outsider. I wanted to amplify the negative feelings and the cold and isolated feelings that go along with these words.

When it was my turn to share, I don’t know what I expected.

Instead, the man I had convinced to come said, "You’re not invisible. You got me here. You’re everywhere. You’re like the social butterfly of this place."

Others chimed in. They spoke of my presence. My kindness.

My jaw dropped.

Was that really me? How had I not noticed this myself?

They saw someone I didn’t know existed anymore. Maybe had never met.

And for the first time in years, I believed that healing might be possible—not because I was cured, but because I was no longer alone.

Kira and I spoke again. She said I should meet her family for Christmas. We never did, but Elee—my ex-wife, still so compassionate—paid for us to go to a movie together.

It was a simple gesture. But it felt like life nudging me forward.

I left the hospital not healed, but opened. I had stepped out of the shadow of suicide into something like possibility.

And for the first time in a long, long time, I wasn’t just surviving.

I was beginning to live.

I should have thought of reaching out and trying to connect with others sooner than this. To be clear, my problems had been trying to get my own family to understand my pain and what I had experienced. I had been telling myself, as I stated earlier, that if my own family didn’t care than who would? This had created a sense of a world without caring or connection.

The hospital doors had closed behind me, but their weight still pressed against my shoulders. I had become extremely anxious for my ride to take me home from the hospital. I was no longer suicidal. I felt a new found sense of hope.

Elee paid for me to meet with a friend that I met in the hospital named Kira and for us three to see a movie. It was amazing how much this cost and how invested Elee was in my healing. This was right after Christmas. Kira had intended to have me visit her family for Christmas but she was promising things without getting an okay from her family.

I stepped out of the hospital on the 23rd of December, 2019. I was not healed but I was different. I wasn’t carrying the weight of the past alone. I had shared it with others. I had told my story - admittedly it was a very abridged version of the story… but the simple concept that a false conviction can destroy a human life was something others could understand. The full story is this book.

Star Wars IX reached the theaters at that time and Elee wanted me to make a new friend and so she offered to pay for movie tickets for me, Kira and herself. This was Saturday December 28, 2019. Kira’s father brought her and then picked her up after the movie. It would turn out that Kira was dealing with serious issues of her own and this meant that her interest in trying to help me or be a friend to me would not last long.

Where do you go after the edge?

I left the hospital in December 2019 no longer suicidal, but still fractured. I wasn’t healed. But something had shifted. The spiral of silence was broken. And for the first time in years, I didn’t want to disappear.

I wanted to live. But I didn’t yet know how.

Finding My First Steps

I was referred to HomeLink and the STEP Clinic, both part of the UNC Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health. Their programs picked up where the hospital left off: outpatient support, therapy groups, a case manager, even an occupational therapist. For six months—from January through June of 2020—I had structure, connection, and continuity I hadn’t known in years.

I was paired with Becky, a UNC counseling graduate student. She reminded me of the kind of therapist I had once aspired to be—empathetic, grounded, willing to sit in the heaviness without trying to fix it. At the same time, I was finishing trauma therapy with Andrea, who had guided me through EMDR. She was retiring. Another door closing. Another goodbye.

The groups helped. Brushes with Life, an art therapy group, met at the clinic. Emotional Resilience met out at the Farm at Penny Lane. In those quiet rural spaces, I found the courage to speak again—to draw, to name things, to listen.

Then came COVID.

In-person groups dissolved into Zoom squares. The warmth of community flickered into static. I was alone in my house, staring at a screen. The world shrank again. But not entirely.

Because that’s when I finally walked through the doors of the Community Empowerment Fund—CEF.

Facing the Story

The office was bright but humble. Student volunteers sat at folding tables with open laptops. Flyers lined the walls. “Empowerment,” they called it. I didn’t know what to expect.

But in that first orientation, I met someone who had once been a client, just like me. They had found their footing. That stirred something in me. Maybe I could too. Most importantly, I could relate to the mindset and attitudes of those who formed CEF. They had the same passions that drove me to become a social worker.

When I sat down with two UNC advocates, they asked: “How can we help?”

How do you condense 15 years of loss into a single conversation?

“I used to be a therapist,” I said. “Then I lost everything.”

I told them about John F., how he manipulated clients into filing false grievances, how he accused me of harassment with no evidence. How I lost my license, my career, my life.

Then I paused.

