The other day, I found myself thinking about Forrest Gump. Not because I think I’m some extraordinary character, but because I started looking back at my life and realizing just how many different lives I’ve managed to live inside one.
One Man, Several Lifetimes
I’m 50 years old, and when I look backward, it sometimes feels like I’m remembering several different people. I’ve worked in professions that had almost nothing in common with each other, met people whose lives were nothing like mine, and found myself in situations I never could have predicted when I was younger. At the time, I wasn’t collecting experiences for a future story. I was busy living them.
I’ve worked for a school corporation. I’ve repaired computers and operated my own business. I’ve worked in security, loss prevention, corrections, and law enforcement. I’ve helped people struggling with addiction and mental health. These days I write, publish books, build websites, and direct software projects.
Those are different worlds, each with its own people, language, responsibilities, and problems to solve. One day of work in a jail is nothing like a day spent fixing somebody’s computer. Investigating a case is different from helping someone talk through a destructive decision. Building software asks something different of me again, but I’ve been completely absorbed in each of those kinds of work at different points in my life.
That’s the part of Forrest Gump I recognized. He kept finding himself in new places, surrounded by people he wouldn’t otherwise have met, and one experience led to another. My life hasn’t followed a movie script, and I wasn’t carried through it by luck alone. But I know the strange feeling of looking back and asking how one person managed to live through so much.
I’ve had adventures I still enjoy remembering and experiences I wouldn’t wish to repeat. I’ve succeeded, made mistakes, lost things that mattered, and started over when I didn’t want to. Some chapters changed how I see the world. Others changed how I see myself. Taken together, they amount to far more than any job title could explain.
I Never Wanted to Be Just Another Guy Doing the Job
When I committed to something, I wanted to become exceptionally good at it. That followed me from one profession to another, even when I was starting in a field where I had a lot to learn. I didn’t want to know just enough to get by. I wanted to understand the work well enough to handle difficult situations and be someone others could count on.
I wanted to know why things happened, how the systems worked, and what separated someone who could perform a task from someone who understood it. In loss prevention, that meant paying attention before making contact and knowing what my observations actually supported. In law enforcement, it meant preparation, sound judgment, accurate reports, and understanding the responsibility that came with authority.
I’m comfortable saying I became very good at many of the jobs I did. I know what I put into them, and I know the responsibilities I earned. I don’t need to exaggerate that record, but I don’t need to pretend the work meant less than it did, either. Being humble isn’t the same thing as being unable to acknowledge your own competence.
I’ve also made bad decisions, missed things I should have recognized, and learned lessons I would rather have learned another way. Being capable didn’t make me right every time. And sometimes the very intensity that helped me excel became a problem. Law enforcement is the clearest example: I loved the investigations, the responsibility, the preparation, and the action, but I let that work become too much of my identity.
When that chapter ended, the loss was bigger than employment. I had to face how much of my understanding of myself I’d handed over to a profession. I still value the work and the years I spent doing it. I just know now that no job should be the entire answer to who I am.
Not Every Life Was One I Wanted to Live
It would be easy to describe my life as a series of interesting jobs and adventures. That would leave out a hell of a lot, including years when I wasn’t doing much worth celebrating.
Addiction took over my life. I lost work, damaged relationships, destroyed trust, and reached a point where ordinary daily responsibilities were difficult. My marriage fell apart. I lost my computer repair business. My health deteriorated, and I became someone I could barely recognize. That was another life I lived, and I can’t tell the truth about the others while leaving it out.
On August 2, 2015, I made the decision to stop drinking and using drugs. The decision changed my direction, but it didn’t restore my life overnight. I had to relearn ordinary things, show up for my children, return to work, and give people reasons to trust me again. Eventually, Kelly and I reconciled and remarried, but the damage and the rebuilding were real.
My body changed too. I went from weighing more than 300 pounds to becoming a distance runner, something the earlier version of me would have struggled to imagine. Running didn’t erase what happened before. It became another part of the life I was building, one I had to earn through repeated effort.
