They say everybody's got their triggers, right? Sometimes you know your triggers, and sometimes you don't. I was almost three years into fatherhood––it was January, 2008––when I found one of mine: the screams that my youngest son Landon started to make when he first learned to crawl, then kept up for another twenty months. For a guy whose nerves were shot long ago, this put me over the edge into the worse emotional imbalance of my life. 

What happened in the earplug phase wasn't about Landon as a person––my son, my darling, my sweetheart, my hero, I want you to know this and I want the world to hear me say it to you. It was about the screams triggering the fear inside me, which was so much bigger than I'd ever imagined. 

That piercing sound was the clarion call to the battle of my life, an all-out assault on the forces amassed at my psyche's borders and waiting for an opportunity to see if they could destroy me. Looking back, those forces were kind in giving me an extra few years to prepare for the test, prepare to face the curse. I was forty-three at the time––older than my father was when he went nuts. Those years might have made all the difference.