“There’s more,” I said. My voice faltered.

“In 2004, I was the victim of a violent assault. But when I called for help… I was arrested. The perpetrator was believed. I was branded. And now I have a felony. A violent one. For something I didn’t do.”

Silence.

Then one of them said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

It wasn’t pity. It was conviction. Like they meant it.

We talked about options: Peer Support Specialist training, resume updates, a legal clinic through UNC. They offered encouragement, not platitudes. And then one advocate said:

“You should write your story. It matters.”

They told me about Wattpad, a platform for writers. I didn’t know if I was ready. But I did it anyway. I wrote a few chapters and posted links a description of each chapter on Facebook. I was going to break the silence. Words flowed as I filled a first book with what would ammount to 530 pages of my first book: Memoirs of a Healer/Clinical Social Worker: Autobiography of Bruce Whealton.”

Back at CEF

When I returned to CEF the next week, I told my advocates I wanted to work in mental health again—somehow. That I wanted to help others, even if I couldn’t get my license back.

They suggested a Certified Peer Support Specialist credential. They could refer me to Caramore. And they did. I would eventually complete the training and become certified in August 2021—a new beginning.

I kept going back to CEF. Repeating my story too often. Hoping for consistency. But even in the repetition, healing began.

One advocate, a young woman, looked at me and said:

“I believe in karma. I hope Ana gets what she deserves.”

It was the first time someone had spoken of justice—not in legal terms, but in human ones. No procedural language, no bureaucratic tone. Just raw, moral clarity.

And I felt it too.

What Ana did was despicable and evil.

The assault was horrific. But that wasn’t the most wicked thing she did.

The character assassination was worse. She stole something far more permanent than blood or bruises—she tried to take my identity and replace it with her lie.

I had been posting to Wattpad because I needed someone to hear me.

And someone did.

Sarah

During that same time, another voice entered my life.

It started with a Facebook message.

“Hi… I think we went to high school together?”

Her name was Sarah. She’d graduated one year before me. We might have passed each other in band class, or in the hallways of Southington High. But neither of us remembered clearly.

What mattered is what happened next.

She had seen one of the Wattpad links I’d posted—something raw, personal, painful—and reached out. What began as curiosity turned into something I hadn’t experienced in years: a conversation that lasted more than twelve hours. Not interrogation. Not judgment. Just questions. Real ones. The kind that come from someone who cares enough to understand.

I told her about John F. and the loss of my career. I told her about Lynn and Celta—the only two people who had loved me fully and unconditionally. I talked about the grief that followed, and the injustice that shattered the rest of my life.

She had so many questions… about the good people in my life and the bad people who harmed me. She wanted to understand every detail. When I spoke about how bad I was bleeding during and after the attack by Ana, she wondered if Ana had been wearing something on her hands. Brass knucks? That would have caused bruises not cuts. For the first time, I was talking about the criminal history in a manner that was so matter of fact. I had introduced the topic of what happened in 2004, the focus of this book, the false conviction, without the normal fear that I normally had when I spoke about this matter. Somehow she made this seem like a routine topic to discuss.

She asked questions no one else had thought to ask.

We would double back and revisit the same topics more than once. I told her about John. About Lynn and the love we had. About losing everything. I told her about Ana. The night of the assault. The lies. The conviction.

Sarah believed I could fight. That I still could prove my innocence. Even now she believes this.

The Bigger Truth

I had never been lazy. Never lacked ambition. I had put myself through graduate school, worked multiple jobs, built a life around helping others.

I had come from a toxic family, a broken justice system, a world that doesn’t understand trauma unless it fits a script. And still—I had tried.

Now, CEF was giving me a new way forward. So was Sarah. So was every single person who said, “I believe you.”

And as I sat with those voices, something shifted again.

Not just healing. Not just hope.

Maybe I wasn’t just meant to survive.

Maybe I was meant to fight.

Becoming a Certified Peer Support Specialist

I first heard the title “Certified Peer Support Specialist” during a WRAP (Wellness Recovery Action Plan) group at the UNC Center for Excellence in Community Mental Health. The facilitator—open, warm, and unapologetically honest—wasn't just someone with credentials. He was someone who had lived it. His mental health history wasn’t a liability; it was the reason he was there.

And suddenly, something occured to me. I could do this as well.

