It is painful showing up as someone you don’t actually want to be.

You know who you’d be if you weren’t doing it. You catch glimpses. The version of you that says what you actually think. That says no when you mean no. That walks out of the conversation without rehearsing it later. That person is right there.

You haven’t been able to be them.

It hasn’t been for lack of effort. You’ve read about it. You’ve named it. You’ve tried what was supposed to work.

What you’ve been chasing is more understanding. What you’ve been missing is the feeling on the other side of it. Of saying what you actually think and the room not ending. Of a life that gets to be a little messy. Of love that doesn’t audit itself. Of the inside of you finally matching the outside.

What you need is to know what has been stopping you. And what knowing hasn’t been able to fix.

The fear that holds you back lives on a spectrum and you sit somewhere on it. At the extreme end live two people. The dismissive-avoidant: fiercely independent, hard to reach. The fawner: endlessly accommodating, hard to know.

Both versions are the same person.

The answer you need is in their foundation.

Learning who you are is not a problem unique to you. It is the work of being a person. But some of us find that process more painful than others. At the painful end of the spectrum live the dismissive-avoidant and the fawner.

The fawner (of fight, flight, freeze, or fawn) has spent their whole conscious life scanning the emotional weather of a room before they sit down. They dream of being able to rush in and solve other people’s problems before anyone asks. They are exceptionally accommodating and are often praised for their sacrifice in doing so. They connect with people, but they have trouble disconnecting from them.

The dismissive-avoidant has spent their whole conscious life standing slightly outside the room they’re in. The calm one. The unflappable one. They take a quiet pride in not needing — in being the one others rely on rather than the one who reaches. Their greatest strength is handling whatever the world puts in front of them, alone. They are often praised for their composure and they earn it. They connect to ideas and to work. But they have trouble connecting to people.

But they are two sides of the same coin.

They both share a similar childhood trauma: growing up in an environment where authentic emotional expression was discouraged or unsafe. And they traded their identity for safe caregiving.

Today, they use survival strategies to avoid the same terror of abandonment and vulnerability. And both are running a fantasy belief.

The fawner’s: if I am perfectly accommodating and fix everything for everyone, I will finally be loved and safe.

The dismissive-avoidant’s: if I remain completely self-sufficient and never rely on anyone, I will never be hurt or abandoned again.

Different directions and a single bargain: trade who you really are for the love and safety of others.

“The world will ask you who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.”

- James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, Living an Examined Life.

Most of us live on the spectrum between there and internal security. Don’t get stuck trying to figure out which one you are. You’re probably some of both, like most people.

You learned the same thing they did — that love, approval, and safety were conditional. You feel the same disconnect they do, between the life you lead and the version of you that you’re too afraid to sit with. But want desperately.

The endless demand of perfection on yourself.

Constantly keeping the peace and silencing yourself.

Masking and resorting to conformity and safe scripts.

I used to be very, very good at not being a problem in rooms I’m in.

Some of these are more intense than others. But they’re all ways to secure approval and avoid rejection. All based on managing what happens outside of you rather than what you can actually control.

Some of you have been performing some version of this for so long it doesn’t feel like performing.

It feels like you.

It isn’t.

When you’re a kid you want the freedom of authentic expression, and connection with parents or whoever is taking care of you. But that doesn’t always happen.

You can be punished or rejected for expressing natural emotions. When you’re angry, or sad, or just being yourself.

So if it’s not safe to have emotions, what happens?

You sacrifice them.

When the people you rely on to take care of you aren’t accepting of your emotions, you learn your feelings are a threat to your survival. And to adapt the brain chooses to protect your younger self by “turning off” or numbing those physical sensations.

From here on out the survival strategy has one central function: severing the person and their sensations from their own body.

In order to regulate themselves, they regulate the people around them. And to do so, they must detach from their own inner world. Effectively abandoning the only things they power to control: their own boundaries, choices, and emotional responses.

“The False Self has one positive and very important function: to hide the True Self, which it does by compliance with environmental demands.”
- Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self (1960)

When feeling uncomfortable or upset, there’s a tendency to turn to self-help or psychological reasoning to solve it. Why am I so upset? Did I do something wrong, or did they? What is this called, and how do I wrangle it in?

For every emotion that rises. Every discomfort. Every sensation that feels misplaced. It all looks toward one final, ultimate process:

How do I solve it.

You embrace intellect and understanding to manage your feelings and discomfort. And once you can manage the emotion that way, put it into a descriptive little box, the discomfort eases away. You feel like you’ve processed it.

Waking up feeling heavy or depressed or angry but unable to point to anything wrong that makes logical sense, you disregard yourself. That you’re being ridiculous. There’s nothing wrong. And so you discount your own sensations.

You feel like a chameleon. Your body speaking to you becomes the most untrustworthy thing.

Stretches of childhood can feel blank. There’s an absence of attunement, of meaning, of validation. If you are completely disconnected from your own internal experience, you are not actually there to remember your own life.

You can be brilliant, successful, articulate, exceptionally functional, and have no idea what you actually want or feel.

And yet the end of the day, alone in a hotel room, with every external demand met and no one left to perform around, there is no relief. Instead, it is terrifying internal blankness. Loneliness. That they don’t know who they are beneath their survival strategy.

But that isn’t how it was supposed to go at all.

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If you can’t rely on what is inside, you look to what is outside.

Your internal compass goes out the window.

What replaces it is logical sequencing. To manage uncertainty, one way to survive is pattern matching. Predictability.

“If I put my toys away, my parents won’t get angry.”
“If Dad comes home extra quiet, I shouldn’t bother him.”
“If I don’t get upset, my parents don’t get upset. So I won’t.”

Your reactive habits persist into your adult lives. My own personal favorite is that I am very, very good at walking around the house silently.

And your habit to solve whenever an intense or threatening emotional situation arises:

“If I can figure out why this is going on and what led to this, then I can prevent it from ever happening in the future.”

And that’s what happens. Safety becomes understanding.

How flawless you can get at this cannot be overstated.

You can read the emotional weather of a room the moment you walk in; or in equal skill, completely detach from the group around you as an intently calm, stoic observer.

Skilled in managing your own presentation: at being low-maintenance, at being the calm one who never seems to need anything, at fixing any problem around you, at reading a friend’s bandwidth — not even asking — before talking to them about anything real.

You get good at taking your own discomfort apart — naming what’s happening, finding the angle; you become a miniature psychologist in your own right.

Even your vulnerability got skilled. You can name your fears. You can communicate your embarrassments. You know what to say. You know how to approach a situation. You can disclose with the right register for the room.

You become praised for these things.

You praise yourself too.

And yet.

The ability to understand all of this. To describe it with precision. To name where it came from, what it does, what it’s costing you.

That’s not normal. You know it isn’t normal.

But the most painful, frustrating part of it all?

You’re still. Not. Moving.

Your flawlessness becomes your greatest obstacle to healing.

The therapy, logic, prevention, understanding, remains a role of performance — a substitute for actual, messy human connection.

It’s all external management.

Eventually the armor that has been protecting you for your entire life becomes a prison.

For a dismissive-avoidant, endless self-reliance results in a profound sense of emptiness and isolation. For a fawner, endless appeasement turns into deep, unexpressed resentment and contempt for the people they serve.

