vulnerability – Muddled Soma

I have not written my 500 words in a while. A few people have reached out to ask why. So, why not write 500 words about that! The lie I tell myself is that life got busy. The authentic answer I have not been interested in facing is that it started to hurt beyond what I could bear.

For months, I sat down every day and gave myself over to the keyboard. Some days the words came easily. Most days they did not. I thought I was spending a year writing about coming of age, but that was fucking naïve. I was trying to become the little boy who finally mattered. That is the lie old wounds tell. If I can remember hard enough, explain it well enough, or tell the story one more time, maybe I can negotiate a better childhood. Of course, that deal does not exist. The past has never renegotiated a better contract.

I believe adulthood begins when I finally let go of the childhood I did not get. I have not been able to shake that thought.

When I look back through my writing and my memories, I realize I have carried two sets of recollections for most of my life. There are the memories of what happened, and then there are the memories of what should have happened. Oddly enough, it is the second set that has always been heavier. They have followed me into relationships, parenting, work, travel, and eventually into my writing. Without realizing it, I was asking 500 words a day to build a bridge backward instead of forward. Every sentence became another attempt to earn something that should have been freely given to a little boy decades ago. No wonder I was so fucking exhausted!

I finally realized the pain was not coming from remembering. It was coming from hope. Hope that one more page, one more memory, one more honest paragraph might somehow change yesterday. I kept trying to convince the past to tell a different story. It never did as some stories are not waiting to be rewritten. They are waiting to be grieved.

Nobody talks much about grieving the childhood that never happened. I am not talking about pretending everything was terrible. I am talking about grieving the hugs that never came, the words that were never spoken, and the moments that quietly shaped my understanding of my own worth. I think there are versions of me that never had the chance to exist because I spent so much energy trying to become enough for someone else.

No one is coming to hand that little boy the childhood he deserved. There is no hidden chapter where everything suddenly makes sense and everyone finally says what I needed to hear. There is only me… now. And I am a fifty-two-year-old man who refuses to spend the rest of my life dragging that kid into the future, hoping tomorrow will somehow fix yesterday. Instead, I choose to sit beside him, thank him for surviving, and tell him he does not have to keep fighting anymore.

I still believe writing saves lives. It certainly has helped save mine. I just finally realized I was asking it to do something it could never do. I was asking words to resurrect the past instead of helping me live more honestly in the present.

Maybe growing up is not becoming someone new. Maybe it is accepting that childhood has no do-overs, nor can it be completed at a later date. It cannot be repaired by achievement, success, travel, love, or another five hundred words. Adulthood begins the moment I stop asking today to pay yesterday’s debts.

I think I finally understand why those 500 words became so painful. I was not writing to remember. I was writing to recover something that was never coming back. There is a difference.

The real work was never bringing that little boy back, but rather thanking him for surviving… and finally letting him rest.

August 2026
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Prompt: A time a friend betrayed you

As a child, I was raised inside a system that offered basic training on how to exist with people that have an expiration date. Military bases were full of kids like me, changing addresses like refugees with pink slips. We learned how to attach quickly and detach cleanly. Friendships were intense, immediate, and understood to be temporary. When orders came, and they always came, we did not fight the ending. We practiced kindness in the present and disappearance in the future. It was not cruelty. It was survival. We handled each other gently because most of us already knew what heavy felt like at home.

I was hurt by friends during those years, but the hurt was diffused and governed by an agreed-upon set of rules. It belonged to circumstance more than intention. No one was really betraying anyone. We were all obeying the same unwritten code. Stay light, do not burden each other, and leave cleanly. This code failed me the first year my family became civilian.

Lawton, Oklahoma broke something open that I did not yet have language or experience for. My father could not find work. My mother worked in another state. Home still felt temporary, but without the structure that once explained why everything was temporary. At MacArthur High School, the rules I knew did not apply. Belonging was transactional and visibility was dangerous.

I was bullied for opting out of football, for choosing books and observation instead of collision. That alone would have been survivable. What I was not prepared for was betrayal disguised as friendship.

Tracy was my first real civilian friend. She listened. She asked questions. She made space for the softer parts of me that had never needed armor before. I trusted her because trust had always been safe inside temporary worlds. I told her my fears. I told her my uncertainties. I told her where I felt small.

She took those truths and passed them along to the very people I spoke about. She did not confront me. She did not warn me. She turned my vulnerability into currency. When the laughter came back to me secondhand, something inside me collapsed. This was not the clean ending I had been trained for. This was exposure. This was humiliation. This was betrayal with witnesses.

For a long time, I believed the lesson was that openness was a mistake. I learned how to seal myself. I learned how to withhold. Betrayal does not only break trust in another person. It fractures trust in the self who chose to believe. I was not only angry at Tracy. I was ashamed of my own hope.

It took years to understand that what happened in Lawton was not proof that I was naïve or weak. It was proof that I had crossed from a world governed by impermanence into one governed by performance. The hope arrived later, quietly. I did not lose my capacity to trust. I learned how to place it with care. I still believe in connection. I just no longer hand it over to civilians.

Tag: vulnerability

What Should Have Happened

Civilian Rules – Day 40