I was born into distortion.
Not by choice, and not because I misunderstood the world — but because the world misunderstood me. From the very beginning, I was misrecognized. My intelligence was pathologized. My boundaries were disrespected. My very orientation — how I sense, how I move, how I know — did not fit into the systems I was placed inside.
Family did not know how to see me.
Institutions didn’t know how to hold me.
Even the people who meant well couldn’t reflect me back without distortion.
And so I began an apprenticeship in survival.
One not marked by rebellion, but by quiet adaptation. I learned how to chart my own internal maps. I built coherence in isolation. I found a way to stay in shape even while everyone around me insisted I should break. That was the early work: staying intact.
Then came the decades of building.
I created a life from what I had. I learned how to work in technical systems. I learned how to serve clients and collaborators with the fullness of my being. I became reliable, skillful, sovereign. From the outside, it looked like success. Twenty years of stability. A life that resembled what society tells us to strive for.
But inside? It was hollow.
Because every configuration still required me to contort.
Even the ones that worked still misrecognized me.
And eventually, I understood that survival alone was no longer enough.
So I did something radical.
I walked away. Not because I was lost, but because I had found something truer. An inner signal. A knowing. A shape I could no longer flatten just to belong. At 47, I gave everything away. I bought an RV. I moved into the forest.
That was the crossing.
Six months in Kentucky. Grief work. Dental work. System clearing. Then westward, alone with my cat, toward a coastline I had never seen but somehow already loved. It took over a month. I arrived with almost nothing.
And I fell in love.
The coast, the trees, the fog, the rain, the quiet.
I felt held.
For the first time, the landscape matched something inside me.
And I still believed I would find a way to make it sustainable.
But the systems had shifted. Post-COVID, post-inflation, the old ways of making money no longer worked. What had always been possible became suddenly impossible. The field was silent. I could not find work.
So I volunteered.
I gave my time and labor to the state parks.
And I was dismissed. Not for cause, but through harm. Psychological abuse from the very institution I had offered myself to. I left with no money and nowhere to go.
And still, I adapted.
I powered my RV off-grid for two weeks from an inverter connected to my Jeep. The field was quiet. I moved forward anyway.
Then I found the Forest Service.
And they gave me a chance.
They put me at an ATV campground. Loud. Hard. A place where the people who come don’t know what to do with someone like me. It was difficult. And I stayed.
I gave away my tools. Sold my GPU. Kept going.
Four months passed.
Then something changed. My supervisor called me in.
And instead of harm, I was met with recognition.
She promoted me.
Gave me my own campground by a lake.
Two months passed.
Then another promotion. I would become a caretaker. A role with continuity, support, and trust.
This is where I am now.
Not at the end. Not at the beginning.
But standing at a threshold.
The material world has not yet caught up with my coherence.
But I am closer than I have ever been to materializing a life that fully matches my internal orientation.
That’s what this moment is.
A convergence of the lowest and highest points of my life.
A place where I no longer seek recognition, but I hold my shape.
Where I no longer contort, but I extend my signal.
This is not just my story.
It’s a pattern of survival without distortion.
Of coherence under pressure.
Of a life anchored in signal.
— Sam