It becomes suffocating. An endless demand of perfection. It’s painful watching yourself from the outside.

From now on, your skill can no longer be about how well you pay attention to the people around you, and instead becomes your ability to stop.

Because the better you get at this, the further from yourself you go.

The self that should have formed didn’t.

Rather than letting internal signals provide a sense of direction, intellectualized strategy became the layer between the outside and internal world. And that strategy became the personality.

It occupies the space where self-formation would have happened.

This is what’s known as the unbuilt self.

Only those at the most severe end of the spectrum sit here, such as trauma-driven fawners and dismissive-avoidants, because all of their developmental energy was diverted towards basic survival.

Not everyone lives there.

At the opposing end lives the solid-self — the most honest and potent version of who you actually are. You can still put up a mask of performance, but crucially, are still able to get in touch with your true preferences when you’re away from a stressful environment.

And in between are individuals like high-functioning perfectionists, chronic caretakers, and learned people-pleasers who were able to build partial structures growing up, but still rely heavily on external expectations.

Our temptation to help by saying “just be authentic” falls short because that assumes there is a self inside that is buried. That it just needs to be uncovered and freed to finally be allowed to express what was already there.

But the parts that would have made one, like the ability to notice what you want, the felt sense of what’s yours, the part that tells your preferences from anyone else’s, were never built.

For an unbuilt-self, underneath their survival strategy is a sense of, “I don’t know what I want, what I like, or who I’d be if I weren’t constantly managing.”

The one collective foundation between them all is self-silencing — to avoid disappointing a partner or surviving some emotional threat, you put a lid on yourself to cope.

It is never too late, though.

I described my own life as having been built by everyone else’s building blocks, until I decided to build it with my own. Now look at me. The belle of the ball.

Starting from zero, although I don’t ever believe in that — more like, starting the next chapter of your life in this way is lonely, sad, filled with grief, and also the most beautiful gift you will give yourself.

But there are barriers along the way. And it isn’t just internal.

Not everyone around you will be ready and accepting of a different version of you. Some have known you for a long time and prefer the version that has been comfortable for them. Regardless of the direction you wish to move.

There are people in the world that actively benefit from your lack of boundaries or from conflict avoidance or your calm, stoic demeanor. It isn’t easy changing your personality around those you’ve known forever.

The world you walk through every day rewards the strategy you’re trying to let go of. The hyper-independent get promoted. The self-sacrificing get praised. Silencing yourself isn’t just permitted out there. It’s the thing you get thanked for.

Change is difficult when the environment doesn’t mirror you back. It is easier to express yourself in a place where you don’t have to work against the grain to be understood.

All of that during an internal war of holding a strategy as a personality, while wanting to face the parts of you that were never built.

In this moment a painful reminder: what’s good for you isn’t always good for everyone else.

That doesn’t mean you have to be alone. It means being around people that bolster your own connection with yourself.

It may seem right now that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t. But at a crucial point in your life, it no longer will. You have understood your way to this exact spot, and understanding has nothing left to give you.

Now, what do you do to heal from this?

I’m so glad you asked.

The life we seek is the most honest version of ourselves. Where we no longer feel wrapped in a blanket of fraudulence, but where our freedom and independence lives alongside safety and closeness with others.

And before you can build, you must let go.

This is where you learn how to let the emotions and sensations in your body exist rather than hide them, be rid of them, or treat them as your shame.

True healing, rather than understanding, lives entirely within behavior and taking action that is contrary to your survival strategy and the mask you wear.

There is no single universal action here. It will vary for you depending on which direction your strategy runs. But let’s look at this in two halves: changing your environment, then changing your behavior inside it.

This first half is the environment.

For a dismissive-avoidant, the strategy relies on emotional withdrawal and extreme self-reliance. So the environment that disrupts the strategy is the opposite: connection and vulnerability. Be around the people you have a desire to connect with. Not the bullshitters who don’t want to know more about you and you feel safe to be around because it’ll never get that deep.

The environment should be with people you have an opportunity to be open with. Where you can, effectively, practice relying on them for something rather than yourself.

This can even be with a group of strangers who you have no personal ties to. Like traveling on a plane or at the airport where you can practice listening to someone else, or open up about something small yourself.

What you do in those environments comes in the second half, but regardless, this is your time to be present. Stay in the room. Don’t disappear into the project, the book, the headphones.

For a fawner, the strategy depends on having people in the room to read and accommodate.

This is where we have to address the fawner differently. Because the environment that disrupts them is solitude.

But not necessarily Superman’s fortress of solitude.

The places you go and the people you hang around with weave a familiar social web — a script to follow.

The restaurant you’ve been to with your family is the place you have an existing script you can follow.

The park you went to on a date has a familiar path you can already fall in place with.

Novelty is the name of the game. Go somewhere new.

It doesn’t have to be far. Near where you live is fine, but be conscious of your social web. Find somewhere near or far where you haven’t explored yourself and by yourself.

But critically, this is not the time for journaling and self-reflection.

Here’s why.

The common advice is to reflect on yourself, or journal or meditate; to consider and think and uncover your way to what is underneath.

Which is excellent. For someone else.

These are tools to uncover buried parts of you, not to build them.

Instead of insight, this tactic is often met with blankness. Or decision paralysis and an endless search.

Maybe you’ve hit this same frustrating wall I did: “This is supposed to work.” And then I threw my sixth and fanciest untouched batch of pen and pad aside.

Rather than digging deep, make new and different choices within these novel environments.

What you get for lunch. What you do for the afternoon or in the morning. Exploring one new location, then another, and then maybe, maybe, don’t check out this other place you thought about.

These seemingly trivial decisions start to teach you something critical.

What you don’t like, and what you do.

And with repetition, you learn that you’re ok with whatever end you land on.

Don’t abandon journaling or reflection. I have had to grieve with myself many, many times. Just realize that’s not the catalyst for change like you thought it was supposed to be. In this instance.

And this isn’t about being literally alone. You can go somewhere with strangers, but note that if you feel a compulsion to make your preferences small and accommodate for cashiers, and passersby, and people you’ll never see again, then a time of true solitude is worth considering.

When I took my solo camping trip to Washington, it became about making small choices. What to eat. Where to turn. When to stop. Whether to stay. And all the human lifts and pains that come from making them.

I picked a new campsite every night to cover as much ground as possible. I hated it.

One night I slept in a hammock because that’s where the trees allowed it. Even though I ended up with a cold ass on the ground, it turns out I love sleeping that way.

All of those preferences were allowed to register because nobody was with me to base my decision off of them.

This solitude is a training ground. It is where you locate your voice and where your survival strategy can stop running so your own preferences get a chance to come forward.

But you cannot stay there. Solitude is where the work begins. It isn’t where the work ends.

For both groups, it is easy to mistake more thinking for healing. To sit alone and try to logically think through the problems you’re afraid to face.

It is also easy to be physically alone or physically in the room and entirely disconnected from your body. Scrolling. Watching. Drinking. Anything that lets the time pass without you having to feel anything specific. Avoid numbing yourself.

The second half is about the behaviors you change in your relationships. Again, take action contrary to what you normally want to do.

