The Gift in the Wound “Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” – Joseph Campbell

Most people talk about healing like it’s some feel-good poster with a sunset and a slogan. What they don’t talk about is the screaming. The silence. The rage. The long nights with no one to call. They don’t talk about how the people you’d die for can still choose someone else. They don’t talk about what it’s like when the system looks at your pain and shrugs.

But I will. Because that’s where Fathership was born.

The Wound That Started It All

Fathership started the day I caught a pedophile—a chomo—grooming my daughter. I didn’t get violent. I didn’t flip out. I did what a man’s supposed to do: I protected her.

And what did the courts do? They gave him three years probation. And gave me two years in prison for growing pot plants.

Let that sink in. A predator walks. A father trying to protect his child gets locked up.

My daughter? She believed him. And the boyfriends. And other strangers. She still doesn’t fully see that no one will ever love her like her family does.

I didn’t grieve her absence—I grieved that she had more faith in strangers than the people who raised her. And that’s a wound I still carry. Still healing from.

But instead of letting it destroy me, I turned that pain into purpose. That’s when Fathership was born—not as a nonprofit, but as a mission.

The Hospital Didn’t Break Me—It Cleared the Smoke

Years later, I lost a lung. A full damn lung—gone. And with it, I lost the ability to keep getting stoned to escape my pain. Weed had been my mask. And now there was nothing to hide behind.

No more smoke. Just truth.

And while they were trying to save that lung—before they knew it had to come out—they gave me ketamine in the ER. Not some therapy session. A trauma response. An emergency measure.

But what happened was something else entirely. I left my body. I saw my life. What mattered. What didn’t. What I still had to give.

And the message came through clear as day: Fathership is why I’m still here.

That ER trip didn’t create the mission. It confirmed it. It stripped away what wasn’t aligned, and reminded me exactly what I was still breathing for.

The hospital didn’t break me. It revealed me.

This Pain Became My Path

In Iron John, Robert Bly talks about “the wound that never heals. ”But it’s not about staying broken. It’s about becoming whole by facing the parts that hurt.

And trust me—I’ve faced them. Still do.

I read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, and it all clicked.

The Lover in me still aches for the daughter I raised. The Warrior still burns with anger at the way the courts failed us. The Magician sits with the pain and turns it into meaning. And the King? He shows up. Even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

That’s the kind of man I’m working to be. And that’s the kind of man I want standing next to me in this movement.

I’m Building What the System Ignored

When I tried to protect my daughter, they treated me like the criminal. When I needed the system to show up—it didn’t. So I stopped waiting.

I started building.

I’m creating anger management courses. Emotional maturity programs. Parenting support. I’m doing everything I can to make sure the next man doesn’t go through what I did.

I’m working to get these programs court-approved, but I’ll be real—funding is tight. That’s the next step. That’s the wall I’m climbing now.

But it won’t stop me. Because I’ve already been to hell. And once you’ve lived through that? You stop letting red tape and price tags slow you down.

Service Is My Oxygen Now

Muhammad Ali once said:

“Service is the rent we pay for the space we take on this earth.”

I used to say that. Now I live it. Every breath I take—limited though it is—goes into this mission.

This isn’t a side project. This is my rent. This is my purpose. This is why I’m still alive.

To the Man Still in the Fire

If you’re in the thick of it—grieving, numbing out, lashing out, isolating—I see you. I am you.

But you are not your mistakes. You are not what happened to you. You are not broken.

You are becoming.

Let the wound show you who you really are. Let it become the gift. Let it wake you up.

Because your story’s not over. And there’s power in your pain—if you’re willing to look it in the eye.