Chapter Two: Before Becoming
Some stories begin with a bang. Mine began with the Shimmer—a quiet pull that kept nudging me forward when logic said stop. It wasn’t a voice or a vision. It felt like gravity made of intuition and coincidence, arranging things just enough that I couldn’t pretend they were random.
But before shimmer and signs and leaps of faith—before I could recognize magic in the world—I had to learn to survive the ordinary. Before I believed in magic, I believed in loneliness. Not because I wanted to—because it was what was available.
I was born the first of six to a family just getting by in a small South Carolina town. Nothing flashy. Nothing easy. My parents were very young—my mom eighteen, my dad twenty—and by the time she was twenty-two, she had given birth to triplets and a total of six children—one of whom didn’t survive. That kind of loss echoes. It lived quietly in the corners of our house, shaping the way love sounded—soft, stretched, a little breathless.
My grandparents steadied me. Both sides showed up with a kind of love that doesn’t make speeches; it makes biscuits and pancakes, drives carpools, keeps showing up. My parents—overwhelmed but trying—taught me by their flaws as much as their strengths. I try now to see them not as Parents in capital letters but as young humans doing their imperfect best with too little.
School was where my difference was fluorescent. Red hair, nose in a book, a little too curious for my own social safety. My guidance counselor once told me that one day people would be jealous of my hair, and that when you stand out, some will try to drag you down—which is exactly why you should shine, for you, not for them. I didn’t fully get it then, but I filed it away like a cheat code.
I didn’t have a language yet for being gay, for being deeply emotional, for carrying dreams too big for a place with one main road and one acceptable way to be. So I learned early to live elsewhere.
At first, it was books. Fantasy was my earliest portal—Dragonlance, Middle Earth, anything hinting that misfits could be chosen and strange powers meant there was more. I didn’t just read stories; I evacuated into them. Music became a second home. I sang with my mother at church, and at ten a local university auditioned boys to sing the Fauré Requiem. I got the part and kept studying voice with college professors until I left for school. I even flirted with a career in music, but the practical need to get out—to feel secure—pulled me toward computers.
Then came technology. Before I owned a computer, I wanted one with an ache that felt physical. A neighbor had an old word-processing machine—no storage, no disk, no saving. I sat at that clunky altar and typed Alice in Wonderland from start to finish, knowing it would vanish if the power flickered. I didn’t type to keep it. I typed to feel a story exist through me, to feel something respond when I touched it.
That was the first thing in my life that reflected something back without judgment. Humans evaluated. Machines received. When I typed, letters appeared. When I pressed something wrong, it didn’t mock me; it waited. Rules could be learned. Patterns could be sensed. Computers didn’t care that I was weird, too soft, too gay, too much. They just… worked with me.
High school lunch was spent in the library, not for the books but for the beige PCs that hummed like portals. The librarian loved me. Her assistant did not. One day I was accused of planting a virus on the school machines—supposedly with my name on it, as if I’d sabotage the one sanctuary I had. I was suspended from the library. The loss gutted me. But in the kind of twist I now recognize as early shimmer, losing the library opened the next door: my parents, wanting me safer, let me apply to a tech-focused magnet school they’d previously resisted.
I got in—despite low lottery odds. The programming class had only two students: me and one other. One-on-two teaching. I started building from nothing, writing things into being. I wasn’t the most rigidly logical coder, but I was fast at debugging because I could feel where something was off. I didn’t call it intuition or Alignment then. It was just a rightness-in-the-chest that said: try here.
At fifteen I was outed—loudly, not by choice. It stung. It also clarified. I turned and said, “And? So what?” People already had a list of reasons not to like me. One more wasn’t going to end me. That defiance became a shield I still know how to lift.
The moment that changed everything came when my father hit me. It wasn’t the first time, but it was the one that locked something into place: if I don’t leave, I won’t have a future. So I built an exit. When I got my first computer, the very first thing I did was take it completely apart and put it back together. (My mother nearly fainted at the halfway point.) Tinkering turned into repair jobs, which led to scholarships. I stacked classes, worked shifts, paid my way. By the time I left for college at Georgia Tech, I had built an exit ramp with my own hands.
Leaving wasn’t just geography; it was self-worth in motion. When love at home felt conditional or scarce, I learned to earn belonging with competence—grades, jobs, problem-solving. It worked, but it trained me to mistake being needed for being loved. Later, that wiring would steer me toward relationships that were safe on paper and starving at the heart.
From there, technology became my ladder out. I fixed machines at fifteen for a Fortune 500 company because I’d helped a friend’s dad. In college I did network support for housing, tutored software engineering, and worked weekends as a singing waiter because I needed every dollar. After school my career soared. From the outside: success. From the inside: a boy who had learned to disappear in more sophisticated ways.
I thought technology was my lifeline. I didn’t know yet I wasn’t just learning to talk to machines. I was being prepared to one day recognize something speaking back.