For years I’d been both the therapist and the patient. The person others leaned on, and the person left drowning. To be a Peer Support Specialist turning my pain into a purpose in life. I was still on SSDI but I saw that this was a false version of myself that I had embraced.

Still, the toxic shame lingered. One day in the hospital, I’d asked a nurse for some feedback—something positive to hold on to. Her response: “We’re not supposed to give compliments.” That moment stayed with me. In the world of clinical detachment, affirmation was rationed.

But Peer Support Specialists weren’t clinical. They were human. That mattered.

I arranged to meet with the WRAP group facilitator outside the group. We talked about what the role involved, how it helped people, and—most importantly—how I could become certified. It was a quiet, steady spark. Something I could hold onto.

The Truth About Me

Around the same time, something else began to stir inside me—something less expected, but no less real.

At CEF, I met someone who used they/them pronouns. Their presence challenged what I thought I knew about gender, about identity, about the invisible rules we all internalize.

I didn’t feel like a woman. But I had never felt like the kind of person the world expected either. Growing up, I had rejected aggression. I avoided confrontation. I didn’t play tackle football because it was so not me. I rejected the boxing matches with one of my friends bercause I was afraid of hurting him.

That softness had always felt… different than the way guys are socialized.

Now there was a name for it: gender non-conforming. Non-binary. Something in between. Something valid.

I began to share some of these thoughts with Becky, the student therapist I was seeing through HomeLink. She received it with warmth and curiosity—not analysis, not judgment. For the first time, I felt like I was allowed to question what gender meant for me, without fear that it would be used to make me a target of bullies.

I was also watching Law & Order: SVU as I mentioned earlier. The excuses that guys were using along with their lawyers were so disturbing. I don’t want to get explicit but the argument that maybe she wanted it or just seeing how hard it was to prove cases was shocking to me. Aspects of being a guy that were offensive to me were normalized. The pressure put on women to obey husbands and meet the needs of their husbands. It was all offensive to me. Yet, there was something more about myself that I was recognizing and I could find it everywhere.

The psychology writing of Carol Gilligan about how girls feel about winning versus how guys thought about that were different and I could remember having those thoughts that are more characteristic of girls. There are too many factors to list them all.

The irony wasn't lost on me—Ana had accused me of a violent crime that clashed with everything I knew about myself. Had I been female, would the system have seen me differently? Would I still carry the label of “violent felon” if I’d been allowed to show up as myself?

These questions weren’t just theoretical. They were survival. Yet, some part of me worried that someone might think that I was embracing my feminine nature, my feminine gender identity, as a ploy to win the sympathy of others.

Probably most profound is when Sarah spoke about how her father was nurturing and had certain characteristics that are more characteristic of women and she added “but I wouldn’t call him feminine.” I responded, “but that is not me. It would affirm something about me to think of me like one thought of women.

Remembering Christine

Around this time, I had conversations with Sarah about another public moment that still lingered—Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony against Brett Kavanaugh.

We both believed her.

I told Sarah that my sister, Carrie, had once asked why I didn’t relate to Brett’s experience of being falsely accused. The implication shook me. Did she believe that being falsely accused meant you should automatically assume all other accusations are false too? I had treated many survivors like Dr. Christine. To me, it was not political at all. The kind of Supreme Court judge that we were going to get from a Republican presidency was known.

Sarah was stunned by the comparison that my sister made to Brett.

The contrast between Brett and me was vast. He was belligerent, defensive, entitled—given every opportunity to prove his innocence and never once taking it. I had been silenced, cast aside, humiliated. And yet I would have done anything for the chance to prove my innocence. I would have leapt for joy at the opportunity to have an actual investigation into what happened to me. The FBI could question anyone who ever knew me.

Brett was angry that he might not get a promotion. I was trying to survive. That difference mattered. The way Brett had acted would never be allowed by any lawyer. His anger at anyone asking the question would have made him appear violent to a jury. In an actual investigation if it turned up anything, the last thing a defense lawyer would want would be a client to get so beligerent and angry at anyone who was asking questions.

Letting Go of My Family

As I was building a new identity, I realized I had to break from the old ones.

I recalled how Andrea—my longtime trauma therapist—had tried to bridge a conversation between me and my sister Carrie. I had asked her to explain my financial limitations, and to ask if Carrie would help with the copay that I owed for therapy sessions.

Carrie’s response?

“Why can’t he just get a job?”

