Your past does not care how long ago it was.

It doesn't care that you've grown up. It doesn't care that you've changed. It doesn't care that you went to therapy, got married, built a career, started businesses, moved to another country, or became somebody completely different from the person you were when it happened.

Sometimes you can go years believing a chapter of your life is completely over.

Then one day, that shit comes knocking on your door.

For me, that knock came almost ten years later.

Back in 2017, I was going through one of the darkest periods of my life.

I was depressed, struggling, and I didn't want to live anymore.

During that crisis, I attempted to end my life.

The woman I was dating came in and tried to stop me.

Police became involved, and instead of that night ending with me receiving the mental-health care I desperately needed, I was arrested.

And there I was, in one of the worst mental-health crises of my life, being taken to jail in fucking fluffy pajamas with clouds and moons on them.

I wish I were making that part up.

I told the police I wanted to die and that I had attempted to harm myself.

I caught several charges that night, including charges I didn't fully understand until later.

Eventually, when the case went to court, my ex didn't show up. The case ended in nolle prosequi. At the time, I didn't understand the legal nuances of what that meant. In my mind, she didn't show up, the case wasn't prosecuted, and it was over.

So I moved on.

And for years, life gave me no reason to believe otherwise.

A bank asked about my background and still hired me. Later, I became a Certified Peer Specialist, where lived experience wasn't necessarily something that made me less qualified. In some ways, having been through difficult shit made me better equipped to sit with other people while they were going through theirs.

As far as I knew, that chapter was closed.

Until it wasn't.

Years later, my wife, Cam, and I started trying to establish our lives abroad.

We did our research. We gathered documents. We got things apostilled. We ordered FBI background checks. We submitted visa applications. We spent money.

And we kept running into problems.

Eventually, an immigration lawyer reviewed everything and told us what was standing in the way.

My FBI background check.

Those charges from 2017 were still showing up.

Are you fucking serious?

Something I genuinely believed was finished was interfering with the life I was trying to build almost ten years later.

I had left the United States trying to build a freer life, only to discover that part of my past had gotten on the plane with me.

And now it wasn't just affecting me.

It was affecting my wife.

Cam wasn't there in 2017. She didn't make those decisions. She wasn't part of that relationship. Yet something that happened before our marriage was interfering with the future we were trying to build together.

Once I knew what the problem was, I started trying to fix it.

But I was living in Peru.

This wasn't a situation where I could drive down the street to the courthouse and figure some shit out.

I had to fly from Peru back to the United States, go to the DC area, and then make my way to Virginia to deal with a case from 2017 that I genuinely believed had been over for almost a decade.

Something from my past had enough power over my present that I had to cross continents to deal with it.

I went to the courthouse in Virginia. I met with lawyers. I started the paperwork and began figuring out what I needed to do to get the record expunged.

Why didn't I do that years ago?

Because I didn't know I needed to.

I wasn't avoiding it. I genuinely believed it was over.

It wasn't a problem until it became a problem.

And once I knew, I started handling my shit.

The woman who got arrested in 2017 and the woman writing this today are not the same person.

2017 Kionna was in pain. She was hopeless. She didn't want to be here anymore. She wasn't actively participating in her healing. She was trying to escape the hard parts of life instead of learning how to live through them.

There was chaos around me too.

The relationship I was in wasn't healthy. There was conflict and drama that I stayed around much longer than I should have.

Just one week before my arrest, my ex's husband had come into that same apartment. He and my ex ended up fighting, the neighbors got involved, the police were called, and he was arrested.

Looking back now, that should have told me something:

Leave.

But I stayed in situations much longer than I should have. I didn't have the boundaries or coping skills I have now.

Today?

I like being alive.

I want to see more of this world. I want a family. I'm enjoying my marriage. I'm building businesses. I want to help people. I have shit I still want to accomplish.

That's why I struggle with what a criminal record can represent.

Records freeze moments. People don't.

A background check can show an incident from 2017.

It can't show my marriage, my healing, the people I've helped, the coping skills I've developed, the boundaries I've learned, or the life I've built.

It shows an incident.

Not the evolution.

There is another uncomfortable part of this story that I can't ignore.

I don't believe jail was what I needed that night.

I was in a mental-health crisis.

Years later, I became a Certified Peer Specialist. I spent my career learning about lived experience, crisis intervention, recovery, empathy, compassion, and what it looks like to actually meet people where they are.

So when I look backward, I can't help but ask:

Why did the system recognize a reason to arrest me before it recognized a person desperately in need of mental-health care?

That night is also part of why I have such complicated feelings about the justice system in the United States.

Honestly, I hate a lot of what I see.

I've watched videos and news stories of people being shot by police. I've watched encounters where people needed help, patience, de-escalation, or compassion, and instead I've seen force, aggression, or people appearing more interested in exercising their authority than understanding the human being standing in front of them.

