Read Book | Preston Memoir

Author biography

Preston Pilant is a business owner, dog lover, and storyteller who believes survival is an art form. Raised in instability and shaped by hardship, he learned early how to endure — and later, how to rebuild. After founding multiple ventures, facing failure, betrayal, and personal reinvention, he ultimately created a thriving boarding retreat dedicated to providing the kind of safety he once searched for. His writing blends honesty, grit, and reflection, inviting readers into a story of resilience, identity, and reclaiming power. He lives in the country with plenty of land, plenty of dogs, and a deep appreciation for second chances.

Preface

This book is not about abuse.

That may seem like a strange way to begin a story that includes years of sexual abuse, incest, and rape at the hands of more than fifteen different men. Those things happened. They shaped parts of my childhood and left marks that took years of therapy, reflection, and hard work to understand and overcome.

But this book is not a graphic retelling of those events.

I will reference them, because pretending they didn’t happen would make this story incomplete. However, I have no desire to relive them in detail, and I have no intention of giving those moments more power than they deserve. The abuse is part of my history, but it is not the center of my life, and it is not the focus of this book.

This book is about surviving.

It is about the strange and complicated ways a child learns to endure when the world around them feels unsafe. It is about the people who appeared along the way—some who helped, some who hurt, and some who changed the direction of my life in ways they may never have realized.

It is about the dogs that became my companions when people could not be trusted. It is about the moments of kindness that stood out like small lights in very dark places. And it is about the long road from a childhood defined by chaos to a life built with purpose, resilience, and hope.

Many people have told me for years that I should write a book about my life. For a long time I resisted the idea. Some memories are heavy, and some stories take time before they are ready to be told. What you will find in these pages are not detailed accounts of every painful year, but small fragments of moments that shaped my path. There are gaps—years that remain unspoken—not because they did not happen, but because my life today is defined not by the trauma, but by what came after it.

But eventually I realized something important: monsters only win when their victims remain silent.

So this book is not about the monsters.

It is about the person who survived them.

Chapter 1

The Laundry Room

Chapter 1

The Laundry Room

I was just a small child when I learned that love was negotiable.

My mother had a habit of “giving me away” whenever it was convenient. One instance, my sister and I were left on my father and stepmother’s porch as a wedding gift, waiting for them to come home from their wedding reception. We weren’t luggage. But we weren’t far from it either.

Years of abuse at the hands of a monster had trained me well.

The rule was simple:

Comply.

Then there was a winter, my uncle and her decided I needed to be “tuned.”

He lived in a tiny trailer off Salt Creek Road with his girlfriend. I was pulled from school and brought there without ceremony. For two weeks, I was not a child. I was labor. I cleaned. I cooked. I stayed silent. Speaking without permission came with consequences.

I wasn’t allowed to cry, I wasn’t allowed to ask for my mom.

One evening my mom came over. The girlfriend, mom and me went to the grocery store. The only thing I really remember is wanting to be close to her. Hold her hand. Tell her I loved her. Tell her I’d be a good boy. Tell her I wanted to come home.

That was a large mistake.

That night he called me into the living room after his girlfriend had gone to bed. I’d disobeyed him.

The television hummed in black and white in the background. The glow from the tv was eerily familiar. I recognized it immediately — it was mine. I had earned it through church reward tickets at the church auction, saving tickets like treasure. My mother had given it to him. I wasn’t even allowed to look at it anymore.

He told me to sit beside him.

My heart pounded so loudly I was sure he could hear it. My hands were wet soaked from sweat from fear. I remember staring at the edge of the couch before I moved, thinking that if I obeyed perfectly, maybe this would end quickly. Maybe I could go home.

I would be good, I promised myself. I would do whatever my mother wanted. I just wanted her to take me back.

He spoke. I don’t remember the words. I remember his eyebrows lifting as he talked, lit from the glow of the TV. I remember his hand on my knee. The pressure. The squeezing. The way pain can make your ears ring.

When it was over, he told me to go to bed.

Bed.

My bed was a dog mat on the laundry room floor.

The room smelled wet and metallic, like old water and rust. It was always cold. The washing machine pressed against my back as I lay down, the metal biting into my skin. The light was off. The house was silent.

Except for the dogs.

Two Labrador retrievers shifted closer in the dark. I could hear their breathing before I felt them. Warm. Solid. Alive. They nudged their noses against my face and licked the tears I couldn’t stop.

I wrapped my arms around them and buried my face in their fur.

In that dark laundry room, on a thin mat that wasn’t meant for a child, those dogs were the only living things that chose me.

I sobbed into their coats until sleep finally took me.

The room was cold.

But they were warm.

Chapter 2

The Hole in the Ground

I don’t remember falling.

I remember being warned.

There was a gate. A man — I assume the property owner — told me not to go back there.

“You’ll fall in a hole,” he said.

I opened the gate anyway.

After that, my memory goes quiet.

Everything I know about what happened next was told to me by witnesses.

The well was thirty feet deep. I fell twelve feet before my small body became wedged in the narrow shaft. Whether it was gravity or the tightness of the circular wall that stopped me, no one knows. What they do know is that I disappeared.

My sister was with me. She later said the ground “sucked him up.” She ran inside screaming for my mother and a neighbor. When they followed her outside, she led them to a small, dark opening in the earth.

A tiny circle.

A child-sized grave.

They screamed when they realized I was down there.

They clawed at the dirt with their hands at first — frantic, instinctive, powerless. But fear of the walls collapsing forced them to stop.

They called 911.

Help came quickly.

The plan was desperate and dangerous: dig down beside the well with a backhoe as deep as possible, then tunnel sideways underneath me and try to pull me free before either shaft collapsed.

Every scoop of dirt held its breath.

Workers shouted down into the hole.

“Preston! Are you still with us?”

“Do you want ice cream?”

No response.

They feared I had run out of oxygen. They lowered a line down, hoping air might reach me. They kept yelling.

“Hang in there!”

“We’re coming!”

Time stretched. Machines roared. Dirt flew. Men shoveled with the kind of urgency that only exists when a child is buried alive.

When the equipment could dig no deeper, it became hand work. Shovels. Sweat. Raw panic disguised as focus.

Then came the tunnel.

I imagine the moment they broke through felt like striking gold. Matt Potter — the man who went into the tunnel — reached through and grabbed my legs. He pulled like his life depended on it.

Dirt fell.

Walls shifted.

He pulled again.

And then I was free.

They rushed me up the mound of dirt and into the waiting ambulance.

My next memory is not darkness.

It’s the fire station.

I was sitting on my mother’s lap, surrounded by the men who saved my life. They gave me a hat that read Mills Fire Department. The local paper took our picture. Flashbulbs. Smiles. A miracle story.

I remember sitting in her arms.

And I remember thinking:

Now she’ll love me.

Almost dying had to count for something.

Surely being nearly lost meant I was valuable.

Surely surviving meant I was precious.

That photograph is the only memory I have of sitting in my mother’s lap and feeling wanted.

It would not last.

Chapter 3

After the Miracle

Almost dying did not make me safer.

If anything, it made me quieter.

After the well, life did not change in the ways I had hoped. There was no new vigilance. No new protection. No tightening of boundaries around me.

Instead, access to me became easier.

My uncle did not disappear after the rescue. He remained part of the orbit. So did my mother’s friends. Adults who were supposed to represent safety began to represent something else entirely.

It didn’t happen all at once. It never does.

It happens in layers.

A comment that lingers too long.

A hand that doesn’t move away quickly enough.

Being called into a room after everyone else is asleep.

At seven, you don’t have language for violation.

You only know discomfort. Confusion. The sense that something is wrong but you are the one being told to behave.

It became routine.

That is the part people struggle to understand.

Abuse, when repeated, does not always feel explosive. It becomes procedural. Predictable. Scheduled into the rhythm of life like chores or dinner.

I learned quickly that resistance brought consequences. Silence brought survival.

I also learned something far more dangerous:

If adults want something from you, you give it.

If you want to be kept, you comply.

The well had taught me that almost disappearing made people rush toward me.

The abuse taught me that staying quiet kept me from disappearing again.

Those lessons intertwined.

And somewhere inside that small body, a belief began forming:

My value is tied to what I endure.

Chapter 4

The Dogs Under the House

We were poor.

Not “forgot to pack lunch money” poor.

More like “if poverty had a mascot, it would’ve been our trailer” poor.

We lived in a small single-wide my great-grandmother owned. The floors creaked. The wind found its way through seams it shouldn’t have. But for a little while, I had toys.

My favorite was a metal dump truck.

Oh god I loved that thing. Big, Yellow Solid Metal.

The wood stove sat on broken bricks, and I’d load those bricks into the bed of my dump truck one by one, haul them across the room, unload them, and start over. It was construction. It was purpose. It was control.

My mother would sit on the couch, applying her makeup in the glow of afternoon light. It was best not to disturb her. Disturbing her meant consequences — not from her hands, but from someone else’s.

She rarely hit me.

She preferred to outsource it.

If I misbehaved, she would wait for my father to return from a trucking run, or she would call Joe. Sometimes Joe wouldn’t show up until days later, but he always came.

Punishment was delayed but never canceled.

I remember once he yanked the power cord from the back of a ghetto blaster — the kind everyone had in the ’80s to most it’s a “tressure” that brings back good times and happy memories. For me, it brings back terror— the cord used as a whip for something I’d done days before. Other times it was fists or being sat on top of my tiny frame to a 200+ lb man. Or being grabbed by my ankles and lifted upside down dropped on my head over and over like it was a game all while I screamed for my mother.

“Stop yelling,” she’d shout from the couch.

Where was the mother from the fire station photograph?

The one who held me like I mattered? The one who presented me to the world like Simba from the Lion King.

She had been replaced by a woman who seemed inconvenienced by my existence. Joe became the arm of whatever anger she carried.

I learned to keep quiet, stay clear, throw my toys away before they angered her.

I learned the sound of his muffler before I learned multiplication tables.

When I heard it rumbling down the driveway, I ran.

And I ran to the dogs.

We had a lot of them. Crystal, our almost feral husky, bred again and again. The puppies grew into wary, under-socialized huskies who spent most of their time hiding beneath the trailer. They weren’t friendly to outsiders.

But they were gentle with me.

I would crawl under the house with them, pressing into their thick fur, listening to their breathing. It smelled like dirt and dog and safety.

Under that trailer, I wasn’t a problem to be corrected.

I was just another small creature trying to survive.

Eventually, the huskies became an issue in the neighborhood. They were roaming. Scaring people. Attacking livestock coming home with their feet entombed in bear traps neighbors had set annoyed by their existence, just as my mother was annoyed by mine. I didn’t know that at the time. I only knew they were mine.

One day my father came home from a trucking trip.

By the end of it, the dogs were gone.

In the 1980s, “animal control” looked different. There wasn’t fines. There wasn’t animal control threats. All there was, was a shotgun. It was almost the way of the west.

I have never hated my father more than I did that day.

My mother made it worse. She told me she hadn’t wanted it done — that my dad “hated those dogs.” And if he hated them, maybe he hated me too.

For years, I believed her.

I didn’t understand until much later that the dogs had become nearly feral. That people had been hurt. That my father had few options in a rural town with limited resources.

But childhood doesn’t process nuance.

It processes loss.

What I remember most isn’t the sound.

It’s the smell.

My father reloaded his own shells. The metallic scent of gun parts. The plastic wads. The fine grit of gunpowder. I used to play with the packing machine, not understanding what it assembled.

Now I associate that smell with the day my protectors disappeared.

I hated guns.

I hated what they represented.

Because those dogs were the only ones who never asked me to earn their affection.

And they were taken too.

Chapter 5

The World Tilts

After years of abuse, molestation, incest, cruel treatment, and complete neglect from my mother, I had grown used to being passed around like something nobody really wanted. She handed me from person to person, each one using me for whatever purpose suited them. I learned early that I wasn’t something to be protected. I was something to be tolerated… or used.

Then I met the Tiemans.

Their daughter Mandy became my best friend. Mandy and I did the normal kid things together — the kinds of things I had only ever watched other children do. She had a playroom filled with toys. Shelves of games. Dolls and puzzles and things meant for kids who were actually allowed to be kids.

I didn’t have much experience with that.

Mandy and I would play for hours, and on weekends we would go to the roller rink and skate until we were exhausted. For those moments I could almost pretend I was just another normal kid.

But it wasn’t the toys that made their house different.

It was her mother.

Jane Tieman.

While the other kids in the neighborhood ran around outside yelling and playing, Jane and I would sometimes sit at the kitchen table and talk. We would sit there for hours. Looking back now, I couldn’t tell you what we talked about. It probably wasn’t anything important.

But I remember how it felt.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel afraid.

I didn’t feel like I had to constantly watch the room, listen for footsteps, or brace myself for someone’s temper to explode. I didn’t feel like something terrible was about to happen if I said the wrong thing.

I just sat there and talked.

And she listened.

That might not sound like much, but to a kid like me it meant everything.

I couldn’t understand why their house felt so different. I didn’t have the language for it yet. I didn’t know how to explain the absence of fear.

But I felt loved there.

There was one time Mandy and I were part of a play. I was so proud of it. I remember desperately wanting my mom to come see it. I wanted her to watch me perform. I wanted her to see me do something good.

Show after show she never came.

But the Tiemans were always there.

Every performance.

They clapped. They cheered. They smiled like I was their own kid standing up there on that stage. After the show they would tell me how well I did.

I remember climbing into the back seat of their car afterward. The interior was red leather. Even now I can still remember the smell of it.

That smell meant safety.

It meant someone cared whether I succeeded or failed.

It meant someone showed up.

