Welcome, Fellow Traveler...
The Mission
If you’ve found your way here, it might be because you know what it feels like to drift after the systems you built your life around finally gave out… or it might be because I commented on one of your posts with way too much to say for someone you’ve never met. Either way, I’m glad to meet you.
This space exists first and foremost for my four daughters. I want them to have a record of who their father was as a boy — the chaos he survived, the systems he built to survive it, and why he sometimes still struggles to be the father he wants to be. That’s what started this project and it remains its core.
But it’s also for anyone who has ever orbited something that anchored them, such as a faith, an ideology, a career, or a mentor, and felt the pain of breaking free from that orbit and drifting into the vast open space. If you’ve ever built your sense of meaning around a force outside yourself and watched it collapse, this space was built with you in mind.
The Focus
This space deals with the loss of my two biggest anchors, which were the frameworks that grounded my meaning, my belief, and my sense of purpose and value.
The first was my father. To a young boy, he was the definition of cool. He had long hair, drove an El Camino, and loved blasting classic rock. I loved him deeply and craved his affection. But beneath all of that was a severe meth and alcohol addiction. His addiction destroyed our family dynamic and ultimately led to our house getting raided by the cops, leaving me held at gunpoint and handcuffed for two hours as a fifteen-year-old boy, before I decided I could no longer live in his house. And even though I left, my desire for him to clean up his life and be present never left me.
The second anchor was a rigid, self-imposed literalist Christianity that stepped in to fill that void. It began at twelve, when a horrific accident left me with third-degree burns the first night I smoked pot and denounced God. My terrified mind was convinced this was a direct punishment. A few years later, following a drug-induced panic attack, I found myself at church camp hearing the message of Jesus for the first time. That fear transformed into a profound, intimate relationship with someone I deeply loved and admired, along with a desperate hope that this new faith could somehow restore my father to me. But as the outside world began to challenge that fragile space, I built an unyielding theological firewall around it, unwittingly setting the stage for its ultimate collapse.
This is not just a story about losing my faith. That’s too small a frame for what actually happened. This is the story of what happens when a faulty, self-constructed framework can no longer hold the weight of two things at once: my father’s death, and ironically, the weight of becoming a father myself.
I still hold a genuine appreciation for the archetypal truths of the faith that protected me and gave me wisdom. I am relearning how to have a relationship with that prior faith, without needing it to define who I am. I’m now trying to learn what it takes to begin generating my own gravity now that these old anchors are gone, especially when your children need you to be a stable system.
My Story
The core of this publication is a curated essay series tracing the raw, personal mechanics of how my absent father shaped the belief system I built, the surrogate fathers I orbited, specifically my faith, mentors, and career, and the slow orbital decay that preceded the collapse. It is a diagnostic post-mortem of a worldview from the inside out; written not from the other side of the wreckage, but from inside it.
But look—if you don’t want to read through 15 separate essays and want a 30,000 feet overview (because let’s be honest, ain’t nobody got time for that), I have condensed the core mechanics into a lean, punchy summary article that gets straight to the heart of the evolution:
Beyond My Story
My goal with this publication is to provide honest, practical resources for anyone living through a similar experience, both for the person walking through deconstruction or deconversion themselves, and for the churches, family members, and friends trying to love them well through it.
Moving Forward Together
I am genuinely glad you are here. If you know someone adrift right now, someone whose orbit has failed and who hasn’t yet found their footing, send them here. This is a space for that exact moment.
Welcome to the journey.
Trevor, thanks for your honesty and for being willing to share your story. I recently went through a similar experience and started a writing project like yours as a place to process some of what's been going on inside me. Reading a bit of your story is encouraging, and I'm looking forward to poking around and discovering more of your journey!