For a fawner, it is asserting separation and your preferences. Disagreeing about the movie. Stating your preference for the different restaurant. Saying you cannot help with the project. Letting awkward silence exist without rushing to fix it.

For a dismissive-avoidant, it is direct connection. Making eye contact when your partner is crying instead of looking away or offering to solve it. Or sharing an emotional feeling without explaining it away — I feel angry right now.

You’ll find the right examples for you and you’ll understand which ones work in a moment.

But the action has to be small.

The instinct here will be to go big. To finally have the conversation. To spiral into your most suppressed emotions. To set the real boundary.

Go too big and your body treats it like a real threat. Then you panic. And then you feel the survival threat you always fear and retreat back into the safety of your process.

Keep the stakes tiny.

But please, please don’t think too hard about this. In my previous life, I would have spent a day or more looking up as many ways to do this properly or examples or options and then, inevitably, I would be latching on to whatever understanding made this process feel safe to me.

If you do that, you will take longer to heal.

For yourself, take a small dive. That’s all you have to know before moving forward.

That’s all.

In the moment of action, here’s how we approach it.

When the initial wave of discomfort arises, the immediate reaction is for your nervous system to scream at you to escape that feeling.

You’ve felt this before and maybe just discount it now.

This can come and go quickly; it doesn’t always lead into holding intense muscle tension, or a rapid heart rate, and quickened breathing.

It is in this moment you must pause.

For enough time to realize you had a sensation. For enough time to realize you wanted to react to it.

First you sit with it. Intentionally pull the rising energy into your body instead of pushing it away. Instead of succumbing to the compulsion to get rid of it.

You must sit in the discomfort before you attempt to solve it.

Release your muscles. And slow your breathing.

Realize that in this moment, your search to solve this the ‘right way’ is what is keeping you from healing.

There is no real, honest, and flawless version of this experience.

Surrender your need to do this perfectly. And allow yourself to make a messy mistake, while acting anyway. You are not trying to make your fear disappear. You are holding it at the same time.

The difficult part is not trying to solve this right now. But there’s good news. Great news.

By staying present in the discomfort, you cross the finish line.

The change you want isn’t with more understanding. It’s by choosing to heal by staying.

And by doing so you teach your body it has a new way it can survive.

It is reps after this. I’m sorry, I wish it just took a couple of times. The rest of the beginning of your life can look different now, if you let it.

But at this stage, a kindness for yourself. Remember that your entire life’s survival was built on a particular kind of process and you are working to undo that. As with any habit old and new, you will certainly slip back, and the new one will be your struggle. But then it becomes second nature. And what a blessing that is.

How do you know if you are just going through the motions and using logic to solve the problem, rather than truly healing?

The answer lies in the friction you feel.

If your action or decision feels safe, secure, and frictionless — if you took your action flawlessly, then you are probably going through the motions.

If you are genuinely changing, you will feel clumsy, unsure of yourself, and emotionally dysregulated, because you are operating without your armor.

The discomfort is not a sign you are doing it wrong. The discomfort is what tells you you are doing it for real.

Your original wound was relational. And your armor was built around the relationships in your life.

The healing has to return there.

That energy you feel rising into your chest is your voice. Practice expressing it. Try relying on a friend. Hold a preference at a family dinner. And then you learn through practice that what you’ve been afraid of this whole time isn’t world ending; it is survivable and your ability to thrive is on the other side.

None of this is fast. You’re going to slip back into the strategy. You spent thirty years building it; you’re allowed to take longer than a weekend to set it down.

It will require making mistakes, the fight-and-fuss of old habits, and patiently weaving in your new behaviors over time. It’s frustrating. When you just want to heal.

It’s really a lifetime process, as all growing becomes.

But it’s worth it. It’s always worth it.

Since rebuilding, I’ve come to think of vulnerability as something close to a superpower.

It isn’t the vulnerability I used to know. I would share parts of my life I knew were embarrassing, or a lesson learned, or where I failed and found the heart the inspire myself to go on. I didn’t know that wasn’t the deepest kind of vulnerability.

I’m talking about what I’m afraid to share. What I still hold as shame.

But now, with friends, with acquaintances, with people who have earned or deserve it. I’ll hand them what I’ve been carrying.

Here is my shame. I don’t know how you’ll hold it. But I believe it’s relating to you.

And to my surprise those people in turn open up. Guarded people. They share things with me and others they’ve been too afraid to share before. They find their own bravery through whatever they saw me do.

We keep things to ourselves because we hang so much on whether the other person will hold it properly.

But the answer was always whether I trusted myself enough to hold it on my own. Whether I could bear in myself to share something messy, and imperfect, and human.

That connection is worth the risk.

The true measure of your efforts from here on out will not be flawless authenticity, but how you treat yourself when you put the mask back on.

You can survive messing up without having to be flawless.

You can be messy.

You can be you.

This year, a man who already knew everything about Earth’s fragility circled the moon and, while still in orbit, said the value was in being shown. It confirmed something I’ve been learning the hard way for years — that the richest parts of being alive have never come from understanding them.

There’s a version of life that works well enough. You’ve done the work to become who you are and learn what you want. Things make sense and life continues with the blessing of less friction than what you used to deal with.

This is the moment of time worth paying the most attention to. Life has moved from being a struggle to being “fine.” And that is where you stopped. And the stop is so gradual you forget why to keep moving at all.

The richness in our lives doesn’t announce its departure. It fades away so quietly that its absence becomes just the way things are. Eventually we mistake knowing about life for living it.

And somewhere along the way you stopped doing the things that gave you those values in the first place.

This pattern comes for us all if we aren’t watchful. Mine came as avoidance. Making decisions that center around my own comfort. My learning stopped being an enhancement to life and it became a replacement instead.

One more book. One more framework. One more conversation where I described exactly what was holding me back, in perfect detail, to anyone who would listen. The describing felt like progress because it took real effort. But it was effort inside a room I already knew. The clarity kept getting sharper. The life underneath it stayed the same.

I wasn’t in crisis. I wasn’t failing. But I wasn’t moving either. I was stuck — not in pain, just in place.

Understanding wasn’t the problem. Understanding is a gift. But it had become the destination when it was only ever meant to be preparation.

Last week, someone proved this at a scale I never could.

Victor Glover — Navy test pilot, aerospace engineer, a career spent among the world’s foremost experts on this planet’s fragility. He knew the science. The history. The timelines. If anyone alive had enough understanding to make the experience unnecessary, it was him.

While still aboard the Orion capsule during the Artemis II mission, a reporter asked whether circling the moon had changed his view of Earth’s fragility.

It didn’t change anything, he said. It absolutely reaffirmed it. “It’s almost like seeing living proof.”

The most prepared human on the planet, saying the value of the most expensive trip ever conducted was in being shown what he already knew.

His preparation didn’t fail. His preparation was extraordinary — it got him there. But preparation and experience are different things entirely. One brings knowledge. The other brings conviction. And no amount of the first produces the second.

Glover didn’t script the meaning. Didn’t plan which moment would confirm what he’d believed for decades. He prepared rigorously, for years, and then the experience arrived on its own terms.

