Or: Why I Bought My First Satoshis at 50
Most people assume that because I’ve been a tech guy my whole life, I must have been into Bitcoin since the early days. Truth is?
I didn’t buy my first bitcoin until April of 2025.
Not because I wasn’t interested. Not because I didn’t understand it.
But because I simply didn’t have the bandwidth for anything beyond basic survival.
When you’ve spent decades unknowingly trapped in a covert-narcissistic family system, your entire internal world becomes… noise. Chaos. Hypervigilance. Emotional firefighting. You can’t invest in the future when you’re busy trying to survive the present.
Bitcoin entered my life only after the Mom-pocalypse — after going no contact, after the truth detonated the lies I’d built my entire identity on, after the dust started to settle just enough for me to breathe again.
And that’s when something unexpected happened.
A Tiny Purchase That Turned Into Something Bigger
I bought my very first $10 of bitcoin just to test a hardware wallet.
Nothing symbolic. Nothing visionary.
Just… let’s see how this thing works.
Then I bought another $300.
Then, by the time my May paycheck rolled around, I had built out a consistent DCA (Dollar Cost Averaging) plan — 15% of my paycheck per month.
And here’s the interesting part:
It wasn’t just about the money.
It wasn’t even about the investment.
It was the first time in my life that I made a consistent decision for future me.
And that was new territory.
Bitcoin Became a Focus — and a Distraction — When I Needed Both
In the aftermath of going no contact, there’s this strange space you enter. The world around you goes quiet, but the world inside you is loud.
Regret. Anger. Relief. Confusion. Hypervigilance.
And grief — not the grief of losing someone, but the grief of losing the illusion you lived under for decades.
Bitcoin became the unexpected anchor during that time.
The charts.
The halving cycles.
The history.
The technology.
The philosophy.
The rabbit holes.
It kept my mind occupied during some of the darkest emotional free-falls.
Not avoidant, not escapist — but stabilizing.
And honestly? I needed that.
When the trauma fog finally lifted, and I could actually see clearly, Bitcoin became something else entirely:
A metaphor for my own story.
Surviving Volatility. Rising From Drawdowns. Halving the Toxic Cycles.
Bitcoin is volatile.
But so is healing.
Bitcoin has cycles.
So does trauma recovery.
Bitcoin survives every attack thrown at it.
So have I.
And like Bitcoin itself, I had spent decades being devalued by someone who didn’t understand my worth.
When I look at Bitcoin, I see:
resilience,
rebirth,
proof-of-work,
a future built by the choices you make today.
And for the first time, I could see my own future the same way.
This Time, I’m Building for the Long Run
Even though the price has risen and fallen since I started — I’m still here, still stacking, still learning.
Because this isn’t about timing the market.
It’s about reclaiming my life.
It’s about choosing consistency after a lifetime of chaos.
Discipline after decades of emotional sabotage.
And forward momentum after years of being held in place by lies.
Someday — maybe five years from now, certainly ten years from now, and absolutely in twenty year’s time — I know future me will look back at this chapter with gratitude.
Not because of the money.
But because I finally started building something for myself.
And one day, a little bit of that stack will get passed on to my granddaughter — a generational chain reset, in more ways than one.
From Chaos to Clarity
Most survivors of narcissistic homes don’t get to invest early.
We don’t get the luxury of long-term thinking.
We don’t get to build wealth, security, or peace — because our energy is spent surviving someone else’s storms.
But now?
It’s my life.
My choices.
My future.
My legacy.
And funny enough, a little white paper released on October 31, 2008, helped me see that, just over 16 years later.
