Nowhere to Go

On June 8, 2026, I was in bed recovering from a five-part foot reconstruction surgery. Six weeks with my foot above my heart in bed. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t work. I couldn’t do the thing I had done my whole life, which was keep moving.

So I picked up my phone, opened a dictation app, and started talking.

I’d never written a book. I’d spent decades making sure nobody saw too much of me. I left home at fourteen. I learned early that the safest version of me was the one I controlled. The addiction, the crime, the years of running all rested on one skill: staying hidden.

Lying in that bed, there was nowhere to go.

So I started talking. About the chaos of my childhood. About the drugs. About the life I kept secret. Most of it was things I had never said to anyone. Eight hours a day, every day, in that bed.

Three months later, on September 10, the manuscript was finished. A developmental edit. A copy and line edit. A proofread. Eight or ten passes on my own. Somehow, 60,000 words had been written.

Somewhere in those months, I figured out what the book was really about. It was never really about the criminal activity or the drugs. It was about fear. I was afraid to be seen as I am.

That line ended up in the epilogue. It’s the closest thing I have to a thesis for my life.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the book began when I couldn’t stand up. My whole life, I stayed on my feet so I could leave before anyone got close. The surgery took that option away. What was left was the truth.

I Just Kept Going, brick by brick… is what came out of that bed. It’s the story of a man who finally stopped running long enough to be seen.

Tony DeChico