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I have one of the Artemis photos pulled up as I write this. Earth in full, the sun behind it, our planet lit at the edges like a marble held to a lamp.

It’s beautiful. Of course it is. The continents under cloud cover, the scale of everything you’ve ever known reduced to a single frame. It is meaningfully difficult to grasp.

But that isn’t what makes my heart skip a beat.

On the lower left and upper right, barely visible without a close look, sits the Aurora Borealis, glowing against the curve of the poles.

I love astrophotography and in that lies my chase with the Aurora. I’ve driven hours just for the chance, stood in the cold, waited for something I couldn’t predict or control. Those nights of success are among the most beautiful experiences of my life — standing on the ground, staring into the sky, entranced by something so ethereal it felt impossible.

And here they are. The same lights. Seen from the other side.

When I look at this photo my eyes hang on those spots. I understand their existence, I know they are there, but it connects to something I already carry — a memory, a night, a moment when I stood somewhere cold and was overwhelmed.

Without my own experiences to anchor to, I’d look at this image and think: cool. Appreciate it, admire it, move on. Whatever richness I pull from this photograph is borrowed entirely from the life I’ve actually lived.

And even this image, as stunning as it is, is no substitute for what those astronauts saw with their own eyes.

There is no substitute for the richness that comes from experience. None.

It’s a simple thing to know. But knowing is the easiest thing in the world, and forgetting is even easier. The day-to-day fills in around you. Knowing feels close enough to living. The experiences that once made life feel vivid become easier to postpone than to pursue.

The richness is still there. It has never once come from understanding alone. It comes from the moments you can’t fully predict, can’t control, and can’t reach any other way than by showing up for them.

Don’t forget.

My ex-wife said something to me years ago that I think about to this day. She said knowing yourself is like breathing. If you know who you are, you don’t even think about it. It just happens. You move through the world as yourself without monitoring every choice, every word, every room you walk into.

But what if you don’t know who you are?

Then it’s like having to consciously think about every breath you take. Inhale. Exhale. Am I doing this right? Is this the right rhythm? What if I stop? What if I do it wrong?

She could see what I couldn’t. That for thirty years, I had been paying attention to my breathing.

I built my entire personality out of other people’s blocks.

Their preferences became my preferences. Their comfort became my priority. I calibrated to what everyone else needed so well that I couldn’t have sooner told you what I wanted for dinner, let alone what I wanted from my life.

I had no signal. The channel where my own wants were supposed to broadcast had been off the air so long I forgot it existed.

For some people this is occasional. A moment here and there. For me it was the operating system. I didn’t just accommodate — I scanned. Every room, every conversation, every relationship. There was a constant background calculation running: what does this person need me to be? And I’d become it. Not as a decision but as a reflex. I didn’t even notice I was doing it because I’d never known myself without it.

Where I was is when the performance runs so long and so deep that you lose the original signal entirely. Where you can be in a relationship for ten years and your partner has never met you — not because you’re hiding, but because what’s behind the performance has atrophied.

In that relationship, every decision ran through a background process. Not always for them — for me. Every choice filtered through a single question: will this keep me accepted? Not what do I want. Not what do I think. Will this keep me safe. Will this let me fit. It wasn’t generosity. It was a monitoring system I couldn’t turn off.

Even though I didn’t want it. Even though I was in therapy. Even though I understood the pattern completely.

And nothing changed.

That’s the gap nobody talks about. Not a gap in knowledge. A gap in proof. I had decades of evidence that the performance worked — that I fit in, that I stayed safe, that relationships held together. And I had zero evidence that I could function without it. Not a single data point that said: you can drop this and survive.

Understanding tells you what’s wrong. But your nervous system doesn’t update through understanding. It updates through proof. Through experience. And I had none.

You can’t think your way out of an action problem. I tried for thirty years.

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Nobody tells you that when you finally stop performing, the first thing you feel isn’t freedom.

It’s a void with nothing to grasp at all.

When the performance dropped and the relationship ended and the structure I’d built my identity around fell away — what was underneath wasn’t some authentic self waiting to emerge.

It was blank. Empty. Not emptiness as a flaw. Emptiness as an absence. The absence of anything I’d built myself.

Instead of a personality, I developed a survival strategy. And when the survival strategy was no longer needed, what was left was the space where a self was supposed to be. Thirty years of proof that the performance works. Zero proof of who I am without it.

What I knew was that my dad had just died weeks prior, my marriage was ending, and I didn’t even know where to begin.

I could have kept doing the same things I’d been doing — the safe things, the familiar things, the things that didn’t ask me to be anyone in particular.

But something in me needed to move. Not in a travel sense. In a personal one. I didn’t feel fear as much as opportunity. Or maybe something in me was just finally ready — not me, exactly. It.

So I booked a solo camping trip to Washington state for two weeks all alone. It became the most important choice I could make at that point in my life.

My trip fell apart before it began.

My rental camera gear to document this wonderful adventure didn’t arrive in time. After landing in Washington my phone was at two percent and without a charger that worked. My first stop wasn’t going to be what I wanted, but to wherever I could find a retail store.

Various other issues compounded into one idea: I shouldn’t be here. What am I doing here?

I cried. In the car sitting in the rental lot. Within the first hour.

This was supposed to be a good trip. And instead, my first stop wasn’t a trailhead or a campsite. It was Best Buy.

I wanted to go home. Genuinely. Within sixty minutes of landing, I wanted to turn around and leave. It was the reaction of someone whose life was currently attached by string and scotch tape. Whose life of accumulated nothing was a mess. Who had never made a single significant choice for himself and was now sitting in a parking lot three thousand miles from home wondering what the hell he was doing.

Some time later, I composed myself, did what I needed to do and drove on.

The trip became about choices. Not big, dramatic, story-worthy choices. Small ones. The kind nobody writes about because they don’t sound like anything.

This sounds stupid unless you’ve spent your entire life scanning for what other people want. When picking for yourself and sitting with it isn’t an act of defiance or courage — it’s an act of developing proof.

I went camping because my dad used to take me as a kid. And while we were only starting to get close in adult life, he’d passed away only recently before this trip. I was carrying his death, my separation, and my own unraveling all at the same time — and I chose to sleep in the woods because it was the closest connection with nature and a territory I loved that I could come up with.

I went skydiving. I went whitewater rafting. And while those were fun and scary, those aren’t the moments that built anything lasting. The foundation wasn’t laid by the electrifying stuff. It was laid by the quiet, unglamorous, compounding choices that don’t make good stories.

I picked a new campsite every night to maximize travel distance and coverage. It seemed like making the most of the trip. And I hated it. I couldn’t rest after a long eventful day. I had to set up at night and in the morning I had to pack. I was at the whim of my travel ambitions rather than my desire to rest in the moment. I didn’t know that about myself until I was too tired to ignore it.

One night I slept in a hammock because that’s where the trees allowed it. It turns out I love sleeping in a hammock. It also turns out it’s important to set up the hammock appropriately or else you find yourself with a cold ass on the ground at two in the morning. But that was mine. A preference discovered and taken seriously because I was the only one there to have it. Not borrowed. Not performed. Not filtered through what anyone else would think. I liked it. That was enough.

