Wayward Mind
A Personal Story by a Faith-Driven Neurodivergent Service Member: From Lost and Broken to Faith, Service, and a Life of Purpose
Welcome to issue #1 of Wayward Purpose. This week’s personal essay.
Wayward Purpose exists to rebuild what breaks along the way; through faith, discipline, and direction. It’s about turning moral injury into moral leadership. This space is growing into a home for veterans, leaders, and wayward minds. For those who gave everything to a mission and lost themselves somewhere along the way.
But we can’t do it alone here. If this mission speaks to you, or to someone you know that is still walking through the dark, please share it. Upgrade, gift, or just send it to a friend. Every act of support helps. You’re not just backing our newsletter. You’re helping build a movement.
Note: The views expressed here are solely those of the author, and those of Wayward Purpose. They do not represent the views of the U.S. Government, the Department of Defense, or any military branch.
Content Warning: Suicide. This article contains discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, especially if you are an active-duty service member or veteran, please reach out immediately. Call the Veterans/Military Crisis Line by dialing 988, then press 1, or contact your local emergency number.
I want to say upfront: the last thing the world needs is more noise. I’m not here to offer shallow inspiration or surface-level motivation. This journey is about transformation: mine. It’s about discipline and choosing the hard path I’ve committed to walk. I want to take off one of the last masks and tell my story raw, unfiltered, and real. So you can see me: my pain, my hurt, my why. Where I’ve come from, why I still get out of bed, and where I’m headed. I don’t want you to just listen to another voice online; I want you to walk beside me. This is for those who’ve felt like too much, too intense, not enough, broke, lost; or all of it at once.
My journals are full of quiet tears and unanswered questions. The confessions of someone who spent years feeling broken and out of place. In the military I have been praised as a passionate innovator, the kind of fire people said they wanted in every leader. But I have also had those words twisted: outcast, disruptor, narcissist, someone who “didn’t know his place or rank.” This duality of who I was, and this shift a few times made me shrink inside and whisper, What’s wrong with me? I tried to fix myself by doing everything “right.” I hid the parts that didn’t blend in. I swallowed wild ideas and buried big feelings. I swung between pride, surviving on my own terms, and shame, that surviving was all I seemed to be doing. Moral injury by another name.
When you hear “wayward,” you might picture someone lost, rebellious, wandering. For most of my life I thought being wayward was a flaw. I colored inside the lines of cookie-cutter organizations until silencing who I was felt like dying. Eventually I started to ask: What if “wayward” isn’t failure at all when I was finally able to name it? What if it’s calling in disguise?
This is probably the twentieth draft of this story. Each rewrite peels back another layer of the masks I’ve worn, the atheist who scoffed at faith, the stoic Airman and Guardian untouched by what he’d seen, the happy husband and father with the “perfect” life. Maybe I was all of them; maybe none. Wayward Minds is about removing the last mask and accepting who I am. It’s my “do one” after years of observing, stumbling, therapy, counseling, and slowly learning to live my faith. It’s confessional. Imperfect. Real.
There are a hundred places I could begin, but I’ll start with this: in my house hangs a piece of raw wood I found in an old German lumber yard. A forgotten board I bought for a few euros, dragged from a dusty second floor in a saw mill where I probably shouldn’t have been. It’s moved with us through every assignment and house since and through every upheaval. Little pencil lines notch my kids’ growth; even our pets’ first and last days. What looks like a quirky yardstick is, for me, a quiet reminder of stability and growth.
I never had a wall like that. As the child of divorced parents passed back and forth as leverage for child support checks, I became a child of many homes, trailers, couches; even a shack in the woods I built as a teenager. I was measured on friends’ doorframes because I never stayed long enough to claim one as mine. I lived out of a traveling trunk I didn’t fully unpack until about two weeks ago. Maybe that’s why that board matters: it’s not polished, but it’s ours. A constant in a life that once felt fragmented and directionless. Every time I pass it, I’m reminded that even the most wayward journeys have markers of progress, and of the stability I owe my children, my wife, and myself.
