Finding Damien | Damien Series by Unfiltered. Unhealed;

Episode Two

Damien Series by Unfiltered. Unhealed;

Twenty years ago, Damien was a chapter in my life that seemed to happen in the blink of an eye.

When I met him, we were just kids trying to survive lives we weren't prepared for. He was funny, chaotic, impulsive, and incredibly kind to my daughter. He made her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches exactly the way she liked them. He called us his "two lovely ladies." For a little while, he became part of our everyday lives.

Then, almost as quickly as he appeared, he was gone.

A week after we broke up, Damien committed a crime that changed multiple lives forever.

A week after turning eighteen years old, he was arrested, convicted, and eventually sentenced to life without parole.

For years, Damien became more memory than person. He became a story I told as a cautionary tale. A chapter I wrote about over and over as more details broke their way loose. A lesson I tried to make sense of. Life moved forward the way it always does. I raised children, survived heartbreak, made mistakes of my own, and became someone completely different than the girl who knew him.

But for some reason, I never completely stopped thinking about him.

Not because I excused what happened.

But because I could never reconcile the young man I knew with the life that followed.

Then one night, my best friend Fawn and I were discussing my book series. We wondered if Damien was even still alive and if he was, what did his life look like today.

So we looked him up.

The search for Damien uncovered he was still in prison, almost two decades later..

That discovery turned into a letter.

And suddenly, the boy I remembered wasn't a memory anymore.

He was a real person again. Different from the boy I remembered but in some ways, still the same.

The Damien you'll hear throughout this series isn't the seventeen-year-old kid I knew. He's a thirty-seven-year-old man who has spent more than half of his life behind prison walls. He's lived through loss, violence, regret, and nearly two decades of consequences. He's spent years trying to understand himself, his choices, and the damage left behind.

Most people will only ever know the crime.

Most people will only ever know the sentence.

Very few people will ever know the person.

That's part of why we're here.

This series isn't about pretending the past didn't happen. It's not about making excuses. It's not about rewriting history.

It's about understanding it.

It's about trauma, addiction, poverty, accountability, environment, grief, and the choices that can change a life forever.

It's about asking difficult questions that don't always have comfortable answers.

It's about looking at a human being as more than the worst thing they've ever done.

Most importantly, it's about a story that isn't over.

When I started writing about Damien years ago, the story was about me. My memories. My confusion. My inability to understand how someone who felt so familiar could become part of something so tragic.

Now it's about understanding who Damien was, who he became, and what happens when someone grows up in prison.

The first episode of the Damien Series tells bits of the story as I remembered it but leaving many details to come. The relationship. The chaos. The mistakes. The crime. The shocking discovery that brought Damien back into my life almost twenty years later.

You'll hear about the first letter that changed everything.

You'll hear Damien's voice.

And you'll hear the beginning of a journey that neither Fawn nor I expected to take.

We don't know where this story ends.

Honestly, neither does Damien.

But we promised him we'd try to figure it out together.

This is only the beginning.

Welcome to Unfiltered. Unhealed.

Welcome to the Damien Series.

Watch Now Here >https://youtu.be/nIeJE-HrZhU