I picked wrong sometimes. I’d get something and not like it. And that — “I don’t like that” — was information. Real information. Mine. A preference that belonged to me because no one else was there to meaningfully influence my take.

What to eat. Where to turn. When to stop. Whether to stay.

Those were my building blocks. My own, for the first time.

Coming back from San Juan Island I was in tears. Not from pain. From gratitude. Something had opened up over those days and I was so full of it I couldn’t hold it together on the ferry.

Then I pulled into a gas station.

A guy at the next pump started telling me about his latest surgery. In rich, committed detail. His entire arm felt like being wrapped in barbed wire, he said. An electrical current running through it. Ten minutes I stood there nodding. “Wow, man. Yeah. That’s crazy...”

Out of... Well, for some damn reason I didn’t know how to leave. Here I was mid-breakthrough, crying with gratitude an hour earlier, and I was still stuck in this Midwest Goodbye.

Honestly I think I was mostly flabbergasted.

I didn’t have this language then. But I think what was happening is that every choice I made on that trip was a deposit of proof my nervous system had never had.

The right choices built something I’d later understand as competence evidence. Proof that my own judgment could lead me somewhere worth going. That I could pick a trail and it would be beautiful. That I could sleep in a hammock in the woods and discover something I genuinely loved. That I could decide to stay somewhere longer or leave earlier and both would be fine.

The wrong choices built something I didn’t expect, and it might matter more. Tolerance evidence. Proof that a bad call wouldn’t destroy me. That I could pick a new campsite every night and learn the hard way that I need rest more than coverage — and still be standing. That I could drive an hour in the wrong direction, eat something I hated, wake up cold on the ground — and still be okay. Not perfect. But functional. Alive.

The fear underneath people-pleasing was never really “what if they don’t like me.” It was “what if I make the wrong choice and I can’t survive it.” Every wrong choice I survived on that trip quietly disproved that.

I’d had decades of proof that performing for other people kept me safe. And now I was collecting new proof. One meal, one trail, one wrong turn at a time.

The old proof wasn’t erased. The new stuff just slowly became louder.

That’s what evidence-based change actually is. The proof accumulating quietly, unglamorously, one choice at a time until it outweighs the fear. Until your nervous system has enough data.

Understanding tells you what’s wrong. Proof tells your body it’s safe to change. I understood my people-pleasing for thirty years. What I was missing was the proof that I could exist without it.

I couldn’t tell you I’d found myself when I came home. That would be a lie.

This was the foundation of starting to build myself. Out of my own materials, for the first time.

What followed was years of continued choosing. Continued collecting proof. Continued catching myself mid-performance and choosing differently. Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Sometimes at gas stations, still nodding along.

Growth is a process, not an end. And the distance between that parking lot where I cried over a dead phone and where I am now isn’t a straight line. It’s years of getting it wrong and getting it right and slowly, slowly accumulating enough proof that something shifted.

There’s an unappreciated beauty to making your own choices. Like how I wrote this to the same album I listened to on repeat during the trip — Carly Rae Jepson’s “Emotion.” That one is mine, too.

I think about my ex-wife’s words differently now.

She said knowing yourself is like breathing. And for a long time, my personality was a conscious, monitored, effortful performance of what I thought would be accepted. Every breath deliberate. Every exhale calculated. Inhale. What do they need? Exhale. What do I become for them?

That shift didn’t come from more understanding. It came from proof.

I don’t have to think about my breathing anymore. I think that’s because my body finally has enough evidence that I can be trusted with my own life.

I’m still building. I’m still collecting. I still catch myself holding my breath sometimes.

But I don’t monitor it anymore.

And that is the most peaceful part of my life.

I’ve chased waterfalls all over the world. The harder they are to reach, the more I want to go. It’s one of the things I know I love because of how fulfilled I feel.

So when I got to the first one and felt nothing, I didn’t know what to make of it.

This is the Waterfall Circuit in the Atherton Tablelands, Northern Queensland, Australia. Three waterfalls — Millaa Millaa, Zillie, and Ellinjaa — all close enough to hit in one day. It’s a popular visit, except for today. It’s foggy, raining, and storming. The kind of day most people would stay home.

That’s never bothered me. I would do the same things, just wet.

The first waterfall — Millaa Millaa — is right off the parking lot. No hike to speak of. Classic, stunning. I had planned to stick around for a while, maybe swim.

But I walked down, took some photos, and checked it off my list. Already thinking about the next one before I’d finished being at this one.

I’d gotten exactly what I came for. Something I supposedly love. And it just felt… flat. Not bad. Not wrong. Just not what I set out for.

I didn’t know why. I just showed up, looked, and left.

The rain was still ebbing and flowing. This next one — Zillie Falls — could also be seen with just a short walk to a nearby viewing platform. This is an immense waterfall. The kind that thunders and makes you yell just so the person next to you can hear you.

Beautiful to be sure. But that view didn’t suffice if I could get closer, and fortunately there’s another much longer trail I can follow.

The hike doesn’t seem too bad. Alltrails describes it as “a bit of a scramble involving climbing rocky and at times slippery steps before reaching the waterfall.” Although the continuing rain made me more cautious than usual.

The trail gave me time to slow down. I started noticing things — the smell of the forest, the ferns, the mushrooms I don’t have at home. Somewhere on that walk I stopped thinking about what I was headed toward and started paying attention to what I was in. I didn’t realize it yet, but that shift changed the rest of my day.

As I near the base of the falls, I reach a point that is about as far as I can go without making a decision.

There’s a gap between two large boulders with water flowing between them. On the best of days I could pass it with a short jump, but that may not be in the cards today. My heavy camera backpack and the rain all day made it a risk I wasn’t willing to take. No one was around. If I hurt myself I’d be in real trouble.

But the waterfall was just ahead. I hadn’t been able to get a good view the entire trail, and with it this close, I couldn’t leave like this.

I had to find another way.

Nearby I notice a crevice between the rocks. It’s small, but I can fit. Deeper inside it and about seven feet up there’s an opening big enough to crawl through — and maybe see what I came to see.

I toss my bag through the opening and start shimmying up the crevice walls. I end up scratched, scraped and bleeding, but after a few minutes of pushing I make it through.

It’s a perfect view of the falls. Exactly what I wanted. And I felt such a rush after wondering if I wouldn’t be able to see it at all, plus showcasing my newly found shimmy skills.

For the first time all day, I was fully here. I felt alive.

At the time I didn’t know how to explain the difference between this and the first waterfall. It wasn’t just that the view was better. Something about being here felt different in my whole body. Like I wasn’t just looking at it — I was in it. The trail, the doubt, the scrapes on my hands, the decision that could have gone either way — all of it was in the moment with me.

I stayed for another hour. Not because I needed to. Because I didn’t want to be anywhere else.

But I still had one more waterfall to go.

The path to Ellinjaa Falls is just as long as the last but far less sketchy. Still, the rain was coming down harder now than it had all day. I was starting to get nervous about lightning.

When I arrived I saw that the falls were by far the smallest of the three.

And I was having the time of my life.

I was soaked. Tired. My feet kept slipping off the wet stones and into the water. The kind of day that would make most people miserable had me standing there, taking it in, and I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I wasn’t thinking about the next thing or the thing after that. I was just here — in the rain, in front of a small waterfall, at the end of a day I had every reason to skip.

