A few particular details define my childhood. I belonged to a big family. I grew up in North Dakota. I was a pastor’s kid. And I constantly felt misunderstood. 

Everyone feels this to some extent. How much can anyone really understand another person? But I believed that no one wanted to know me. On my worst days, I suppose I still believe that. 

My dad was about as straight-laced as they come. A farm kid from a pious Lutheran family. No cards. No dice. Certainly no booze. But they were the real deal too. In church every Sunday. Living out the kind of love and forgiveness that they heard from the pew. Albeit with a little judgement on the side. 

My mom is a ton of fun to be around, but she has no confidence that she’s likeable. She basically raised her family, or at least took emotional responsibility for them from a young age. She cooked and cleaned for them since she was about 10. What she doesn’t say is that she also carried the weight of their happiness on her little shoulders. She still does that for us. 

So how did I become so messed up with two wonderful parents like that? Good question. I suppose it’s those same traits that I admire in them that also created my own faults. 

From my father I learned to not quit until the job is done, patience when life throws you hurdles, and discipline to keep personal chaos at bay. But I also learned to never complain or speak my mind—even when I was dying inside. I learned nothing of standing up for myself.

From my mother I learned how to keep the peace and how food brings family together. But I also learned how to avoid conflict at all costs for the appearance of peace. If there isn’t peace, then I am the one to blame. Maybe I also inherited from her my self-doubt. 

That means I became a very nice, naive teen who let himself get pushed around by friends and enemies in the hope of being liked. I was good at recognizing failures to communicate, but it didn’t help in the likeability department. 

I didn’t really stand for anything, so there wasn’t much of a personality to like or dislike. I didn’t really let anyone see me. The world inside my head belonged to me alone. 

It was a good world, filled with stories I wrote, things I created, and LEGO, mostly LEGO. 

Then I met a girl in college who seemed to really get me. I latched onto her as much as she latched onto me. I had never felt so understood by anyone. I didn’t know much, but I knew that I wanted to be the object of her affection for the rest of my life, so I married her. 

Life with her was exciting! Which in hindsight was just a pseudonym for tumultuous. Things would be wonderful for a week and then terrible for two. I tried so hard to understand why, to understand her.

One by one, my family members each did something trivial that warranted her hatred forever. 

In her eyes, my oldest brother went from being “a great spiritual leader of his family” to being a liar and controlling manipulator. 

My next brother went from being a funny storyteller to creepy and inappropriately flirty. 

My sister was entitled and annoying. 

My youngest brother kicked her under the table or something.

And my mom apparently made a face of disapproval at her once. 

You get the idea. You know the type. 

There was more to it, but the important part was that I kept compromising who I was, just so I could cram myself into her distorted reality. A reality I was liking less and less. Isolated from my apparently terrible family and at the brink of insanity, I walked away—or rather, fled in the night. I’ve never looked back.  

Slowly, I picked up the broken pieces of my life and started to discover what it meant to be my own person.

My family was an amazing support through this time. It’s a funny place to be when you appreciate your family more than ever before, but are also more aware of the ways they have failed you. We are all pretty flawed, and I think we all know it. That’s the main difference between them and my ex. 

At my job, I used my face—and mostly my hands—to grow a YouTube channel from a couple thousand subscribers to over a hundred thousand. Some videos got millions of views. I’ll be honest, that was a confidence boost! That success came from having opinions—and a backbone, which was a new experience for me. 

But I decided that I didn’t want to be known for paracord tutorials, so I took a job at my alma mater, Free Lutheran Bible College. 

There, I create a majority of their marketing, using my fear of being misunderstood to clearly communicate the mission of the school in an attractive way. I have a knack for reading anyone’s writing in the worst possible light, especially my own. 

In my classes, I teach students how to communicate clearly through audio and video. I also caution students who seem a little too desperate to be married.