By this point I was spending so much time at their house that it barely felt like visiting anymore. Most weekends I was there. Sometimes longer. Slowly, without me even realizing it, their home started to feel like the closest thing I had to a real one.

Jane knew something about my life wasn’t right.

I never told her the full truth about the abuse I had endured. I didn’t know how to say those things out loud. But she could see enough to know that my upbringing with my mother wasn’t normal.

Eventually she and her husband began talking about something bigger.

They began talking about adopting me.

When they approached my biological mother with the idea, it wasn’t the dramatic confrontation someone might imagine. By that point I was practically a stray kid wandering between houses anyway.

Nothing about her life would really change.

She jumped at the opportunity.

Rehoming me meant about as much to her as giving away a stray kitten she had taken in and grown tired of.

The truth is she had never really connected with me in the first place.

But for me, the idea meant something completely different.

It meant freedom.

Freedom from Joe.

Freedom from my mother’s friends.

Freedom from the endless cruelty I had spent so many years enduring.

For the first time in my life there was a door out of that world.

But there was one more obstacle.

My father.

And based on everything my mother had told me growing up, I believed my father didn’t want me any more than she did.

So I assumed the adoption would simply happen.

I was wrong.

My dad had been living in Montana with his new wife and their newly born son. My mother had spent years filling my head with stories about him.

He hated me.

I was a burden.

He only cared about his new family.

The truth was much more complicated than that.

For years my parents had gone back and forth trying to establish some kind of custody arrangement. Sometimes we would go live with my father for a while. But sooner or later my mother would suddenly decide she wanted us back.

She would say she missed us.

She would say she loved us.

She would say she needed her babies.

But that wasn’t the real reason.

When we weren’t living with her, the welfare checks stopped.

The assistance she had learned to rely on disappeared. The sympathy she collected from acquaintances, family members, and government agencies dried up.

We were her income.

So whenever we returned to her house, our heads were filled with lies.

Your dad hates you.

You’re a burden to him.

He only wants his new family.

You can imagine what that does to a child.

I didn’t know my father well. He had left when I was young, and the chaos that followed made any normal relationship nearly impossible. Dealing with my mother was exhausting for anyone, and sometimes the easiest path for him was simply letting her take us back.

But when the Tiemans called him and explained the situation — that I had been living with them, that my mother was willing to sign over custody, and that they wanted to adopt me and give me a future — something changed.

My father absolutely refused.

He forbade the adoption.

Then he got in his car in Montana and drove all the way down to come get his son.

I remember the drive back to Montana. We drove through the night, mile after mile of dark highway that seemed to stretch on forever.

But I was excited.

For the first time in my life I believed I might finally be free.

Free from the people who had hurt me.

Free from the house where so many terrible things had happened.

They couldn’t follow me that far.

I believed everything was going to be okay.

But there was something the Tiemans never knew.

There was something boiling inside me that years of abuse had created.

A demon made of anger, fear, and pain that had been building for years.

Even when someone finally showed me love, my mind didn’t know how to accept it.

My heart didn’t believe I deserved it.

And that voice inside me kept whispering the same thing over and over.

You don’t belong here.

Settling into life in Montana wasn’t easy.

My father had remarried. I had a stepmother now, and brothers I barely knew. I wanted so badly for my stepmother to love me.

But the lies my mother had planted in my head kept growing.

My dad didn’t want me.

She didn’t want me.

They only wanted their real son.

Even my stepbrother — my stepmother’s son from a previous marriage — didn’t seem fully wanted either.

I tried to adapt.

But inside I was furious.

I felt abandoned by the Tiemans. I couldn’t see them anymore. I couldn’t talk to them. I couldn’t sit at that kitchen table that had once felt like the safest place in the world.

The one place I had ever felt truly protected was suddenly gone.

My father worked constantly. My stepmother worked too. Most days it was just me and my brothers — boys I barely knew and didn’t get along with.

School wasn’t any better.

Kids bullied me relentlessly. They beat me up. They mocked me. Every day felt like another reminder that I didn’t belong anywhere.

The anger inside me kept growing.

But anger wasn’t the only thing.

Fear grew too.

Even though I was hundreds of miles away, I was convinced my abusers were coming for me. Without the Tiemans there to protect me, who would stop them?

I started wetting the bed again.

I slept with knives hidden under my mattress.

I began stealing anything I could get my hands on. Food. Objects. Toys. In my mind I was stockpiling things because at any moment everything could be taken away again.

The anger finally began to spill out.

I smashed things.

I smashed toys — toys I had never had before but suddenly found myself surrounded by. I broke my brothers’ things. I broke my parents’ belongings.

I was furious at the world.

I hated my life.

I hated everything.

The one thing that had always brought me comfort — dogs — wasn’t there either.

My parents were afraid of the anger inside me. They feared that if we had animals I might hurt them.

But more than that…

They feared I might hurt them.

Or worse.

My brothers.

And in their eyes, the boy they had brought into their home was beginning to look less like a wounded child…

And more like a monster they didn’t know how to control

Chapter 6:

Locked Doors

I remember it like it was yesterday.

I had just been committed to my first mental institution — Rivendell Psychiatric Center.

Somehow I managed to get my first phone call. Except it wasn’t a call I made. It was an incoming call.

From my grandparents.

As a kid I don’t have many memories of them. Just fragments. Small snapshots in time. But the ones I do remember are warm.

I remember the candy dish.

I remember the sing-alongs.

I remember them sitting at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes while bacon fried on the stove.

The smell of that bacon still lives somewhere in my brain.

They were loving people. They cared about me deeply. At that time I was their first—and only—grandson on my father’s side.

So when staff told me I had a phone call and walked me down to the office, I went with them.

You have to understand something about institutions.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Girl, Interrupted, that’s the closest comparison most people might understand. Friendships form, traumatic things happen, and everyone inside is trying to survive their own chaos.

But what people don’t understand is the loss of freedom.

And I don’t mean the kind of freedom kids complain about when their parents tell them when to go to bed.

I mean everything.

You can’t use the bathroom when you want.

You can’t go outside when you want.

You can’t talk to who you want.

Every movement. Every action. Every breath almost feels like it requires permission.

For a ten-year-old boy who was already scared, angry, and confused, it felt like prison.

Most of the staff were just there to do a job.

They didn’t care about the job.

And they certainly didn’t care about a frightened little boy who had just been thrown into their system.

But my grandparents cared.

When I picked up that payphone in the office and heard my grandmother’s voice, something inside me broke.

I started crying.

Not the quiet kind of crying. I was sobbing. Begging them to get me out of there. Telling them how scared I was. Telling them I didn’t understand why I was there.

I just wanted to go home.

That was always the thought that ran through my mind growing up.

I wanted to go home when my uncle kidnapped me.

I wanted to go home when I was with an abuser.

I wanted to go home when I was with my dad.

I always wanted to go home.

But the truth was, I had no idea where home actually was.

Instead, I was trapped inside this massive brick building filled with people who had anger problems, drug addictions, and severe mental health issues.

There was even a murderer in there.

And I was ten years old.

I don’t remember everything my grandparents said during that call. I don’t even remember if they were both on the phone or if it was some kind of party line.

But I remember one sentence.

Clear as day.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get you out of there.”

Those words filled me with excitement.

Hope.

Relief.

I held onto them like a life raft.

I believed the nightmare was about to end.

But I was wrong.

The nightmare wasn’t ending.

In fact, it was just beginning.

That was the last time I ever spoke to my grandmother.

I didn’t learn the truth until years later.

At the time, like everything else in my life, I assumed they had abandoned me too.

I had already convinced myself I was just a piece of trash nobody wanted.

But the truth was very different.

My grandmother died in 1998 while I was still institutionalized.

I entered the system on February 14th, 1990.

I didn’t leave my final institution until the summer of 1997.

Seven years.

Seven years without birthdays.

Seven years without Christmas.

Seven years without Halloween or Thanksgiving.

Seven years without a normal childhood.

My father rarely visited.

We barely spoke.

Occasionally a family friend would stop in, but mostly it was just silence.

The Tiemans — the only other adults who had ever shown me real kindness — disappeared from my life too.

I had no way to contact them. I didn’t know their phone number. I didn’t know if they even knew where I was.

What I didn’t know then was that they had been looking for me.

Thinking about me.

Wondering if I was okay.

But from inside those locked walls, it felt like everyone had vanished.

And in my mind, if my grandparents had abandoned me, why would anyone else care?

Looking back now, I sometimes wonder if I even belonged in those institutions.

Maybe I did.

Maybe I didn’t.

But the truth is simpler than all the diagnoses they tried to give me.

I was a little boy who had been sexually abused most of his life.

A boy who had been physically abused.

A boy who had been tortured by family members who used him as a release for their own anger.

Maybe what I needed was therapy.

Instead, I got locked doors, buzzers, and keys.

To this day, I hate keys.

I hate locked doors.

The sound of a door locking behind me still makes something inside my chest tighten.

Because in those places, everything was locked.

The bathrooms.

The bedrooms.

The hallways.

There were no toys.

No playgrounds.

No real childhood.

Just lectures, punishments, and something they called RBs — Recognized Behaviors.

If you behaved well enough, you earned a small reward.

Usually a tiny cup of root beer.

That was the system.

Do something good, get root beer.

Do something wrong, get an LB — a Learning Behavior — where they wrote down everything you did wrong and told you about it until you felt like garbage.

And that went on for years.

There were moments of light though.

One staff member named Mary used to call me Elvis.

I never figured out why.

Other patients would ask her why she called me that, and she’d just smile and say,

“Because he’s the king.”

Maybe she saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself.

Maybe she just felt sorry for a scared little boy surrounded by teenagers and adults who were far more broken than he was.

One of the groups they placed me in was called Survivors Group.

I was the youngest kid there.

But I also had the most history of abuse.

Everyone in that room shared their trauma.

Their stories.

Their pain.

It was hard for me to speak, but eventually I told them everything.

I cried while I talked.

But when it was over, I remember feeling strangely lighter.

Like something inside me had finally been released.

After that group I made a phone call to my stepmother.

It was the first time I had ever told a family member what had been happening to me all those years.

I don’t remember exactly how that conversation went.

But I do remember that eventually I spoke with a detective.

Nothing ever came from it.

Most of the men who abused me were just passing through my mother’s life. Boyfriends. Friends. Strangers.

There were never charges.

Never arrests.

And honestly, by that point, I didn’t expect anyone to save me.

They taught us in school that police officers and firefighters were heroes.

But nobody had ever come to save me.

So I learned to save myself.

I learned to hide.

I learned not to speak.

Because speaking only brought more consequences.

And slowly, all that anger and pain started turning inward.

I began to feel ugly.

Unwanted.

Unworthy.

Feelings I still struggle with today.

I moved from institution to institution not really know where I was going to be

tomorrow

Chapter 7

The Swecker House

By the time I arrived at the Swecker group home, I was already what the system called a ward of the state.

That phrase sounds official, almost protective, like someone important is looking after you. But in reality it just meant nobody really knew what to do with me anymore. I’d been placed in about five different mental institutions by this point and now they were just going to dump me where they could.

The Sweckers ran what was technically called a group home, though it was more like a holding place for foster kids the system needed to put somewhere. It was supposed to be transitional housing. A stop along the way.

But to me it felt like another house of horrors.

The Sweckers had a beautiful tri-level home. From the outside it looked perfect—like something from a magazine. Trim lawn, nice neighborhood, the kind of place people drove by and assumed a happy family lived there.

But the foster kids didn’t live in that house.

We lived downstairs.

A baby gate stood at the top of the stairs like a border we weren’t allowed to cross. Unless we were coming upstairs for breakfast or dinner, we were not allowed past it. The rest of the time we stayed below.

The downstairs had three or four bedrooms filled with cheap wood framed bunk beds. The mattresses were thin and uncomfortable. Everything down there felt temporary, like furniture meant for a summer camp that never ended.

We rarely saw Dwayne or Diane Swecker. They didn’t talk to us much, didn’t interact with us unless we had done something wrong. Sometimes we were allowed upstairs to clean or dust the house, but even that was rare.

Mostly, we stayed behind the gate.

I often think about the movie The People Under the Stairs when I remember that place. In that movie, the couple keeps children hidden away in their house and terrible things happen to them.

The Sweckers didn’t feed kids to each other like the movie.

But sometimes it felt close enough.

There were six other kids living there with me. None of them liked me. Kids in places like that learn quickly that survival often means finding someone weaker than you.

And I always seem to be the weakest.

Except for Dusty.

Dusty Dusipin was the only one who treated me like a human being. Dusty was also my first boy crush, but I hadn’t yet come to terms with these feelings yet. Those feelings only brought up the dark feeling of disgust with myself.

Fights broke out often between the kids. Sometimes it was screaming, sometimes fists. No one came to stop it. No one came to check on us.

The Sweckers didn’t seem to care.

By then I had been diagnosed with ADHD, though I barely understood what that meant. All I knew was that school was nearly impossible.

Teachers talked and the words slipped past me like water through my hands. I couldn’t concentrate. I fell further and further behind. Other kids noticed.

And kids can smell weakness like sharks smell blood.

They teased me. Mocked me. Made fun of me constantly.

Life in the Swecker house had its own strange rules. Dwayne ran mornings like a drill sergeant. He’d come downstairs and shout for everyone to wake up.

You got one wake-up call.

If you fell back asleep, that was it. You were on your own.

If you missed breakfast, you went to school hungry. There was no granola bar, no quick snack, no second chance.

That happened to me more times than I can count.

I would sit in class with my stomach growling so loudly I was sure everyone could hear it, counting the minutes until lunch.

Eventually, something unexpected happened.

I made a friend.

His name was Jerry.