To my children, if you ever read this: I owe you an apology. As everything between your mother and me fell apart this last year, I learned you used your birthday wishes on us, your small magic, your prayers, to hold us together. Birthday wishes are sacred when you’re a kid, pure hope, and I robbed you of that. I didn’t give you the stability of the board on our wall. I carry that weight. I’m also sorry for the other ways I lost myself, for what your mom and I became in front of you, for the times I wasn’t present because I felt alone, buried under shame and despair. Through it all, the one constant was the relationship I was slowly learning to build with God, the Catholic community that stood by me even when the military questioned my stability or whether counseling, or faith, were “enough” for them. In my darkest times, I shouted into the void and let my voice land where it wasn’t cared for, and it warped how I saw the world.
And so I write, not to tie neat bows on these experiences, but to witness. Resilience isn’t the absence of wounds; it’s the willingness to walk with them. I’m learning to love the discipline of honesty more than the comfort of silence. I’m writing a record for my children, my wife, myself, and maybe for you, if you’re wandering the same corridors of doubt and devotion. This isn’t a manifesto; it’s a beginning for me. A gesture toward the idea that we’re not broken, only being translated into new languages of meaning and purpose. What we do with that translation is on us.
There are nights when memory returns first as scent before it returns as thought. Lourdes was like that. My wife and I moved inside a river of strangers who weren’t strangers for long, thousands stepping in uneven cadence while Ave, Ave, Ave Maria braided every language into one song. In that current, my why began to shift. Through my pain, it stopped being only about easing my own hurt; it started being about offering someone else relief.
But, before purpose found me and I say that story, I was truly lost. I learned to go numb to cope. I became an Airman and readied for war at a young age. I became the uniform; I became my rank. We were told we defended the Nation, the Constitution, the hopes and dreams of those we protect when we put on the cloth of our country. I’ve known many who took off that uniform, and many who never got the chance. Some came home wearing it still; body intact, soul already on its way home. These experiences provide a context, but nonetheless; I still wear my uniform proudly, and still glad I can every day.
Early on in my military career, I moved off the flight line, from loading bombs others would take into battle to providing the intel that decided where those bombs might go. I went from being a cog who could partition himself off after the jets roared away to knowing exactly what those missions might do, and often seeing what they did. With knowledge came a burden I wasn’t ready for. I carried things home that no rucksack could hold: invisible wounds, moral injuries that followed me from mission to traffic to kitchen table. I buried the pain in work, distraction, alcohol; telling myself the next bottle had the answer. I surrounded myself with people telling the same lies.
I called myself an atheist, bitter, disillusioned, convinced faith was a crutch. We all search for something to base a life on. I built mine on supporting others; when that cracked, on their approval; when that failed, on myself; when I failed, I gave everything to the uniform. I confused what I did, or how I did it, with who I was. I chased meaning everywhere: the big three Abrahamic faiths, Buddhism, Stoicism; edgy cynicism, read books like I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, and barroom bravado about preferring hell with friends to heaven alone. I even started the process of becoming a Freemason at one point, grasping for fraternity, and a purpose I was longing for; missing. Nothing filled the hole. I chased praise more than what was right, which is why I still dislike how our awards system can turn something personal into a metric, an assembly line of checkboxes where meaning used to be.
Home didn’t get easier. I was a husband, but not a good one. Shame from my past, childhood trauma, and undiagnosed ADHD ran like a fault line through everything. My differences got framed as moral failings or social inconveniences. Each dropped ball made me feel smaller. I started to believe I was the problem. The shame was suffocating, its own sinister ecstasy, a self-torture I wore like armor.
My mind grew dark. I isolated, even from my wife, friends, kids. Days were motions; nights were questions about whether any of it was worth it. I never crossed into an attempt, or started the process to go down the path I’ve seen so many others go down, but I peered over the edge a few times in my past trying to understand why others stepped off it. I believe everyone carries a private scale from “great day” to “I can’t go on.” Mine tilted hard. Only a sliver of will, and maybe a whisper of grace I didn’t yet recognize, kept me from sliding further. Or, maybe my obsession with horror films, where the damned always end up in hell, kept me from stepping too close to the edge where I’d seen too many fall, including my mother.
There are stories orbiting those years, near-misses and miracles. The night we raced to the hospital where I almost lost my wife and our firstborn; she weighed less than a pound at twenty-four weeks when she arrived. I remember sprinting down hallways trying to save them both. A father who abandoned me in one of my most vulnerable moments. A vow whispered to a God I didn’t know. Saving each of my four kids at least once. Near-death misses, abuse, trauma, lies, sins confessed later; all while clinging to the belief I could do it alone.
