How survival, psychosis, fatherhood, philosophy, education, and an endless need to understand the world became the foundation of a life devoted to helping others make meaning from chaos.
There is a temptation, when telling the story of a life, to make everything appear inevitable.
We look backward and organize the disorder. We connect childhood to adulthood, suffering to purpose, failure to wisdom, and hardship to transformation. Once enough years have passed, the road behind us can begin to look almost intentional.
My life has never felt that way from the inside.
It has been far less like a straight road and more like a collection of possible lives—some abandoned, some destroyed, some narrowly escaped, and others still waiting to be lived.
For much of my life, I did not know where I was going.
Sometimes I was simply surviving.
Sometimes I was self-destructing.
Sometimes I was trying to understand what was happening inside my own mind.
And eventually, almost without realizing it, I began doing something different.
I started studying the chaos.
That decision changed everything.
Today, I am a psychology student, writer, philosopher, Certified Peer Support Specialist, life strategist, mental-health advocate, entrepreneur, podcaster, father, and founder of The Nomothete LLC, a company built around an idea that emerged slowly from everything I survived:
Human beings are not finished things.
We are continually becoming.
I did not arrive at that belief through philosophy alone.
I lived it.
A Childhood of Questions
I have always wanted to understand things.
Not merely memorize them.
Understand them.
I wanted to know why people behaved the way they did, why societies created the rules they created, why religions believed what they believed, why people suffered, why the brain could distort reality, why time seemed to move differently depending on what we were experiencing, and why one person could survive something that completely changed another.
Even as a child, I was fascinated by knowledge.
Science.
Religion.
Psychology.
History.
Mythology.
Comic books.
Human behavior.
Anything that provided another piece of the puzzle attracted me.
I did not yet know that this curiosity would eventually become one of the organizing forces of my life.
I also did not understand that children learn about the world not simply through what adults teach them, but through the environments they are forced to interpret.
My early life contained instability, grief, family struggles, exposure to experiences I was too young to fully understand, and responsibilities that often seemed larger than childhood should require.
Like many children raised around unpredictability, I became an observer.
When the world feels uncertain, observation becomes a survival skill.
You study expressions.
Voices.
Silences.
Changes in mood.
The atmosphere of a room.
You learn that reality has layers.
There is what people say.
There is what they mean.
There is what they feel.
And somewhere underneath all of it is what is actually happening.
Years later, I would become fascinated with perception and the construction of reality.
Looking back, perhaps that fascination began much earlier than I realized.
When the Mind Becomes Its Own Universe
Mental illness entered my life early.
I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, depressive type, while still young. Later in adulthood, I would also come to understand myself through the lens of autism.
Those labels explain parts of my experience.
They do not explain the entirety of me.
That distinction became enormously important.
There is a strange psychological experience that can occur when you receive a serious psychiatric diagnosis. A diagnosis intended to describe symptoms can quietly begin to describe your identity.
You stop thinking:
I am experiencing something.
And begin thinking:
This is what I am.
That difference matters.
Psychiatric language can be extraordinarily useful. Diagnosis can help clinicians identify patterns, communicate about treatment, organize research, and provide people with access to services.
But a human being is always larger than a diagnostic category.
I learned this slowly.
There were years when depression, anxiety, addiction, trauma, hallucinations, emotional instability, and confusion made life feel less like something I was living and more like something happening to me.
Alcohol and substances became part of that story.
For a period of my life, they offered temporary escape from thoughts and feelings I did not know how to regulate.
Escape, however, has an expiration date.
Eventually, everything you are avoiding begins waiting for you on the other side.
Psychosis and the Collapse of Ordinary Reality
There are experiences that divide a person’s life into before and after.
Psychosis became one of mine.
For someone who has never experienced it, psychosis can be difficult to describe because ordinary language assumes a shared reality.
Psychosis disrupts that assumption.
Meaning expands.
Patterns multiply.
Coincidences seem connected.
