I was hired at Circle K this week.

I start tomorrow or during the week of June 16, 2026.

That is the sentence I am sitting with as I write this — not as defeat, not as the bitter irony of a man who was once a licensed clinical social worker with a private practice and a life that felt like what he had always been meant for, now starting a shift at a convenience store.

I am sitting with it as what it is: the next thing. The thing that is available. The thing that allows me to keep going while the motion is pending, while the therapist I found begins her work with me, while the book I have been writing for the last several years is finally approaching its last pages.

I am sixty years old. I have missing front teeth. I have a false conviction on my record. I have a Motion for Appropriate Relief pending in a North Carolina courthouse. I have a job that starts tomorrow. I have a therapy appointment on Monday with someone trained in Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, a kind of therapy I have studied and wanted for myself because it begins where I have so often needed someone to begin — not with correction, not with challenge, not with cognitive reframing, but with felt experience, with emotional attunement, with the body’s knowledge, with the repair that comes from having another person respond to the emotional truth of your history.

This is the ending I have.

Not the ending I would have written when I was designing the street sheet and building toward the kind of work I believed I was meant for. Not the ending I would have written when Lynn and I were in our house and the practice was growing and the life we had built together felt like something that could hold. Not the ending I would have written in any of the years when I still hoped the next chapter would be the one where the weight finally lifted, the record was addressed, the work was available to me again, and love returned in a form I could recognize.

This is the ending that is actually here.

By now, I have cut off contact with my sister. That is not a sentence I write lightly. It took me far too long to understand that some relationships do not become safer because you explain yourself better. Some relationships only keep reopening the same wound. Eventually, the only remaining act of selfprotection is to stop returning to the people who keep asking you, directly or indirectly, to disappear.

Even after all these years, I am still learning what self-protection means.

I have been thinking about Carrie.

Not Carrie my sister — the other one. The girl in the film I watched as a teenager, again and again, stopping before the horror at the prom because what I needed from that story was not the destruction. What I needed was the moment before. Tommy Ross asking her to the prom. Tommy seeing her when others had agreed not to see her. Tommy moving toward the girl who had been treated as if her longing made her ridiculous.

In the film, Sue asks Tommy to take Carrie to the prom because Sue feels guilty about what she and the other girls did. That is how the story begins. But something happens when Tommy is with Carrie. He does not merely perform kindness. He looks at her. He helps her stay in the moment when she wants to flee. He lets her experience herself as someone worth being near.

That was what I wanted.

I wanted someone to look at me that way — like I mattered, like the part of me that was shy and frightened and unable to speak was not something to mock, not something to correct, not something to overcome before I deserved tenderness.

I wanted to be chosen. I wanted to be found.

I would like to say that I have outgrown that longing. I would like to say that the adult man, the former therapist, the writer, the peer support specialist, the person who has studied attachment and trauma and the nervous system, has become so integrated and self-sufficient that the old wish no longer lives in me.

That would not be true.

There is still a wounded child in me who wants to be comforted.

There is still a part of me that wants someone to say, “You are doing okay.” There is still a part that needs to hear, “What you cannot do yet is okay.” There is still a part that wants to be told that not knowing how to leap toward love again does not mean I am weak, defective, less masculine, less worthy, or impossible to love.

I did not fully accept that part of myself when I was working with Andrea.

That is hard for me to admit because the work with Andrea mattered. EMDR helped desensitize some of the terror. We talked about growing up, about narcissistic abuse, about the ways the past had shaped me. She recognized things that needed to be recognized. She gave me something important. She helped me begin telling parts of the story that had been impossible to tell.

But I was not vulnerable enough then to say the simplest things.

I am scared of being alone. I am scared of having to ask someone out. I am scared that I do not know how to find another life partner.

I am scared that the part of me that once needed Tommy, then found Celta, then found Lynn, is still here and still does not know what to do when no one comes toward me.

I kept asking for help understanding that it was okay to be hurt by my parents. It was okay to see wounded parts of myself. It was okay to realize that what happened in childhood mattered. But even then, I think I was tentative. I placed one foot on that truth and then pulled it back. I talked about abuse because abuse was the recognizable word. I talked about narcissism because that gave me a structure. I talked about trauma because that was a clinical language I knew.

But I did not always say: I am still the little boy who wanted to be held.

I did not say: I am still waiting for someone to help me feel safe enough to reach.