I suspect God always saw I cared deeply, even when my care was wildly misguided. It took hitting rock bottom, again and again, before I surrendered. One day on a backyard trampoline with my kids, I couldn’t breathe, the bill for eight years of heavy smoking and neglect of my health. Traded for hours of mission and operations; selfish career grinding at the expense of myself and family. Trading doing everything I could to help another human I would never meet; at the expense of who I was. In that gasp in my backyard, a memory slammed me: begging my own mother to jump, watching her laughter flip to an asthma attack, joy draining as she fought for air. The moment and the memory braided into a single challenge: If I don’t take responsibility for my healing, who will? If I keep waiting for the “right time,” when will it come? Healing wasn’t just about me anymore. It was for the little ones looking up at me, and for what I figured others who were fighting the same invisible battles.
As a teenager living between feuding parents, I wrote that life was a “sinister ecstasy” in a poem long forgotten (no one really knows what it means, but it gets the people going), while being used and passed back and forth, a thing rather than a person. I was a child support check more than a child. Organizations and systems do the same, reduce people to functions. Maybe that’s why the military felt like home in a twisted way, and why parts of it still do. A story for another time.
My wife and I met in the throes (that’s one way to put it) of youthful chaos. At the time two undiagnosed-ADHD, traumatized, mask-wearing sinners who somehow met in holy matrimony; now trying our best to be good parents to four amazing kids. Our early marriage had all the predictable drama of young military life. (Fun fact she’ll love me sharing: I got caught sneaking and letting my then-girlfriend into my dorm, and stay there when I was at work on the flight line…and yes, her dad worked at the base fire station. Lucky for me, me and my girlfriend were the same age, and my supervisor gave me extra work, rather than the paperwork he should have.) Our early dates were romantic and ridiculous, a candle I tried to convince her to steal as a souvenir we could cherish forever; me mistaking shredded carrots for cheese at a fancy Greek restaurant (something she hasn’t let me live down to this day). By day three I basically declared she was my girlfriend like a caveman. We’ve been together ever since, and almost lost our way back to each other three times.
The military man in me learned certain lessons, and still more everyday; often wrapped in war stories and mantras, many reinforced by voices like Ryan Hawk on one of my favorite podcasts: The Learning Leader Show. I keep circling a line from retired General Stanley McChrystal’s Character: one of the biggest regrets he carries into retirement is not standing strongly enough when the organization failed someone and he could have helped. In my darkest stretches, God kept placing people in my path who pulled me back as I have come to accept and understand, and I want to be that kind of person for others. It will take many pieces to honor the few who saved me, but for now I’ll say this: we call silence restraint; in practice, silence is consent. In a marriage or a unit, silence leaves someone swinging like a piñata; exposed, inviting opportunists to fill the vacuum where conviction should be. Leadership isn’t posture; it’s presence. Same hard lesson I’ve learned for marriage.
I didn’t begin with faith; far from it. For years the “honest” position was atheism; agnostic at best. I joked my theology was Dr. Pepper: everyone agrees there are 23 flavors; we just can’t name them. Life burns away half-answers. Trauma stacked on trauma. Moral injury. Marital collapse. The slow self-destruction and ultimate self-imposed actions of someone you love leading to their own decision to take their own life: suicide. Eventually I prayed, not because I suddenly believed, but because there was nothing left to do.
My mom’s death just a few years ago now sealed that turn. Her dying was slow and messy. The culmination of pains she’d carried her whole life. Call it overdose, self-inflicted, suicide by another name; it broke me. (If you’re an organ donor, tell your family; I found out my mom was in the worst way.) My battlefield in uniform wasn’t mud and blood but fluorescent rooms and endless research, making sure downrange teams had the best information possible. We were told our work saved lives and I know it does. I still proudly serve to this day; however, when findings cut too close to power, we were told to stay small. The dissonance still echoes, in work and in faith.
There’s another moral injury that doesn’t come from what you did, but from what you wonder if you didn’t: Did I do enough? Did I do it right? No limp, no visible scar, just an inward one where doubt gnaws. I tried to quiet that doubt the way I watched my parents quiet theirs: alcohol, drugs, silence, cheap dopamine, self-pity. My father still nurses his slow suicide with bottles. I forgave him long ago; he is who he is. Early in my marriage I mailed him all my jewelry, my wife’s, too; to melt down into a ring for my proposal to her. He sold it, kept the money; and called it payment for what he’d spent on me as a kid. My mother chose a different path of self-destruction, not one dramatic act, but a decades-long slide.
