“To the kids who dropped out and didn’t stay down,” I said. “To the failures who refused to stay failed. To anyone who ever got called a parasite and decided to become the ecosystem instead.”
I took a sip.
For the first time in a very long time, I didn’t feel like I needed to prove anything to anyone—not even the strangers on the internet who kept telling me I’d done the right thing or the wrong thing or too much or not enough.
For the first time, the only person whose opinion really mattered looked back at me from the glass, reflected in the window: thirty-three, tired, stubborn, still here.
And he looked… okay.
Not perfect. Not healed. But okay.
Which, after everything, felt like the most radical ending of all.
Six weeks after that New Year in Vancouver, I walked into the incubator on a Monday morning and realized something sneaky had happened while I wasn’t paying attention.
It didn’t feel like my parents’ house anymore.
The bones were the same, sure. Same creak in the hallway floorboard outside what used to be my room. Same stubborn front door that needed a little shoulder nudge in the winter. But the energy was different.
There were Post-its on the walls with phrases like “User interviews this week” and “Beta launch goals.” There was a whiteboard in the old living room with Jordan’s messy handwriting mapping out a funnel for free users versus paying subscribers. Someone had left a half-finished latte on the windowsill, and there was a hoodie slung over the arm of the couch like the person had been called into a meeting and forgot it existed.
It looked lived in.
Not by people trying to survive a family, but by people trying to build something.
Priya met me at the door, tablet in hand.
“We filled the last open desk,” she said, skipping hello because that’s who she is. “New founder starts next week. Single mom, background in social work, building a platform that connects low-income tenants to legal resources. I like her.”
I smiled. “You usually like the complicated ones.”
“People who’ve lived through things don’t waste time on fluff,” she said. “Speaking of, Whitmore confirmed the sponsorship contract. You’re officially stuck with after-hours ‘Ask the VC’ nights once a month.”
“Great,” I said dryly. “My favorite audience: nervous founders and men in Patagonia vests.”
She smirked. “That video of you roasting ‘resident parasite’ culture is still getting shared on founder forums. They’ll show up.”
I shrugged out of my jacket and hung it on the coat rack by the door. For a second, my fingers brushed over the wood, and my brain flashed back to all the winters I’d stood there, dripping snow onto the tile, being interrogated about my GPA.
This time, nobody asked me anything. A door down the hall opened and Leah stepped out, earbuds dangling around her neck.
“Hey, Damon,” she called. “Got a second? We hit our pilot metrics. The hospital board wants to extend the contract.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “You did that, not me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but you’re the one who taught me how to not sound like I was begging in the negotiation. Come look?”
I followed her down the hall, into what used to be my parents’ bedroom and was now a shared workspace with four desks and a massive window.
We bent over her laptop together, going through the numbers. Reduction in missed appointments. Higher satisfaction scores from caregivers. Better adherence to treatment plans.
It was the kind of data I used to chase for banks. Now it meant exhausted daughters and sons had a tiny bit less chaos to juggle.
“Raise your price five percent,” I said. “You’re delivering more value than you scoped.”
She bit her lip. “Won’t they balk?”
“Some will,” I said. “The ones who don’t see what you’re building. The ones who do? They’ll understand. Don’t pre-reject yourself on their behalf.”
She nodded slowly. “Okay. Five percent.”
As I left her office, my phone buzzed. It was a text from an unknown number out of state. Normally I’d ignore it, but something about the preview caught my eye.
Hi Damon. You don’t know me, but I saw your video…
I opened it.
It was from a 52-year-old guy in Ohio who’d been the “failure uncle” of his family. Layoffs, messy divorce, adult siblings who never let him forget the time he moved back in with their parents for six months. He’d been watching my videos in the dead of night, trying to convince himself he wasn’t done.
I’m not asking for money, he wrote. I just wanted to tell you I signed up for a coding bootcamp last week. I figured if you could start over after everyone decided you were nothing, maybe I can too.
I stared at the screen for a long moment.
Two years ago, if you’d told me some middle-aged stranger would use my story as fuel to rewrite his own, I would’ve laughed in your face.
Now, it just felt like another strange ripple in a pond I hadn’t realized was deep.
I typed back: Good. Show up. Do the work. The only one who gets to write your ending is you.
I hit send, slipped the phone back into my pocket, and went to check on Adam.
Adam’s office was a controlled disaster—sticky notes everywhere, two monitors glowing with spreadsheets and flow diagrams, a small plant on his desk he kept forgetting to water.
“Did you just talk to a human being who isn’t me?” I asked as I walked in. “You look like someone who’s been staring at regex for six hours straight.”
He rubbed his eyes. “Regulators dropped a 200-page update last week. If I can’t make this tool digest it automatically, I’ll be stuck in manual hell until retirement.”
“You chose this life,” I reminded him.
He gave me a sideways look. “So did you, Mr. I-Turned-My-Trauma-Into-Real-Estate.”
I sat on the edge of his desk. “How’s the pilot going?”
He leaned back. “Good, actually. Better than I expected. Two of the credit unions we work with asked if we can integrate directly into their existing workflows. That’s… huge.”
