Chapter VIII: 

​

The Way Back/The First Arena

​

I once heard a line — I still don’t know who said it:

“Anxiety is just energy without a purpose.”

Fine.

Then I would give mine a purpose.

​

I signed up as a volunteer literacy tutor.

Books had kept me alive;

maybe they could keep someone else upright long enough to find air.

That single choice became the hinge on which my life turned.

After a few months they hired me on a one-year contract.

ESL classes. GED prep.

Reading and writing with people whose stories cracked the shell of my self-pity.

The center sat in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in the world —

over forty languages crossing the same threshold every day.
And it humbled me, hard.

​

The people who walked through those doors had lived through things I had never imagined:

Civil war.
Deserts crossed on foot.
Governments collapsing around them.
Uprooted from everything they knew —

forced to learn a language that wasn’t theirs simply to survive.

Everything I thought was a “problem” dissolved.

My grief was real, yes —

but theirs carried entire histories inside it.

Entire bloodlines.

Entire nations.

And yet… they showed up.
They tried.
They practiced their consonants with trembling hands.
They laughed when they mispronounced something.
They worked.

​

The reciprocity of those small sessions —

an hour at a table, a notebook between us — reshaped me. 

 Humility drummed in my ribs. 

My perception shifted. My attention sharpened.

I felt alive for the first time without chemicals in my system.

There were moments where I had to swallow tears mid-conversation —

not because of sadness, but because of the sheer beauty of it.
Their courage lit something in me I didn’t know was still there.

 

Resita—a Haitian mother—became my teacher long before I understood it.

We bonded.
Her spirit still speaks to me to this day.

Relentless.

She would nod off mid-sentence during our sessions,
worn down by the weight of her life—
work, her son, her family.

Then she’d catch herself.

Shake awake.
Stand up.

And keep going.

She never missed a session.
No matter how exhausted.

Her smile—always genuine, never forced—
lives in me like a photograph.

I’d tell her,
“You need rest.
You won’t retain it like this.”

But she never gave in.

“I cannot,” she’d say.
“My son needs this.
I need this.”

I didn’t know it then,
but I was witnessing a Fire
as powerful as any I will ever meet again.

 

Every day became another lesson

in what it takes

to live a life in this world. 

When the contract ended,

I reapplied.

I walked into the interview ready, mapped out answers, braced for approval.

But the director sat across from me with a sly smile.
I hated that smile immediately.

​

What did I do wrong?

Why are you smiling like that when you’re about to cut me open?

​

She finally spoke.

​

“Sean… we aren’t offering you the position this year because…”

Everything in me stopped moving. 

I died between the words.

“…because we want to offer you something better.

Something we couldn’t find a better person for.”

That “better” was the Fire cracking open the next door.

A position as a mentor and facilitator for a juvenile reentry program.

​

Which meant:
I would be looking into mirrors every day —

boys and young men whose lives rhymed with my own,

whose mistakes were carved from the same hunger,

whose shadows walked beside them the way mine once walked beside me.

I’d never been so excited.
And terrified.
Imposter syndrome clawed at me.

On day one, I understood exactly why.

There I was — a white kid from the suburbs —

sitting at a table with boys and young men who shared neither my culture nor my upbringing.

Except one thing.

We all knew the Beast.
We all knew what it was to wander unsupervised in the dark.

​

Trust was everything.

And trust takes time.

Truth recognizes truth —

even across skin, culture, and history. 

​

I didn’t flinch. 

My Beast knew its own language, and it could speak to theirs.

 I offered what no one had offered me at their age:

Attention.
Honesty.
Endless questions.
Challenge, without humiliation.
Presence, without performance.

They pushed back.
As they should.

And every time I stood my ground without posturing, something in them loosened.

​

The trust didn’t fully open until we started peace circles with a partner program —

a ritualized space where every boy had the right to speak without being mocked, dismissed, or punished.

And in that circle, their Beasts finally spoke.
Not with violence — with truth.
With grief.
With rage.
With laughter.
With the relief of finally being seen.

I watched them remember the very thing our culture taught them to forget:

They were not broken.
They were uninitiated.

Disconnected from the wisdom once passed from generation to generation.

 

The Sacredness of the Circle

​

No description does it justice.
A peace circle looks simple —

chairs, bodies, breath —

but the elements at play refuse to be captured fully by ink or tongue.
You only understand once you sit inside one.

A circle.
A topic.
A silence thick enough to hear your own heartbeat.

Two guardians, maybe one facilitator.
And at the center: the talking piece —

an object meaningless to the uninitiated,

holy to those who learn its weight.

A stone, a feather, a carved scrap of wood.

Anything that lets the Fire breathe.

If the piece rests in your palms, you may speak. Or you may sit in silence.
That option is crucial.

Armor never falls from pressure; it loosens when it finally feels safe enough to slip.