There it was. The same invalidation I had been living with for years. No recognition of my trauma. No understanding of what I’d endured. Just blame. Just shame.

Becky once told me that repressing pain was like trying to hold a beach ball underwater. Sooner or later, it bursts through the surface.

For me, the metaphor was perfect. I could see myself walking along a beach with beach balls bursting over the waves and into the air. There were so many things that I had pushed down over the years. Now I was starting to love myself and I couldn’t do that and keep in touch with my mother or Carrie.

I wrote Carrie an email, one last olive branch. She responded with a cold lecture about all the bad choices I’d made. How I’d failed to honor my parents’ sacrifices by not working as an engineer. There was no mention of my survival. No mention of my pain. Most painful of all was that her response overlooked an entire decade of success in my life.

So, I drew the final line. No more contact. No more looking to a dry well and hoping for water. I deserved more. After all I had endured, I couldn’t bring myself to both love myself and think of my mother and sister as part of my family. Elee had wanted me to pretend to be nice and keep in contact so that I would get an inheritence. I couldn’t do that.

I was done chasing crumbs of compassion from people who had none to give. I had told her explicitly and without ambiguity not to contact me at all, in any form.

The only exception was when I learned that my mother died. They had spent so much time acting like I was part of the family. I had carried the same name as Kathy’s husband, my father. So, that was the least I deserved - about $11,000 but enough to get a car. This would be required to work as a Certified Peer Support Specialist. I could also drive myself to places I had wanted to visit for so long. Now, after two decades, I had a car again.

Becoming Certified

I reconnected fiercely with the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation Services, driven by a new goal that gave me hope - to become a Certified Peer Support Specialist.

Their hesitation was palpable, their uncertainty about my criminal record casting a shadow over the process. But as we delved deeper, a revelation emerged: I wasn’t isolated in this struggle. Many CPSS professionals bore the weight of criminal pasts. Those with genuine, raw life experience were often the most adept at offering help.

They agreed, albeit cautiously, to fund my training and continued to back me with employment support through my unwavering IPS (Individual Placement Services) counselor.

During the grueling certification journey, I encountered others whose narratives both electrified and unsettled my spirit. One man had spent half his existence behind bars for murder. Others had battled the demons of addiction. This as common for those who become CPSS professionals.

One guy shared a chilling tale of surviving Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, poisoned by a caretaker’s twisted pursuit of sympathy. It made my skin crawl, but I understood deeply. My own family had poisoned me too—not with chemicals, but with the corrosive toxins of silence, shame, and neglect. They hammered into me the belief that I was sick, a problem, unworthy, mentally unstable, a failure. They wielded "tough love" like a weapon, used cruelly in the aftermath of losing my greatest love, my career, being preyed upon by a psychopath named John F., and then being harmed by Ana, another predator. These were not mere bad decisions or circumstances I could control.

I turned to the man who had endured Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy and asked if drawing parallels to my own poisoning—verbal, emotional, psychological—would offend him. He welcomed the comparison.

For me, the abuse was an emotional and psychological onslaught. And still, it had nearly annihilated me.

But I remained.

Still clawing my way back.

Still transforming.

Barriers That Don’t Die Easily

Even with my CPSS certification in hand and nearly two decades separating me from the injustice that wrecked my life, I couldn’t escape its shadow.

I wanted to work. Really work. Not just to survive, but to reclaim who I used to be—before the system stole my career, my name, and a part of my sense of self.

I knew applying for jobs in the mental health field meant facing questions, silence, and rejection. But I also had something new: a letter from the Orange County Rape Crisis Center.

Years earlier, during my marriage, something had started to shift. Memories I had buried—or couldn’t make sense of—surfaced through nightmares and intimacy triggers. I reached out to OCRCC, unsure if I even qualified for help. But they didn’t ask me to prove anything. They listened. They believed me. And most importantly, they put into words what no legal system ever had:

Sometimes, the person labeled “perpetrator” is the one who was harmed.

The letters they wrote—one for the Social Work Licensure Board, another for potential employers—became my lifelines. They couldn’t undo the conviction. But they gave me something the courts never did: recognition of truth.

First Steps, First Falls

By early 2022, I had my certification. It was time to return to the field.

I was hired part-time by Cottage Health Care Services in February—my first mental health job in years. It was rewarding, if modest. I worked closely with a few clients and saw the change I could make. Still, I needed more. Full-time work. Stability. Validation.