Internal thoughts can appear external.
The boundaries between imagination, interpretation, memory, emotion, symbolism, and perception become unstable.
Time itself can become strange.
During periods of psychosis, my experience of time changed dramatically.
Hours could disappear.
Minutes could expand.
Days and nights blurred together.
Sleep became irregular.
The ordinary architecture of life—morning, afternoon, evening, tomorrow—became unreliable.
Sometimes several hours seemed to pass in what felt like minutes.
At other moments, seconds seemed impossibly long.
Eventually, this experience would influence one of the most important ideas in my philosophical work: what I call the Perpetual Present.
But when I was living through it, there was nothing theoretical about it.
It was terrifying.
It was consuming.
And it was real to me.
That last sentence matters.
People experiencing psychosis are often told that what they are perceiving is not real.
Clinically, that may be correct regarding the external source of a hallucination or delusion.
Phenomenologically, however—the study of lived experience—the fear is real.
The confusion is real.
The meaning is real.
The emotional response is real.
If we want to help people experiencing altered states of reality, we cannot understand them by simply dismissing the world they are experiencing.
We have to understand how that world is being constructed.
That realization would eventually become central to the way I think about mental health.
What Happens When Everything Means Something
During psychosis, the brain becomes an extraordinary meaning-making machine.
Things connect.
Events become symbols.
Randomness begins to look intentional.
A television program may seem directed toward you.
A song lyric may feel like a message.
An ordinary coincidence may appear cosmically significant.
From the outside, these interpretations can appear irrational.
From the inside, they can feel overwhelmingly coherent.
That experience eventually made me deeply interested in neuroscience, cognitive psychology, consciousness, predictive processing, the default mode network, perception, temporal processing, and the human tendency to create narratives from incomplete information.
I became fascinated by a fundamental question:
How does the mind create reality?
Not reality in the ultimate metaphysical sense.
The reality we actually experience.
Because none of us encounters the world directly.
The brain receives signals.
It filters them.
Interprets them.
Compares them to memory.
Predicts what they mean.
Adds emotion.
Adds expectation.
Adds language.
Adds culture.
Adds identity.
Then consciousness experiences the result.
Psychosis exaggerates this process, but the basic mechanism belongs to everyone.
We are all interpreters.
The difference is often one of degree, context, regulation, and neurological stability.
That realization would become one of the seeds of what I later called The Multiverse of Self.
The Years I Lost—and What They Gave Me
There were long stretches of my life when, by conventional standards, I was not accomplishing very much.
I was not building a career.
I was not accumulating impressive titles.
I was not following the timeline people are often told adulthood should follow.
Graduate.
Build a career.
Buy a house.
Advance professionally.
Become successful.
My life did not move according to that script.
For years, I felt behind.
But something else was happening during those years.
I was learning.
Constantly.
Sometimes obsessively.
Psychology.
Philosophy.
Religion.
Science.
History.
Spirituality.
Human behavior.
Mental illness.
Trauma.
Addiction.
Consciousness.
Physics.
Mythology.
Comic books.
Whatever question caught my attention became another doorway.
I often learned a little about everything because everything seemed connected to something else.
At the time, it did not look like a career.
It did not look like productivity.
It barely looked like progress.
But gradually, all those disconnected subjects began forming a system.
What had looked like intellectual wandering became interdisciplinary thinking.
What had looked like wasted time became preparation.
This is one of the lessons my life has taught me:
You do not always recognize the value of what you are learning while you are learning it.
Sometimes the meaning arrives later.
Recovery Was Not a Miracle. It Was Construction.
People often describe recovery using dramatic language.
A breakthrough.
A transformation.
A moment when everything changed.
There were important moments in my recovery, but recovery itself was less cinematic.
It was repetitive.
Recovery was learning to structure ordinary days.
It was sleep.
Routine.
Reflection.
Education.
Accountability.
Boundaries.
Learning what made symptoms worse.