It was a perfect day. Inside a completely imperfect one.

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Yet there was still the difference between the first waterfall and the others. I was here to seek enjoyment and fulfillment. But why did I start out feeling so flat instead, despite seeing exactly what I intended?

It would be easy to think the difference was the difficulty. That I just needed a harder hike to appreciate the reward. But the last waterfall was an easy-breezy trek, plus the smallest of the three. And yet I was having the time of my life.

The difference was that nothing at the first waterfall asked me to choose. I showed up, I looked, I left. I was on autopilot and I didn’t even notice. A frictionless path to something I wanted — and frictionless meant I could sleepwalk the whole way there.

Everything after that had friction. The rain, the gap I couldn’t cross, the wet stones I kept slipping on. None of it was extreme, but all of it interrupted the autopilot. All of it forced a decision — keep going or take the easy out.

But friction alone wasn’t what changed the day. If I’d been rushing through the trail, frustrated by the rain, on my phone, powering through to get to the view — that friction would have just been a bad time. What changed was that somewhere on that second trail, I started paying attention. I stopped chasing the destination and noticed what was around me. And once I was actually present, every obstacle became something I was choosing rather than something I was enduring.

That’s the part that unsettles me. Not the waterfalls — what they revealed. How many times I’ve taken the frictionless path to something I wanted and arrived feeling flat. And how many times I’ve hit friction and just resented it, because I was too focused on getting there to notice where I was.

Every time I thought if I just get there, I’ll feel better — if I just get the job, the relationship, the thing I’ve been chasing — I ended up standing in front of it on autopilot. I got there. But I didn’t have the feeling I really wanted out of it.

The destination is the same either way. But getting there in a way that feels earned — choosing to stay in it, and paying attention while you do — that’s what determines whether you feel anything when you arrive.

I think about what would change if I stopped waiting for the right moment to pursue something that matters to me. If I stopped looking for the frictionless version of the path. Because that path gets me there. But it doesn’t get me there alive.

And I love that I get to make that choice today.

Nobody warns you about how lonely getting better can be.

You finally start setting boundaries. Finding your own integrity. Figuring out what you actually want. And then there’s this space — between the before and after — where what surrounded you is no more, but what’s in front of you isn’t here yet either.

It is incredibly easy to look around at your shrinking circle and think, I must be doing something wrong.

You might expect that personal growth is supposed to feel positive. That it’s supposed to look like good vibes and connection. So when you start outgrowing people — or outgrowing the version of you that used to fit perfectly into their expectations — it starts to feel like you made a mistake.

But here’s what I want you to hear, and I want you to hear it before we go any further:

The loneliness doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong. It means you are in the in-between. The unknown, unclear, messy middle.

it is one of the most painful places you can be and I’m going to tell you how to get through it.

I was 30 years old, sitting at the top of Mount Storm King in Washington State. It was near the end of the day. The sun was going down, a quiet fog setting in. Everyone else had made their way home. I’d just finished one of the most difficult hikes I’d ever done — uphill the entire way, rope scrambles, the kind of trail that asks you if you’re sure about every ten minutes because what sounds real better right now is not this.

I was two weeks into a solo camping trip after separating from my partner of ten years.

A group of kids from out-of-state came up to join me at the summit. We chatted a bit and got to know each other a little. And one of them unknowingly threw a profound banger my way as he observed where I was as “the third stage of my life.”

Because they were right. I’d moved past school, then found someone and built a life. And then that life ended. And now I was standing on a mountain in the fog, at the beginning of something that didn’t have a shape yet.

The third part of my life.

I’ve thought about how life is built in chapters a lot since then. And how that same guy dubbed me the Seattle Mountain Goat.

What I lived through I eventually learned has a name.

William Bridges called it the Neutral Zone. In his book Transitions, he lays out what happens when life changes faster than your identity can keep up: you end what was, you enter the middle, and eventually you begin again. Found, lost, found.

This loneliness is the middle part before you’re found again, where everything falls apart. And where, if you let it, everything gets rebuilt.

Here’s what I think most people don’t understand about this middle: it’s coming for you.

Sometimes because you chose to grow, and sometimes because life made the choice for you. A relationship ends. A career collapses. Something you built your identity around simply stops being true. And suddenly you’re between who you were and who you haven’t become yet, whether you signed up for it or not.

Now — you can refuse it. You can stay in “found.” You can hold tight the shape of who you are today and what you know. But that choice has a cost: you have to keep starving yourself for the comfort of your tiny walls.

You have to keep saying no to the parts of you that are trying to grow because growing means entering a space you can’t control. And most people will make that trade for years — sometimes their whole lives — because the known feels safer than the unknown.

Or you believe you can skip the middle entirely. That growth goes from one version of settled to the next without the shit in between — like a quick flash in a montage. You expect the glow-up without the discomfort. And you believe growth can happen without the seeds we sow in our own pain.

The middle is the whole point.

As far as when and how this appears, this model doesn’t always happen in clean stages. From my own experience it was more like found → lost → what I thought led to found → still a bit lost → maybe this is it → no, still lost.

Then something that felt like close to found again — until something else challenged it.

And I’ve noticed something more: as I actively pursue growth, the more ambiguous the cycle becomes. Where the peaks and valleys of it all don’t go away, but they’re an out-of-focus blur of the process. Found doesn’t become a destination anymore and lost feels more like a chosen-wander. It’s just all together and part of it, largely I think as a result of staying in a state of growth and challenging yourself as often as you can.

Early on, the neutral zone felt like a mountain top crashing toward the Mariana Trench into what felt truly lost. Now I have a stronger instinct of where I am and where I’m going and there is a familiarity and comfort in it all.

I think that’s because when growth happens to you, it is uninvited, unwanted, challenging the comfort of being in a world you know — then you’re just in freefall with no frame for what’s happening.

But the more you choose to grow, the more you recognize the terrain. Not because it gets easy. Because you’ve survived it before. And that survival becomes its own kind of evidence.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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I remember being in the bathroom at work.

I was embarrassed. Crying. And I couldn’t escape my thoughts: Why did I do this? Why couldn’t I do this better? Why am I such a fuckup? What if I never find what I had, or what I want?

That last one held the terror about the future. What if this is just what my life is now?

What if I made a mistake?

I wanted my old life as I envisioned it at its best. That’s what I remember most. Not certainty, even. Just comfort — even the illusion of it. Just the feeling that something was familiar and safe. Because the absence of that is just the raw exposure of being alone with a life that no longer had its old shape.

And so I did what a lot of people do. I tried to fix it.

I made choices I wasn’t ready for. To make this process stop; to move past it ASAP; to make it to the promised land everyone kept saying existed.

This is where your insecurities and faults project onto your decisions. You want to prove that’s not you. They feel urgent and obvious from the inside but are visibly wrong from the outside.

They’re not the right paths. Some of them have real consequences. But they’re part of how you test yourself.

I didn’t see that when I was in the middle of it. I do now. It doesn’t make someone feel better to know they are where they are supposed to be — when the only thing around them is pain.

But I do want to affirm that being in this middle part doesn’t mean you did something wrong to deserve it.