I had actually known Jerry years before when I lived with my dad and stepmom. Back then he wasn’t my friend at all.

He was a bully.

He used to beat me up at the bus stop.

But kids grow up. Things change.

Now we were preteens, and somehow Jerry and I became friends.

Not really at school. At school we kept our distance. No one really wanted to be friends with the weak Preston.

But outside of school, we were friends.

Jerry lived only a few houses away, and amazingly the Sweckers allowed me to go over there sometimes.

Jerry’s family had a tradition.

Taco Tuesday.

I loved Taco Tuesday.

But more than the tacos, I loved Jerry’s mom.

I think her name was Linda, though I can’t remember for certain. What I do remember is how kind she was.

She reminded me of my biological mother.

Not the cruel version of my mother—the one who passed me from man to man and ignored the horrors happening to me.

She reminded me of the rare good moments.

The few times my mom rubbed my back when I was sick. The nights she laid beside me when I had a fever.

Those memories were rare, but they existed.

Jerry’s mom felt like that.

She would offer me snacks, ask about my day, talk to me like I mattered.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt something I hadn’t felt in years.

Safe.

I started spending more and more time there.

Too much time.

Jerry’s family eventually began to notice things. They started hearing about the way the Sweckers treated us.

They didn’t like it.

One Taco Tuesday, something happened. I don’t even remember exactly what. I just remember sitting there crying and telling Jerry’s mom about it.

That night she made a decision.

She told me I wasn’t going back there.

Part of me felt relieved.

Another part of me was terrified.

What would Dwayne do?

What would Diane do?

They had never hit me, but their punishments could be just as cruel. Sometimes they even encouraged the other kids to take things out on me.

We sat around eating tacos while my mind raced.

At any moment Dwayne could show up.

And he did.

A loud knock slammed against the door.

My heart dropped into my stomach.

Jerry’s mom refused to open it.

Dwayne shouted through the door asking where I was.

“He’s eating tacos,” she replied.

Dwayne said I needed to come home.

That night, the rebellion ended quickly.

I left with him.

When we got back, I was told I was never allowed to go to Jerry’s house again. I was to go to school and come straight home.

But that rule didn’t last long.

I started sneaking out.

Soon enough I was back at Taco Tuesday again.

And once again, Dwayne showed up.

This time Jerry’s mom refused to let me go.

Dwayne threatened to call the police.

Jerry’s mom told him to go ahead.

If the police came, maybe they would finally see what was happening in that house.

For the first time in my life, someone was standing up for me.

The police arrived.

They took me down to the station.

I sat in what people usually call the drunk tank—a locked room with a camera watching.

But strangely, I felt calm there.

Places with locked doors were familiar to me by then.

Safer than most homes.

I remember listening to voices outside the room.

One voice stood out.

Diane Swecker.

She told the officers I was a troubled child. That they had tried nothing but love and affection. That they were trying to help me.

It was all lies.

She had never shown me love.

Not once.

Eventually the officer opened the door.

Diane came in, wrapped her arm around me, and hugged me.

It was the first time she had ever done that.

I almost laughed.

The performance was so obvious it felt ridiculous.

But I knew what was coming.

The moment we got into the car, the mask dropped.

She screamed at me the whole way home.

I had embarrassed her. I was stupid. I would never see Jerry or his family again.

Her plan was simple.

Dwayne would take me to school.

Dwayne would pick me up.

And I would stay locked in my room.

In a moment of sudden bravery—or maybe desperation—I grabbed the steering wheel and pushed with all the strength my small arms could muster. Diane screamed, slamming on the brakes as the car jerked to a stop. She whipped around, her face inches from mine, shouting and cursing, calling me a terrible child, telling me she was not going to tolerate another second of my behavior. Whatever brief triumph I had felt vanished instantly. All that remained in my bones was fear.

We returned home, sent straight to basement. I cried, Dustin came and asked me what happened and if I was ok. I knew I’d never see the light of day again.

But somehow I got out again.

I made it back to Jerry’s house one more time.

When Jerry’s mom came home and heard what had happened, she made another decision.

This time she called the police herself.

She told them something was wrong in that house and she wasn’t letting me go back.

She said she was willing to risk going to jail for kidnapping if that’s what it took.

For a boy who had never had a voice, it was overwhelming.

She never said the words I love you.

But I felt loved. Immensely loved.

In my young mind, she was a superhero. A small woman with a fierce presence, standing up and fighting for me with a strength that felt larger than life.

The police came and they took me again.

I spent a short time at the station before they transferred me to another institution called YSC.

It was still locked doors and cameras.

But it wasn’t maximum security like some of the other places I’d been.

People mostly kept to themselves.

I had already given up on expecting anything good.

Then one day I got a visitor.

Jerry’s family had come to see me.

They brought small treats and trinkets and told me they hoped I would be okay.

That day I something I had never done. I told them the truth about everything.

The abuse.

The institutions.

All of it.

Jerry’s mom hugged me and told me I was still a good person.

Then they left.

I never saw them again.

Not long after that, the state decided to try something different.

A foster home.

Not a group home like the Swecker house.

A real foster family.

Chapter 8

Glimmer of Hope “Lee”

By this time, I had been bouncing between institutions for a while, something inside me had started to change.

Not in a hopeful way.

More like a quiet understanding that my life was going to be lived behind locked doors.

So when they told me they were going to try foster care, I didn’t know how to react.

Part of me was excited.

Another part of me had learned not to believe anything until it actually happened.

Still, the idea sounded incredible.

A real home.

A family.

Not a locked building with buzzing doors and staff watching every move you made.

The couple came to meet me before the placement.

They seemed kind.

They asked me hundreds of questions—things nobody had asked me in a long time.

What kind of toys I liked.

What my favorite color was.

What kind of room I wanted.

They told me about their house and about their life. But the thing I remember most was when they told me they had a puppy.

That was all I needed to hear.

I couldn’t wait.

They also told me I would be returning to public school.

That part scared me a little.

Public school hadn’t been kind to me in the past. My memories of it were mostly kids making fun of me, pushing me, spitting on me, treating me like I didn’t belong.

But this time was going to be different.

This time I would have a home.

A family.

A puppy.

Maybe things were finally turning around.

The day finally came.

My social worker, Tom Locklin, picked me up from the institution. We were going to enroll me in school before going to the foster home that evening.

I remember sitting in the school office filling out paperwork.

The secretary asked a simple question.

“What’s your name?”

And suddenly something inside my head clicked.

I didn’t want to be Preston anymore.

Preston was the angry kid.

Preston was the problem child.

Preston was the boy everyone knew for all the wrong reasons.

Preston was TRASH.

So I blurted something different. It came out so fast I didn’t even realize what I was doing.

“Lee.” I said softly.

“Lee Pilant.”

If nobody knew my name, nobody would know my past.

Nobody would know the institutions.

Nobody would know the abuse.

I could start over.

Just like that!

When I walked into my first class, it actually worked.

Kids started talking to me.

They thought I was funny.

Interesting.

Cool, even.

People wanted to sit next to me. They wanted to talk to me. They actually wanted to be my friend. They weren’t making fun of me. They weren’t teasing, or pushing me down.

For the first time in my life, I felt like maybe I could actually fit in somewhere.

I remember sitting there thinking,

This is what normal life must feel like.

It was incredible.

For a few hours, I was just Lee.

And everything felt possible.

I sat at my desk almost in a trance thinking and daydreaming of what it was going to be like to walk into my new home.

Then the classroom speaker crackled.

“Lee, please come to the office.”

At first I didn’t even react.

I hadn’t been Lee for very long, and it didn’t immediately register that they were calling me.

Other kids started nudging me.

“Hey Lee, that’s you.”

My stomach dropped.

I walked down to the office.

Standing there was my social worker.

Tom.

He was looking at the floor.

That was the first sign something was wrong.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

He looked up at me with a sadness in his eyes that I still remember.

“I’m really sorry, Preston.”

The moment he said my real name, I knew.

“They changed their mind.”

I didn’t understand.

“How can they change their mind?” I asked. “I haven’t even been to their house yet.”

Did I say something wrong?

Did I do something wrong?

What was wrong with me?

Tom explained that we had to go back.

Back to the institution.

I don’t remember much about the drive.

I remember the feeling though.

That sinking feeling that had followed me most of my life.

The realization that nobody actually wanted me.

Walking back through those locked doors felt different that time.

Not angry.

Just empty.

I had believed, even if only for a moment, that I was getting out.

That I was finally going to live a normal life.

Instead, I was right back where I started.

Behind locked doors.

Surrounded by people who didn’t care if I lived or died.

And that was the moment I started to give up hope that my life would ever be anything different.

Eventually Bud Patterson came to see me. They took me into the very room I had last seen Jerrys family. The room filled me with great sadness. Bud went on and on about all that Normative Services had to offer. Frankly I did’t care. I didn’t care about him, I didn’t care where I went and I certainly didn’t care about me. After all, I’d moved from place to place so much. I knew I wouldn’t be there long and even if I did like it. I’d surely be moved to some where else I didn’t like.

I was transferred to Normative Services in Sheridan, Wyoming. I was picked up by Becca and Jace. Becas was a staff member at NSI and Jace was a student. They didn’t call the patience, patience were referred to as students.

We drove from Montana to Sheridan. I remember them making small talk. Asking about who I was where I was from. I’ve been through all this before, so I didn’t care much to engage or partake.

But what I didn’t know was NSI was about to changed my life.

But that’s another story.

Chapter 9

FRED

The first thing that greeted me at Normative Services wasn’t a counselor.

It wasn’t a social worker.

It wasn’t another patient.

It was a dog.

A massive, shaggy Saint Bernard named Fred.

By the time I arrived in Sheridan, Wyoming, I had already been through multiple institutions. I knew the routine by heart—locked doors, buzzing intercoms, staff members with clipboards, and the quiet understanding that your life now belonged to a system.

So when I stepped out of the vehicle that day, I was expecting the same thing I always expected.

Another building.

Another set of rules.

Another place where I didn’t belong.

Instead, I saw Fred.

He came lumbering across the property like a small bear with fur that had seen better days. His paws were enormous. His head was even bigger. His tongue hung out the side of his mouth as if he had absolutely no concern about anything happening around him.

He walked right up to me and leaned against my legs.

No hesitation.

No questions.

Just leaned there like we had known each other forever.

For a moment, I forgot where I was.

I dropped down and wrapped my arms around his neck. His fur smelled like dust and sunshine and old dog. He licked the side of my face like I had just come home after being gone for years.

Fred didn’t know anything about my file.

He didn’t know about the diagnoses, the reports, or the endless lists of “problem behaviors” adults had been writing about me for years.

He didn’t know about the abuse.

He didn’t know about the anger.

To Fred, I was just another kid standing in front of him.

And apparently a kid worth saying hello to.

That mattered more than anyone there could have understood.

Fred belonged to the family that owned Normative Services. He had lived there most of his life and roamed the property freely. Everyone knew him. Everyone loved him.

But to me, Fred was something more.

He was proof that maybe this place really was different.

At the other institutions, everything was controlled.

Locked.

Restricted.

Even the air sometimes felt like it belonged to someone else.

But Fred wandered wherever he wanted.

Across the yard.

Around the buildings.

Through the parking lot.

He was a living contradiction to the world I had just come from.

And somehow, that made me feel safer.

Fred was old.

Really old.

You could tell by the way he moved. His joints were stiff, and sometimes when he laid down it looked like getting back up was a negotiation his body wasn’t always winning.

But he still followed people around like it was his job.

Sometimes I’d sit with him while he ate. His dog food was dry and hard, and I remember worrying that it must be difficult for him to chew.

So I started cutting it up for him.

I’d take a butter knife (because we didn’t have access to sharp knifes) and sit there chopping the pieces smaller so he wouldn’t have to struggle.

Nobody told me to do it.

I just did.

Maybe because I understood what it felt like when life was harder than it needed to be.

Fred never seemed to mind.

He’d wag his tail slowly while he waited, watching me with those big, tired eyes.

Then he’d start eating, taking his time, like he knew we weren’t in a hurry.

There’s something about dogs.

They don’t care who you were yesterday.

They don’t care what mistakes you made.

They don’t care what other people say about you.

They just decide whether they trust you or not.

And once they do, that’s it.

You’re theirs.

Fred trusted me.

And for a kid who had spent years feeling like nobody wanted him around, that simple thing meant everything.

Sometimes I’d sit next to him and just lean against his side.

His breathing was slow and steady.

In a place filled with therapy groups, rules, and constant supervision, Fred was the only thing that felt uncomplicated.

No expectations.

No lectures.

Just quiet company.

Looking back now, Fred was probably the first living thing in years that made me feel safe.

Not protected.

Not rescued.

Just… safe.

And when you’ve spent most of your childhood waiting for the next bad thing to happen, that feeling is something you never forget.

Chapter 10

The Field

Life at Normative Services slowly started to feel… normal.

That was a strange feeling after years inside locked institutions.

Most of the places I had lived before ran like prisons. Doors buzzed open and shut. Staff rotated through shifts like factory workers. Every movement was monitored. Every mistake was documented.

Normative was different.

There were still rules. There was still structure. But the goal didn’t feel like containment.

The goal felt like helping us figure out how to live.

Our days followed a routine.

Wake up.

Breakfast.

School.

Group therapy.

Chores.

More groups.

At first it felt like just another program. Another place trying to reshape angry kids into something manageable.

But over time something happened I wasn’t expecting.

I started settling in.

There was a rhythm to the place. A predictability that my life had never really had before. You knew what the day was going to look like. You knew what was expected of you.

For the first time in years, I wasn’t just surviving hour to hour.

I was living inside a routine.