I know every police officer isn't the same and every interaction isn't the same.

But my own experience changed the way I look at the system.

When you're the person in crisis, you don't experience "the system" as some abstract conversation about laws, policies, or public safety.

You experience the person standing in front of you.

Are they listening?

Do they recognize that you're scared, sick, or in pain?

Do they see a person who needs help, or only a person they have the power to arrest?

That's one of the reasons I don't want to live in the United States anymore. It isn't the only reason, but it's part of it. I don't want to live somewhere where I have developed this level of distrust and discomfort toward systems that are supposed to make me feel protected.

Accountability and compassion should be able to exist in the same room.

Nearly ten years later, I still find myself asking:

Why was I taken to jail instead of somewhere that could help me stay alive?

Maybe I didn't need a cell.

Maybe I needed a hospital.

My relationship with shame started much earlier.

When I was about 14 years old, I was struggling badly with my mental health.

I had been hospitalized. I was taking medication. I struggled academically and failed several classes during my ninth-grade year.

I went to summer school, where one of my guidance counselors was working. Other students told me she had been talking about my mental health and hospitalizations.

I confronted her.

There was already tension between us, and it continued into the following school year.

One day, she said something sarcastic to me as she was going to sit down.

I pulled the chair out from underneath her.

What I didn't know was that she was pregnant.

She was taken to the hospital.

I left because I knew the police were coming.

That became my first juvenile charge. I dealt with probation, essays, community service, the juvenile justice system, and eventually being expelled from public school.

Was pulling that chair the right way to handle the situation?

No.

Could I have gone to another adult?

Yes.

Could I have handled it differently?

Absolutely.

But I was also a kid who believed she was protecting herself.

Both things can be true.

I was wrong for how I responded, and I wasn't wrong for believing I deserved protection.

One teacher even called me the "spawn of Satan."

Imagine being a kid already dealing with mental-health problems and having an adult describe you that way.

Eventually, you start wondering whether maybe everybody is right about you.

I have two younger brothers, nine and eleven years younger than me, who eventually attended the same high school I had attended.

Some of my old teachers were still there.

I told my brothers:

"Don't tell them I'm your sister."

I didn't want my reputation to become theirs.

Of course, one of them eventually told somebody.

He came home and said a teacher had responded:

"Oh my God, your sister was so bad."

And I remember thinking:

I told your ass not to tell them.

Years later, I wasn't even in that school anymore.

But my reputation was.

That's how long shame can travel.

Then one day as an adult, I ran into my ninth-grade IB English teacher. She told me how much I had changed, how much I had grown up, and how well I seemed to be doing.

I still talk to my old geometry teacher, and she tells me she's proud of how far I've come.

They knew teenage Kionna.

And they also got to meet the woman she became.

People can remember who you were and still make room for who you became.

Not everybody will.

Even recently, during family counseling, my mother brought up the incident with the teacher again.

It hurt, not because I'm incapable of acknowledging what I did, but because something I did as a child could still be brought into a conversation decades later.

At some point you wonder:

After everything I've done since then, is that still who you see when you look at me?

I can't control somebody else's answer.

But I know mine.

There were things I used to hate talking about.

If somebody asked why I had been expelled from public school, I didn't want to explain it.

In college, I got caught selling weed on campus by one of my professors. The professor reported me to campus police, and I had to go before a judicial board.

For years, I didn't even tell my mother the entire story.

Today?

Ask me.

I'll tell you.

Not because I'm proud of every decision I've made.

Because those decisions don't own me anymore.

There is a difference between saying:

"I'm proud of what I did."

and:

"I'm no longer ashamed to tell you that I did it."

I've had people hear me talk openly about difficult things I've experienced and then tell me something about themselves they've never said aloud before.

Sometimes telling your truth gives somebody else permission to face theirs.

We all fuck up sometimes.

What matters is what you do next.

I've also learned that accountability isn't the same thing as beating yourself up.

After losing a job, I initially believed a particular person had played a role in what happened.

I told other people that.

Later, I received information that changed my understanding of the situation and realized I had blamed the wrong person.

So I went back to the people I had spoken to and corrected myself.

I was wrong.

That's accountability.

But there was another piece of accountability I had to accept too.

Regardless of what anybody else did afterward, my actions were still my actions.

That's an important distinction.

Accountability isn't finding another person to carry responsibility for your choices. It's being willing to correct yourself when you're wrong while still owning whatever part of the situation belongs to you.

You admit when you're wrong. You correct what you can. You apologize when necessary. You change your behavior.

And then you move forward.

Standing ten toes down doesn't mean pretending you're never wrong.

Sometimes it means having enough integrity to say:

"Yeah. That was me. I fucked that up."

There have been things in my life I didn't handle immediately.

Debt is one example. Sometimes I simply didn't have the money, and stressing myself into the ground wasn't going to magically create it.

