The Story I Wasn't Ready to Tell

I have been working toward anchoring myself in my divine masculine, both to strengthen my leadership potential and to prepare myself for fatherhood. As I have learned to manage my affairs with greater discipline and efficiency, I have watched my ambition expand. My vision has become clearer. I know more about what I want, what I stand for, and who I am becoming.

And yet, I still feel hesitation in one particular place.

There is a male authority figure from my past whose refusal to hear my perspective continues to affect the way I express myself. I have wanted the opportunity to speak honestly to a former partner about what I experienced in our relationship, but that opportunity has never fully been granted to me.

For a long time, I believed I needed his willingness to listen before I could finally speak.

That silence followed me.

It became difficult to show up completely authentically with the beautiful souls I encountered because somewhere inside me, my heart was still playing a song that had never been allowed to reach the air. Part of me remained attached to words left unsaid, memories left unexplained, and experiences I had never fully integrated.

It has affected the way I approach new intimacy because I know there is still a depth to the ending of my former relationship that I have never expressed.

I am beginning to understand that I must embark on this journey of sharing not to change the past, but to free myself from the restrictions I have placed around it.

For years, I lived inside a kind of disillusionment. I analyzed the relationship endlessly, searching for meaning in what happened and trying to understand who I had been inside of it. With time, that analysis eventually led somewhere useful: toward greater self-awareness.

I began to recognize how tightly I had held onto my version of the story.

Part of that attachment was nostalgia.

I wanted to preserve the most beautiful parts of what we had experienced. I wanted to remember the places where love had been real, where connection had existed, and where two people had genuinely tried to find one another despite everything happening beneath the surface.

But nostalgia can become another form of captivity when we use it to avoid looking at the entire picture.

Eventually, I came to believe that sharing my experiences and reflections about love might finally interrupt the suffering of repeatedly carrying a story wrapped in secrecy.

Not because my perspective is the only truth.

It isn't.

There were two people inside that relationship, and therefore there are at least two versions of what happened. His experiences belong to him. His memories belong to him. His interpretation of me may never resemble my interpretation of myself.

But my experience belongs to me.

Releasing these karmic bonds and lessons in love means allowing myself to look at what happened from a wider perspective. It means attempting to bring compassion and accountability to both myself and my former partner without needing either of us to become the villain.

There were things I did not understand then.

There were things I could not understand then.

There were places where I was hurting so deeply that I could not recognize the ways my pain was shaping my behavior.

And there were truths I saw but did not yet possess the emotional stability to carry responsibly.

I stopped writing publicly in 2018 because I wasn't mentally stable enough to continue the way I had been. I had also been asked not to share the intimate truth of what my partner and I had experienced together.

So I stopped.

And somewhere along the way, I began confusing silence with loyalty.

I know returning to this story will challenge me. It requires me to practice a different kind of courage than I understood when I was younger. Courage is not simply exposing everything. It is knowing what belongs to you to tell, what belongs to someone else, what needs protection, and what can finally be released.

Mental courage means being able to look directly at the secrets that once controlled me without allowing them to control the person I am today.

There are experiences from that period of my life that brought me frighteningly close to losing myself entirely.

The person I was wanted desperately to be loved, yet was terrified of actually receiving love.

I wanted someone to choose me while simultaneously expecting abandonment.

I wanted intimacy while building defenses against anyone capable of reaching me.

I wanted to be seen, but being truly seen terrified me.

And then I met him.

I met my former partner in the winter of 2017, shortly after leaving the Marine Corps and traveling through Rome and Cancún. I was writing a blog called Bulldoze with Joey, sharing with the world the truths as I understood them.

I met strangers and listened to their stories. I wrote about where they had come from, what had shaped them, and what I believed their lives could teach me.

At the same time, I was turning that same gaze inward.

I became vulnerable and raw to the point of feeling completely exposed, stripped down to the roots. I was unapologetic about who I was becoming and determined to transmute the painful energies that had been cast into my life into something meaningful.

Writing became the place where I transformed experience into understanding.

Trauma became language.

Confusion became inquiry.

Shame became something I could hold in front of me and examine rather than something I had to keep buried inside my body.

I thought honesty alone could save me.

What I did not yet understand was that truth requires grounding.

Vulnerability without discernment can become exposure. Love without boundaries can become self-abandonment. Storytelling without enough distance from the wound can become an attempt to survive the wound publicly rather than actually heal it privately.

I was still learning those distinctions when our lives collided.

Our relationship became one of the greatest mirrors of my life.

It reflected my capacity for devotion, passion, creativity, tenderness, obsession, fear, insecurity, and love. It exposed places inside me that I had not known existed. Some of those reflections were beautiful. Others were devastating.

There were moments when I believed I had found the person who would finally make sense of everything that had happened before him.

There were also moments when I no longer recognized myself.

That is the story I am ready to examine now.

Not the mythology of a perfect love destroyed.

Not an indictment of another man.

Not an argument designed to make someone finally admit that my interpretation was correct.

I want to write about what happens when two wounded people discover love before either completely understands how to hold it.

I want to write about masculinity, queerness, trauma, power, desire, secrecy, mental illness, spiritual awakening, attachment, fear, and the enormous difference between loving someone and knowing how to love them well.

Most importantly, I want to write about the person who survived it.

Because the man writing these words is no longer the young man who needed another person to authorize his truth.

That may be the lesson my divine masculine has been trying to teach me.

The masculine I seek is not an authority demanding permission.

It is integrity.

It is responsibility.

It is the ability to stand behind my own experience without needing to dominate someone else's.

It is protecting what should remain sacred while refusing to imprison myself inside secrecy.

It is being able to say:

This is what I remember.

This is how it affected me.

This is where I caused harm.

This is where I was hurt.

This is what I understand differently now.

And then allowing the story to breathe.

Perhaps I have waited all these years for a conversation that may never happen because I believed closure had to involve another person.

I don't believe that anymore.

He does not have to open the door for me to leave the room.

He does not have to agree with my story for me to learn from it.

And he does not have to hear every word for those words to finally be spoken.

Returning to the page is not my attempt to resurrect what was.

It is my willingness to bury what needs burial, bless what deserves gratitude, take responsibility for what belongs to me, and carry forward only what can still become wisdom.

I loved him.

I lost myself.

I found parts of myself through losing him.

And now, after all these years, I am finally learning that telling the truth does not have to mean destroying the past.

Sometimes telling the truth is simply how we stop allowing the past to write the future.

The Beautiful Story Never Told, Jo He and Mai Taeo

"There once was a Knight who was offered a throne. But somewhere along the way, I ended up alone. With a broken heart, a part of me died, so I traveled to the forest to see what I would find.

There, the Knight became the damsel.

Just over a year ago, I felt myself beginning to disappear. Codependent, afraid of abandonment, and desperate to be loved, I surrendered my power while waiting for someone else to save me.

But no one came.

So I learned to rescue myself.

The forest taught me that the damsel was never weak; he was the part of me asking to be protected. The Knight was never gone; he was learning that strength without tenderness is only armor.

Now I return to the throne differently.

Not as the Knight searching for someone to fight for. Not as the damsel waiting to be chosen.

But as the King who has learned to hold them both.

I did not lose my kingdom. I had to lose myself long enough to learn how to rule it."