It almost felt like being a normal kid again.

Almost.

And a big part of that was the staff.

At most institutions, the staff were just people doing a job. They watched the clock, filled out paperwork, and waited for their shift to end.

But at NSI, there were people who actually cared.

One of them was a man named Keith.

Keith was a big guy. The kind of man who filled a room just by standing in it. When I first met him, he honestly scared me.

He reminded me too much of my abuser.

Big. Loud. Physically imposing.

My instinct was to stay away from him.

But Keith wasn’t like that.

Keith was a giant teddy bear.

At NSI they had something called transitional living. The idea was to help kids like me slowly adapt to normal life again after spending years inside institutions. You would live with a staff member who understood the program and could help you learn how to function in a regular home environment.

Keith was one of the transitional parents.

At the time, I wasn’t ready for that step yet.

But Keith still took an interest in me.

Sometimes he would take me home on the weekends.

The first time he offered, I was nervous. Really nervous.

But Keith never gave me a reason to be afraid.

He would take me to the movies.

He had a computer at his house, which at the time felt like something out of science fiction. On it was one single game — Star Trek.

It was probably the dumbest game ever made.

But to me it was the greatest thing in the world.

I could sit there for hours playing that game.

Sometimes the entire weekend.

More than once I managed to break his computer.

Not out of anger.

Just pure curiosity—pushing buttons I probably shouldn’t have, poking at things I didn’t understand, right up until the entire machine decided it had enough of my nonsense and fried itself.

Keith would just sigh, almost laugh. He take it in and get it fixed, and let me play it again the next time I came over.

He never yelled.

He never treated me like I was a burden.

He just welcomed me back.

That kind of patience was new to me.

By that point I had started acting more like a regular kid.

Which meant I also started acting like a mouthy kid.

And that mouth sometimes got me into trouble.

Older kids don’t always appreciate attitude from a younger one.

So every now and then someone would put me in my place. A shove here. A punch there. Someone sitting on me until I stopped mouthing off.

It wasn’t the kind of violence I had experienced growing up. It wasn’t abuse.

It was more like big brother justice.

And honestly, it was probably the closest thing to normal childhood conflict I had ever experienced.

That was the strange thing about NSI.

For the first time in my life, chaos started looking a little bit like normal life.

But even with all of that progress, there was still something inside me that I hated about myself.

Something I refused to say out loud.

I was attracted to men.

When you grow up being sexually abused by a man, it twists your mind in ways that are hard to explain. The main man who abused me used to say something while it was happening, or sometimes after it was finished.

“You shouldn’t be playing with men’s dicks.”

Those words stuck with me for years.

So when I started going through puberty and realizing I was attracted to men, I thought it meant he was right.

Something must be wrong with me.

All of that shame came out in one word.

FAG!

I used it constantly.

I called staff that word.

I called other kids that word.

Anyone who irritated me got called that word.

One day during group therapy, a counselor finally asked the question nobody had asked before.

“Preston, why do you use that word so much?”

I shrugged.

That was just how I talked.

Then he asked another question.

“Do you see that word inside yourself?”

The room went quiet.

And I felt my stomach drop.

Because I knew exactly what he meant.

The anger came up instantly.

I stood up, shoved my chair back, and screamed.

“FUCK you FAG!”

Then I ran.

I ran out of the building, across the yard, and out into the open field behind the property.

I ran until my legs couldn’t carry me anymore.

And then I collapsed in the grass.

Years of anger and shame poured out all at once.

I cried harder than I had cried in a long time.

Eventually I heard footsteps.

It was Brooke Collins.

She didn’t yell at me.

She didn’t tell me to come back.

She just sat down beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders.

For a long time we didn’t say anything.

We just watched the sun start to dip behind the Wyoming hills.

Finally the words came out before I could stop them.

“I’m gay, Brooke.”

Then I started crying again.

She pulled me closer.

“We know, Preston,” she said softly.

“And it’s okay.”

I had spent years believing that admitting that truth would destroy me.

Instead, it set me free.

We sat there quietly in that field while the sun disappeared.

And for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like I had to hide who I was.

Years later, after I had left NSI, I would still go back and visit.

In many ways it had become my home.

I had spent so many years there. I had built strong bonds with staff and with other kids who were going through their own battles.

Keith was always one of the first people I went to see.

He never judged me.

Even when I made mistakes.

Even when I got caught doing things I shouldn’t have been doing, like sneaking around and having sex with other patients.

Keith never looked down on me.

He was always just my friend.

The last time I saw him, I stopped by his house. He had moved out of his parents’ place and was living on his own.

His hair had turned completely white.

It shocked me how much older he looked.

Not long after that visit, Keith died of a heart attack.

And the world lost one of the kindest men I ever knew.

There were many people at NSI who helped shape who I became.

Dawn.

Becca.

Julie.

Tim.

Lance.

Bud.

Tammy.

And many others.

Some staff were cruel.

Some didn’t care.

But many of them treated me like I mattered.

Like I was human.

Even when I didn’t believe that about myself.

And those people helped shape the person I would eventually become.

Chapter 11

A Place to Land

By the time I was nearing the end of my time at Normative Services, something inside me had changed.

I had completed most of the program. The therapy groups, the endless conversations about anger and trauma, the routines and responsibilities. Slowly, piece by piece, I had begun turning into someone I didn’t even recognize from the angry boy who first walked through those doors.

I was becoming a young man.

The anger that once lived just beneath the surface had softened. I had faced parts of myself I used to hate and slowly made peace with them. I had accepted that I was gay, and the shame that once wrapped around that truth had finally begun to fade.

For the first time in a long time, life felt like it might actually move forward.

That meant the next step was transitional living.

Transitional living was designed to help kids like me reenter the real world after years of institutional life. Instead of living in the program, you stayed with a staff family who helped you learn what normal life looked like again—chores, routines, family dinners, responsibility.

By this time NSI had also reconnected me with my biological mother. She had remarried a man named Chuck, who would later teach me a lot about what it meant to be a man.

But before that chapter of my life began, there were my transitional parents.

My first transitional parents seemed like wonderful people on the surface.

To the outside world they were kind. Even to the staff at NSI they appeared kind.

And Larry truly was a good man.

But his wife, Geraldine, reminded me of something very different.

I wouldn’t say she was a terrible person, but she wasn’t a particularly warm one either. Sometimes it felt like having transitional kids in the house meant having someone around to do chores she didn’t want to do.

Still, there were good things about that house.

The best ones had four legs.

They had two dogs named Kitty and Izzy. Kitty was a big white dog, and Izzy was part border collie. Taking care of them was one of my chores, and it was easily my favorite.

They also had a cat named Sadie.

I never really cared much about Sadie.

Cats and I have never really gotten along.

Life in transitional living followed a simple routine.

Every morning I would wake up, catch the bus, and go back to NSI for the day. School, therapy, and the regular program continued just like before.

But at five o’clock something changed.

I got to go home.

Home meant the transitional house.

There were dinners at the table, evenings on the couch watching television. Sometimes we watched old episodes of Star Trek, and that’s also where I became oddly hooked on a show called Touched by an Angel.

They even threw me a really wonderful birthday party.

In many ways it looked like a normal home.

But there were things that didn’t sit quite right with me.

One of the strangest rules involved the bathroom.

There was a bathroom directly outside my bedroom door, but I wasn’t allowed to use it. Instead I had to use another bathroom in the house, and after dark I wasn’t supposed to leave my room at all.

For a kid with a lot of nervous energy and a bladder that didn’t always cooperate, that rule became a problem.

One night I woke up needing to go badly, so I quietly snuck out and used Geraldine’s bathroom.

Being a half-awake teenage boy, I accidentally got a little pee on the floor.

The floor was carpet.

A short while later Geraldine got up and stepped in it.

The next thing I heard was my name being screamed from the bathroom.

The way she yelled, you would have thought I had done it on purpose.

All the old feelings rushed back—fear, shame, the instinct to stay quiet and avoid making things worse.

She scolded me while cleaning the floor, and I stood there with my head down, saying very little.

After that night I became afraid to leave my room.

So I started doing something else.

Something pretty ridiculous.

I started peeing out my bedroom window.

I did it so often that eventually Larry noticed something strange outside.

The snow beneath my second-floor window had turned yellow.

One day he pulled me aside.

He wasn’t angry.

He just looked at me and said gently,

“You know it’s okay to leave your room at night to use the bathroom.”

Then he added,

“I’ll talk to Mom.”

I didn’t like when he called Geraldine my mom.

She wasn’t my mom.

But Larry understood me in ways she never did.

Eventually tragedy struck their family.

Their daughter was involved in a terrible car accident. Her entire family had been in the vehicle—her husband and her two daughters, Katie and Juliana.

Katie died in the crash.

Juliana survived, but the brain injury changed her life forever. A once quiet, brilliant twelve-year-old girl now faced a lifetime of severe cognitive challenges.

Their world changed overnight.

Because of the tragedy, I was moved to another temporary foster home.

That’s when I met the Wilkins.

Curt and Lynn Wilkins were wonderful people.

From the moment I walked into their home, something felt different.

Warm.

Safe.

Lynn and I would sit on the couch for hours laughing and talking. She loved telling stories. Sometimes we’d go thrift shopping or drive up and down The Strip, the little road in Sheridan that seemed to connect the whole town.

It was supposedly the most driven road in the entire state.

We ate McDonald’s way more often than we probably should have.

But mostly we talked.

And laughed.

And told stories.

For the first time in my life, I felt something I had never really experienced before.

Home.

One of the things that made Lynn so special was how easily she accepted me for who I was.

By then I had already come to terms with being gay, but that didn’t mean I was used to talking about it openly with adults.

With Lynn, it was never a problem.

She knew.

And she didn’t care.

Not in the dismissive way people say they “don’t care,” but in the genuine way that means it simply wasn’t an issue.

Sometimes we’d be watching a movie and I’d say something like,

“That guy is pretty hot.”

Without missing a beat she’d laugh and say,

“Yeah, he is pretty cute.”

Other times she would tell me stories about gay people she had known throughout her life—friends, coworkers, people she had met along the way.

There was never judgment.

Never awkwardness.

Just acceptance.

For the first time in my life, talking about who I was felt normal.

Later on, when I returned to visit them, I even brought my first boyfriend to meet them.

They welcomed him like they welcomed everyone else.

Years later, after I was married, I brought my husband to visit them in their home in Colorado.

We sat in their living room for hours talking and catching up.

At some point my husband fell asleep on the couch while Lynn and I kept talking the way we always had.

Some things never changed.

Eventually I was discharged from NSI and sent to live with my mother.

Things didn’t go well.

My mother’s chaos quickly took over again, and before long I ran away.

At one point I even tried to run away and join the circus.

My mother eventually started calling anyone who might take me.

And this time someone magical answered.

The Wilkins.

They agreed to take me in again, even though this time they wouldn’t be getting paid.

They told me gently,

“We can’t do McDonald’s every day or all the fun stuff like before.”

I didn’t care.

I was just happy to be there.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t asking myself when I could go home.

Because I already was.

Even after I left, Lynn and I stayed close.

I would call her almost every week.

Collect calls.

It became a little game between us.

We were both big fans of The X-Files, so when I called collect I’d pretend to be someone else.

“Agent Mulder calling.”

Or some other ridiculous character.

She always accepted the charges.

Then we’d laugh and talk for hours.

Eventually Lynn got cancer.

I was planning to visit her, but because she was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation she couldn’t risk being around people who might get her sick.

We decided to wait until she was stronger.

The following week she died.

Just like that.

Another wonderful person in my life was gone.

I never saw my first transitional parents again.

Both of them have since passed away.

I don’t know what became of their children.

But I will always remember the Wilkins.

Because for a time in my life when I needed it most, they gave me something I had spent my entire childhood searching for.

A place to land.

Chapter 12

CHUCK

By the time my mother came looking for me, nearly seven years had passed without any contact.

In my mind, I had long ago filed her absence away under the same category as so many other things in my childhood: ABANDONMENT.

My mother had always had a way of disappearing.

She passed us around to whoever would take us — family members, friends, strangers — anyone willing to carry the responsibility for a while. What she didn’t seem to notice, or maybe didn’t want to notice, was that some of those homes also contained the very predators who would shape the rest of my childhood.

So when she vanished from my life after I was institutionalized, I didn’t question it. It felt normal.

But that didn’t mean I didn’t think about her.

Some nights I would lie awake and wonder where she was. I think when you’re in institutions that’s what a lot of us did. When the lights were out and everything went quiet, our minds drifted to the outside world. We dreamed about our friends and families — the people who were out there living normal lives while we were locked inside these places.

Where were they?
What were they doing?
Were they thinking about us?

Those questions floated through the halls of those places like ghosts. None of us ever really had answers.

It never even crossed my mind that she might be looking for me.

But apparently she was.

Or more accurately, Chuck was.

My mother had begun dating a man named Chuck, and somewhere along the line he decided he wanted to find out what had happened to the boy she supposedly “always” talks about. So Chuck hired a private investigator to track me down. The investigator eventually located me at NSI.

I had been there about two years when one day Brooke Collins came to me and said something that caught me completely off guard.

“Your mom is looking for you.”

They wanted to know how I felt about it.

How did I feel?

I was a little boy who had spent years wanting his mother. Even though I believed she had abandoned me, even though terrible things had happened under her watch, the truth was simple.

She was my mom.

And children have an incredible ability to love their parents no matter what those parents have done.

So I said yes.

I wanted to see her.