“Scary huge or good huge?”
“Both,” he admitted.
We batted around options for an hour—pricing tiers, enterprise versus mid-market, how not to accidentally underprice a tool that might save institutions millions in penalties.
As he walked me out, he hesitated in the hallway.
“By the way,” he said. “My mom told me your parents asked about you the other day.”
My jaw tightened automatically. “In what context?”
He shrugged. “The usual. Complaining about how ungrateful you are. Talking about how you ‘air dirty laundry for strangers’ now. Then my mom asked them if they’d watched any of your other videos.”
“Have they?”
“No idea,” he said. “But when she mentioned the one about boundaries, my aunt Brenda said—” He shifted his voice into a pitch-perfect imitation. “‘Damon acts like he invented therapy.’”
I snorted despite myself.
“Part of me wants to be offended,” I said. “Part of me is like… if they’re complaining about boundaries, that means they noticed I have some.”
Adam’s mouth twitched. “Gold star. Now you just have to not yank them down the second they cry on the phone.”
“Working on it,” I said.
I did start therapy, eventually.
Not because of the comments telling me I “obviously needed it,” but because one night I came home from the incubator, dropped my keys on the counter, and realized that I’d built a life where I was responsible for an entire ecosystem of people and still had no idea what to do with my own feelings.
The therapist was a quiet woman in her forties with kind eyes and a talent for asking exactly the question I wanted to avoid.
In our third session, she leaned forward slightly.
“What are you afraid will happen,” she asked, “if you stop being angry at your parents?”
I stared at the ceiling for a long time.
“I’m not ready to forgive them,” I said.
“That’s not what I asked,” she replied gently. “I asked what you’re afraid of.”
I swallowed.
“If I’m not angry,” I said slowly, “then I have to deal with the grief under it. The kid who still wanted them to show up.”
She nodded. “And that feels…?”
“Dangerous,” I admitted. “Like if I let myself feel that, I’ll slip, and the next thing you know I’m in their living room at Christmas pretending everything is fine because Dad smiled once.”
“What if you could grieve without going back?” she asked. “What if those are separate choices?”
I didn’t have an answer that day. But the question stuck.
It was there when I watched founders call their parents from the incubator courtyard, hands shaking, voices small as they said things like, “I love you, but I’m not coming home for Easter this year.”
It was there when I got an email from Leah’s mom thanking me for “not seeing my daughter the way her uncle does, even though he still thinks this is a phase.”
It was there when I woke up one morning, checked my phone, and saw a voicemail from Cassie timestamped 2:13 a.m.
Her voice was thick with tears.
“Hey,” she sniffed. “I know you’re probably asleep. I just wanted to say… I talked back for the first time tonight. They were going on about you again. I told them they don’t get to call you names at my table. Dad got mad. Mom cried. But I didn’t back down. I…I don’t know, I guess I just needed you to know I’m trying. Okay. Goodnight.”
I listened to it three times.
Anger had burned everything down.
Maybe grief, if I let it, could clear some of the smoke.
A year later, I got the call Cassie had been dreading and I’d been expecting without admitting it out loud.
Dad had a heart attack.
He survived. Barely.
Cassie called me from the hospital lobby, voice flat with exhaustion.
“He’s in recovery,” she said. “They put in a stent. The doctors say he’ll need to change a lot of things if he wants to see seventy.”
I sat at my kitchen counter, phone pressed to my ear, staring at a bowl of cereal I wasn’t going to eat.
“What do you need?” I asked.
She let out a humorless laugh. “Mom needs money,” she said. “For the deductible. For the meds. For the follow-ups. She asked if I would ‘talk some sense into you.’”
“And you?”
“I need you to know I’m not calling for her,” she said. “I’m calling for me. Because I’m scared, and he’s still my dad, and I don’t know what the hell I’m supposed to feel after everything.”
I closed my eyes.
There it was again: the knife-edge between compassion and self-betrayal.
“I’m sorry he’s sick,” I said. “I wouldn’t wish a heart attack on anyone.”
“I know,” she whispered.
“I’m not paying their bills,” I added quietly. “I won’t step into that role. Not again.”
“I figured,” she said. “I told her as much. She said she doesn’t understand how her own son can be so cold.”
“Of course she did.”
Silence stretched. I could hear a hospital intercom in the background, a cart squeaking past, somebody coughing.
“Do you… want to see him?” she asked finally. “If you don’t, I get it. I really do. But if you’d regret it later…”
I thought about the therapist’s question. About what anger was hiding.
I thought about sitting on the other side of the world one day, getting a text that he’d died, and wondering if I’d dodged something or lost something I never had.
“I’ll come,” I heard myself say. “But I’m not coming alone. Adam’s going to be with me. And if he starts in with the names or the guilt, I’m leaving. No speeches. No big forgiveness scene. I just… want to see him.”
Cassie exhaled. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell the nurse to put you on the visitor list.”
The hospital room smelled like disinfectant and microwaved coffee.
