Sometimes the past sneaks up on me like an unpaid parking ticket from the universe.
I’ll be walking the dog.
Folding laundry.
Standing in line at Target pretending not to calculate whether buying candles counts as emotional healing.
And suddenly I’m twenty-one again.
Standing in a transitional house on Long Island smelling faintly of cafeteria coffee, cigarette smoke, and industrial-strength disinfectant trying its absolute best to lose a fight against human suffering.
I had just graduated from a tiny college in West Virginia with a psychology degree, a mustache that had no business existing, and the naïve confidence of a young man who thinks compassion automatically equals competence.
I truly believed wanting to help people was enough.
Which is adorable in retrospect.
That first job title sounded noble:
ADL Counselor.
Activities of Daily Living.
Very official.
Very clinical.
What it actually meant was:
“Twenty-one-year-old kid with unresolved childhood issues attempts to supervise grown men with schizophrenia while pretending he understands literally anything about life.”
The pay was terrible.
The emotional damage?
Free.
Most of the residents were men who had been abandoned slowly. Families exhausted. Systems overwhelmed. Lives reduced to medication schedules and laminated charts.
There was John.
Tall. Quiet. Wiry.
Always wearing the same stretched-out white T-shirt that looked like it had survived several wars and at least one emotional breakdown.
His mornings ran with military precision.
Two blue pills.
Twenty jumping jacks.
Three yellow pills.
Twenty sit-ups.
Then one final pill.
After that last pill, the lead counselor always told me:
“Leave the room.”
I never asked why.
At twenty-one, I still believed adults knew what they were doing.
That illusion had a very short shelf life.
Then there was Stephen.
Stephen was brilliant.
Not “good at trivia” brilliant.
Terrifying brilliant.
The kind of intelligent where you leave conversations wondering if you accidentally gave away your bank password and social security number.
The lead counselor warned me immediately.
“Don’t play chess with Stephen.”
That should’ve been enough.
But younger versions of me had a chronic condition:
the need to become the exception.
I didn’t hear:
“Don’t play chess.”
I heard:
“Prove you’re special.”
Because deep down, my desire to help people was tangled up with something uglier:
I wanted to be admired for helping people.
And those are not the same thing.
But at twenty-one, I didn’t know that yet.
So one humid August night, after the medication rounds and evening routines, Stephen and I sat in the back room where the staff couldn’t see us.
An old fan hummed in the corner like it was emotionally exhausted.
The overhead lights flickered occasionally.
Outside, fireflies blinked in the dark like tiny ambulances responding to invisible emergencies.
We played chess.
At first it felt magical.
Normal even.
Like maybe connection alone could heal people.
Like maybe I wasn’t just some scared kid wearing a lanyard and pretending confidence.
I remember thinking:
This is working.
Which, in hindsight, is often the exact moment life starts preparing a lesson.
We played quietly for almost an hour.
Then suddenly—
A scream split the room.
The table launched upward.
Chess pieces exploded through the air.
The chairs crashed backward.
I hit the floor hard enough to feel it in my teeth.
For one frozen second, all I could see were black and white chess pieces spinning through fluorescent light like tiny shattered planets.
And underneath the noise—
underneath the chaos—
came a truth that landed even harder than I did:
I did this.
Stephen erupted.
Not anger exactly.
More like terror breaking through skin.
Staff rushed in.
Voices shouted.
Someone grabbed him.
Someone grabbed me.
And there I was on the floor at twenty-one years old realizing something I would spend decades trying to avoid:
Good intentions do not erase ego.
I had broken protocol because I wanted to feel important.
I wanted to be the counselor who “got through.”
The one who understood him.
The one who succeeded where others failed.
I made his illness part of my self-image.
And when the table flipped, so did the story I had been telling myself about who I was.
That was my last day there.
I was fired.
Rightfully so.
Do you know what I told my parents?
Nothing true.
I lied.
Of course I lied.
Because that’s what I had learned to do with shame.
Hide it.
Minimize it.
Smile through it.
Become charming quickly enough that nobody notices the smoke pouring out of your life.
Even at twenty-one, I was still just a little boy trying desperately to avoid disappointing people.
And honestly?
That little boy followed me for years.
Into leadership.
Into marriage.
Into fatherhood.
Into every room where looking okay felt safer than being honest.
That’s the strange thing about hidden shame:
It doesn’t disappear.
It waits.
Quietly.
Patiently.
Like a chess player three moves ahead of you.
For years, I thought the worst part of that night was the table flipping over.
Now I think the worst part was how quickly I abandoned the truth afterward.
Because hiding your failures doesn’t free you from them.
It just turns your inner life into a full-time hostage situation.
And the exhausting part is that eventually you can’t tell anymore whether you’re hiding from other people…
or yourself.
I think about Stephen sometimes.
I wonder if he ever knew the strange gift he gave me.
Because lying there on that floor surrounded by overturned chairs and scattered chess pieces, something inside me cracked open for the very first time.
Not enough to change me yet.
But enough to leave a mark.
Enough for truth to slip inside.
Back then, I thought the table turning over was destruction.
Now I think it may have been mercy.
Because life had been trying to interrupt my pretending for years.
And that was the first time something hit the floor loud enough for me to hear it.
For a long time, I thought God showed up in polished moments.
Clean moments.
Successful moments.
But I don’t think that anymore.
I think God is often sitting quietly in the wreckage…
waiting underneath the overturned tables of our lives…
waiting for us to finally stop trying to win long enough to tell the truth.
And maybe that’s why I still remember those chess pieces spinning through the air.
Because that wasn’t the night my life fell apart.
It was the first night the performance did.
Comments