What Happened When I Couldn’t Hide Anymore

A story about collapse, accountability, and starting over

Author’s Note:
This post contains references to sexual abuse, sexual sin, incarceration, and suicidal ideation. I am sharing this story not to shock, sensationalize, or excuse harm — but to speak honestly about trauma, accountability, and recovery. If any part of this brings up difficult emotions for you, please consider reaching out to someone you trust or a qualified support professional. If you are in Canada and in immediate crisis, you can call or text 9-8-8 for the Suicide Crisis Helpline (available 24/7). You are not alone, and your life matters.

For most of my life, I believed strength meant self-sufficiency.

If you needed something done right, you did it yourself.
If you were struggling, you kept it to yourself.
If you were drowning, you learned how to hold your breath longer.

I didn’t believe in God for most of my life. Not really.
I believed in myself. Or at least the version of myself that kept moving, producing, providing, and pretending.

Looking back now, I can see how early the cracks formed.

I grew up in a house shaped by addiction. My mother was a lifelong drug addict. My father drank. Around the age of nine, I learned he wasn’t even my biological father — I had been adopted by him. That revelation alone planted an identity fracture I wouldn’t have language for until decades later.

By the time I was seven, my siblings and I were taken into the care of the state. I would spend my entire adolescence in the system. Group homes. Rules. Survival. Detachment.

And layered beneath all of that — the thing I didn’t tell anyone — was sexual abuse by my grandfather.

I didn’t process it. I didn’t even know how.
I just buried it and kept walking.

Society doesn’t give boys a roadmap for surviving sexual abuse. It gives you silence, confusion, shame, and the unspoken message that you should be able to handle it. That damage doesn’t disappear. It mutates.

For me, it tangled up my sense of identity, my understanding of intimacy, my relationship with my own body, and my relationship with God — long before I even acknowledged He might exist.

I didn’t date in high school. I worked instead — nearly full time — because money felt like control. I stayed away from drugs and alcohol. I followed rules. I kept my head down. From the outside, my life looked stable.

Inside, I was fractured.

I married young. We had four children — Child #1 through Child #4. I love them deeply. That has never changed.

I worked whatever jobs I needed to work: food service, technology, property management, trucking. When trucking entered my life, it felt like freedom disguised as responsibility. I was providing well. I was gone for weeks at a time. The road was quiet. Predictable. Lonely in a way that felt safer than home.

By then, I was a proud atheist. I didn’t acknowledge God — or the wreckage accumulating behind me.

Then, slowly, something shifted.

A coworker asked questions I couldn’t shrug off. I started listening to sermons alone in the cab of a seventy-five-foot truck. I prayed without really knowing who I was talking to. I believed — but I still believed I could manage everything myself.

That was the pattern:
believe just enough to feel comforted, but not enough to surrender.

While my faith was flickering to life, my marriage was collapsing. I didn’t ask for help. I didn’t tell the truth. I drifted into sexual sin — not as rebellion, but as escape. Pornography. Secrecy. An affair I minimized because it only happened once.

That’s the lie secrecy always tells: once doesn’t matter.

It always matters.

In 2022, my life finally collapsed under the weight of everything I refused to face.

I was arrested in the United States as part of a sting operation related to sexually inappropriate communication. There was no real person involved — but that doesn’t soften the truth of what I was becoming or the harm embedded in it. My heart was not right. The damage was real. And the consequences were unavoidable.

I lost my career. My marriage. My freedom. My reputation.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was finally out of places to hide.

Looking back now, I understand something I couldn’t then:

“My grace is sufficient for you. My power works best in weakness.”
— 2 Corinthians 12:9 (NLT)

I had spent my entire life trying to be strong enough on my own. Prison stripped that lie away. I wasn’t strong. I was exposed. And that exposure — not comfort, not success, not control — was the first place God could actually reach me. Not because I was fixed, but because I had finally stopped pretending.

After more than a year of legal limbo, I took a plea deal and was sentenced to prison.

Prison stripped away every illusion I had left.

Early in my incarceration, I was brutally raped by another inmate. I genuinely believed I was going to die. The system did not protect me. Most officers didn’t care. Trauma stacked on trauma — this time without anywhere left to run.

Eventually, I was transferred to a faith-based dorm. That’s where something finally broke open instead of collapsing inward.

I read Scripture obsessively — not to perform righteousness, but because it was the only thing anchoring me. I was baptized inside prison walls. And yet, even then, healing wasn’t clean or complete.

Later, I was asked to relive the assault through depositions and legal proceedings. Justice mattered — but something else started to matter more: forgiveness. Not forgetting. Not excusing. But choosing not to let violence have the final word over my life.

I asked the court for mercy on behalf of the man who assaulted me. The sentence was reduced. Justice still stood — but it didn’t become vengeance.

When my sentence ended, I wasn’t going home. There was no home to return to.

I was transferred to immigration detention, then deported to Canada.

I arrived in Ottawa in the middle of winter with nowhere to go, no phone, no plan, and no certainty I would ever see my children again.

I stayed at a men’s shelter. During the day, I rode public transit just to stay warm. One afternoon, a little girl sat across from me on the train. She talked to me like I was safe. Like I mattered. Like I was still human.

She gave me a high-five when she got off.

I broke down completely.

That moment did more to keep me alive than she will ever know.

Since then, life hasn’t magically stabilized.

I’ve battled depression. I’ve lived with estrangement. One of my children won’t speak to me. I’ve stood on a train platform and seriously considered ending my life.

But something interrupted me that night.

Not comfort.
Not answers.
Just a clear, unrelenting truth:

“I’m not done with you yet.”

I don’t tell this story because I’m fixed.
I tell it because I’m still here.

Because strength turned out not to be self-sufficiency — but surrender.
Because healing didn’t come through isolation — but confession, counseling, community, and obedience when familiarity felt safer.

I don’t walk alone anymore.

And if you’re reading this carrying secrets, trauma, addiction, shame, or a past you think disqualifies you — I need you to hear this:

God does not wait for you to get your life together before He meets you.

He met me in prison.
He met me in exile.
He met me when I was ready to disappear.

And He keeps meeting me — one unfinished step at a time.

This story isn’t over.
The rest is still being written.