I will never forget the day she finally appeared. It didn’t happen right away—weeks passed before I saw her face to face. But strangely, I can’t remember what I did with all that time in between. She drove up from Casper, Wyoming, bringing my sister with her — a sister who, by that point, felt almost like a stranger. She had survived the same childhood I had: years of trauma, rape, incest, and the steady rotation of boyfriends and “friends” who treated us like SEX objects instead of children. Somehow, though, she had found her way back to our mother and was living with her again.

But in that moment, none of that crossed my mind.

I was thrilled.

All I could think about was my mama. The part of me that had spent years wishing she would come back suddenly woke up again. In an instant I slipped back into the heart and mind of a little kid, even though by then I was already a preteen.

It had been years since I had seen any member of my family. After I had been institutionalized, the visits slowly stopped. First it was fewer phone calls. Then fewer letters. Eventually even friends and relatives who used to pop in simply disappeared.

For years the outside world had faded away.

So when my mother arrived, it felt like the outside world had suddenly found me again.

NSI arranged for us to stay at the Holiday Inn.

And that night felt magical.

The hotel had a swimming pool, and I can still remember the sharp smell of chlorine in the air. Even today, when I walk into a hotel pool and smell chlorine, it takes me right back to that night.

The night I reunited with my mother.

For those few hours, she was the mom I had always wanted her to be.

She took me to Walmart and bought me a remote-controlled car. Not the fancy kind kids have now — this one had a cord connecting the controller to the car. It was a little black Porsche that ran on two AA batteries and it headlights glowed like beacons in the dark.

Believe it or not, I still have that car.

Out of everything from my childhood, it’s one of the few things I kept.

She also gave me a teddy bear — actually a little stuffed dog — that had a heart on it that said “I wuv u.”

I still have that too, although the little heart has long since fallen off. It sits in a plastic tote now. I’m not even sure why I keep it.

I don’t care for my mother anymore. I want nothing to do with her.

But that moment in time…

That moment meant everything.

For the first time in years I felt hope.

Hope that maybe life was finally going to become normal.

Hope that maybe I was finally going to receive the love I had spent my entire childhood searching for.

I couldn’t stay overnight with them, but I spent the entire day with my mom and my sister. We drove around Sheridan. We sat in the hotel room for hours talking.

I told them everything.

Stories about the institutions. The things I had seen. The things I had been through.

And within just a few hours………

My mother began poisoning my mind.

She told me my father and stepmother never wanted me.

That the institutions were proof of it.

That they had finally gotten what they always wanted — to get rid of the inconvenient bastard child who had disrupted their lives.

And like so many times before, I believed her.

After all, she was here now.

My dad wasn’t. He was hundreds of miles away and it had been years since I’d even so much as received a letter from him.

The goal at NSI was eventually to transition me back into the community, by placing me with my mom. Brooke Collins was absolutely against it. I thought maybe because, she wanted to ruin my life, but looking back on road, I think she saw through my mom and saw her for the snake she was. But brooks power was limited and I was labeled “cured” with a discharge plan of placement with my mother.

And slowly that process began.

I was allowed to go home on visits on weekends, sometimes a couple times a month. During those visits I stayed with my mom, Chuck, and my sister.

Those weekends felt incredible.

I even spent a Christmas with them — the first Christmas I had celebrated in six and a half years. By then I was long past the age of believing in Santa Claus, but Chuck still went through the effort of making boot prints in the carpet so it looked like Santa had walked through the house during the night. I played along and pretended to believe. In truth, I think I was indulging him more than anything.

But I hadn’t stopped believing in Santa the way most kids do — slowly discovering their parents were the magic behind it all.

I stopped believing much earlier.

I stopped believing the night I sat behind the locked door of my room and cried because Santa wasn’t going to bring me anything. He wouldn’t know where to find me. I wasn’t at home. I wasn’t anywhere a child was supposed to be.

Eventually an older kid yelled through the door for me to shut the fuck up. Then he told me the truth.

Santa wasn’t real.
Parents were Santa.

And in that place, there were no parents.

In chuck’s backyard there was an old truck — a 1974 Ford Bronco. Chuck had originally bought it years earlier just for the camper shell on the back. The truck itself had basically been discarded.

But to me, on weekend home visits, it was everything.

I would climb into that Bronco and pretend I was a race car driver. I’d sit behind the steering wheel imagining myself flying down highways or tearing through dirt roads. I could sit in that thing for hours.

It was freedom.

Eventually I’d officially be discharged from NSI and moved in with my mom and Chuck full time.

The transition was harder than I expected.

After spending so many years in institutions, silence felt terrifying. Nights were the worst. I was used to hearing staff walking the halls, flashlights shining through door, people bed checking, people looking in on me.

Now it was just…

Quiet.

Too Quiet

Just me and the sound of the house breathing at night.

It felt strange. Surreal.

But it was also good.

Because I was finally home.

Just before I left NSI, a staff member named Ryan Metcalfe helped me adopt a ferret.

That ferret came home with me.

We named him Mischiev — short for mischievous — because he stole everything. He loved grabbing dog food from our dog’s bowl and hiding it in my stepdad’s dresser drawers.

I loved that little ferret.

And I never thought ferrets were dirty animals.

Probably because his cage was always spotless.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that part of my mother’s personality involved severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. She couldn’t tolerate anything being dirty. It drove her insane. I can only imagine the impulsivity she felt to clean the floor after the Santa boot prints. Your talking about a women who wore out vacuum cleaners like they were disposable.

So every single day she cleaned that ferret’s cage.

Convenient for me.

Probably exhausting for her.

But that was the least of my mother’s struggles.

My mother had anger issues. Deep insecurities. And later in life, after learning about my own diagnosis with borderline personality disorder, I began to understand something else.

Borderline personality disorder often develops from childhood abandonment.

But it can also run in families.

Looking back at my mother’s history and the trauma she experienced in her own life, I believe she likely suffered from it too.

One of the biggest symptoms was her complete inability to trust.

Especially when it came to Chuck.

Chuck was an incredible man.

I absolutely adored him.

He was smart in a way that doesn’t come from books. He could build anything. Fix anything. Take apart an engine and put it back together like it was a puzzle.

And he taught me everything he knew.

Chuck was heavily involved with the volunteer fire department. Before moving to Wyoming he had spent years as a firefighter in Oklahoma. At the station he specialized in building tender trucks — vehicles used in wildfire firefighting.

Volunteer departments didn’t have huge budgets, so they bought old military trucks and converted them into fire engines.

Chuck would tear those vehicles apart and rebuild them into something entirely new.

And he let me help.

I learned how to wire 12-volt systems.

How to strip wires.

How to bolt frames together.

How engines worked.

How machines worked.

We spent countless hours down at that fire station.

And I loved every minute of it.

Eventually, when I got older, I even joined the fire department myself.

It didn’t last long.

My ADHD and my teenage desire to party didn’t exactly mesh well with the responsibility of being a firefighter.

But those years with Chuck were some of the most important of my life.

Joe — my mother’s brother — eventually reappeared. Part of me wasn’t afraid of him anymore, but another part of me was absolutely terrified.

Chuck did something remarkable, though — something no one had ever done for me before. He flat-out forbade Joe from coming over, or at least from stepping inside the house.

I think Joe only showed up once or twice after that, but each time it ended the same way. I’d be standing in the dining room, heart racing, trying to hold myself together while he stood outside yelling vulgarities through the window before finally storming off.

And just before he left, he’d shout one last insult into the house:

“Well your ‘faggot son’…”

In the end, alcohol finally claimed him — just not in the slow way most people expect. One night he stumbled onto 2nd Street and a truck struct him, killing him instantly. His family grieved his death.

I felt relief.

Meanwhile my mother’s insecurities were slowly destroying the marriage.

She was constantly convinced Chuck was cheating on her.

Even when he was simply down at the fire station building trucks — usually with me right there beside him.

She imagined women everywhere.

Arguments became constant.

Chuck tolerated it for a long time, but you could see it wearing him down.

Still, he kept showing up for me.

And one day he gave me something incredible.

That old 1974 Bronco I used to play in?

Chuck came to me and said we were going to restore it.

From the ground up.

Just him and me.

My first vehicle.

We rebuilt everything.

The motor.

The transfer case.

The four-wheel drive system.

The bearings.

The transmission.

We spent endless weekends wandering around junkyards searching for parts. Every piece felt like buried treasure.

I was impatient the entire time.

I wanted that truck running yesterday.

But when it was finally finished…

Oh, that Bronco roared to life.

Dual glass packs, 302 V8 that engine purred like a beast.

It was powerful.

And incredibly dangerous.

I wrecked it more than once, but it never took much damage. Vehicles from the 1970s were built from solid steel. That thing could survive almost anything.

My friends and I would drive around town blasting music, clapping our hands, singing at the top of our lungs.

It was pure teenage freedom. I fucking loved that truck.

One time one of the departments fire trucks broke down blowing a belt and Chuck called me.

“Grab a chain and bring the Bronco.”

I hooked the chain up and we used my truck to pull a massive E1 fire engine full of water all the way back to the station.

Chuck and I had built that truck.

And in that moment I had never felt more proud.

Eventually I became what most teenagers become.

Restless.

I started pushing boundaries. Spending more time with friends. Going to parties. Dating.

That’s when what I jokingly call the Seven Joshes began.

The first Josh wasn’t anyone particularly special. Just a teenage relationship — exciting, dramatic, and short-lived. Then came another Josh, the one I tried to run away with before eventually coming back home. Somehow he even ended up living with us for a while.

Chuck, who had once struggled with the idea of me being gay, surprised me.

He didn’t make a scene. He didn’t throw me out. He just… adjusted.

Josh claimed he was a firefighter and told endless stories about it. Looking back, most of them were probably exaggerated or completely made up. But at the time none of that mattered.

He was just another chapter in what would become a long series of chapters.

Eventually he disappeared too — just another one of the seven.

Then came the next Josh.

The real Josh.

The one who mattered.

The one I eventually moved out of my parents’ house for.

Not long after that, my mother and Chuck divorced.

And just like that, Chuck was gone from my daily life.

No big dramatic ending. No final speech. No moment where we sat down and said goodbye.

Life just moved on.

And he moved on with it.

For a long time I didn’t realize how important Chuck had been to me.

When you grow up surrounded by chaos, you don’t recognize stability when you’re living inside it. You only notice it once it’s gone.

Chuck had given me something I had never experienced before.

A man who showed up.

A man who built things instead of destroying them.

A man who taught me how engines worked, how wires connected, how tools fit in your hand — and without ever saying the words out loud, he taught me something even bigger.

Not every man in the world was a monster.

For someone who had spent most of his childhood believing the opposite, that lesson mattered more than he probably ever knew.

The Bronco is long gone now, probably rusting away in the junkyards we had scavenged for parts.

The fire trucks we worked on are probably rusting in some field or still fighting fires somewhere in Wyoming.

Life moved on the way life always does.

But the things Chuck taught me never left.

Because sometimes the people who save you aren’t the ones who stay forever.

Sometimes they’re just the ones who show up long enough to prove that monsters don’t win.

Chapter 13

In March of 1998, my father died.

At the time, I hadn’t seen him in years.

I hadn’t spoken to him much either. If I’m being honest, I hadn’t thought about him much at all. Somewhere along the way I had convinced myself that he didn’t care about me and didn’t want anything to do with me.

That was the story I told myself.

But there was something I had carried with me for years without even realizing its importance.

A box of letters.

When you live in institutions for most of your childhood, you don’t really have a name. Not in the way most people do.

You have a number.

Much like a prisoner.

Every belonging you owned had that number on it so it wouldn’t get mixed up with anyone else’s things. Clothes, notebooks, personal items—everything was marked.

My number was 61.

When you were transferred from one facility to another, everything you owned was thrown into a trash bag and sent with you. That bag followed you from place to place, building to building.

And the number 61 followed me.

Inside that bag were letters.

Each one marked with the same number.

Around this time my grandfather, my dad’s father, died.

Despite everything that had happened in my life, I still loved my grandfather. Our relationship had never quite been the same after I left home and disappeared into the system, but every once in a while I would call him just to say hello.

The conversations were always short.

“Hi Grandpa.”

“Hi grandson.”

And then almost every time he would ask the same question.

“Have you called your dad yet? Have you worked things out?”

My answer was always the same.

“No, Grandpa. Not yet.”

And that would usually be the end of the conversation.

I didn’t know it then, but my grandfather had been suffering from bone cancer. Because I had lost contact with most of my dad’s family, I had no idea how sick he really was during the final part of his life.

The last part of his life was painful and difficult.

And sadly, I wasn’t there for him.

But now there was going to be a funeral.

And I wanted to go.

I had already been to one funeral before.

My grandmother’s.

I was still in Normative Services when I got that phone call. It had been the first funeral I had ever attended in my life.

Now this would be the second.

The problem was that going to my grandfather’s funeral meant I would have to see my dad.

After years of silence.

Chuck had been encouraging me to reconnect with him for a long time. He kept telling me it was something I should do.

So I finally did.

I put on my brave face and called him.

The conversation was awkward at first, just small talk. Eventually he suggested we meet for coffee.

We decided to meet at The Eagles.

The Eagles had always been a big part of our family growing up. My grandparents had been deeply involved in the organization for years, and when my dad eventually moved back to Casper, he became very active there too.

I didn’t even know he had moved back to Casper until that moment.

We met at the bowling alley.

We sat down and drank coffee together.

And something unexpected happened.

We reconnected.

What I didn’t know nor my dad at the time was that my dad was dying.

This was September of 1997.

By March of 1998, he would be gone.

He had stomach cancer, and it was already growing inside his body even though he didn’t know it yet.

But during those six months, something incredible happened.

My dad and I finally became father and son.

Not in the traditional sense.

We didn’t go fishing.

We didn’t rebuild trucks together.