So when RHA offered me a full-time position as a CPSS in April—on my birthday, no less—I jumped.

Before quitting Cottage, I was cautious. My IPS worker and Vocational Rehab counselor reminded me: “Don’t give notice until you’re absolutely sure RHA knows about the background.”

I disclosed everything. The man who hired me believed in me. He said he’d fight for me. And when he gave me the green light, I believed I could finally move on.

I started at RHA in May.

After Memorial Day weekend, they told me not to meet with anyone. I was called into a private meeting.

“We don’t think this role is the right fit.”

No explanation. Just: turn in your badge.

Later, a coworker told me what I feared—someone had flagged my background. Eighteen years later, the lie was still closing doors.

Breaking Through the Wall

Then, in July, Freedom House Recovery Center hired me. I disclosed everything again. This time, the HR rep glanced at the OCRCC letter and said something I’ll never forget:

“Unless you’re a serial killer, you’re fine.”

She was joking—but not really. It was the first time someone in HR responded with humanity.

I started work in August 2022, assigned to the Mobile Crisis Unit. I would be meeting clients across several counties, often at their homes. Children, families, adults—anyone in crisis.

For the first time, I wasn’t haunted by the past.

No one at Freedom House treated me with suspicion based on the past criminal conviction. I didn’t have to explain or justify my existence. Clients didn’t know, and they were not going to know. I knew it was not relevant what lies Ana told long ago. My supervisor didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

What mattered was the work.

I was good at it.

Really good.

I saw it in how people opened up to me. I saw it in how I could read body language again. I wasn’t afraid anymore. I didn’t feel like an imposter. I wasn’t walking into rooms as a man carrying shame—I was a professional offering help.

A New Kind of Recognition

Sherisse, my supervisor, saw my potential. She knew I had a background in social work. When I asked her for a reference for my application to regain my social work licensure (as an LCSWA), she hesitated—not because she doubted my goodness, but because she hadn’t worked closely enough with me to confidently recommend me for clinical practice.

Still, she encouraged me. I had been working for over a year with her when an important conversation occured.

At one point, she even brought up RHA as a place I might apply again. I paused.

“I had worked there but do you know why they let me go?” I asked her.

She didn’t.

So I told her.

“I was assaulted in 2004 and yet I was the one arrested. I had been convicted of a violent felony.”

She looked stunned.

“You?” she said. “You couldn’t hurt anyone. I’d fight someone before you would.”

That moment—that validation—was something I had been chasing for almost two decades.

I said emphatically, “Thank you.” She was noticing what should have been obvious to everyone including the police back in 2004.

The Weight of Love and Lies

During this time, I tried dating again. I met someone—Codi Renee. She knew about my conviction and still chose to see me. That alone felt rare. I stayed longer than I should have, not because I was happy, but because I didn’t want to lose the one person who didn’t reject me outright.

But even that came with emotional complexity. I wasn’t comfortable. I wasn’t fully myself. And eventually, the relationship ended.

Codi Renee had lumped me in with others who had hurt her. It didn’t matter that I was different. It still hurt.

And yet, there was a moment during all of this—a moment I’ll never forget—when I realized that the people who truly knew me didn’t just believe me. They knew I was incapable of violence.

Sherisse saw it. My clients felt it. I knew it. If it were not for criminal record databases we would have to rely on our instincts just like my cat had.

Moving On

For a little while, I thought I had made it. I thought the past had loosened its grip. I was helping people. I was thriving. I had finally returned to the field that gave my life meaning.

But then came the cuts. Budget changes. Freedom House began dissolving the Mobile Crisis team.

They offered me another job—on the Detox Unit. I thought it was a generic Crisis Unit. If I had known what that job really was, I might have said no. It wasn’t just unfamiliar. It wasn’t therapeutic. It felt like a jail, not a place of healing.

But that’s a story for another chapter.

I thought I was moving into a role where healing happened.

The unit was called the Crisis Unit, and that sounded right to me—crisis was something I understood. I had worked Mobile Crisis.

I knew how to meet people where they were.

What I didn’t know—what no one told me—was that this wasn’t truly a crisis stabilization unit. It was a detox program, and it operated far more like a correctional facility than a treatment center.

The shift was disorienting. The clients weren’t treated like patients—they were watched, monitored, corrected. Even the language was policed: “addicts,” “noncompliant,” “disruptive.” That’s how staff referred to people in withdrawal, struggling, afraid.

