08/09/2026
THE POWER OF PERSEVERANCE
An excerpt from my upcoming book
Loss has a way of stacking itself until it becomes unrecognizable. I’ve buried my father after a tornado took his life, my brother after he died by su***de, and my mother after finding her gone at home—and survived moments I never thought I would come back from. This excerpt is not just a reflection on what happened, but a testament to the resilience it took to survive what should have broken me and to keep moving forward when everything I knew was gone.
Many of the people reading this knew my family. You remember the tornado. You knew my dad, my brother Adonis, and my mother. Some of you attended the funerals, stood beside us, prayed for us, or watched these chapters unfold in real time.
You did not read about this part of my life after the fact. You were there.
I was trained to survive combat, but the hardest battle came after the uniform.
The Marine Corps taught me how to move toward danger, endure pain, protect the men beside me, and continue functioning when fear and exhaustion were present. But no training could have prepared me for losing nearly everyone who helped shape the first half of my life.
By the end of 2020, grief was no longer a single event. It had become an environment.
Military trauma, family trauma, PTSD, depression, addiction, anxiety, guilt, physical illness, and nervous-system symptoms had stacked on top of one another. I was trying to carry all of it while still appearing functional to the outside world.
That is one of the most dangerous things about human suffering. A person can answer the phone, make people laugh, attend meetings, and tell everyone he is fine while quietly fighting to survive inside his own mind.
I did not rebuild my life through one breakthrough. There was no single morning when everything suddenly made sense. I rebuilt through repetition and thousands of small decisions that rarely looked heroic while I was making them.
I stopped using drugs and alcohol to escape. I began writing every day. I studied Stoicism, psychology, consciousness, trauma, physiology, identity, and human behavior. I practiced Transcendental Meditation. I trained my body, took cold showers, examined my thinking, and became honest about the patterns that had been controlling my life.
I learned that perseverance is rarely dramatic.
Sometimes perseverance is getting out of bed. It is making breakfast, answering an email, attending class, walking to an appointment, keeping your word to yourself, or refusing to disappear on a day when nobody would blame you for giving up.
Those decisions began changing me.
I started recognizing the relationship between my thoughts, emotional states, choices, habits, and identity. What began as survival became observation. Observation became understanding. Understanding became a system.
That system became the foundation of the 3.2 Method™ and the work I am now building through Adonis Wellness Group™.
I did not create this work because I studied transformation from a safe distance. I created it because I had to learn how to return to myself before grief, trauma, addiction, and old patterns destroyed what remained of me.
I know some of you remember who I was before all of this. Some of you saw me during the years when I was barely holding things together. Now you are watching me build a company, earn my degree, study consciousness and human potential, write books, and turn the hardest experiences of my life into something that may help other people find their way back.
That is why I wanted to share this here.
Not because I believe suffering automatically makes someone stronger. Sometimes suffering simply hurts. Strength comes from what we choose to build in response to it.
I still carry my family with me. I carry my father’s strength, my mother’s love, my brother’s name, and every lesson their lives and deaths left behind. They are part of the man I became and part of the mission I am building.
To everyone who stood beside my family, attended those funerals, checked on me, prayed for me, challenged me, or refused to give up on me, thank you. You are part of this story too.
Perseverance is not pretending the pain never happened. It is deciding that pain will not be the only author of what happens next.
“Pain may explain where you are, but it does not get to decide who you become.”
Thomas D. Peil
Founder and CEO, Adonis Wellness Group™
Creator of the 3.2 Method™
