Introduction

Why the book exists and refuses the sanitised version of the life it describes: part memoir, part manifesto, part blueprint.

Seed Draft

I am writing this because I almost did not.

I have been scared to write for as long as I can remember. Part of that fear is simple: if I tell the truth, people will have to meet the version of me that was built in systems, shelters, psychosis, code, rage, hunger, and love that never felt safe for long. The other part is harder: I know how easy it is for people to take a life like mine and flatten it into a clean little success story. I am not interested in that version.

This book is not me asking for pity. It is not me trying to sound healed, polished, or professional enough to be digestible. This is me putting my real name, my code name, and my animal on the record. Sirrele. Fosterman. The black wolf. The version of me that learned how to survive before he learned how to rest.

I have been homeless and held. I have been loved by blood and abandoned by blood. I have been scared of my own mind and still found a way to build with it. I have known psychosis, juvenile systems, code-switching, borrowed floors, and the kind of loneliness that makes a laptop feel like a lifeline. I have also known reinvention, mentorship, strategy, leadership, and the strange whiplash of moving between survival mode and success in the same lifetime.

I am writing this because I do not want the sanitized version of me to be the one that survives. I want the truth to survive. I want the contradictions to survive. I want the receipts, the damage, the love, the mistakes, the intelligence, the paranoia, the ambition, and the rebuilding to survive.

Even Better If is part memoir, part manifesto, and part blueprint. It is the story of what it took for me to become myself, and the rules I learned while crawling through systems that were supposed to help and often did the opposite. It is for people who have had to parent themselves. It is for the kids who got labeled before they got understood. It is for the mentors who never waited for permission. It is for the people who need truth more than they need comfort.

I am not writing this from the other side of pain. I am writing it from inside a life I had to build in public and protect in private. That is why this book has to be honest. Anything less would be another form of abandonment.