But we talked.

We joked.

We connected in a way we never had before.

And in a very short amount of time, I grew close to him.

Eventually my dad received the diagnosis.

Terminal.

He didn’t have much time left.

Not long after that, he wrote me a letter.

In that letter he apologized.

He apologized for putting me in the institutions.

He apologized for the things I had gone through.

He apologized for not fighting harder for me.

He told me he wished he could go back and make different choices.

I had never heard my father say he was sorry before.

Not once.

But in that letter he said it.

And it broke my heart.

For most of my life, my mother had poisoned my mind about my father.

She constantly told me that he didn’t want me.

That he only cared about my half-brother and half sister.

That he had chosen them instead of me.

But it wasn’t that simple.

My dad didn’t want to fight my mother.

And honestly, who could blame him?

Up to that point in my life I had gone years at a time without speaking to my mother.

Sometimes seven years between conversations.

Her chaos pushed people away.

My dad simply stepped back.

When I was younger, during the summers I did spend with my dad, he always talked about one thing.

Business.

He believed everyone should start their own business.

One day he tried to explain entrepreneurship to me using the simplest example he could think of.

He grabbed a cardboard tube and put it on the desk.

“See this?” he said. “This holds pens.”

Then he smiled and said, “If you invent something that solves a problem like this, patent it, and sell it—you’ll make millions.”

He had owned his own cleaning business for years.

That’s part of why we rarely saw him.

He worked nights.

Ten at night until ten in the morning.

Then he slept.

Sometimes during the summers I would go to work with him. I was just a little kid—seven, eight, nine years old—helping him clean businesses, factories, bars, optometry offices, and architecture firms.

To me it felt like an adventure.

But to him it was work.

Looking back, those nights were some of the only time we truly spent together.

My dad died on March 6, 1998.

I was there when he took his final breath.

He looked at me.

And then he was gone.

Chuck warned me about something after it happened.

He said that even if the loss didn’t hit me immediately, eventually the pain would come.

And when it did, it would hurt more than I expected.

He was right.

A few months later I was sitting in class when it suddenly hit me.

Out of nowhere.

I looked at my teacher, Mr. Selmaier, and told him I needed to leave the room.

He asked why.

I told him I didn’t know.

I walked into the school’s timeout room and just broke down.

I cried and cried and cried.

It was the first time I truly grieved the loss of my father.

I don’t talk about my dad much.

I don’t think about him every day.

But he gave me something I didn’t even realize he had passed on to me.

The idea that you should solve problems.

Build things.

Create something of your own.

The idea that someday you could own your own business.

I didn’t know it then.

But that idea would follow me for the rest of my life.

Chapter 14

The Seven Joshes

For reasons I still can’t fully explain, I went through a period in my life where I dated seven different guys named Josh in a row.

Seven.

I’m not exaggerating, well there was a Sam at the tail end.

At one point I remember stopping and thinking, What are the odds of this?

It became a running joke among my friends. If someone introduced me to a guy named Josh, they’d laugh and say, “Well, I guess this one is next.”

Most of them didn’t last very long.

But one of them did.

And that Josh would end up changing my life.

I met Josh during a time when I was trying to figure out what adulthood was supposed to look like. I had survived institutions, foster homes, and the chaos that followed my childhood. I had finally started living in the real world, trying to build something that resembled a normal life.

And then one night, almost by accident, I met him.

We were at a party. Josh had come with someone else, and somehow by the end of the night we ended up in a room together.

And just like that, things changed.

Almost overnight, we were inseparable.

Josh became my first real boyfriend.

Not just someone I dated for a while. Not someone I secretly met up with.

Josh was the first person I ever truly built a life with.

For the first time in my life, I was living on my own and trying to figure out what it meant to be an adult.

It was exciting.

Terrifying.

And sometimes completely overwhelming.

But for the most part, it was incredible.

Josh and I stayed together for nearly six and a half years.

Those years were some of the most important years of my life.

We grew up together.

We learned how to be adults together.

We moved from apartment to apartment, always believing the next place might be better than the last.

Eventually we both landed our first professional jobs, and it finally felt like life was beginning to move forward.

But there was something happening inside my head that I didn’t understand yet.

Something that had been quietly building for years.

FEAR.

A constant fear that Josh would leave me.

That he would find someone better.

That he would abandon me the way so many people in my life already had.

It didn’t matter how much he reassured me.

That fear never really went away.

Looking back now, I understand why.

But at the time I had no idea.

All I knew was that the thought of losing Josh felt unbearable.

He was my world.

And when someone becomes your world, the idea of them disappearing feels like the end of everything.

In the beginning, our relationship felt like magic.

I had never cared about someone the way I cared about Josh. And for that matter, I had never had a healthy sexual relationship with someone of the same sex before. It was completely new territory.

But it was good territory.

Josh and I were both young.

Very young.

And very dumb.

But we were also deeply in love.

One of my favorite memories from that time was when we were both working as clerks at Loaf ’N Jug Mini Mart. Our weekly paychecks were tiny — somewhere around $230 to $280 every two weeks. Not exactly the kind of income that builds empires.

One day I came home from working graveyards and found a note taped to the door of our tiny little apartment.

The note said:

Come inside. We're rich. We got our taxes.

For two struggling young people, that tax return — maybe a thousand dollars — felt like winning the lottery.

We didn’t have much.

We both had our own cars, and we had that little apartment. You know the kind everyone has at some point in their life. The furniture was mismatched and terrible. Milk crates or bricks doubled as TV stands and nightstands.

And of course we had a waterbed.

Because apparently everyone needs to experience owning a waterbed at least once in their life.

Those early days were simple.

And they were wonderful.

Before getting that apartment, we had been living with friends — the same friends who had introduced us at that party. One of them was a guy named TJ.

TJ was a raging alcoholic.

He was also constantly surrounded by drama. But that drama was exactly how Josh and I met.

Sadly, TJ would eventually lose his life to alcoholism.

But during the time we were living there, something else was happening in my life.

Something inside me was beginning to surface.

I didn’t understand it then.

But later it would be diagnosed as borderline personality disorder.

One night I walked into the house — I don’t even remember where I had been — and suddenly I became completely consumed with the belief that Josh was cheating on me.

The thought didn’t just cross my mind.

It overtook me.

Josh and I were pretty popular back then. There were parties everywhere. The gay community was tight, loud, social. Everybody seemed to know us. We were the “it” guys.

Maybe it was because we were young and attractive.

Maybe it was because people saw us as a couple that had it together.

But inside my head, something was unraveling.

The thoughts started spiraling, just like the obsessive thoughts my mother had when she believed Chuck was cheating on her.

I became convinced Josh was cheating on me. I became convinced josh was going to leave me.

Josh was in the shower when I burst into the bathroom, pounding on the door and screaming.

“Where have you been? Who have you been talking to? Who are you fucking?”

Josh must have been completely stunned.

I can only imagine what it felt like for him — being accused out of nowhere when he had simply come home from work or was getting ready to leave or work. I honestly don’t remember.

But I do remember the door flying open.

And I remember the rage. My cheeks burned with fire. My hands sweaty. My heart racing, almost pounding outside of my chest.

I screamed in his face.

Josh reacted the way someone reacts when they grew up in a house where physical violence was normal.

He shoved me.

Hard.

I flew backward into the couch, both me and the couch tumbled over.

Now I was furious.

I charged him.

And we got into one of the biggest fights of our relationship. The kind the cops should of came for and took both of us to jail.

One of many.

Our relationship could be incredibly toxic.

But not because either of us were bad people.

It was toxic, because we were two traumatized kids who had never learned what healthy love looked like.

And all that trauma was bleeding into our everyday life.

But there were also beautiful moments.

Josh knew things about my life that almost no one else knew.

He knew about the sexual trauma.

He understood that sometimes certain things in the bedroom triggered memories I couldn’t control. Images would flash into my mind — things that had happened to me — and I would have to stop.

Josh never pressured me.

He never shamed me.

He never made me feel broken.

It was, in many ways, the healthiest sexual relationship I had ever had.

Eventually we both left the mini mart and moved into professional jobs.

Josh stepped into the digital age and proudly bought us our first cell phones. This was long before smartphones or touchscreens.

Back then we had something called T9 texting.

To send a single word you had to press each number key multiple times. Writing a text message sometimes felt like solving a puzzle.

But we loved those phones.

It felt like we were stepping into the future.

Around that time I began working for a lawyer named Jeff Gosman.

Jeff was Mormon.

And he was one of the kindest bosses I ever had.

I worked as a paralegal, legal secretary, and network administrator — wearing a dozen different hats.

But there was one problem.

I had essentially been homeschooled through my life chaos. Institutions are not known for their education system.

My grammar and spelling were terrible.

The letters I drafted were full of mistakes.

Eventually Jeff developed a rule: I was not allowed to send a letter without him reviewing it first.

He would mark them up like a grade school teacher with a red pen.

There. Their. They’re.

To. Too. Two.

I mixed them up constantly.

It was humiliating sometimes.

But Jeff never judged me.

He never fired me.

Instead, he helped me learn.

And he helped me grow.

Unfortunately, the problems in my personal life began bleeding into my work life.

Borderline personality disorder was beginning to take control of my mind.

At work, all I could think about was Josh.

Where was he?

Who was he talking to?

Was he cheating on me?

Sometimes random people would even call and tell me they were sleeping with him.

We didn’t have social media back then.

No Facebook.

No MySpace.

Just phone calls and text messages.

Every rumor felt real.

Every accusation felt like proof.

The fear of abandonment was constant.

Josh did a lot for me — emotionally and physically.

He bought me things.

He made me feel wanted.

He LOVED ME.

That was something I had almost never experienced growing up.

But with borderline personality disorder, love can become terrifying.

Because if someone loves you that much, it means they can leave you.

And that fear can become unbearable.

People with borderline personality often try to abandon someone before they themselves can be abandoned. It’s taking control of a situation because you lack control.

And that’s exactly what I did.

Josh and I broke up constantly.

Not normal breakups.

Explosive breakups.

I would destroy things in the house.

Gifts he had given me.

Objects that meant something.

If I couldn’t have them, then neither could he.

It was dangerous thinking.

The kind of thinking that sometimes leads people to commit terrible acts when relationships fall apart.

I never had homicidal thoughts.

But I did feel an overwhelming sense that no one else should have Josh.

Looking back now, I’m amazed we lasted six and a half years.

Over time our living situation kept changing.

We moved into a bigger house.

Lost that house.

Moved into something smaller.

Lost that.

Eventually we found ourselves living in a cramped studio apartment with two dogs.

Horribly cramped.

Later we attempted to buy a house from a friend.

That ended in disaster too.

But that house is where Briar came into our lives.

Briar was our black lab.

And I loved that dog more than I can explain.

Technically I stole him. Dog’s always seem to appear in my life when I need them. Briar was no different.

Briar lived through all of it — the chaos, the screaming, the breakups.

Dogs know things.

They understand patterns.

Whenever a fight started, Briar would run straight to my vehicle and sit beside it.

Waiting.

He knew what it meant.

It meant Preston was leaving again.

Packing his things.

Driving away.

Looking for somewhere else to live.

The funny thing was, it never lasted.

I always came back.

Because despite everything…

Josh and I were madly in love.

One of the worst moments in our relationship came because of manipulation.

I had a friend who believed Josh and I shouldn’t be together.

He spent a lot of time planting doubts in my head.

He had a psychology degree.

Which made it incredibly easy for him to manipulate someone whose brain already leaned toward paranoia.

One day he told me there was a phone number hidden above the sun visor in Josh’s car.

He suggested I call it.

So I did.

The man who answered said something that made my blood boil.

“Josh is my boyfriend.”

My mind exploded.

Finally, proof.

Evidence.

Someone admitting it.

I began interrogating him like a detective.

When did they meet?

Where did they meet?

What did they do together?

He told me they met during lunch.

That should have been my first clue.

Josh and I had lunch together every single day.

Usually at A&W, eating Coney dogs.

But my brain didn’t want logic.

It wanted confirmation of betrayal.

I hung up the phone, immediately Josh cell rang.

He cried out, “I don’t know you how did you get this number”.

LIAR!

It was all the proof I needed.

My phone wrang again. The voice on the line continued to spill details of Josh.

Eventually the man said someone else wanted to talk to me.

Another voice came onto the phone.

I was furious.

“Who is this?” I shouted. “You screwing my boyfriend too?”

The voice answered calmly.

“No… I’m your brother.”

And without thinking…

I said the worst thing possible.

“I don’t have a brother.”

And I hung up.

It was my brother.

My half-brother.

The one my father had written about in his letter before he died.

The one he had asked me to watch out for.

I hadn’t seen him in years.

After my dad died, everything had become awkward and distant.

And now, in a moment of rage and paranoia…

I had rejected him.

Borderline personality disorder can do that.

It can twist reality so badly that the people you love become casualties of your fear.

I didn’t even realize what I had done at the time.

I just ran.

Left the apartment.

Left Josh.

Left everything.

We eventually worked things out again.

But something inside me had broken.

I no longer trusted him.

The fear of abandonment had taken full control.

Around that time I remember driving Jeff’s Suburban to Riverton for a legal deposition.

Jeff thought I was just driving fast because I was in a hurry.

The truth was darker.

I was driving 80 or 90 miles an hour because I wanted the day to end faster.

I needed to get home.

To see if Josh had cheated.

Those thoughts consumed my mind constantly.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was destroying my own relationship.

Eventually my friend’s influence poisoned my mind enough that I believed Josh was the problem.

Josh was the toxic one.

Josh was the broken one.

Not me.

That friend introduced me to my next boyfriend.

Sam.