Learning what helped stabilize them.
Learning how emotions influenced perception.
Learning when isolation helped and when it became dangerous.
Learning how music could anchor attention.
Learning how journaling could slow thoughts enough to examine them.
Learning how conversation could pull attention back toward the external world.
Learning to question interpretations without automatically invalidating experience.
Recovery meant learning how to live with my mind instead of constantly fighting it.
It also meant confronting addiction.
Sobriety required something deeper than simply removing substances.
I had to understand what substances were doing psychologically.
What was I escaping?
What emotions did I not know how to tolerate?
What memories remained unresolved?
What identity was I trying to avoid?
Recovery forced me to ask questions that intoxication allowed me to postpone.
Eventually, those questions became a philosophy.
Fatherhood Changed the Equation
Among all the identities I have carried, fatherhood remains one of the most important.
My children, Aiden and Raven, became reasons to continue becoming when continuation itself was difficult.
Fatherhood changes your relationship with time.
You begin realizing that your decisions do not exist only in the present.
They travel forward.
Your habits become memories someone else will carry.
Your emotional wounds can become inherited patterns if you refuse to address them.
Your growth can become someone else’s foundation.
That realization created a different kind of responsibility.
I did not want merely to survive.
I wanted to become someone whose survival meant something.
That distinction helped move me from endurance toward purpose.
Returning to Education
Eventually, learning became formal again.
I returned to school and began studying psychology at Purdue Global University.
For me, studying psychology was not simply an academic choice.
It was personal archaeology.
I had spent years experiencing mental illness from inside the system.
Now I wanted to understand the theories, research, neurological mechanisms, diagnostic frameworks, therapeutic approaches, cognitive processes, ethical debates, and social structures surrounding those experiences.
Psychology gave me another language for questions I had been asking for years.
Why do people interpret the same event differently?
How does memory reconstruct experience?
What happens when perception becomes unreliable?
How does trauma alter attention and expectation?
How does identity develop?
How much of the self is stable?
How much is contextual?
How does language influence thought?
What makes change sustainable?
The deeper I studied psychology, the more convinced I became that psychology cannot exist comfortably by itself.
Human beings are biological organisms.
But we are also social organisms.
Narrative organisms.
Symbolic organisms.
Cultural organisms.
Philosophical organisms.
We ask not only:
What is happening in my brain?
We ask:
What does my life mean?
That question belongs partly to psychology.
But it also belongs to philosophy.
The Birth of The Nomothete
Eventually, all these strands began converging.
Mental-health recovery.
Psychology.
Philosophy.
Spirituality.
Peer support.
Coaching.
Science.
Art.
Storytelling.
Education.
I wanted to create something that could hold them together without pretending they were the same thing.
That became The Nomothete LLC.
The word nomothete comes from the idea of a lawgiver—someone associated with establishing principles or frameworks.
For me, however, the deeper meaning became personal.
What are the laws by which we organize our lives?
What assumptions govern our behavior?
What beliefs determine what we think is possible?
What invisible rules did trauma teach us?
Which rules deserve to survive?
Which ones must be rewritten?
The Nomothete became a place for exploring those questions.
Not as religion.
Not as therapy disguised as coaching.
Not as motivational hype.
But as an interdisciplinary approach to personal transformation.
The mission eventually became simple:
Turn survival into structure.
Turn insight into action.
Turn pain into becoming.
From Diagnosis to Peer Support
One of the most important developments in my professional life was becoming a North Carolina Certified Peer Support Specialist.
Peer support occupies a unique place in mental health.
Traditional clinical systems are organized around professional expertise.
Peer support adds another type of expertise:
lived experience.
There are things textbooks can teach that experience cannot.
There are also things experience teaches that textbooks cannot.
The strongest systems need both.
My experiences with psychosis, addiction, hospitalization, recovery, trauma, and rebuilding my life do not make me a clinician.
They give me another form of knowledge.
