What Kept Me From Becoming the Other Thing
I want to be honest about something that I don’t think I’ve said directly anywhere else in this project, even though it runs underneath everything I’ve written.
The formation this blog has been describing — the household, the father, the specific kind of darkness that gets installed in a person when that’s what they grow up inside — doesn’t produce only one outcome. It produces a range of them. And some of the outcomes in that range are not good. Some of them are people who become, in one form or another, a version of what made them. Not necessarily the same version, not necessarily as extreme, but recognizable in the family line — the capacity for harm, the willingness to use it, the specific combination of intelligence and darkness and the absence of a functioning conscience that produces people the world rightly fears.
I am not that outcome. I’ve thought about why, more than once, across more years than I’d like to admit to spending on the question. And the honest answer — not the philosophical answer, not the one that sounds most considered — is this:
The animals kept me from it.
Not as a metaphor. As a literal, operational fact about how my life has actually worked.
From Eva to Here
Eva arrived when I was thirteen. A German Shepherd puppy, given to my father for reasons that had nothing to do with anyone’s wellbeing, who became the most important being in my life for the fourteen years she lived. I’ve written about her elsewhere — about what purity actually means in an animal, about the specific quality of a presence that has no gap between what it shows and what it is. What I want to say here is something different: Eva was the first thing in my life that required me to be the right kind of person in order to keep it.
That’s the mechanism. Not inspiration — requirement. An animal that depends on you, that has no other source for what it needs, that will suffer or not suffer in direct proportion to what you do and don’t do — that animal is not giving you a reason to be good in the abstract. It’s giving you a consequence. Immediate, specific, personal.
From Eva at thirteen to two hundred animals at forty-five, that consequence has been present every day. Not as a weight, not as a burden I resent — as a container. The thing that answers the question “how far” every single time the question needs answering, before the answer can go somewhere it shouldn’t.
The Moral Prison
I am physically free. I want to be clear about this because I think it matters: I have a passport, I have the ability to travel, and there are places I want to go and haven’t been to in years. Lisbon is twelve years away. Portugal, where my mother is, where I was born, where most of what this blog describes happened — twelve years, and I haven’t been back, and I can’t go back, not yet, not for as long as I need to be here every morning.
Not because anything is stopping me externally. Because leaving would mean leaving them. And leaving them — even for a week, even with someone watching, even with every arrangement made — is not something I can make peace with, because the someone watching is not me, and I am the container, and the container can’t be somewhere else.
I used to think of this as a sacrifice. I don’t anymore. I think of it as the deal — the specific terms of the life I’ve built, which is also the specific terms of what has kept me functional across thirty-two years of carrying what I carry. The sanctuary is a moral prison, yes. It is also the lock on a door that, without it, I’m not entirely sure would stay closed.
How Far
During the six years of the sanctuary — and these have been, without question, the hardest six years of a life that has never been easy — there have been situations where the question of how far became very concrete.
A trafficking network that attacked the sanctuary in La Calera. Former paramilitaries in El Guamo. Threats that weren’t abstract, from people who understood exactly what they were threatening and intended it. In those situations, I was ready for whatever was necessary. I’ve written about the gate at El Guamo, the four men on motorcycles, the Molotov cocktails positioned in strategic spots. What I haven’t written about directly is the internal calculation that ran simultaneously with all of it.
How far do I need to go right now to defend them? How operational can I allow myself to be to handle this, and for how long? How much pressure can I absorb before something gives? And what does something giving look like — not in the moment, but afterward, when the threat is dealt with and two hundred animals are still here and still need feeding and still need the same person who was managing the threat to show up the next morning and be capable of managing them?
That last question is the one that actually governs everything. Not morality in the abstract, not the legal consequences, not even the strategic calculation. The animals. What happens to them if I go somewhere I can’t come back from? What happens to them if I become something that can’t function in their daily world because it’s functioning in a different one?
The answer to that question has, every single time, pulled me back from whatever edge I was approaching. Not because I’m afraid of the edge — I know the edge well, I’ve been close to it in enough situations to have stopped being surprised by it. Because the animals are on the other side of it, and I can’t be on both sides at once.
What the Other Thing Would Have Looked Like
I want to name this directly, because I think the naming is the point.
The other thing — the outcome that didn’t happen — would have been someone who used what the formation built in him without a governor. Someone with the same capacity for reading threat, the same speed in crisis, the same willingness to go all the way when going all the way was what the situation seemed to require — but without the container that asks, every time: and then what? What happens to them if this goes where it’s going?
Without the container, the capacity has nowhere to stop. It finds its own stopping points, which are not the same as the right ones. I know this because I know what the capacity feels like when it’s running, and I know that without something outside myself that I care about more than I care about the outcome of any given situation — the two hundred animals who have no other source, the fence that holds regardless, the morning that comes regardless — there is nothing reliable between the capacity and wherever it decides to go.
The animals are that reliability. They have been, since Eva. They will be, I hope, for whatever time is left.
The Hope
I am forty-five years old. I’ve been carrying this for thirty-two years since Eva arrived, and for longer before that in a form that didn’t have a name yet. I’ve stayed, mostly, on the right side of what I’m capable of. Not perfectly — the ledger is honest and I’ve never pretended it was clean. But functional. Present. Here, every morning, for the ones that need me here.
I hope the container keeps working. I hope the two hundred animals, and whatever comes after them, continue to be the answer to the question of how far — for as long as the question keeps coming, which will probably be for the rest of my life, because the formation doesn’t retire and neither does the capacity it built.
And when I finally go to hell — and I will, the accounting is what it is and I’ve made my peace with it — I hope I can stay there quietly. I hope whatever is left of the capacity, freed from the container at last, has the sense to rest.
Because the score that’s pending against certain people is long, and specific, and has never once been forgotten.
And the only thing that has kept it from being settled is that two hundred animals needed me to show up the next morning.
They still do.
So I still do.
This is the architecture behind the entire Plan X Series — and the specific relationship between capacity, containment, and the fence is explored in full in Leave No One Behind and When You See Evil, Do Your Worst.