Sam looked like a young Eminem and had a child.

Our relationship lasted about a year.

And I loved that kid like he was my own.

But Sam had his own struggles.

In many ways his borderline personality disorder was even worse than mine.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t have time to obsess over my own fears.

I was too busy trying to stabilize someone else.

Meanwhile, Josh moved away to Denver.

It was easier that way.

Not seeing him meant I didn’t have to imagine him happy with someone else.

Years passed.

Nearly twenty years would before we’d recconect.

Eventually Sam and I ended and I started dating another Josh.

I started seeing a counselor and was finally diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.

That diagnosis sent me on a journey.

I requested records from the institutions I had been placed in as a child.

Most of them had been destroyed.

But one facility still had records.

A massive box arrived in the mail.

Inside were three daily log entries for every single day I had been there.

Three years of documentation.

As I read them, I barely recognized the person they described.

The behaviors.

The anger.

The survival mechanisms.

That child didn’t feel like me.

But it was me.

That journey eventually led me to reconnect with my stepmother.

We met in Colorado and spent three days talking.

Three days digging through my past.

She told me something that changed my life.

My father had not wanted to put me in an institution.

My stepmother had insisted.

Not because she hated me.

But because they were afraid.

Afraid I’d burn there house to the ground. I’d already lit multiple fires by this point, nearly burning structures to the ground.

I had been lying constantly.

Wetting the bed and hiding it.

Destroying things.

Stealing things.

Sleeping with a knifes under my pillow.

An eight-year-old child living in that kind of survival mode terrified them.

And they had a five-year-old son to protect.

For the first time in my life, I understood.

My father hadn’t abandoned me.

He had been trying to save me.

That realization changed everything.

My stepmother and I rebuilt our relationship.

For a while, she even moved in with me and the last of the Joshs.

Eventually she moved on and rebuilt her life.

And eventually that Josh and I ended our relationship as well.

After all those years…

I finally decided I was done with Joshes.

Forever.

Looking back now, I can see that Josh wasn’t the enemy I once believed he was. Neither of us were. We were just two people carrying wounds from childhood that had never been treated, trying to create stability in a world that had never shown us what stability looked like. In many ways, Josh helped me survive a chapter of my life that might have broken me otherwise. Even if he was only one of the seven Joshes… he was the one who mattered.

Years passed. Life pulled us in different directions. We built new lives, made new mistakes, and became different versions of the people we had once been.

But somehow the thread between us never completely broke.

And years later, during one of the lowest moments of my life, that thread would find its way back.

I was going through a divorce.

Not the kind of heartbreak where you cry for a few days and slowly move on.

This was the kind that hollowed you out.

The kind where getting out of bed feels like climbing a mountain.

Most mornings I couldn’t even do that.

One morning I was lying there staring at the ceiling, feeling like everything in my life had collapsed.

Then my phone rang.

I almost ignored it.

But something made me pick it up.

When I looked at the screen, the name surprised me.

Josh.

I answered.

There was a small pause on the other end of the line.

Then his voice.

Soft. Familiar. Unchanged after all those years.

“Hey… how are you?”

Chapter 15

Derek

After my relationship ended with the last Josh — a Josh who honestly didn’t mean much in the long run, more of a blip in my life than anything meaningful — I met a man named Derek.

I used to joke that it was the end of the Joshes and the beginning of the D’s.

No… not really.

Derek was something different.

Derek was charming and handsome. He made me laugh. He made me smile. He was quiet and shy in a way that somehow made him even more attractive.

But Derek came with his own demons.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Derek was a drug addict. Derek also carried a lifetime of childhood trauma — stories I would only learn pieces of later. He kept most of his background hidden from everyone, including me.

When Derek first came into my life, he wasn’t meant to be a relationship.

He was meant to be a replacement.

A distraction.

A way to fill the void left behind by the end of the Joshes.

By that point in my life, I had developed a pattern of jumping from one relationship directly into the next. I rarely allowed myself time to sit alone with my thoughts.

At the time I was still living with the last Josh. We had broken up, but neither of us could afford to move out yet, so we continued living in the same house.

It was awkward.

Messy.

And full of mind games.

Josh made a big show of setting rules for the house.

No bringing people over.

No sex in the house.

Big dramatic rules about respecting each other.

But the funny thing was that almost immediately after making those rules, I walked in on him with another guy. This was typical behavior for that Josh. He was a narcissist.

This Josh I never really loved or cared about despite being together for several years.

This was just another Josh — a toxic relationship that had taken me on one more small emotional roller coaster.

But one that ultimately didn’t shape my life the way the earlier Josh had.

Then Derek entered the picture.

I brought Derek over mostly just to get under Josh’s skin. A little one-upmanship. In my mind Derek was straight, so there was no real threat of romance.

He was just a guy who sat on the couch and played video games with me day after day.

But he was also a handsome man sitting next to me — and that drove Josh absolutely crazy.

I loved it!

Eventually Josh moved out and moved in with his new boyfriend, who would later become his husband. Boy could that be a whole other book.

Derek, meanwhile, was living with his brother.

Both of them had grown up in their own version of trauma and chaos. I never learned every detail of Derek’s past, but I learned enough to recognize the pain.

And something inside me clicked.

I wanted to help him.

I wanted to save him.

I wanted to fix him.

So I offered him a place to live.

Before long Derek moved in with me.

What started as a friendship two guys sleeping in the same bed, slowly turned into something more.

And before I realized it, I was completely in love with him.

Derek could build anything. If I had an idea — a project, a business, some crazy dream — Derek could make it real. He had that kind of talent with his hands.

By this point in my life I had already started several businesses. Most of them had failed. Some of them collapsed completely. Some fizzled for a while.

But Derek was always there beside me.

Helping.

Building.

Creating whatever crazy vision I had in my head.

But our relationship came with a complication.

Derek was in the closet.

He didn’t want anyone to know about us.

When we visited his family, people would ask about our relationship. I remember the first camping trip with his family, his brother referred to me as Derek’s “misses.”

I loved hearing it.

But Derek would lose his mind when those comments happened.

He did not want anyone acknowledging that we were together.

From the outside, our relationship probably looked perfect.

We rarely fought. We rarely argued.

Just two people, two pieces of the puzzle that fit perfectly.

It was the same rather we were alone or surrounded by friends and family.

But the truth was we were trauma bonding without realizing it.

My borderline personality disorder convinced me constantly that Derek would eventually leave me.

Derek’s addiction pushed him to bury whatever emotions he was feeling.

We fueled each other’s damage without understanding it.

Still, there were beautiful moments.

We traveled together.

We camped.

Oh how we loved “Glamping”

We spent holidays with his family.

His sister became like a sister to me. After losing my own sister in a tragic car accident, that connection meant everything.

To this day we still talk almost every day.

Over time, Derek and I began talking about getting married.

At first it was going to be a quiet thing — just the two of us and a witness.

But then something changed.

One day Derek said something that shocked me.

“If we’re going to get married… I have to tell my family.”

I couldn’t believe it.

After years of secrecy, Derek was finally going to tell the world we were together.

I went out into the garage and cried.

Not quiet tears.

I sobbed.

Years of never being able to say something publicly I was finally going to plant my flag on top of the mountain.

For the first time in our relationship I felt seen. Confirmed. Acknowledged.

Getting married meant Derek wasn’t going to leave me.

It meant we were forever.

We began planning our wedding.

At first it was simple, but soon it grew into something much bigger.

It would be a Halloween-themed wedding.

The biggest wedding anyone had ever seen.

Derik asked me not to say anything to his family. He wanted to do it and on his own terms.

I didn’t care. But being I was close to his sister I couldn’t help but spill the beans. She was ecstatic, soon she was involved in the prepping and planning.

Then Derek told his mother. She was ecstatic.

His sister was ecstatic.

Everyone was happy.

Well almost.

Everyone except one person.

His father.

Derek eventually told him we were getting married.

His father said he liked me.

But he wished Derek was marrying a woman so he could carry on the family name and have children.

Derek was crushed.

But we went forward with the wedding anyway.

His father never came.

He said he had to work.

The wedding was beautiful.

It was the happiest day of my life.

Derek’s mom pulled me aside and told me something I’ll never forget.

“I think Derek is finally happy,” she said. “I think he’s finally being himself.”

For a while, it felt like a fairy tale.

But fairy tales don’t always last.

Chapter 16

Divorce

Derek’s addiction had never really gone away.

It had just been hiding. Popping up now and then.

He’d get clean, relapse.

Rinse and repeat.

Eventually it came back stronger than ever.

Small attempts at getting clean stopped working.

Derek needed real treatment.

Eventually I confronted him.

I told him he had to choose.

Rehab…

Or leaving.

What I didn’t know was that Derek had already been planning his escape.

He had been secretly carrying on relationships online — with multiple women.

In those conversations he told them something unbelievable.

That he was about to divorce me and take half of everything.

Half of my business.

Half of everything I had built.

He told them I would give him a huge settlement and he would take care of them with that money.

I didn’t discover any of this until two o’clock in the morning on TikTok.

Around that time Derek disappeared for five days.

Five days with no contact.

My borderline personality spiraled into the worst abandonment panic imaginable.

Thankfully I was seeing a counselor.

She helped keep me grounded while my world was collapsing.

Eventually Derek came back.

He told me he just needed time.

He pretended everything was fine.

And I wanted to believe him.

So I focused on the future.

Camping trips.

Small plans.

Anything to avoid facing the truth that my marriage was ending.

Then one day I came home and Derek told me he was going camping.

Without me.

We always camped together.

But this time he insisted he was going alone with his dog.

The dog was dying, and part of me believed he needed that time.

But something felt wrong.

Things around the house were missing.

Not camping gear.

Important things.

Our surround sound system.

My guns.

Power tools.

I asked him about it.

He said everything was in the camper and he would show me later.

It didn’t feel right.

Was this my borderline personality imagining things again?

Or was something really happening?

Derek had left and went to an AA meeting. I called a friend and had him open the camper.

Inside was everything.

Our belongings.

His belongings.

My belongings.

Packed.

There wasn’t even room to step little lone sleep.

He wasn’t going camping.

He was leaving.

I removed everything that belonged to me and stored it at my mom’s house.

Then I waited.

When Derek came home, I asked him directly.

“If this is the end, just tell me.”

He still wouldn’t tell me directly.

He simply said I’m going camping with my dog.

Then he drove away.

I wouldn’t see him again until our divorce hearing.

The next weeks were the darkest time of my life.

I didn’t want to get out of bed.

I didn’t want to go to work.

I didn’t want to live.

I had spent thirteen years with Derek.

And suddenly he was gone.

My entire world collapsed.

My business — the boarding facility I had built — brought me no joy anymore.

Every room in my house reminded me of him.

Every memory felt like a knife.

But one person refused to let me disappear.

Dawn.

Dawn was my employee.

But more importantly, she became my friend.

A close friend.

While I lay in bed unable to function, Dawn kept the business running.

She fed the dogs.

Played with the dogs.

Took care of everything.

In many ways…

Dawn saved 4Paws.

One day she came into the house and told me something simple.

“Get up. Take a shower. Get dressed.”

Some days I didn’t want to live anymore.

The depression was that deep.

I even gave Dawn my gun and told her I didn’t trust myself with it.

“Hold onto this,” I said. “Give it back when I’m stable again.”

Dawn never judged me.

She just stayed.

Encouraging me.

Talking to me.

Reminding me that I was stronger than I felt.

I cried every day.

But slowly…

I survived.

And looking back now, I don’t know what would have happened if Dawn hadn’t been there.

But I know this much.

I probably wouldn’t have made it through that chapter of my life without her.

Chapter 17

Failing Forward

Over the years I’ve started more businesses than I can count.

Some lasted a few years.

Some lasted a few months.

A few probably shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

But every one of them taught me something.

And every failure pushed me one step closer to what eventually worked.

The very first business I ever started was called Copycat Corner.

I remember being unbelievably excited about it. At the time my relationship with Josh had just ended, and a short rebound relationship with a guy named Sam had also fallen apart. I ended up living with my good friend Scott’s sister, Cheryl, who was an incredible person.

Somehow the idea for Copycat Corner was born.

It was basically a tiny print shop—something like a miniature OfficeMax or Staples. We made business cards, copies, flyers, and anything else people needed printed.

When I say tiny, I mean tiny.

It was basically a little shack.

But I loved every minute of it.

I made thousands of business cards. I designed logos, flyers, advertisements. I got to create things every day, and that part of the job lit something up inside me.

One night around eleven o’clock I remember standing outside hand-painting the sign for the store using a projector to trace the letters on the wall.

It was one of the most fun nights I had ever had.

The problem was I had no idea how to actually run a business.

My pricing was terrible.

My margins were terrible.

And while customers loved my prices, they weren’t exactly sustainable.

Eventually a Staples and an Office Depot opened in town.

That pretty much ended Copycat Corner.

After that I tried a few other business ideas before eventually starting something that meant much more to me.

A dog rescue.

I was deeply involved in spay and neuter clinics at the time, and I wanted to create something that could support those efforts.

The clinics were always mobile. Veterinarians would travel in, and we would set up temporary surgical stations at the fairgrounds. Equipment had to be hauled in, assembled, torn down, and hauled back out again.

Things constantly broke.

It was chaotic.

My idea was to create a mobile spay and neuter clinic.

So I bought buses.

The plan was to convert them into traveling surgical units that could move from town to town helping animals.

Unfortunately the funding never came together.

The buses were eventually scrapped.

But the rescue itself was thriving.

Eventually I landed my first real building.

At the time it was meant to be a rescue facility and surgical center. It had kennels, surgical space, and a lot of room.