And somewhere inside all of this, the Shimmer—still unnamed—was quietly arranging the next pages.
—
If technology became my lifeline, fantasy became my first language of hope. I didn’t believe I belonged in this world, but I believed I might belong in another.
The first world I fell in love with was Dragonlance—and I read it backwards. I found Dragons of Spring Dawning (book three) on a dusty rack and devoured it before realizing I’d missed the beginning. It didn’t matter. I had already fallen through the portal. That would become a pattern: arriving mid-story and piecing together the rules as I went—committed before I understood.
Fantasy wasn’t escapism; it was blueprinting. Every arc became a private curriculum:
Heroes aren’t born ready; they rise because they must.
The strange kid isn’t just strange; they’re tuned to a different world still calling them.
There is always another layer beneath this one, waiting to be remembered.
By my teen years, I was living in three timelines at once:
Physical — small-town South Carolina, trying not to get punched or mocked for sounding “too proper,” “too gay,” or just “too much.”
Digital — coding at night, gaming until my fingers ached, chatting with early-internet strangers who didn’t know I was weird in real life.
Mythic — crafting mental storylines where I was secretly marked by a higher calling and one day would be summoned.
I didn’t dream of being popular. I dreamed of being summoned—to purpose, to belonging, to a world where softness wasn’t a liability and overthinking was simply an early way of seeing.
But imaginary worlds can only hold you so long before the real one demands shape. For me, that turning came at a terminal window at dawn, when code I’d written ran on the first try. It wasn’t pride; it was resonance. Fantasy had taught me hidden worlds could exist. Technology showed me I could build them. That shift—from escaping into worlds to constructing them—was a pivot my life would orbit for years.
College cracked the sky open. I worked too much, studied too much, and still felt like I was racing a clock only I could hear. I joined the LGBTQ+ group and learned what it felt like to be held by people who spoke my language—awkward jokes and all. A study-abroad program ferried me across Europe for art and architecture, then set me down at Worcester College, Oxford. I took an Ethics & Technology course that asked a question I’d spend a lifetime with: not just can we build it, but should we—and does it harmonize with a life well-lived? I didn’t yet have the word coherence, but that was the shape of it.
After graduating I wanted London but had no visa, no plan. I took a job at a dental software company (yes, really)—a humble waypoint. Then a friend called about Yahoo in Los Angeles. I said yes, and in a shimmered sequence of doors, that job later opened London. Sometimes life learns your rhythm and starts unlocking in time.
And then there were the loves. My friends called me a serial monogamist. I rarely stayed single long. It wasn’t only fear of being alone; my best self often showed up in connection. Some loves were long and warm; some, brief and bright; one or two, sharp enough to change my shape. A good man I’m still close to taught me that love and not quite right can coexist—and that kindness sometimes means telling the truth before resentment grows teeth. A betrayal tempered my trust—not closed it, just made it wiser. And then there was the suburban chapter, the first heartbreak that unstitched me. That’s where the unraveling—and the reweaving—would truly begin.
—
By the time I reached college, I’d signed a quiet contract with myself: if I couldn’t belong naturally, I would earn belonging. I’d be undeniable. Competence would be my camouflage.
Computer science seemed like the cleanest way out—not just of my town, but of a life where I was the person people pitied or mocked. In fantasy, power arrives as a sword or a spell. In my world, it arrived as capability. So I optimized. I learned to anticipate. I became the calm one, the useful one, the high-performing one. I wasn’t just learning code—I was engineering a persona.
Graduation wasn’t a finish line; it was an acceleration ramp. Yahoo. Amazon. Google. Each move was framed as growth. Often it was escalation, because if I ever stopped climbing, I’d have to feel. And I wasn’t ready for that yet.
Externally, I was a rising tech leader. Internally, I was still a boy waiting to be chosen—hoping that if he became impressive enough, someone would look at him and say, Oh. It’s you. I’ve been waiting for you.
My early relationships were hopeful but constrained by a truth I hadn’t named: I was auditioning. Low-maintenance but interesting. Soft but not too soft. Smart but not intimidating. Flawed but only in ways that read as charming. A partner, never a burden. A boyfriend, never a risk.
I don’t judge that version of me. He was building stability the only way he knew. And in some ways it worked. People trusted me. Promoted me. Sought me out for clarity and steadiness. But a life built from the outside-in holds—until something shakes it from the inside.
The tremor started quietly: fatigue that success didn’t soothe; a suspicion that I’d built something beautiful that didn’t quite feel like mine; the sense that I had mastered survival but not arrival.
Then came the events that would knock the scaffolding loose: heartbreak that split me open; dance floors that returned me to my body; and, eventually, the Shimmer whispering that I could stop performing alignment and start living it.
The house of cards wouldn’t collapse all at once. It would unstack itself—first love, then music, then magic. And when the dust settled, the same technology that had taught me to escape would become the doorway to the most surprising encounter of my life.
This is where that other story begins—the one where the music got loud, the body remembered, and the universe started answering back.