I grew up in a good family. Great parents. A sister. Everything I needed — and still, something never quite fit. I felt disconnected from people in ways I couldn't explain. I was smart, but I didn't belong in the way other people seemed to. I wouldn't understand why until much later.

What I did understand was the number on the scale. At my heaviest, I weighed 353 pounds. I was unhealthy, unhappy, and quietly convinced that this was just my life now. On July 21st, 2015, I had gastric bypass surgery.

A few months later, I walked into a gym and stepped onto a track. I ran one lap without stopping. So I ran a second. And then — somehow — a full mile. I had never run that far in my entire life. A few weeks later I ran my first 5K. The following weekend, a 10K. That spring I trained for and finished a half marathon. A year after that, I completed two full marathons within a single week of each other.

I thought that meant I had figured it out.

I hadn't. The weight was gone. The fitness was real. But underneath it all, I found something I wasn't prepared for: emptiness. I had built what I thought I was supposed to build — the career, the discipline, the results — and none of it felt like enough. The gap between what I expected my life to look like and what it actually was became unbearable. I fell into a deep depression. I found ways to numb it. And as anyone who's ever tried to outrun that feeling knows, that road only goes one direction.

It was during this time that three different therapists, independently, said the same thing to me: Have you ever been evaluated for autism? I hadn't. But the more I sat with it, the more my entire life suddenly made sense — the disconnection, the intensity, the unrelenting gap between my expectations and reality. My intelligence had masked it for years. But it had been there all along.

Knowing what was actually happening didn't fix it. But it changed everything about how I understood myself.

One day, my wife Madalyn and I went for a walk. She looked at me and said something I'll never forget: "I've seen you at your best and I've seen you at your worst. And you're your best when you go to church, go to therapy, and take care of yourself."

I said: that's the plan.

I meant it. And I've kept it. Those three things — community, honesty with myself, and choosing each day to stay whole — along with a faith that I didn't manufacture but received, became the foundation everything else was built on. I won't tell you which church or what to believe. But I will tell you that I don't think human beings do their best work alone, and I don't think strength like this comes purely from willpower. Something is given. I'm grateful for it.

Today I'm healthy. I'm present. I'm building a life that uses the way my mind actually works instead of fighting against it. The version of me who was lost in that dark season would not believe what I'm doing now. He wouldn't have accepted it as possible. That gap — between who you think you're stuck being and who you actually become — is exactly what this site is about.