I didn’t know it yet, but that building would eventually become the birthplace of something much bigger.

The man who would later become my husband played a huge role in building that facility.

We spent months—almost a full year—remodeling the building.

It had been built in the 1960s and nearly everything in it was broken. Pipes leaked. Walls needed repair. Systems barely worked.

But we slowly brought it back to life.

We held several spay and neuter clinics there, and for the most part they were successful.

But there were problems.

Some of those problems were business related.

Some of them were personal.

My management style still needed a lot of work.

And my own mental health struggles made things even harder.

Eventually the clinic began to fail.

Before everything collapsed completely, I started another business with my best friend Scott.

We called it Soda Central.

Soda Central was essentially a drive-through soda shop that specialized in custom sodas and flavored drinks.

And it exploded.

Cars lined up around the building.

Sometimes the line stretched for hours.

For a while it was wildly successful.

But trends change quickly.

Casper suddenly went through a big health-conscious phase, and soda sales dropped dramatically.

So we pivoted.

Soda Central became a vape store.

For a while that worked too. The vape industry was booming and it helped fund both the rescue and the building.

But I hated it.

I had zero interest in the vape industry.

With my ADHD, if something doesn’t capture my interest, it’s only a matter of time before I lose focus.

Eventually that business fizzled out too.

Both Soda Central and the vape shop were operating out of the same building, and since we still had the lease we had to come up with something else.

That’s when the universe through Mike in my path.

Mike had years of experience running charity bingo.

We were excited because bingo could help raise money to support the rescue.

But there was one problem.

The city of Casper seemed determined to shut us down.

Every time we tried to operate some form of bingo, the city would raid us, confiscate equipment, and claim what we were doing was illegal.

To this day I still don’t understand it.

Especially considering that what we were doing wasn’t much different than the skill games and casinos that operate legally today.

Eventually we combined traditional paper bingo with electronic systems, and they mostly left us alone.

It worked for a while.

But it was extremely expensive to run.

And at the same time, the rescue was drowning in debt.

That’s when something unexpected started happening.

We began boarding dogs for a fee to help support the rescue.

And people loved it.

The boarding program grew quickly.

Before long it became clear that the boarding side of things was stronger than the rescue.

That’s when the idea for 4 Paws Boarding started to take shape.

At the same time, I was completely burned out.

Rescue work is emotionally brutal.

Story after story of abuse, neglect, abandonment—it drains your soul.

Eventually I realized I couldn’t do it anymore.

The depression and emotional exhaustion were destroying me.

Boarding was different.

Boarding was joyful.

I got to play with dogs.

Care for them.

Spend time with them.

And at the end of the day they went home to loving families.

That difference changed everything.

Then something big happened.

I landed a second building.

Now we had two locations operating at the same time.

But two buildings meant double the rent, double the expenses, double the stress.

And I had made one major mistake.

I wasn’t charging enough.

I didn’t value my time.

Eventually we had to make a choice.

Even though we had invested thousands of dollars renovating the original building, it needed far more work than we could afford.

So we closed it.

And focused entirely on the newer facility.

I stayed in that building for ten years.

That’s where 4 Paws truly began to grow.

But being I lived in the Rescue building in an apartment that Derek and I had built this meant I also needed somewhere to live.

Friends of mine—people who felt more like family—owned property out in the country.

Years earlier I had dreamed of building small cabins where rescue dogs could live instead of being stuck in kennels.

Dogs need time to decompress.

Often two months or more.

And kennel stress makes adoption harder.

The idea was that dogs could live in cabins, almost like small homes, while waiting to be adopted.

That dream never fully came to life for rescue.

But for boarding?

It was perfect.

That’s where the idea for 4 Paws Camp was born.

We started small.

Two cabins.

Then four.

Then six.

Eventually ten.

The seeds for my future were planted.

But life had one more storm brewing in the waiting.

Chapter 18

Betting Everything

For years I had been building something little by little. Not perfectly. Not smoothly. But steadily.

What started as rescue work and boarding dogs had slowly grown into something that mattered to me more than almost anything else.

4Paws.

I had a kennel in town that was thriving and I was slowly building what would become 4PAWS CAMP.

But then the ground shifted.

There comes a moment in life when you realize there’s no safe move left.

That’s where I found myself.

The landlord for my kennel told me they would not be renewing my lease.

Just like that, everything I had built suddenly had an expiration date.

According to them, they wanted the building back to expand their own business. Maybe that was true. Maybe it wasn’t. I’ll probably never know for sure.

What I did know was that I was running out of time.

If I couldn’t find a way to keep the kennel running, 4 Paws would disappear. The cabins were still in their infancy, and the occupancy was nowhere near what the kennel had been built to hold. The timing was terrible. The number of clients we had and the capacity of the cabins we needed were living in two completely different realities.

All the work.

All the risk.

All the years of failing forward.

Gone.

There was only one option left.

I had to build something of my own.

Not rent.

Not borrow space.

Own it.

But that meant doing something that terrified me more than almost anything else.

I had to go to a bank and ask for a loan.

For most people that’s just part of business.

For me, it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff.

My entire life had been filled with people telling me no.

No, you can’t stay here.

No, you’re not wanted.

No, you don’t belong.

No, this won’t work.

Walking into that bank felt like walking into another moment where someone would say no again.

And this time the stakes were everything.

If the bank turned me down, 4 Paws would die.

Simple as that.

I remember sitting there thinking about everything that had led up to that moment.

The institutions.

The foster homes.

The businesses that had failed.

Copycat Corner.

The rescue.

The clinics.

Soda Central.

The vape shop.

The bingo hall.

Every one of those ideas had crashed into a wall eventually.

But every failure had also taught me something.

How to adapt.

How to keep going.

How to try again.

That’s what failing forward really meant.

You don’t stop failing.

You just stop letting failure stop you.

This time there was no backup plan.

No second attempt waiting in the wings.

It was all or nothing.

So I walked into that bank and made the biggest bet of my life.

I bet everything on the idea that this strange journey of failures and lessons had been preparing me for something bigger.

I bet everything on the belief that dogs deserved something better than cages and kennels.

I bet everything on 4 Paws Camp.

And I waited to hear the answer

Chapter 19

The Place I Built

For most of my life, I never really had a place that felt like home.

I moved from house to house, institution to institution, foster home to foster home. Everywhere I went felt temporary, like I was just passing through someone else’s space.

Even the places that were good never lasted forever.

Eventually something would change.

Someone would leave.

Or I would.

The idea of building something permanent had always lived somewhere in the back of my mind, even if I didn’t fully realize it at the time.

It was there — just on a much smaller scale. Small meant less risk. Less chance of it disappearing or being taken away from me.

But now things were different.

Now I was going to have to go big or go home.

And the truth was, not going big meant I was going to lose my home anyway.

When the bank approved the loan, everything changed.

Suddenly the idea of 4Paws Camp wasn’t just a dream anymore.

It was real.

And it was absolutely terrifying.

Because now the responsibility was entirely mine.

If it failed, there was no one else to blame.

But for the first time in my life, that responsibility didn’t scare me the way it used to.

It motivated me.

The vision for the camp had been growing in my head for years.

I had seen what dogs went through in rescues and shelters. I had seen the stress of cages and kennels and concrete floors.

Dogs weren’t meant to live that way.

They needed space.

Freedom.

Something that felt closer to a home.

The idea of cabins had started years earlier when I was working with rescue dogs. I had always believed that if dogs could decompress in a calmer environment, they would adapt better and eventually find homes more easily.

But the rescue world had burned me out.

The heartbreak was constant.

Every story of abuse or neglect took a piece out of you. Every dog that came in broken left you carrying a little bit of that weight.

Boarding was different.

Boarding was joyful.

The dogs came to visit.

They played.

They ran.

They spent time with people who cared about them.

And then they went home to families who loved them.

That difference changed everything for me.

Now With money in the bank and the loan approved, it was finally time to move forward.

At first, I tried to do it myself. My brother-in-law and I rented a massive bulldozer and set out to conquer the mountain of dirt that sat where my dream was supposed to be. For hours we pushed and carved into it, moving pile after pile of earth, slowly crushing that towering mound into something that resembled a flat field.

But the truth quickly became clear.

That mountain was bigger than the two of us.

As much as I wanted to do it on my own, there was simply too much work. I had no choice but to bring in professionals.

After talking to several people, I found a company willing to take on the job. When they arrived, they brought the kind of equipment that made our rented bulldozer look like a toy. Within days they did what had seemed impossible. The giant mound of earth that once dominated the property was gone.

In its place was a wide open field.

A blank canvas.

A field where the cabins of 4Paws Camp could finally come to life.

Next came the concrete crew. They poured the pads, marking the places where the cabins would soon stand. Then construction began.

Day after day, I stood there watching it happen.

Piece by piece.

Board by board.

Cabin after cabin began to rise from the ground. Structures slowly appeared against the skyline where nothing had existed before.

My dream was becoming real.

Everything I had worked for… everything I had fought for… everything I had imagined for years… was finally taking shape right in front of me.

4Paws Camp was no longer just an idea.

It was just around the corner.

And the best part?

I had bet on myself.

I wasn’t just building a place for dogs.

I had building a place for myself.

For the first time in my life, I wasn’t the kid being moved around from place to place.

I wasn’t the kid whose belongings were stuffed into a trash bag and sent somewhere new.

I wasn’t number 61 anymore.

This place was mine.

Every fence.

Every building.

Every cabin.

Every decision.

It all existed because I had refused to stop trying.

Looking back now, I can see how every failure led here.

Copycat Corner.

The rescue.

The buses.

Soda Central.

The vape shop.

The bingo hall.

All of those attempts felt like mistakes at the time.

But each one taught me something.

Each one moved me a little closer to understanding what I was actually meant to build.

And eventually all those lessons came together.

People sometimes ask me why I care so much about the dogs.

Why I put so much energy into making sure they feel safe, comfortable, and happy.

The answer is actually pretty simple.

For most of my life, I knew what it felt like not to have a safe place.

To feel like you didn’t belong anywhere.

So when I thought of the idea of building this place, It would be built with one goal in mind.

No dog that comes here should ever feel that way.

In the end, 4Paws Camp will be more than just a business.

Its proof that a life filled with chaos and failure can still lead to something meaningful.

Its proof that even someone who spent years feeling unwanted could eventually create a place where others feel safe.

Its proof that sometimes the only way forward is exactly what I had been doing all along.

Failing forward.

Until one day you finally build something that lasts.

Epilogue:

Monsters Didn’t Win

For a long time I believed monsters always won.

When you grow up the way I did, that’s the lesson life seems to teach you. The people who hurt you walk away. The people who abandon you move on with their lives. And the ones left behind are the ones who carry the scars.

For years I believed the monsters had taken everything.

My childhood.

My sense of safety.

My sense of belonging.

Even my sense of who I was supposed to be.

But life has a strange way of revealing things slowly.

Sometimes it takes decades to understand that the story didn’t end the way you thought it did.

The monsters didn’t win.

They didn’t win when I survived the institutions.

They didn’t win when I found the courage to tell the truth about who I was.

They didn’t win when every business I tried seemed to collapse around me.

They didn’t win when people left.

They didn’t win when life knocked me down again and again.

Because every time something broke, I kept moving forward.

Sometimes crawling.

Sometimes stumbling.

But always moving.

I ‘m building something.

Not just a business.

A place.

A place where dogs run through yards instead of pacing in cages. A place where animals who come in scared and uncertain find comfort and safety while they wait for their families to return.

A place where joy is louder than pain.

Every time a dog runs across the yard with a toy in its mouth or collapses onto the ground after a long day of playing, I’m reminded of something simple.

Life kept going.

And so did I.

The monsters may have taken pieces of my life.

But they didn’t take my future.

They didn’t take my ability to build something good.

They didn’t take my ability to love.

And they didn’t take the part of me that refused to give up.

So when I look around at this place now—the cabins, the dogs, the people who trust me with the animals they love most—I realize something I never understood when I was a kid.

All these small blips of my life, I’ve shared with you. A life filled with, physical abuse, sexual abuse, rape, and trauma.

They didn’t define the ending.

Because in the end, the monsters didn’t win.

I did.

And I’ll keep winning.

Comments (5)

Melisaa Propp

Mar 17

Your words have such an impact, Preston. I had no idea that you had experienced trauma in your life. However, you prevented the monsters from winning. The only person I can rely on to look after my kiddos while I am away is you, sir, I have no doubt that they will receive the same love and care as if they were at home. This memior was really well written, and you should be proud of what you have accomplished and where you are headed. I appreciate the courage it took to share this with everyone.

Edited

Brittney Rummel-Tidholm

Mar 16

Preston, this was such a powerful read. It’s so well-written that I couldn't put it down. I’ve followed bits and pieces of your story on Facebook over the years, but seeing it all laid out like this was a completely different, eye-opening experience. My heart breaks for everything you endured as a child—you deserved so much better—but you came out of it as a true survivor. I’m so proud of you for sharing your truth.

Vicki T

Mar 16

Amazing cover! Fits your story perfectly. I couldn’t stop reading. You have such a way with words. I swear I felt every emotion including such anger at people who hurt you. I don’t know you personally, I’m just a client who trusts you with my fur babies, but I’m so proud of you. So very proud.

Andy Wirth

Mar 15

Prescott....I'm so proud of you. Your Dad and Chuck would be extremely proud of you. As I read this, feeling every emotion possible....I thought of how many people in this world succumb to their past, blame their failures, bad circumstances on everything and everyone else because of what they've gone through....instead of realizing it was their choices made for those things using the excuse of their past. You know who should be the most proud? YOU

Preston

Mar 14

Thanks for reading feel free to share your thoughts and feelings.