I can still see myself by her hospital bed, talking to her, to a God I wasn’t sure I believed in yet, and to myself, while machines hummed around us. The same hum I’d heard years before outside my wife’s German hospital door as she fought to keep our firstborn alive. Life circles back in cruel ways. The last hour after they pulled my mom from life support, after I, her son, had to make the decision whether she lived or died; was both the shortest and the longest of my life. Just days before, she was supposed to come stay with me, suitcase packed with presents for the grandchildren she would never see again. Instead, she lay there, too stubborn to let me watch her go. They said she wouldn’t last more than a few minutes, but she held on. They let me in the room, and I squeezed her hand three times; our childhood code for “I love you.” But the four squeezes back “I love you, too” never came. Only when I drove home the next day did she finally release. Hours later during the drive home, the call came. She left on her terms. Strength inside weakness, stubbornness to the end; a woman who refused to let her son witness her final breath. This paragraph has been one of the hardest I’ve ever had to write.
Months later, I dreamed my mom visited me. Vivid, real, and I still carry that conversation, one meant only for the two of us. Around that same time, Wendy, the woman who helped raise me when I had no mother present, taught me optimism like no one else. People talk about glasses being half full or half empty; Wendy always said the glass is always full; part water, part air. A mindset I’ve woven into my life. When she was dying of cancer, I dropped everything and drove to Tennessee. My wife held the fort, and my thesis advisor, now friend, told me, “Don’t worry.” We watched Star Wars, reminisced, and simply held on. It wasn’t about words; it was presence. And presence, I’ve learned, is what saves us. I’ll save the full stories of Wendy for another time, because she truly was an amazing woman who shaped who I became. To me, she was living proof that God exists. I owed her so much, but the one thing she needed most, time, I could never give her enough of.
All of it collapses into one image just a few years ago: my wife and I landing in France, stepping into Lourdes on a pilgrimage for wounded warriors seeking healing from moral injury. We’d been through fire; counseling, separation, new self-awareness, mess spilling into friendships and work. Neither of us grew up with the kind of family that drops everything; we had to build family out of strangers. Still, we tried. We sought to have our marriage blessed in the Church, by a priest who has become my spiritual advisor, one of my godfathers, and brought me home to the Catholic church. We looked for redemption. One night my wife said, “We’ve tried everything except the spiritual route…want to try that?”
A few heart-to-hearts with a priest, some knee-to-knee and eye-to-eye with the love of my life, and a thousand tears later, the Knights of Columbus flew us to France. I wasn’t Catholic yet. They saw the moral injury in me and knew we needed God more than we knew. Amid candles, crowds, and cold stone, something shifted. I knelt at the grotto in military dress uniform, palm on the wet rock, and felt the weight lift just a little. In a moment of surrender I prayed; probably fully, for the first time. I asked God for help, for strength, for proof I wasn’t alone.
No lightning bolt. No instant cure. No choir of angels descending to sing me out of my mess. Just me, my baggage, and a faint flicker I hadn’t felt in a long time: hope. I believe God was with me even in my angriest, emptiest moments; in Lourdes I finally cracked the door open, my neurocomplex mind, for once, not just spinning but listening. I held my wife’s hands in the baths and thought, maybe all this pain could mean something after all. I swam in glacier-fed water that felt like a punch to the soul, drank a beer with priests and learned some new jokes, and slept in the tiniest, stuffiest room Europe could engineer (maybe on purpose, to herd us pilgrims out into community; and if so, well played). On the flight home, I didn’t erase my pain; I just filed it. Because you can’t ignore your thoughts and feelings, trust me, I tried. You acknowledge them, let them scar over in their own jagged time, and hope the scar tissue holds better than duct tape (we all can’t hope Red Green will come save us).