I know what it feels like when your mind becomes frightening.
I understand what it means to lose confidence in your own perception.
I understand the shame that can accompany psychiatric labels.
I understand how difficult it can be to imagine a meaningful future when life has narrowed to survival.
That perspective influences everything I create.
I am not interested in telling people who they should become.
I am interested in helping them understand the forces shaping who they already are—and giving them better tools for deciding what comes next.
The Multiverse of Self
Eventually, the questions that followed me through psychosis, recovery, psychology, and philosophy began forming a framework.
I called it The Multiverse of Self: A Unified Philosophical Theory of Perception, Time, and Becoming.
The central idea begins with something relatively simple:
There is never only one possible version of you.
Every moment contains possibilities.
Different environments reveal different traits.
Different decisions strengthen different habits.
Different interpretations create different emotional responses.
Different relationships activate different identities.
Different choices produce different trajectories.
The self is therefore not best understood as a single fixed object moving unchanged through time.
It is a developing system.
A field of possibilities constrained by biology, history, environment, circumstance, perception, and choice.
I began describing these possibilities metaphorically as a multiverse of self.
Not because I claim human beings literally split into quantum universes whenever they make a decision.
That would confuse metaphor with physics.
The framework is philosophical and psychological.
Its purpose is to explain how multiple possible futures can coexist conceptually within one life.
At any moment, several versions of you are possible.
The version that continues a destructive habit.
The version that stops.
The version that calls someone.
The version that isolates.
The version that returns to school.
The version that gives up.
The version that creates something.
The version that finally asks for help.
You do not become every possible self.
Choice collapses possibilities into lived experience.
Then action gives that choice momentum.
Consistency gives action structure.
Time reveals the result.
That idea became what I call the Effort Equation:
Effort = [(Action × Choice) + Consistency] ÷ Time
It is not a law of physics.
It is a conceptual model.
Its purpose is to capture something recovery taught me:
Transformation is rarely one extraordinary decision.
It is usually an ordinary decision repeated long enough to become a life.
The B.E.C.O.M.I.N.G. Method
The philosophical work eventually required something practical.
Ideas alone do not change lives.
Application does.
That led me to develop the B.E.C.O.M.I.N.G. Method, a framework designed around eight areas of sustained personal development:
Building Stability & Daily Structure
Emotional Mastery & Self-Regulation
Clarity on Identity & Personal Growth
Overcoming Limiting Beliefs & Trauma
Mindset Shift: Perception, Time & Becoming
Integrating Spiritual Alignment & Healing
Navigating Life with Confidence & Purpose
Growth for the Future: Long-Term Stability & Success
The framework reflects something I learned through recovery:
You cannot build transformation on permanent instability.
Before someone can become extraordinary, they often need help making ordinary life sustainable.
Sleep.
Food.
Routine.
Connection.
Emotional regulation.
Meaning.
Purpose.
Small goals.
Realistic expectations.
Growth becomes easier when life has somewhere stable to stand.
Spirituality Without Abandoning Reason
Spirituality has also remained part of my life.
But my relationship with spirituality is different today than it once was.
I am fascinated by ritual, mythology, religious symbolism, altered states of consciousness, shamanic traditions, meditation, mystical experiences, archetypes, and humanity’s long attempt to understand what cannot easily be explained.
At the same time, I believe extraordinary claims require evidence.
These positions do not have to contradict each other.
A ritual can have psychological value without requiring supernatural causation.
Prayer can focus intention.
Meditation can influence attention and emotional regulation.
Symbols can externalize abstract psychological states.
Myths can encode recurring human conflicts.
Music can alter emotional states.
Community ceremonies can reinforce identity and belonging.
Meaning can influence behavior.
Spirituality becomes dangerous when interpretation becomes immune to evidence.
Science becomes unnecessarily narrow when it assumes that subjective experience is meaningless simply because it cannot always be reduced to a laboratory measurement.