​

Those first circles were awkward — predictable.
These boys had armor thicker than the one I wore at their age.
Layers of it: street-learned reflexes, survival instincts,

masks they didn’t even know they were wearing.
But the circle doesn’t demand; it beckons.
It holds you until you are ready to let something slip.

I watched boys sit week after week, eyes down, shoulders low —

until one day the dam cracked.
Tears.
Shaking hands.
Anger spoken without shame.
Grief rising from years of silence.

And then — the miracle:
the way the other boys responded
when truth entered the room.
Snaps.
Respect.
Hands pressed to chests.
Nods of recognition.

No mockery.
No laughter.
Just truth meeting truth.
I nearly choked on my own tears.

About two weeks in, something shifted.
The older boys began guarding the circle themselves.
They became referees, sentinels.
If a younger one started joking or breaking the silence,

I didn’t have to lift a finger.

“Yo. Zip it.
This man’s talking for real.”

Respect —

not from fear, not from authority, but from recognition —

is a rare currency.
And they gave it.
To me.
Because I didn’t hide.
I didn’t sanitize anything.
I told them the truth —

the stories they didn’t believe,

the darkness I lived through,

the pain I caused,

the Fire I couldn’t contain.
And when they messed with me,

laughed at my stories, teased me for being “a soft white boy,”

I took it as the compliment it was:

​

They trusted me enough to play.

​

And I always had the same half-joke, half-thunder response.

​

Come find out.

​

(My supervisor would cringe and remind me every time afterward, 

“you can’t say that!!”)

 

Respect the Anger Within

​

One kid — big, emotional, volcanic — was my mirror.
The younger ones are usually the most dangerous:

too much fuel, not enough consequence.
When this one got angry, he didn’t go red — he went crimson.

We had to restrain him once.
Afterward, I sat with him in a quiet room still buzzing with heat.

“I know where you go when you get that angry,” I told him.
“You won’t believe me now, but I see myself in you.
Your rage is passion.
And you’ve got more of it than most grown men ever will.
We need you here.
The circle isn’t the same without you.
Just walk outside next time.
Say ‘fuck this’ as many times as you need.

Break something that doesn’t have consequences.
But don’t let that rage ruin your life.

I know you could knock some heads off.
But all it takes is one head — one moment —

for everything to change your life forever.”

He didn’t answer.
He didn’t need to.

That is the power of the circle.

When the walls fall, something real walks in —

something ancient, something honest,

something that every culture before ours understood instinctively:

The circle is the great equalizer.
The sacred geometry where the Beast finally speaks without being punished for its voice.

I don’t use the word “miracle” lightly.
But what I witnessed in those circles was exactly that.
Not because the boys were special — though they were — but because truth is rare now.
Because honesty among young men has become an endangered thing.
Because in a world of noise, posturing, and digital masks,

something as simple as a circle restored what the world forgot.

A circle became the answer.
A circle became the Fire.
A circle became the place where we returned to ourselves.

Red Tape and Lies

The system was never built to save them.
It was built to manage them — shuffle them — document them —

bury them under forms and signatures until the boy inside went quiet.

Programs came and went with the fiscal year.
Funding renewed, then vanished.
Staff rotated like weather fronts.
And the boys who tried the hardest —

the ones clawing at the edges of their own extinction —

were always the ones most likely to be swallowed first.

Two faces live inside me permanently.
Not as memories — as wounds.

They walked through the doors every day with crooked grins,

eyes bright with that frantic hunger to learn, to be challenged, to be seen.
When they weren’t in the room, the circle felt tilted.
Then came more days without them.
And the sick logic of the streets whispered its verdict:

They weren’t coming back.
And it was not their choice.

One was locked up.
One was killed.
That’s the math of a world without Guardians.

Their names will be carved into the walls of The Arena.
Not as decoration — as indictment.

It was in the ache of losing them that the first vision of The Arena came:
A warehouse.
Rough. Ugly. Alive.
Rooms divided for movement,

voice, grief, and creation —

a dojo, a studio, bunks, a kitchen, a circle that never closed.
A place open at 2 a.m. when a boy’s grief hits him hardest.
A place where the Beast has somewhere to go besides the grave or the cage.

I realized then:
This was bigger than “dangerous neighborhoods.”
Boys everywhere are exiled from the spaces they need to grow.

Good homes. Broken homes. Rich. Poor. Rural. Urban.
Different languages — same wound.

They all need the same thing: 

A place for their Beast, 

the Fire, 

structure, challenge, belonging, Guardianship.

That warehouse was the seed.
The Arena is the tree.

 

 

The System Doesn’t Feel

​

The lesson came cold.

I had finally landed what felt like my dream job —

a three-year contract mentoring adult felons.
It felt like destiny putting a hand on my shoulder.

I crushed the interview.
Told the truth.
Laid my past on the table like a confession.
They offered me the job on the spot.