Change unnerves everyone it touches. Lourdes marked a new beginning and left me on a ridgeline, climbing alone. I started rebuilding: therapy, spiritual direction, apologies, self-awareness of my own neurocomplexity, forgiveness; for my wife, for others, for myself. I studied my brain and habits like a lab rat who kept failing the maze. I leaned into the relationship I was building with God, though half the time it felt like talking to an answering machine that for some reason someone still had. I re-entered the Church community I’d held at arm’s length, trying to convince myself that vulnerability wasn’t just a polite word for bleeding in public. Faith stopped being a one-time decision and became a daily response. Later I learned the Latin phrase, ex opere operantis: grace received in proportion to our openness. The work of the worker; the fire you carry and how you use it. That lesson carried me home to the Catholic Church. To me, words mean things, and learning the words changed everything. Each morning now, I try, imperfectly most days, to choose purpose, even if some mornings purpose looks a lot like dragging myself out of bed muttering, “Fine, God, you win. Again.”
None of this was neat. Old numbness didn’t vanish. We all do stupid shit. I quit smoking. I got healthier. I stumbled. The vows I made in Lourdes followed me, and then, just months later, we collapsed harder than ever. Divorce papers. Six months of near silence. Every unresolved wound and unspoken resentment collided at once. We inflicted on each other the very pain we each knew too well. I won’t narrate every detail; we’re still in the healing process, and she has a say in that story. But I will say this to my wife: I’m sorry for who I became in this last season. Nothing prepared me for the vacuum of having no one and then losing the one constant in my life I’d had the longest. We became prisoners in our own home; separate rooms, passing like ghosts, communicating through cold emails and court-approved emotionless texts. Families took sides. Old wounds reopened. And through it all I realized: I still love you. I don’t ignore what happened, but in my heart, I want you in my life forever.
In that void, my OCIA (Order of Christian Initiation of Adults - Catholic Church’s process for adults who are interested in becoming Catholic, or for baptized Catholics who haven’t yet completed their sacraments) family became my Nathans to David as I learned through beginning to read scripture; truth-tellers and safeguards against my own neurocomplex ADHD mind. They gave me more support and guidance than any professional had to that point. They helped me see my conversion had to be mine alone; not for my wife or kids, but between me and God. Ironically, it took our separation for me to know that. If it had all been smooth, I might always wonder if I converted to Catholicism only to save my marriage, or for someone else. Instead, I had to reach for God, and walk this path alone.
Am I perfect now? Not close. I still stumble daily.
But I’ve stopped pretending “not broken” is the goal. One of the worst mistakes in mental health is telling someone in pain, “You’re fine.” It erases the human in front of us. Neurodivergent minds like mine aren’t broken; we’ve been forced to wear other people’s masks in a world not built for us. My work now is translation, taking the weather inside my head and boiling it into language that connects instead of shouting into the void.
I’ve been part of processes and systems that should’ve offered care, but instead pushed my wife and me into adversarial corners. I was command-directed into a redundant evaluation even though I had a counselor, a priest, and therapy. When I asked questions, and begged for empathy; I was labeled a problem. A personality test under stress flagged ADHD as “narcissism.” Then I was told not to be defensive; that this was care. But care reduced to compliance isn’t care.
Moral injury doesn’t just live in policies; it lives in us. In a season of depression, my wife drew a piece she still calls unfinished. I believe that’s its power. Healing rarely arrives polished. Her sketch looks like someone bleeding from unseen cuts. To me it looked like my own journey; trying to help others while bleeding out myself. Where I bleed onto the page with words, she bleeds onto paper with lines and shadows. My writing is my confession; her drawing was hers. Sometimes the only way we know to say we’re not okay is through what leaks out around the mask.
Systems matter, but presence matters more. What changed me were the priests who sat with me in silence when I had no words, the friends who stayed when others walked away, and a God who met me at a rock wall in France. The discipline now is choosing honesty over avoidance and building spaces where confession meets care instead of punishment.
Alfred Adler, someone I base some of my leadership coaching around, wrote that the great question eventually shifts from “How do I survive?” to “Who needs what I have to give?” That turn is harder when systems feel weaponized, when paperwork replaces presence, and truth sounds like guilt. I’ve watched too many fall through seams we maintain meticulously but rarely mend. And yet grace breaks through; in silence, friendship, song, in rare moments I wasn’t a problem to fix but simply present: a son, a husband, a service member, healing alongside others with wounds too deep for policy to touch.
