For a long time, I had a habit of looking at my life like somebody checking a scoreboard. Who was ahead? Who had made it? Who had the career, the money, the applause, the proof? Then I would look at myself and start counting what had gone wrong. Sports was one of the first places I thought my life was supposed to announce itself. I was serious about football and basketball, and I believed that road might carry me beyond the circumstances I came from. When it did not become the professional future I had imagined, I did not treat it like one road closing. I treated it like evidence. Something was wrong with me. Then came college. I received a scholarship to Pratt Community College in Kansas and got expelled before the first game. More evidence. I joined the Army because I felt restless and believed there had to be something larger than the life I had known. That road ended after two years, several AWOLs, and an Article 15 being prepared for my release. I remember walking off Fort Lewis feeling like I had failed at everything I had tried. At the time, I was not building a philosophy around it. I was hurting. I watched people I thought had passed me in life and wondered whether I would ever become what I felt somewhere inside I was capable of becoming. 

That kind of thinking can become dangerous because after enough disappointments you stop seeing events and start seeing a verdict. A basketball dream does not work out, college ends badly, the military does not become your calling, and eventually you stop saying, “That did not work.” You start saying, “I do not work.” That difference matters. Once I began building an identity out of disappointment, every new struggle had somewhere to land. Crack did not walk into an empty life. It entered a man already carrying questions about his value, his direction, his purpose, and whether he was somehow missing whatever everybody else seemed to understand. Addiction then offered a way to stop sitting with those questions. It gave me something immediate to organize myself around. I did not have to know where my life was going if I knew where I was going to get high. I did not have to solve the problem of David if I could temporarily stop feeling him. 

Years later, even the parts of my life that looked successful from the outside had to be reconsidered. I worked at The Potter’s House in Dallas from 1998 to 2003. I saw professional athletes, actors, politicians, and other successful people. I was surrounded by examples of lives that appeared to have arrived somewhere. At the time, I did not understand what that experience was giving me. I was still comparing. Still measuring. Still wondering why greatness seemed close enough for me to see but somehow difficult for me to possess. When I left, I pursued acting and stand-up comedy. That made sense to me because I had always felt the pull of storytelling and performance. But again, if I looked at my life only by the standards I had inherited, I could add another unfinished road to the pile. Sports. College. Army. Ministry. Performing arts. Addiction. From one angle, it looked like a man who could not settle into anything long enough to become what he was supposed to be. 

The strange thing about time is that it lets you stand far enough away from an experience to see things that were invisible when you were trapped inside it. Looking back, I began to understand that the word failure had been doing too much work in my story. It had become a lazy conclusion. Some things absolutely were mistakes. Some choices were destructive. Some doors closed because of what I did. I do not need to rename everything beautiful just to make peace with my past. But a mistake and a meaningless experience are not the same thing. That is what changed for me. The college experience taught me something about restlessness and identity. The Army showed me what happened when I entered a structure my heart was not truly committed to. The years at The Potter’s House allowed me to observe people I once imagined had everything figured out. Performing taught me something about story, persuasion, character, and the human need to express itself. Even addiction exposed levels of focus, endurance, manipulation, fear, pain, and hunger that I eventually had to understand if I was going to understand myself. I had numbed many of those experiences as failure before I ever asked what they had trained me to see. 

That does not mean every failed plan was secretly perfect. It means I stopped asking one experience to summarize an entire life. I had done that to myself over and over. One rejection became proof I was rejected. One unfinished road became proof I was incapable of finishing. One destructive period became proof that destruction was my identity. When you think that way, memory becomes a prosecutor. It brings forward only what supports the charge. Looking back differently allowed me to become more objective. I could admit the facts without allowing them to become the final sentence. I could say, yes, that happened. Yes, I did that. Yes, I lost that opportunity. Then I could ask the question I had skipped for years: what did I learn that I could not have learned from getting exactly what I wanted? 

That question changed the emotional shape of my past. I stopped envying other people’s timelines as much because their lives could not explain mine. I had spent years looking sideways when I needed to look inward. What somebody else accomplished by thirty, forty, or fifty had nothing to do with what my own road was trying to reveal. The obsession with being “behind” had kept me from seeing that I was still moving, even during seasons when movement looked ugly. I was accumulating experience, seeing what I did not want, testing identities that did not fit, discovering the limits of what could satisfy me. Some of those lessons were expensive. I paid for them in ways I would never recommend to anybody. But once the price had already been paid, continuing to call the lesson worthless would only waste it twice. 

Now when I look back, I do not need to pretend I won every round. I did not. I do not need to make every road respectable. Some were dark. Some hurt people. Some nearly swallowed me. What I can do is refuse to let the word failure flatten everything I lived. I came from somewhere. Every road left something with me, including the roads I wish had been shorter. If you are looking at your own history and seeing nothing but unfinished chapters, I understand that view because I lived inside it. Just be careful about deciding what the story means while you are still in the middle of it. I spent years calling parts of my life failure that I later recognized as training. The event did not change. I did. And once I changed, I could finally read my own history with different eyes.