Then on day one, fifteen minutes in,

a stranger led me to a beige cubicle and said they had to run a background check.

“Sure,” I said.

“No problem. I already told them everything.”

He stared at his screen and asked,

“You don’t have anything violent on there, do you?”

I paused.

“Umm… does aggravated battery count?”

​

I laughed the bitter laugh of a man who knows the gods by name and none of them play fair.

Because who is more qualified to guide men out of the dark,

than someone who’s crawled through it barefoot?

​

Of course, I didn’t get the job.

On paper, I understood why.

Liability has its own language.

But paper cannot measure transformation.

Systems can record the wound.

They cannot always recognize the scar.
This vision won’t be built inside a machine that treats men like liabilities.
It has to be forged outside of it.

So I looked at the sky and said:
Fine.
I’ll build it myself.

​

An Interlude:

I Will Not Forget

​

In those years I made friendships unlike any I’d known before.
Not built on bravado or masks, not on nightlife or escape —
but on the raw currency of truth.
On sitting in half-lit rooms, porches cracked by winter,

stale smoke drifting between sentences,
and saying out loud what most people never admit even to themselves.

These were men and women who let the armor fall.
Who showed me the soft underbelly beneath the grit.
Who laughed with their whole chest,

even when their eyes were drowning.
They didn’t pretend to be strong —

they were strong, because they were honest.

That’s what made losing them unbearable.

When someone you love dies from addiction,

you don’t mourn the mask.
You mourn the light behind it.
You mourn the tenderness you saw in private moments,
the jokes whispered at 2 a.m.,
the way they leaned on your shoulder when the world felt too sharp.

One day you’re smoking together, laughing about something stupid —
a joke that doesn’t even matter now —
and the next you hear they died alone in a motel room
with the television still glowing in the dark.

 
And each one carved a mark in me that has never closed.
Their laughter.
Their hunger.
Their fire.
Echoes — reminders of how high the stakes are,

and how low a man can sink without a circle to hold him.

Sobriety isn’t just saving your own life.
It’s carrying the dead with you.
It’s letting their absence sharpen your vow.
It’s knowing exactly what you escaped,
and exactly who didn’t.

Addiction is the proof of what happens when Fire is left without a vessel.
It is hunger turned in on itself.
It is a wound rotting in the dark.
Withdrawal is not metaphor — it is hell in the bloodstream.
Families shatter.
Years vanish.
Bodies shake until they break.

And all of it points to the same truth:
once the flame twists inward, it is almost impossible to straighten again.

Prevention is not “better.”
Prevention is mercy.
Prevention is the only path that saves the boy
before he becomes a man chained to cravings older than reason.

Because the real enemy was never the pill, the bottle, the needle.
Those are symptoms.
The real trials are older:

Pain.
Fear.
Isolation.
The absence of a Guardian when the storm arrives.

Face pain early, before it grows teeth.
Face fear early, before it names you.
Face the Beast early, before it devours everything good that might have been.

The Arena exists for this reason:
not to rescue men already undone,
but to give boys a crucible where Fire is shaped, not feared —
where instinct becomes wisdom,
and the Beast becomes an ally instead of a jailer.

​

 

Sally

​

She was tall,

dark auburn hair,

red glasses—stylish, a little bold—

magnifying blue eyes

you couldn’t ignore. 

She had the kind of beauty

that made me worry for her —

not because beauty is weakness,

but because the world knows how to steal from the wounded. 

 You could hear the ache in her voice every time she spoke,
as if the words had to push through ghosts just to reach daylight.

I respected her boundaries, and my own.
I had taken a vow: no dating, no sex, no romance in my first year of sobriety.
The vow made room for a real friendship —
one free of the noise and confusion that often clouds desire.

She didn’t laugh often,
but when she did,
it came with her whole body—
a sudden, unguarded snort
that broke through everything.

Every time I heard it,
my own laughter followed,
rising to meet hers.

 

But she carried a war inside her that no one could see.
A war I feared she was fighting alone.
The possibilities of what she had endured still twist my stomach in knots.
I never pushed her to say more than she wanted.
Sometimes I wonder if I should have.
The maybes still haunt me.

She faced her own death by choice.
She hung herself from a tree on the north side of Chicago.

I don’t write that for shock.
I write it because truth must be allowed to haunt,
or we learn nothing. 

 Because she deserved to be remembered, not anonymized.
Because the pain that made life impossible for her
was not her fault.

It was not hers alone to carry.

It belonged to a world

that failed to hold her. 

A society that fails its wounded, then blames them for bleeding.

She deserved a circle.
She deserved a fire.
She deserved an Arena.
Something real.
Someone real.

I know a page is not enough.

It never could be.

But now she has this page.

Now she has this vow. 

 

 

How many more must we bury
before we remember
what we were entrusted to protect?