I have tried to build a worldview capable of holding both.
Wonder without gullibility.
Skepticism without cynicism.
Spirituality without abandoning reality.
Science without abandoning meaning.
Why Comic Books Matter
Another strand of my life might seem unrelated until examined more closely.
Comic books.
I have loved them for years.
But superheroes are not simply entertainment.
They are modern mythology.
Batman asks what trauma becomes when transformed into mission.
Spider-Man asks what responsibility follows power.
The X-Men explore prejudice, difference, identity, belonging, and social fear.
Superman examines morality through the perspective of almost unlimited capability.
The Hulk externalizes anger, repression, trauma, and fractured identity.
Daredevil explores faith, guilt, justice, suffering, and moral contradiction.
These characters survive because beneath the costumes are psychological problems.
I became interested in using comic characters and stories as tools for reflection, education, identity exploration, coaching, and personal development.
Sometimes people can discuss Batman’s trauma before they can discuss their own.
Sometimes fiction creates enough psychological distance for truth to become safer.
That possibility eventually became another area of The Nomothete’s work.
Building a Life From What Nearly Destroyed Me
There is an uncomfortable truth behind much of what I create:
Almost everything I now study emerged from something that once hurt me.
Mental illness led me toward psychology.
Psychosis led me toward perception and consciousness.
Temporal distortion led me toward questions about time.
Addiction led me toward recovery.
Trauma led me toward emotional regulation.
Spiritual experiences led me toward the psychology of belief.
Feeling misunderstood led me toward peer support.
Identity confusion led me toward philosophy.
Years of intellectual wandering eventually became interdisciplinary thinking.
Pain did not automatically make me wiser.
Suffering does not contain guaranteed meaning.
People often romanticize trauma by suggesting that everything happens for a reason.
I do not believe we need to say that.
Some things are simply terrible.
Meaning is not always something hidden inside suffering waiting to be discovered.
Sometimes meaning is something we construct afterward.
That distinction matters.
I cannot change everything that happened to me.
But I can participate in determining what those experiences become.
That is agency.
And agency may be one of the most important ingredients in recovery.
The Life I Once Thought I Wasted
There was a time when I looked at my life and saw mostly delay.
Years lost.
Opportunities missed.
Mistakes made.
Potential wasted.
Other people seemed further ahead.
That comparison created shame.
But adulthood has slowly taught me that human lives cannot be evaluated using one universal timeline.
A person can spend decades surviving before finally discovering what they are capable of building.
A career can begin at forty.
Education can resume.
Recovery can happen.
Ideas can mature.
Relationships can change.
Purpose can emerge late.
There is no cosmic deadline by which a person must become meaningful.
Perhaps I was never late.
Perhaps I was simply living a different sequence.
Who I Am Now
Today, I occupy identities I once could not have imagined.
I am a father.
A psychology student.
A Certified Peer Support Specialist.
A life strategist.
A writer.
A podcast host.
A mental-health advocate.
An entrepreneur.
A student of philosophy.
A builder of frameworks.
A person in recovery.
A man diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder who refuses to let diagnosis become destiny.
I founded a company.
I wrote a book.
I built theories.
I developed coaching frameworks.
I returned to school.
I earned certifications.
I began speaking publicly about experiences I once might have hidden.
None of that erased the person I used to be.
He is still part of me.
The frightened person.
The addicted person.
The confused person.
The person experiencing psychosis.
The person who believed life had gone permanently wrong.
The person who had no idea what came next.
I do not reject those versions of myself.
They carried me here.
What I Still Do Not Know
The older I become, the more comfortable I am admitting something:
I do not know nearly enough.
That realization does not discourage me.
It excites me.
There is still so much to understand.
Consciousness remains one of science’s deepest mysteries.
We still do not fully understand schizophrenia.
The mechanisms underlying subjective time remain incomplete.
Psychology continues to wrestle with reproducibility, measurement, culture, and the complexity of human behavior.
