But the roots of this go deeper than burnout. They go back to boyhood.
I was a shy kid. Quiet. Introverted. The kind of boy who felt things intensely but had no framework for any of it. At school, that made me a target. The bullying was not dramatic or cinematic — it was the daily, grinding kind. The kind that teaches you, slowly and thoroughly, that the world outside your front door is not safe.
I was an only child. No siblings. No built-in playmates. My father struggled with active addiction for a solid ten-year stretch when I was growing up. My parents stayed married, but those years were just bad. They were preoccupied. Emotionally unavailable. They were not cruel people — they were people drowning in their own weight, and there was nothing left over for me. I learned early that no one was coming. If I needed comfort, I had to build it myself.
So I built an internal world. Bright colors. Soft textures. Imaginative spaces where things made sense and nothing hurt. As an AuDHD kid, my brain was already wired to go deep into objects and sensations — the way a particular fabric felt, the way a certain cartoon made everything quiet. What looked like "being in my own world" to everyone else was actually the first version of what I now understand as regression. I was not escaping reality. I was surviving it.
And here is the part that matters most: I saw what my father did to cope, and I made a choice. I was not going to mask the pain with substances. I was not going to numb out and disappear. I was going to build a clean, internal, physical safe harbor — a way to self-soothe that did not destroy me in the process. Age regression was never a hobby. It was not something I chose because it looked interesting. It was infrastructure. The same way you service a mower before the season starts — change the oil, sharpen the blades, check the belts — I needed a way to service my nervous system before it seized up entirely. The world was loud. The responsibilities were heavy. The depression was old and patient and always waiting. Something had to give.
The first time I let myself be small — really let myself — I was alone in my room at the end of a week that had chewed me up. I turned off the lights. I wrapped myself in an afghan my grandmother made. I put on a show I watched as a kid. And my brain, for the first time in months, went quiet. Not because I was escaping. Because I had given myself permission to stop holding up the ceiling.
If you are a man reading this and you have had a moment like that — alone, in the dark, holding something soft, feeling something shift — you need to hear this: you are not the only one. You are not broken. You are doing what your nervous system was designed to do. The shame you feel is not evidence that you are wrong. It is evidence that you were taught a lie about what men are allowed to need.