Only recently, I heard again some version of the old script: women like the chase.

There it was again.

The idea that a man is supposed to pursue. That uncertainty is part of the game. That the man proves himself by pushing through doubt, by risking rejection, by somehow knowing when persistence is wanted and when persistence becomes pressure.

Maybe some people experience that script as playful. Maybe some people know how to live inside it without fear.

For me, it has always felt like a locked door.

I did not need a chase. I needed mutuality. I needed a sign that my reaching would not be punished. I needed the other person to move too.

Celta moved toward me.

Lynn moved toward me.

That was what made love possible.

It was not conquest. It was not pursuit. It was not me proving myself through some ritual of masculine confidence. It was two people finding one another in a way that allowed neither person to carry all the terror alone.

That was what Tommy represented before I had the language for it. He was not merely a boy taking a girl to the prom. He was the impossible figure who moved toward the person who could not confidently move toward the world.

I still want that.

Not as a rescue fantasy. Not as a belief that another person can erase the past or fix the record or make the missing teeth disappear or undo what happened after Lynn. I know better than that now.

But I still want someone who can come toward me with tenderness.

Someone who can hold the emotional reality of what I am saying without flinching. Someone who does not rush me toward a lesson. Someone who does not treat my need for reassurance as neediness. Someone who understands that being comforted is not the opposite of strength.

That is the leap I am making on Monday.

I have made this kind of leap before.

At four years old, in a pool, toward a swimming instructor whose arms I did not know would hold me.

At fifty-two, picking up the phone to call Andrea after years of managing the unmanageable alone.

Each time, the leap required something that almost felt unreasonable: the willingness to reach before I knew whether anyone would receive me.

I am making it again.

The AEDP therapist has reviewed what I need. I know what I will tell her in the first session: I need to be heard before I am challenged. I need the emotional reality of my experience to be met before anyone helps me examine it. I need someone to understand that the corrective experience is not advice, not a clever reframe, not a strategy for carrying the weight more efficiently.

What I need is simpler than that and harder to find.

I need someone to receive what is true and let me feel that it has been received. I need someone to help my body know what my mind has been trying to believe: that the feelings were real, the damage was real, the abandonment was real, and that none of it means what I was taught it meant about who I am.

I have studied these things because I had to.

Attachment. Earned secure attachment. Complex PTSD. Narcissistic abuse. The biology of trauma. IFS. AEDP. The freeze response. The way the nervous system protects a person from what cannot be processed alone.

I did not read these books as an intellectual exercise. I read them the way a lost person reads a map.

The map helped. It still helps.

But a map is not the same as being accompanied.

Knowing the word for a wound is not the same as having someone sit beside you while the wound is touched.

That is why Monday matters.

I still go to the open mic.

I stood at the microphone last week with the returned book behind me, the Uber rejection behind me, the Circle K job starting tomorrow behind me, and I read a poem. The room listened. Something moved in the air between me and the people in it — that particular electricity that happens when language finds the thing that was always true and says it out loud in a room where other people are present.

I did not tell the full story.

I am not permitted to tell the full story in that room.

But I brought what I was permitted to bring, and the room received it, and for the duration of the poem I was visible.

Not completely.

Not finally.

Not forever.

But visible enough to keep going.

That is not the ending I wanted.

It is the ending I have.

The ending I have contains the microphone. The room. The choice to keep standing there even when I cannot say everything. The motion pending in a courthouse. The job that starts tomorrow. The therapist on Monday. The book in your hands. The longing that has not disappeared. The wounded child who still wants to be held, not because he is weak, but because he was never held enough when holding would have changed everything.

I am still here.

I am still telling the truth, even when the room asks me not to.

I am still trying to believe that my reactions were not the problem. That my needs were not the burden. That my suffering was not a failure of character. That the freeze was not guilt. That the silence was not consent. That the longing to be held, reassured, and met with tenderness was never something I should have been ashamed of.

It was the cost of surviving without support.

I survived anyway.

I am sixty years old. I have missing teeth. I start at Circle K tomorrow. I am making a leap on Monday. The motion is pending. The book is finished, or nearly finished.

And still, some part of me is asking what I asked all along.

Look at me.

Not as a case. Not as a record. Not as the lie. Not as the burden someone wished I would stop carrying into the room.

Look at me as the person who has been here the whole time.

Tell me I’m not invisible.