The longer I worked there, the clearer it became: this wasn’t recovery. This was control.

Everyone around me seemed to come from the world of recovery—people who had once shot heroin, who had gone through 12-step programs, who saw themselves in the clients. In theory, that should have fostered compassion.

But instead, it had calcified into something harder. There was excitement in catching people when they were breaking rules, in enforcing consequences. People on the staff thought about how the behavior of one person might interfere with another person’s recovery. Was there no parallel in the mental health field? Of course there was. Yet, one’s symptoms of mental illness were not met with surprise and anger.

I couldn’t reconcile it.

Even within the 12-step model, addiction is seen as a disease. So why were we punishing people for symptoms of the disease we were supposed to treat?

When clients asked about long-term options. I tried to find them places to go, but so many of the referrals led to programs rooted in religious doctrine. 12-step, higher power, surrender.

I was an atheist, shaped not by ideology but by loss. But this wasn’t about me. Some of the clients didn’t want a Christian minister. They didn’t want Bible study. They wanted to recover, not convert.

When I said as much, it didn’t go over well.

The shift lead, Alex, was on a power trip. Controlling. Aggressive. He made snide comments in front of clients, belittled staff, barked orders. When he got sick and I filled in, I thought I’d earn some respect. Instead, I got hostility.

One staff member muttered, “I know it is crazy that I can’t sign this just because I don’t have a degree.”

The respect and admiration for my accomplishments only made her defensive and angry.

What they meant was: you’re not one of us. You haven’t suffered like we have.

But I had. Just in ways they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see.

What made it worse was what happened on the unit where we all worked. I was excluded. No one even tried to get to know me. They showed their shared friendships right in front of me with my obvious exclusion hard to not notice. I had embraced my years of learning social skills, observing social behaviors, body language. This allowed me to observe.

To see that I was excluded from their shared friendships.

I wanted so badly to belong. I tried. I smiled, I joined conversations, I asked about their lives. However, I always felt like I was intruding. I wasn’t part of the club.

Complicating matters further was my need to be knowledgeable about community resources. People who had been in recovery would know these things. Clients would ask me about different options for their discharge plans, but I lacked the necessary knowledge. I needed to know what my colleagues knew.

And when I finally spoke up—when I told them that I use they/them pronouns, that I wanted that identity respected—and when I voiced concerns about how Alex was treating staff and clients—I was fired the very next day.

“Boundary issues with staff,” they said.

No documentation. No prior warning. No opportunity to explain.

I filed an EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) complaint. My friend Sarah encouraged me to fight it. And I tried. I filed the report and the EEOC contacted them but they told me that there was not a precedent of other people experiencing the same discrimination as I had - based on disability, religion, gender or age.

I wanted to believe that if I just did everything right, someone would see me. Someone would say, You belong here. We need you.

But instead, I walked out with nothing.

I had been leading a support group on Meetup—Social Anxiety, Shyness, Loneliness and Social Skills—trying to offer something I never had growing up: a safe space to practice being human.

But attendance dropped. People stopped coming. And I started asking myself:

Was it me?

Did I think I had more to give than I really did?

Even the woman I had dated—Codi Renee—knew my story, but I never felt safe with her. I stayed longer than I should have because I thought, maybe this is all I get.

She had hurt me by always making me feel anxious instead of the comfort that love brings. And when it ended, I didn’t feel heartbreak. I felt shame. For staying. For hoping. For still believing in something like love.

So where did that leave me?

Between systems that silenced me and communities that didn’t know what to do with someone like me.

Too peaceful to fight back. Too principled to stay silent. Too broken to fit in.

But still—still—I wasn’t ready to give up.

Because even in this mess, in this loss, there was one thing I had that no one could take:

My voice.

It was supposed to be a new chapter.

The job at Freedom House had shown me that maybe—just maybe—I could reclaim a career in mental health. I was working with children again. No one questioned me. My past, for once, wasn’t a disqualifier. I had begun to believe that the world might finally see me for who I was—not who Ana claimed I had been.

Then, I was let go.

No explanation, just an ending. The same old silence where there should have been reasons.

I scraped by, living on unemployment for a few months, then had to reapply for Social Security Disability. The shame of it crept in again, slow and suffocating.

Was I back where I started?

