I didn't study transformation.
I lived it.

I grew up the youngest of three in a house where I learned early that the world was not always safe. My older siblings made sure of that. I was small and I was alone, so I did what children do when they have no one to play with. I built an entire world inside my imagination. I learned to survive on the inside when the outside wasn't available.

I was eleven when my father was taken by death, four days before my twelfth birthday. The man who should have shown me what it looks like to carry yourself through the world was gone, and nobody talked about it. So I did what boys do when nobody talks about it. I got angry. I got reckless. I was fourteen and already running from something I couldn't name.

I ran for years. Through a relationship that lasted thirteen years and cost me more than I knew I was paying. Through a business that went bankrupt. Through a stepson I loved and lost, a vibrant young man who was visiting us on a Thursday afternoon, went to hospital on Friday morning and was gone by that evening from a severe strain of meningitis. I ran through the grief, the arrangements, the funeral, and went back to work because what else do you do when you are the one who holds it together.

Twice in my life I came to the edge. Not metaphorically. Twice I was close enough to ending it that I had the means in hand. Both times, something pulled me back. Both times, it was the thought of what it would do to someone else. Even at my lowest, I was thinking about other people.

I kept going. I always kept going.