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Stories about the things men carry but never say out loud. Written by one man figuring it out in real time. Start wherever it stings.
The Original Version Isn't Available
Some of what you call your personality is just what nobody has challenged yet.
Some time ago, our friend came to visit. He'd barely sat down before he started — how they sang to the baby, the competition for the baby's attention. The best grandparents he'd ever seen. Possibly the best grandparents anyone had ever seen. Then my partner asked about his wife, and he told her she had lived in both Africa and Asia before they met. Super, super awesome person.
Stop Selling Hours
Your best work hours are invisible. They happen on a walk, in the shower. They don't show up on a timesheet. Those hours don't exist on any calendar. That's the work that matters.
When the work stops feeling right, most people don't change the work — they change the evenings.
The Chevy Year
My toes. The weave of the rope. A leaf turning slowly in the wind above me.
I had been lying there long enough that the rope had pressed its pattern into my back. A plane crossed the sky — unhurried, silent from that distance. I watched it until it disappeared. Then I watched the place where it had been.
Fine, Thanks
I was happiest alone as a boy. I had a bicycle and fields and small forest roads, and I could ride for hours without seeing anyone and feel completely full.
But I also loved being near people. Just not in them.
My mother's kitchen, when relatives came to visit. The adults around the table, the coffee, that particular hum of people being easy with each other. I sat in the other room and listened. Not to the words. To the warmth of it.
The Parent You Never Had
I don't remember how old I was. Three, maybe four.
I remember the room. The door between me and everyone else. The knowledge — not thought, knowledge, the kind that lives in the body before the mind has words for it — that I had done something wrong. Eaten incorrectly. Moved wrong. Said something that didn't fit. Nobody explained what.
Men's inner life — without the mask
I climbed for over twenty years before I thought to look down.
Not a mountain. The usual ladder — the one they set up for you before you know what's at the top. School. Job. Better job. Title. Salary. Apartment. Car. The kind of life that looks right from the outside and feels thin from the inside.
The Handbook Nobody Gave Us
I was five, maybe six years old.
It was late evening at my aunt's place in the countryside. The children had been sent to bed at nine, as they always were. But I couldn't sleep — too wired from the day, from playing, from whatever keeps a small boy's mind running long after his body should have surrendered. I wanted to be in the living room. Not because I particularly wanted to be with the adults. I just wanted to feel a little older than I was.
The Room
There is a room I have been trying to earn my way into for most of my life.
It changes address. Sometimes it's a house in the suburbs where my uncle's wife walked in and thickened the air without saying a word. Sometimes it's a startup office with a CEO who recruited me personally and then, eight months later, told me to prove myself more.
Knowing Isn't Freedom
On the gap between knowing your wounds and actually being free of them.
I have done the work.
I know why I get angry. I know what's underneath it. I've traced the root back to a boy who didn't have enough power and is now walking around in a man's body, occasionally honking at strangers like it means something.
Hunger Wounds
Part I
On food, shame, sexual insecurity, and the body that remembers.
I don’t have the healthiest relationship with food. Intellectually, I understand that food is medicine. It fuels the body. It sustains energy. It determines longevity.
But understanding something and living it are different negotiations. Food has often been a comfort.
Old Reflexes
There are moments when I don’t become the man I believe I am. They arrive unexpectedly. A tone. A look. A sentence delivered just slightly above me. And before I can think, something tightens inside.
I stop being measured. I stop being calm. I stop being the man who writes reflective essays. I become reactive. I’ve started to notice a pattern.
The End of Pleasing
There is a man trying to emerge in me. Not a protesting man. Not a wounded man. Not a man still arguing with his past. But a man who understands it.
A man who has finally realized that proving himself is an exhausting hobby. He no longer tries to be impressive. And even less to be liked. He just wants to be himself. Honest. Calm. Unarmed.
After the Climb
I didn’t start writing this to teach you how to be successful.
And certainly not to tell you how to live your life.
Honestly, success is a strange game. Most of us think we know the rules — money, titles, square meters, horsepower, the occasional airport lounge photo. I believed that too. For years.