Because when you’re in this middle part — alone and confused — the most natural thing in the world is to treat your pain as proof that you failed. Everyone else seems to have figured this out. Everyone else seems to be moving forward. And here you are, crying again, unable to explain to anyone what’s even wrong because the answer is: everything changed and I don’t know who I am right now.

That loneliness feels personal.

But you’re not alone because you’re the problem. You’re alone because you’re in a passage that, by its nature, no one else can walk for you. And the fact that it hurts this much isn’t a sign that you did something wrong — it’s a sign that what you left behind mattered to you, and what you’re walking toward matters to you, and you’re standing in the gap between the two.

What feels like failure is the cost of actually growing.

While you move toward the next stage of your life, the practice in self-compassion has to do real work in two different places.

The first is the acute moment in the middle of the day when you’re alone and the voice in your head is saying what if I never find myself. In that moment, you’re in pain, and the only question is whether you beat yourself up for being in pain — or whether you let yourself be there.

That means: do not judge yourself for missing the comfort of what you left behind. Do not judge yourself for wanting to go back. Do not treat your grief for what you lost as weakness.

Let it hurt without turning the hurt into evidence that you’re broken.

The second is slower. It’s the ongoing frustration of being in the middle longer than you want or expected.

You’re trying. Nothing’s clicking yet. Other people seem to move through this faster. You expected that by now something would have happened for you, surely it would have — and it hasn’t. And you start to wonder if you’re just stuck.

This is when self-compassion looks more like endurance.

And here’s the part I want to be honest about: I don’t know how long the middle takes. I don’t know how long this lasts for you or what your valleys and peaks entail.

It takes what it takes.

I hold something to be true that I know won’t comfort you right now — that you will find where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there. I know how unhelpful it sounds from the inside. I’m offering it as something I hold for you until you can hold it for yourself.

The self-compassion is the closest you can get to peace and acceptance while you’re still in the middle of it.

So, you’re in it — what do you actually do?

One option is to wait. Wait for clarity. Wait for the right moment. Wait until you know who you’re becoming before you take a step.

But clarity doesn’t come from waiting or preparing. It comes from action.

Dave Evans in his work with Stanford’s Life Design Lab talks about this as prototyping — small experiments without a thesis. Not grand pivots. Not strategic moves. Just: try something. Talk to someone new. Say yes to something for no reason. Go sit somewhere unfamiliar for an hour. Respond to one person differently than you normally would.

Now — your response may be that, in pursuit of your destination, this seems rather akin to throwing shit against a wall and seeing what sticks. And honestly? It is.

But here’s what’s hard to accept: directionless is actually the more direct path.

Because while you think the better path is straight from A-to-Z, what that really looks like is waiting for certainty before you move. It isn’t short at all. In reality, the most direct path is the one that bounces around, side-to-side, back and forth — because you are human.

And the pace is yours. You can make more experiments and it can accelerate. But it doesn’t have to. No one else is grading your speed of transformation. If all you can manage today is getting out of bed and being kind to yourself about the fact that getting out of bed was hard — that’s not stagnation. That’s someone who’s still in it, still moving, and still here.

The only thing that matters is that you keep moving. That you don’t give up and fall into hopelessness.

I want to tell you how long this takes but I can’t. None of my growth felt like growing at the time. You never know it’s happening until you look back.

Right now it feels like nothing is happening. Like you’re standing still while everyone else moves forward. You’re waiting for the morning you wake up and it all finally clicks into place.

But the ache in you is the growth.

Nobody warns you that getting better can feel this lonely. But nobody tells you this part either: you were never supposed to feel positive right now.

You were just supposed to feel.

For a long time, this is exactly what the inside of my head felt like. It is how my outside world felt. Like waves crashing on rock in a storm, my overthinking and rumination were endless, immortal, chaotic, and never satisfied.

Today, that same image brings me serenity rather than chaos. The awareness I needed may be the one you need, too.

I have been a massive overthinker my entire life, so when I finally figured out what raises it and what eases it, waves of relief washed over me.

What you already know is that overthinking is exhausting. The endless ping-pong in your head is putting you into massive amounts of mental debt, and it’s probably why you’re tired all the time. I certainly was.

You probably also know—although this is harder to accept—that as much as you intend for that cycle to be helpful in preparing you for the unknown, it just isn’t.

Don’t believe me?

Because, of course, you think that if you just spend enough energy trying to figure out every possible outcome, you can perfectly prepare for the moment so nothing will go wrong. It is a way to control what happens in that unknown world.

You tell yourself that you’re just thinking ahead to solve a problem. And if you could just find an answer and be done with it, that would be fine. But the trap of overthinking is that you are never actually satisfied with the solution, so the process never stops.

When was the last time you said, “Hmm. Okay, that sounds like enough thinking.” And then you put the idea to bed and moved on? It doesn’t happen.

Because instead of being satisfied with a “good enough” answer, you look for that one perfect, pain-free solution within a cognitive minefield of a million other disastrous ones.

So here is how we think differently. Let’s trace the logic back to the root:

You overthink to perfectly prepare for every possible outcome. You need that perfect answer because the unexpected feels dangerous. And the unexpected only feels dangerous because you do not trust yourself to handle it.

Even I have to take a breath after that one.

The unexpected only feels dangerous because you do not trust yourself to handle it.

When you stop trusting yourself, your overthinking rises. When you start trusting yourself, it lowers.

So I want to be clear about what trusting yourself looks like, because even I need this reminder.

Self-trust just means you believe you can handle whatever comes your way. That you don’t need every answer. That in the moment, even when you don’t have something figured out, you are still going to be okay.

If this idea sounds scary to you, then I have some great news—amazing news.

You have already done this time and time again.

You have handled the unexpected, the imperfect, and here you are. You made it. And you may not believe it right now, but you have the evidence you need to prove that you have handled and can handle what comes your way.

Here’s what you need the next time you recognize you’re overthinking:

Ask yourself how to handle or approach whatever this situation is. Your first or second answers will be good enough. That’s step 1.

Step 2 now, is to stop trying to solve the problem.

Stop trying to solve it.

Stop.

Breathe into that discomfort.

My favorite take on this comes from Dr. Michael J. Greenberg, who describes rumination as a treadmill we step off of.

He makes the distinction that ruminating is an effort we make; not-ruminating (although with its challenges) is the act of not making effort. And so he describes it as stepping off a treadmill. He says, “Directing attention is like mentally holding onto something. You don’t need to grab onto something else, just to let go.”

The idea is simple, but not always easy. That’s why you must also be kind to yourself, because this is going to take some time and practice before you start to know you’re safe enough to feel like you can completely stop.

But at some point sooner than you expect, you’re going to be satisfied with the first “good enough” solution that comes into your head.

The answer is in the silence.

This same coast, violent and chaotic, looks entirely different to me today. I imagine sitting on a rock by myself with waves crashing around me, and I am serene.

I trust in myself not to know the answer, but to handle what comes my way.

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I came to this bat hospital thinking I knew what I believed about bats. Turns out, I had no idea why I believed it.

See, I’ve been afraid of bats my whole life. Not because of anything I’d actually experienced, but because I accepted what I was told without ever questioning it.