Then came other losses. I lost the law enforcement career I’d poured myself into. I later found meaningful work helping people with addiction and mental health, but that chapter carried its own disappointments. Not every transition was a deliberate move toward something better. Sometimes what I had built disappeared, and I had to decide what to do next.
I’ve restarted my life more than once. Experience can teach you how to rebuild, but it doesn’t make the loss of something important painless. Some chapters I chose. Others I had to survive. Both kinds belong in the story.
Most People Have Only Known One Version of Me
People usually know you through the circumstances in which they meet you. Someone who worked with me when I repaired computers may have trouble imagining me serving warrants or working inside a jail. Someone who knew me in law enforcement might be surprised to find me writing books and spending hours working on websites and software.
People who met me through recovery know the man who talks about addiction, accountability, and rebuilding a life. Someone discovering Bonumark Stream may see a builder who happens to write. My family knows versions of me that none of those people have ever met.
None of those impressions is necessarily wrong. They’re incomplete. Each person saw a real part of my life, but not necessarily what came before it or what happened afterward. I understand why people think of me in those terms. We all do that when we know someone primarily through one place, one job, or one period of their life.
For a long time, recovery occupied most of my public writing. It made sense. I’d lived through addiction, rebuilt my life, and worked professionally with people facing similar problems. I had something worth saying about it, and I still do. But recovery isn’t the only subject I understand, and it doesn’t have to explain everything else I care about.
I’m a husband, father, grandfather, runner, writer, builder, former law enforcement officer, and someone who still works in corrections. Those aren’t costumes I’ve put on for different audiences. They’re parts of one life. I want my website to have enough room for that whole person, not just whichever role happens to be most familiar to readers.
Is This Guy for Real?
I’ve wondered what someone might think after finding my website and looking through several articles. They could read something about addiction, move to an essay on discipline, find a technical breakdown of a software project, and then discover that I’m writing about law enforcement and corrections. I can imagine the question: Is this guy for real? Has he actually done all this?
It’s a fair question. The internet is full of people claiming authority they haven’t earned, so I don’t expect a stranger to believe my experience just because I list it on an About page. But there’s a difference between claiming to understand a subject and being able to describe the work, the decisions, and the consequences from firsthand experience.
Wearing a badge didn’t make me right about everything in law enforcement. My own recovery doesn’t mean I understand every person’s path out of addiction. Directing AI-assisted software development doesn’t make me a traditional software engineer. I can be clear about those limits without minimizing what I’ve actually done.
What I can offer is an account of the work itself. I can explain how I investigated something, what I was responsible for inside a correctional facility, what changed when I stopped using substances, or why I made a particular decision while building a tool. I’ve written about how I actually build software with AI because the decisions, testing, and corrections are more useful than a title that sounds impressive.
Experience doesn’t make every opinion correct, and I don’t expect readers to agree with everything I write. I’d rather give them enough substance to judge for themselves. They can decide whether an account is useful, whether my reasoning holds up, and whether something I learned applies to their own lives.
That’s the authority I’m comfortable writing from. Not a demand to be believed, but a willingness to show the experience behind what I’m saying.
I Don’t Want to Be Trapped Inside Another Identity
Several months ago, I started thinking seriously about how I describe myself publicly. By then I’d already spent years moving through different professional identities. When I was in law enforcement, being an officer was a huge part of how I understood myself. Later, recovery coaching became another important part. More recently, writing, publishing, and building software have taken up a great deal of my attention.
What I finally understood was that I don’t need to keep replacing one identity with another. I don’t have to leave the recovery coach behind to become a builder or stop talking about software because I want to tell stories from my years in law enforcement. I’ve written about recovery being part of my history rather than my entire identity. That same distinction applies to every chapter of my life.
I describe myself as a writer, builder, and recovery coach because those words are useful. They tell someone a little about what I do. They don’t cover everything, and I don’t expect them to. I still work in corrections, run, spend time with my family, and have ordinary interests and responsibilities that don’t fit into a professional description.