Faith, neurodivergence, trauma; none of it lines up neatly. ADHD isn’t a superpower and it isn’t a curse. It sharpens some edges and cuts others. The only way forward is to wrestle with it: translate its energy, buffer its damage, learn not just how my brain hits the world, but how the world hits back. I’m learning to see my wayward mind as design, not defect; intensity that once drove me to collapse now channeled into contribution, impact, and purpose.
I don’t have cures. I have promises; small, stubborn ones to myself and anyone reading: to stop letting broken systems set our emotional default; to remember cultures weren’t built with all of us in mind and what matters is how we choose to engage them; to build spaces where confession doesn’t trigger punishment; to let faith and grit be lifelines, not loopholes; to measure resilience by connection, not compliance. Maybe wayward doesn’t mean broken, it means misaligned, restless for something truer. Purpose is what happens when we turn that misalignment into fuel. The enemy; trauma and despair. They get a vote. So do we. Every day my vote is to keep showing up. To answer the call. To look someone in the eye and say, “I’ve got seven minutes. Always. I’m here.”
There’s already too much noise out there. Slogans about “grit” that disintegrate the moment life actually punches you in the teeth. Inspiration and motivation without transformation; cheap fuel that burns out before it even warms the room. Endless cheap dopamine scroll sessions to feed a malnourished and misunderstood neurocomplex mind. I’m after the slow kind of change, the kind that seeps into bone and calcifies into daily discipline. Social media sold me a counterfeit version of connection; I mistook broadcasting for presence and vulnerability. Broadcasting begs for attention; vulnerability gives it. One is performance. The other is presence. I’ve bled publicly and called it courage, splattering my pain onto others like that would somehow heal them; or me. My wife’s sketch bled lines onto paper; I bled words onto people who never asked to carry them. Now, finally, I’m learning that maybe the bravest thing isn’t bleeding in public at all, but showing up quietly and offering presence instead.
Wayward Purpose exists because I’ve lost people to suicide; in uniform and in my own family. I’ve lived the system’s response: checklists, PowerPoints, prevention reduced to paperwork. People reduced to functions. People are not equipment; you can’t bring them back online with a signature. This work is our answer: get to the front end before someone decides the only way out is to step off the edge. Help neurodivergent, faith-driven service members and veterans understand their minds and their pain. Name moral injury and shame for what they are. Turn intensity into contribution, impact, purpose instead of collapse and misalignment.
Why Wayward? Because my path here was never straight. I wandered. Doubled back. Shed mask after mask, like a bad actor stuck in the wrong play, or like Nicolas Cage playing every role possible. Purpose wasn’t waiting at the end of some neatly paved road; it showed up limping on the far side of wandering. At this point, I’d rather spend what life I have left playing to my strengths, fully aware of the landmines that are my weak spots, leaning on God, and building alongside people whose gifts fill the gaps I can’t duct tape shut on my own (just remember, if the women don’t find you handsome, they should at least find you handy).
This Substack is our “do one” in the “see one, do one, teach one” mantra: a raw, unfiltered space for questions, experiments, scars, and small victories. A small window into our mind as we contribute to what we are building at Wayward Purpose. With the vision that it will grow into the teach one: the frameworks, practices, and community we’ll offer freely to anyone it might help. I’m not a guru. My only real strength is learning fast and turning that learning into action. Taking complex ideas, translating them into something usable, and sharing them with the people who need them. Less a problem-solver than an opportunity-seeker.
That’s why this belongs here. Wayward Purpose isn’t a polished brand. It’s a gathering place for restless, wandering souls; veterans, neurodivergent minds, faith-curious seekers, who don’t fit the self-help mold. A place to bring your whole self, even the bleeding parts, and find company instead of isolation. If Jesus could sit at a table with drunks and gamblers and prostitutes, then Wayward Purpose can sit at the digital tables where the lost gather; offering light, presence, and hope where I once walked and held company.
Any money given here isn’t about monetizing pain. It fuels a vision: stop suicide; build what the system can’t: connection, coaching, and community that saves lives.
I’m showing up as a fellow wayward traveler. Mud on my boots, scrapes still healing, trying to bring something good out of all this. Some weeks we’ll share a hard story. Some weeks, a tool. Some weeks, a quiet truth. No highlight reels. Just the ongoing process of healing and walking with others toward purpose.
If we are for you; walk with us. Let’s build this different wayward road together.