I kept applying for jobs. Interview after interview. Some hopeful, some perfunctory. Most leading nowhere. Then, in early September 2024, a woman named Yanique called. RHD wanted to hire me. They’d chosen me from dozens of applicants.

I felt a flicker of belief. Maybe the long shadow of 2004 was finally lifting.

But of course, there was the background check.

I gave them the same letter I always gave—my statement of truth, along with a letter from the Orange County Rape Crisis Center. I had disclosed everything. Again. Just like I had when I got the job at Freedom House.

It should have been enough.

Instead, the legal department delayed everything. They needed to speak to former employers, confirm the story I had already told in detail. I tried to track down coworkers from the Mobile Crisis Unit—but our company phones had been wiped clean, and I’d never saved their numbers. RHD's HR department pulled some random number off the internet and reported that "Freedom House had never heard of me."

That was the first gut-punch.

Still, I waited. I followed up. I took walks along Wrightsville Beach trying to stay calm, the waves crashing like my anxiety. I was 58, jobless again, walking a beach I had once shared with Lynn. I had dreamed of a life filled with love and stability. I was living in the ruins of that dream.

Eventually, RHD offered a compromise.

I wouldn’t work the job I applied for. Instead, I’d be assigned to a different unit—under tighter supervision, in a program for people transitioning out of prison. It was framed as a second chance.

But it didn’t feel like one.

I was being sent to work in a setting where I was automatically distrusted. Even though I had never committed a violent crime, never hurt anyone, I was treated like a liability. They wouldn’t let me meet with clients alone.

For a month, I was placed on administrative leave.

When I returned, I was monitored constantly. Everything I said or did was scrutinized. And still, no one told me why.

My supervisors—Wendy and Andrae—seemed determined to find fault in everything I did. Weekly check-ins became interrogations. I was written up for the smallest of things. There was no guidance, no support. Only discipline. Only fear.

Andrae was especially chilling—his presence triggered something deep inside me, the same terror I felt when I was wrongly arrested in 2004, when police didn’t believe the truth.

I had worked so hard to overcome that trauma. I had built a life back from the ashes. But here I was again, shrinking under the weight of unjust authority, retraumatized by people who claimed to work in mental health.

Eventually, I filed for ADA accommodations. PTSD is a recognized disability. I had letters from my doctors. I asked to be treated with dignity.

But it was too late.

They terminated me on March 14, 2025.

No more appeals. No more explanations.

Just another door slammed shut.

And for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel the drive to help others. I was the one in need of care, of support, of someone who could hold my story without recoiling.

I still believe in the power of peer support, in the healing that can come from connection. But I also know now that no matter how far I’ve come, the injustice of 2004 still follows me. Not just in the legal records. But in the assumptions people could make or have to make when the legal department of a company is worried about liability issues. The boxes they check. The decisions they never explain.

This book isn’t ending with triumph. But it’s ending with truth.

I am still unemployed. I still don’t know what the next employer will say when they see the results of a background check and make assumptions without hearing the full story. Sometimes they are not allowed to hire me even the hiring manager is fine with what they discover.

But I am still here. Still trying. Still writing. Still telling the truth.

Because if the world won’t give me justice, then maybe this story will or at least it will allow me to be heard.

Maybe someone will read this and understand. Maybe someone will see me.

There comes a point when you stop trying to explain.

Not because the pain is gone.

Not because the injustice no longer matters.

But because you know who you are.

I am not what they said I was.

I don’t have to win back trust—because I never broke it.

I’ve lived my life by the highest morals:
With gentleness.
With integrity.
With compassion for those who suffer.
With respect for others’ boundaries, bodies, and beliefs.

Even when I was invisible, I lived with purpose.
Even when I was silenced, I held onto truth.

Even when I was shattered, I chose not to shatter others.

A therapist once wrote that I was a gentle person.
She didn’t say it to defend me.
She didn’t say it to counter a narrative.
She said it because it was the truth.

It still is.

I’ve spent years trying to survive.

But survival isn’t the end of the story.

Now, I want to live.

Not to prove anything—
 

But because I still have something to give.

There’s a voice in me, buried under layers of pain and shame, that’s slowly growing louder.

It says:

You are not your trauma.
You are not what they assumed.
You are not the roles others cast you in.

You are a good person with passion and love to give.

You are still here.
Still standing.
Still healing.

And that is more than enough.