The Altar of My Mind: A Memoir Trauma, Music, Grace, and Return

What happens when a nervous system trained for survival finally encounters a rhythm it can trust?Raised in a fundamentalist evangelical world, Todd Mayson learned early how fear, shame, and certainty could be mistaken for the voice of God. By thirteen, he had run away. At seventeen, he entered prison. Yet beneath the trauma, addiction, incarceration, grief, and years spent trying to outrun his past remained the boy he had been before any of it happened-a boy still worthy of love.Only later would Mayson begin to understand his life through the lens of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. CPTSD gave language to the vigilance, instability, and survival responses that had followed him for decades. Music gave those experiences a voice. But an unexpected kind of relief emerged through the ancient order of the Eucharist: gathering, confession, Scripture, prayer, peace, table, and return.The repetition did not erase the past. It offered his mind and body a rhythm they could learn to trust. Within that sacred order, grace and mercy became more than religious words. They became a way of understanding God, himself, and the people whose behavior often conceals wounds no one else can see.The Altar of My Mind is a memoir of childhood trauma, incarceration, sexual identity, music, loss, CPTSD, and spiritual return. It is not a story of abandoning faith, but of separating God from fear and discovering that healing does not require denying what happened.For anyone who has lived in survival mode, questioned the faith they inherited, or wondered whether mercy might still have the final word, this is a story of what it means to remain-and to keep becoming.