Dad looked smaller. Not just because he was lying down, hooked up to monitors, but because the bravado had been stripped away. His shoulders didn’t seem so broad without the constant puff of indignation. His hands, resting on the blanket, were mottled with age spots I hadn’t noticed before.
He turned his head when I stepped in. For a second, something flickered across his face—relief? Shame? Habit?—then his jaw tightened.
“Well,” he rasped. “Look what the internet star dragged in.”
So. Not starting with “hello.”
Adam shifted slightly beside me, but said nothing. He was here as backup, not referee.
I pulled the visitor chair closer to the bed, sat down.
“You look terrible,” I said.
His mouth twitched. “You always did have a gift for charm.”
We sat there, two stubborn men who shared a face shape and nothing else.
“I heard you scared everyone,” I said finally. “Seems dramatic, even for you.”
He snorted, then winced, a hand instinctively going to his chest.
“Doctor says I have to change everything,” he muttered. “Diet, stress, exercise. Says I got lucky.”
“You did,” I said. “Most people don’t get a warning shot.”
He stared at the ceiling.
“Your mother says you turned the house into some kind of charity,” he said. “For quitters and dropouts.”
I let that hang for a moment.
“It’s an incubator,” I replied. “For founders who didn’t take the straight path. You’d hate them. They’re stubborn and mouthy and refuse to stay in the box they were assigned.”
His eyes slid over to me.
“Sounds familiar,” he said.
I huffed out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.
We didn’t talk about the video. Or the birthday dinner. Or him calling me a parasite. Those wounds were too big to fit in a hospital room between vitals checks.
Instead, we talked about neutral things.
He asked about the weather in Phoenix, even though he lived twenty minutes away and knew exactly what it felt like outside. I asked about the nurses, the food, whether he liked the cardiologist. We skirted around anything real, two boxers circling a ring long after the main event was over.
At one point, when a nurse came in to adjust his IV, he closed his eyes briefly and murmured, “Not like this. I didn’t think it would be like this.”
She thought he was talking about the hospital. I knew better.
When it was time to go, I stood up.
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” I said, because it was the truest thing I could offer.
“You and me both,” he muttered. He hesitated, then added, “That… thing you built in the house. They say it’s on the news now. Some banker on TV called you ‘visionary.’”
I raised an eyebrow. “You watch the news?”
He bristled automatically. “Course I watch the news. I’m not some—” He stopped himself short, closed his eyes, swallowed. “Anyway. I saw.”
“And?”
He shifted, the sheet rustling.
“And I don’t understand it,” he said finally. “But… it’s not nothing.”
It wasn’t an apology. It wasn’t even praise.
But for a man who’d spent thirty years pretending my work was a hobby, “not nothing” landed like an earthquake.
“Take your meds,” I said, because if I stayed a second longer I was going to say something I wasn’t ready to feel.
He smirked weakly. “You’re not the boss of me.”
“Actually,” I said, moving toward the door, “given the contracts you signed, that’s debatable.”
He snorted again, and this time I let myself smile before I walked out.
Adam waited until we were in the elevator to speak.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
I watched the numbers tick down.
“Like I just visited a museum exhibit about a life I didn’t choose,” I said. “And like I’m really glad someone invented emergency cardiology.”
He nodded. “That tracks.”
Then, after a pause, “You did good. You didn’t fold.”
“Yet,” I muttered.
“You won’t,” he said confidently. “You’re too stubborn. It runs in the family.”
The channel kept growing.
I never set out to become some accidental spokesperson for people with crappy parents, but that’s what happened. Every time I posted a new video—about boundaries, about money, about not fixing problems you didn’t create—there were thousands of comments saying, “This. This is my life.”
Sponsors came knocking eventually, waving checks and wanting me to shill things that made my skin crawl. I said no to most of it. The last thing I was going to do was turn into Allan-with-the-Lambos, promising shortcuts to people who’d already been burned.
Instead, we worked something else out.
Whitmore helped me set up a small content arm under the foundation’s banner. We brought in a handful of therapists, financial educators, and legal experts to create free resources for the exact people who kept showing up in my comments.
“Not everyone gets a seat in the house,” I told Priya one afternoon as we pored over a content calendar. “But everyone deserves a flashlight.”
She tapped her pen against the table. “You realize you’re slowly turning into a non-cringey Tony Robbins, right?”
“Wash your mouth out,” I said. “I’m not selling cold showers or morning routines.”
“Relax,” she replied. “You’re selling something better. Reality.”
On the two-year anniversary of the Brennan Opportunity Fund, we held an open house.
Not for my family—they weren’t invited—but for the community that had grown around this unlikely ecosystem.
Founders came back from the first cohort, bringing product samples, pitch decks, screenshots of user testimonials. There were investors, city council members, leaders from local nonprofits. The house buzzed with conversations about infrastructure and impact and runway.
If you squinted, it almost looked like one of those glossy magazine spreads about “innovation hubs,” except our coffee was store brand and half the people in the room had once been told they’d never finish anything.
At some point in the evening, I slipped outside to the front yard to breathe.
