The Glass Prison
I was raised in foster care, learning early that survival meant wearing the right mask at the right time. Smile for the case workers. Be quiet for the volatile placements. Disappear when adults needed you gone. I got so good at it that I forgot which mask was supposed to be me.
By my twenties, I was living on autopilot—watching life happen through glass while some confident version of me handled everything. Job interviews, relationships, daily decisions—all managed by someone who looked like me but felt unreachable. I was the passenger in my own life, convinced the driver's seat was meant for someone else.
Until the day I realized: that confident version everyone saw wasn't a performance. It was me. The real me. Trapped on the other side of the mirror, pounding on glass while my traumatized consciousness played dead in the corner.
So I started architecting my own escape route using the one thing that made sense to my pattern-obsessed, system-hacking brain: cybersecurity. If I could understand how to break into systems, maybe I could break out of mine. If I could learn to exploit vulnerabilities in code, maybe I could exploit the vulnerabilities keeping me dissociated.
It worked. Not overnight. Not cleanly. But learning to hack systems taught me how to hack myself—how to map neural pathways like network diagrams, how to patch trauma responses like security holes, how to architect integration instead of waiting for it to happen.