Some days I’m thinking through a software problem. Other days I’m remembering a case or an experience inside a jail. Sometimes I’m running and not thinking about any of it. I’m not trying to make all those things match a single label anymore. I want to be able to live them without having to choose which one is supposed to define me.
Why I’m Going to Start Telling More of These Stories
I’ve recently decided to write more about my experiences in law enforcement and corrections. There are things from those years I’ve never discussed publicly, including situations that were exciting, frightening, frustrating, or simply revealing about the way people behave under pressure.
I worked in loss prevention and was stabbed twice during apprehensions. I served warrants and conducted investigations. I’ve worked inside correctional facilities, where an encounter doesn’t necessarily end when the immediate problem is resolved. The person is still there, and so are you. Whatever happened, you have to keep doing the job.
That work taught me about preparation, authority, judgment, restraint, and the difference between what someone can make another person do and what they should do. I liked the action and responsibility, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I also saw the cost of poor decisions, the importance of treating people like human beings, and the consequences of becoming too consumed by the work.
Some articles will explain something people misunderstand about law enforcement. Others may tell the story of an investigation or describe the daily reality of corrections. I won’t turn every experience into a lesson about recovery just to make it fit my existing writing. Some stories deserve to be told for what happened, what I saw, and what somebody else might understand after reading them.
The same is true of technology, family, fitness, and the other parts of my life. Not everything needs to become a framework. Sometimes I want to document how I solved a problem. Sometimes I want to share something I learned the hard way. Sometimes an interesting story is enough.
There’s a lot of life behind the articles I’ve already written. I don’t want to keep leaving whole chapters out because they don’t fit the category people associate with me.
I’m Not Looking for Applause
I don’t share these experiences because I want strangers to tell me I’ve lived an impressive life. I know what I’ve done and what it took. I also know what I’ve gotten wrong, the people I hurt, the opportunities I lost, and the things I’d handle differently now. I’ve never been especially comfortable receiving compliments or praise, and that isn’t what I’m looking for through my writing.
If I only wrote about accomplishments, the picture would be false. If I only wrote about addiction, loss, and rebuilding, that would be incomplete too. The times I handled something well matter, and so do the times I failed or misunderstood what was happening. Some of the lessons worth sharing came from mistakes I still don’t like remembering.
I don’t need every reader to be interested in every part of my life. Someone reading about corrections may never care about a software project. Someone who finds an article about recovery may have no interest in running. That’s fine. They can take what is useful and leave the rest.
I want the writing to stand on its own. I want the stories to be honest, the lessons to be grounded, and the work to be useful. If a reader comes away understanding something they didn’t understand before, that’s enough for me.
There’s Still More Life to Live
One of the strangest parts of this reflection is realizing that I’m only 50. I say only because, despite everything I’ve lived through, I don’t think my best opportunities are necessarily behind me. There are things I still want to build, skills I want to learn, places I want to go, and experiences I haven’t had yet.
I don’t know what the next ten or twenty years will bring. If the first fifty are any indication, I probably won’t be doing exactly what I expect to be doing today. I’ve learned that a job or interest you once thought would define your future can become a chapter you eventually close. Something you barely noticed before can turn into the work you can’t stop thinking about.
What I don’t want is to reach the end with useful experiences still locked away because I decided they didn’t fit the identity people knew me by. That’s part of why I write while I still remember the people, the circumstances, the decisions, and the consequences well enough to tell the stories properly.
Maybe someone will recognize a mistake before making it. Maybe a reader will understand a profession they’ve never worked in or see a problem from a perspective they hadn’t considered. I can’t control what anyone takes from an article, and I don’t need to. My part is to tell the truth, explain what I know, and acknowledge what I don’t.
I won’t force those chapters into a single identity or leave parts out because they don’t match what people already know about me. They all belong to me.
I’ve lived a lot of life. I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve learned some things worth sharing. I’m not asking you to be impressed. I’m inviting you to learn from my experiences.