Neuroscience is constantly revising simplified models of the brain.
Philosophy continues asking questions humans have argued about for thousands of years.
Spiritual traditions preserve both profound psychological insight and claims that should be approached critically.
There is more work to do.
That is why I continue studying.
Not because I believe I already have the answers.
Because the questions keep improving.
The Future of The Nomothete
I want The Nomothete to become larger than a coaching business.
I see it developing into an interdisciplinary educational and personal-development ecosystem.
Books.
Courses.
Research.
Peer support.
Speaking.
Podcasts.
Workshops.
Creative mental-health tools.
Comic-based identity exploration.
Recovery resources.
Philosophical frameworks.
Scientific education.
Mental-health advocacy.
I want to contribute to conversations about psychosis, temporal perception, recovery, consciousness, neurodivergence, personal development, and meaning-making.
I want to help create better bridges between people with lived experience and the professionals who study them.
And I want the people who encounter my work to leave with something more useful than inspiration.
I want them to leave with structure.
A question.
A framework.
A practice.
A different interpretation.
A decision.
Something they can actually use.
The Person I Am Becoming
If there is one principle underlying my life so far, it may be this:
Identity is not a verdict.
A diagnosis is not a final sentence.
A mistake is not a permanent definition.
A traumatic chapter is not an entire biography.
The person you have been places constraints on the person you can become, but it does not completely determine them.
We are always standing between history and possibility.
The past creates conditions.
The present creates choices.
The future records what those choices became.
That does not mean everyone controls everything that happens to them.
We do not choose our genetics.
We do not choose every environment.
We do not choose every illness.
We do not choose every injustice.
We do not choose every loss.
Human agency exists inside constraints.
But inside those constraints, even small choices can matter enormously.
A phone call.
A class.
A meeting.
A journal entry.
One sober night.
One conversation.
One boundary.
One application.
One hour spent learning something new.
Lives change through accumulation.
That is what mine has done.
There Is More Story Left
I used to think the goal was to finally become the person I was supposed to be.
I no longer believe there is one final version.
There will always be another question.
Another challenge.
Another contradiction.
Another possibility.
Another version of myself waiting on the other side of a decision.
That is why becoming matters more to me than arrival.
My life is not a story about defeating mental illness.
It is not a story about turning trauma into some perfect heroic narrative.
It is not a story about having discovered all the answers.
It is the story of a person who survived long enough to become curious about his own survival.
A person who began studying the mind that once terrified him.
A person who turned questions into frameworks.
A person who returned to education.
A person who became a father with something to teach his children.
A person who built a company around meaning, structure, and transformation.
A person who continues trying to understand consciousness, identity, time, perception, suffering, choice, and what it means to become human.
There are still books I want to write.
Research questions I want to investigate.
People I want to help.
Ideas I want to challenge.
Things I currently believe that future evidence may force me to revise.
That possibility no longer frightens me.
Changing my mind when better evidence appears is not losing myself.
It is becoming.
So I do not consider this the conclusion of my story.
It is simply the point from which I am writing today.
The end is not here yet.
There are still possible selves ahead of me I cannot see.
There are timelines I have not created.
There are ideas I have not encountered.
There are people I have not met.
There are versions of The Nomothete that do not exist yet.
And somewhere ahead is another version of me who will look back at the person writing these words and understand things I cannot understand yet.
That may be one of the most extraordinary things about being alive.
You never completely know who you are becoming while you are becoming them.
You simply keep choosing.
Keep learning.
Keep questioning.
Keep constructing.
Keep moving.
And eventually, when you look backward, what once appeared to be chaos begins to reveal a pattern.
Not because the pattern was always destined to exist.
But because you created something from what happened.
That is the work.
That is recovery.
That is becoming.
And my story is still being written.
Thank you for today.
Thank you for yesterday.
Thank you for tomorrow.
Always remember to question your reality.
And at every end, there is a beginning.
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