I've compartmentalized trauma until I was in a safe enough place to process it.

I've avoided conversations when I knew nothing productive would come from them.

I've waited months to address something because I needed to be ready.

Not everything you haven't dealt with is something you're running from.

Sometimes you're waiting until you have the money, information, resources, safety, strength, or simply the right moment.

But once you can do something?

Do the hard thing.

Cam taught me years ago to stop saying "I can't."

That stuck with me.

Someone once told me I probably had too much going on to become a Peer Specialist.

Don't tell me what the fuck I can and cannot do.

I became certified.

Fear and shame are real.

They just don't get to make my decisions for me anymore.

If you're considering making a major life change, especially moving abroad, learn from me.

Do your research.

Check your record.

And don't assume that because something hasn't caused a problem yet, it never will.

If you have a criminal history and you're thinking about moving abroad, find out exactly what's there. Research what can potentially be expunged or sealed and what your destination actually requires.

Get your important documents together. Birth certificates, marriage certificates, passports, background checks, legal paperwork.

Look at unresolved government, financial, administrative, or court matters that could potentially become relevant.

You don't need a perfect past to move forward.

But you should know what's in it.

And even then:

You can research the hell out of something and still not know what you don't know.

Cam and I researched before we moved.

We prepared.

And we still got blindsided.

That's part of why we created Sovereign Sundays.

I wish Sovereign Sundays had existed for us.

We're building it because we didn't have all this information when we started. We encountered the problems, spent the money, asked the questions, and learned some things by actually living through them.

Now we can turn those experiences into resources, including things like our country index, to help somebody coming behind us ask better questions before they make the leap.

If I already had to learn some lessons the hard way, somebody else might as well benefit from them.

Each one, teach one.

If I could sit beside 14-year-old Kionna today, I'd tell her:

You're not the spawn of Satan.

You're not bad.

You're in pain.

You have things you're going to have to work through, and you need support and better ways to protect yourself.

And people are going to talk about you.

They're going to talk when you fuck up.

They're going to talk when you get better.

They're going to talk when you do something they don't understand.

One day you're going to pack up your life and move to another country, and trust me, they're going to talk about that shit too.

Some people will think you're brave. Some will think you're crazy. Some won't understand why you left. They'll have opinions about how you're living and what you should have done instead.

And none of them have to live your life.

They're going to talk when you're struggling, and they're going to talk when you're winning.

So learn this early:

Your why has to be louder.

Know who you are.

Own your truth.

There's power in making peace with the things someone else might try to use against you.

What are you going to expose me for if I've already made peace with the truth?

That doesn't mean putting every detail of your life on the internet.

It means your history doesn't get to control you just because somebody else remembers it.

Let them talk.

You still have a life to live.

Little Kionna was always strong.

She was always a fighter.

Sometimes she got in trouble because she was trying to protect herself with whatever tools she had.

Today, I still fight for myself.

I just have better tools.

Sometimes that means setting a boundary or walking away.

Sometimes it means therapy or having a difficult conversation.

Sometimes it means admitting I was wrong.

And sometimes it means getting on a plane from Peru, flying back to the United States, going to Virginia, walking into a courthouse, and dealing with some shit from almost ten years ago because I'm not letting it decide my future.

I didn't need to stop fighting.

I needed to learn how to fight differently.

Things have a way of resurfacing.

Sometimes it's a criminal record.

Sometimes it's debt.

Sometimes it's trauma.

Sometimes it's a lie.

Sometimes it's something you did when you were 14 years old that somebody is still bringing up decades later.

And sometimes you're the one who finally turns the light on.

There are things I once couldn't talk about that I can say out loud today.

They don't have the same power anymore.

I try to live as honestly as possible because I don't want to spend my life worrying about what happens if somebody finds something out.

I'm human.

I've fucked up.

I'll probably fuck something up again.

When I do, I want to own it, fix what I can, learn from it, and keep moving.

Take the anger, frustration, embarrassment, and pain.

Transmute it.

Build something.

Help somebody.

Tell the story.

Fix the problem.

Do the hard thing.

Then let yourself live.

The uncomfortable truth about consequences is that there are always consequences.

Good or bad.

Every action has one.

So save yourself some misery.

Make good decisions.

Handle your shit.

And when you don't make the good decision?

Handle that shit too.

You cannot always control what you've already done.

You absolutely control what you do next.

What's done in the dark may eventually come to light. Sometimes almost ten years later when you're living in Peru, trying to build a life abroad, and wondering why the hell your visa keeps getting denied.

Sometimes decades later when somebody brings up something you did as a kid.

You can't control when your past decides to knock on your door.

But you can control what happens when you open it.

Own your shit.

Fix what you can.

Forgive yourself for what you can't change.

Learn from it.

Then move the fuck on.

Because sometimes the consequence of finally handling your shit is freedom.