Once I was willing to look, I realized these bats were about to teach me something I desperately needed to learn.

This is the Tolga Bat Hospital in Queensland, Australia.

They exist because most people get bats completely wrong.

They provide rescue services to rehabilitate injured and orphaned bats. They educate the public, teachers, students, and are active in conservation and habitat improvements.

When I first looked into this rescue, I kind of wondered why it was necessary. I mean, haven’t we been doing a decent job of talking about the benefit of bats over the last few decades? Yeah, I guess not.

Even though I’m here visiting bats and I have some kind of fascination with them, I have a prejudice stemming from when I was a little kid. My grandmother hated bats. Every time we visited her in Arizona, she had me and her grandkids go out and... deal with them. And that’s a part of my life I’m not fond of.

Since then I’ve had an open opinion about bats towards anyone that brought them up. This wasn’t broadcasting a mission - I didn’t have a stake in this. But I didn’t hold back in telling other people that I felt bats were no good.

I was perpetuating what my grandmother taught me.

Of course, I understood then that there were legitimate safety concerns with bats and rabies. I held onto that rigid belief for most of my life.
But I never questioned why I believed it.

And the stakes for better understanding were never high, as I wasn’t directly affected.

I was about to find out what happens when that box is directly challenged.

What you’ll see here are primarily Flying Foxes.

Our group toured the small facility and it was explained that these bats are a keystone species - crucial for long range pollination. This is part of what I did know, but what I didn’t is that the diseases heavily associated with bats are largely misunderstood. According to their website, “Irrational fear of diseases in bats is an impediment to the conservation of flying foxes in Australia and other countries.”

I was starting to question what I thought I knew

What struck me the most was the protectiveness and care being provided. To me this went beyond simple care and rehabilitation for what I thought was at best a ‘useful critter’.

These bats are loved.

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I didn’t expect to see hand feeding - tiny bottles held to tiny mouths. Or bats swaddled in blankets like newborns, clinging to the fabric with their small clawed thumbs.

I didn’t even realize until later this is a volunteer organization.

It made me wonder what that took. What did they see that I wasn’t?

I think about how easily I let this belief become inherited. The larger societal opinion is that bats are gross and dangerous, even if through some effort through the previous decades they’re known as ‘useful’ despite that negative feeling.

I don’t think just knowing that they have a place got me far enough, though.

Most people feel a type of way about bats. Or at least I fit myself within a certain group that did. So, that made sense.

My logic was clear enough. If what I believed made me feel safe, that was all I needed. Even if incompletely, I had enough of an answer and I didn’t have to look further.

But as I watched the love of the bats come through, I knew at my core I was missing something important. I was letting a limiting belief and fear decide what I felt about something else, rather than an understanding of them.

I had to do something about that.

There are some requirements for changing a judgement and part of that is creating and allowing for the opportunity itself.

One of the reasons I bring my camera with me is because it forces me to connect with whatever my subject is. I’m watching it. Taking it in. Often times, appreciating it.

And I am unable to just move on. Getting a good shot takes time. I’m not a passive audience in a museum moving from one talking point to the next.

I have to sit in it.

It isn’t lost on me that my realization that I was wrong is followed by the gift of being able to admit it. I mean okay you can say “it’s just bats, this isn’t that deep.” But this isn’t just about that for me.

It makes me question what else I put into a stupid little box because of a fear, which is just easier for me if it stays there.

It makes me wonder what I’m missing because of being stuck in that - what other wonder of life and appreciation I could be holding and embracing and being enriched with.

Today, I try to take stock of other bias or prejudice I hold.
If you were to survey yourself right now, you’ll likely come up blank. Why would you do it then? Because it leads to the most important result: the humility to be wrong.

This is more critical than even I realized.

It is the ability to ask yourself that question - even when it draws up blank:
“What am I missing here?”

What I’m fostering today isn’t perfect self-awareness, it is my willingness to ask that question and confront my beliefs.

You’ve likely already met circumstances that challenge your belief, and you’ll absolutely encounter more in the future.

How will you spot this?

There is likely a negative belief and along with it, a lack of direct experience around that belief. Look for how you filter information to confirm your belief or if your belief carries an emotional charge.

The most difficult step is being open once you are challenged - to go looking for the answers that would prove your belief wrong.

It’s scary.

There are many reasons why you don’t have to go looking. But if you do, you’ll inevitably be met with compassion and gain a life with deeper connections than you had before.

There will never be a shortage of people who think you should be doing something differently - and no amount of agreement will make you feel safe. You’ll never find fulfillment through other people’s expectations either.

I spent 20 years as the ultimate people pleaser and this is the one true law I learned:

Doing what you ‘should’ do only works until you actually need to show up for yourself.

Those familiar with this have a difficult time changing because they don’t understand the cost of staying in it or the reward for getting out:

• Exhaustion from overthinking. Trying to be the ideal version for everyone means overpreparing endlessly on behalf of others.

• Zero self-confidence. Hesitating, second-guessing, and always letting others lead before me meant I never became the leader I thought I could be.

• Lack of respect. I had little respect for myself and even when others thought me as a kind or considerate person, few people respected (or saw) the real me.

The flip toward self-honesty and authenticity wasn’t instant. I had to work at it.

If it took 20+ years to build, I promise it won’t change in a day. As ‘tough-writing’ as this may be sound, the process for me was incredibly painful. There were countless days spent mourning the person I was and the person I had not yet become.

But the moments I was myself - without fear of judgement - were intoxicating:

• Conversations felt richer in the moments I spoke freely instead of saying what I thought the other person wanted to hear, leading to more laughter and deeper connection.

• Everyday choices gained meaning when I chose what resonated with me, rather than what I was ‘supposed’ to value.

• Goals became deliberate decisions. They were no longer just tasks to achieve, but journeys I could savor.

The day I let myself be fully honest, I felt a genuine love for myself that I hadn’t realized was possible.

Today, the ‘shoulds’ still appear. But I notice them, and they no longer dictate my choices. They are no longer my duty to fulfill.

The self-respect I gained by letting go is more meaningful than I could imagined back then. It only gets better from here.

I’d rather do anything else than write something that will prove I’m not made for this.

It is one day before the new year, and if I measured 2025 by my writing, it would be summarized more by silence than sentences.

It’s not easy for me to admit. Even though the proof - or lack thereof - stares me in the face.

I spent the whole year repeating the same cycle:
- Convince myself to just write anything.
- Re-convince that it has to be life-changing.
- Fold - head face down on my desk.

One felt meaningless, the other impossible. So, I stayed stuck. Each cycle I was left a little more worse-for-wear, a little more defeated, and exhausted from a battle I wasn’t winning. I watched myself from outside the room failing at the one thing I claimed to want.

But not knowing what to write about wasn’t the problem.

This was:
I wanted to matter.

And writing for the world to see and then ignore it, would be the proof that I didn’t.

I didn’t want to write something no one cared about.

Worse still is I know the trap of relying on external validation. And yet I craved it.
I wanted the dream more than the work, and the fantasy more than the risk. To stay in a dream that couldn’t hurt me; far away from a reality that could.

It’s numbing to watch yourself get in your own way. To chase a goal while clinging to the comfort of not trying.

That pattern doesn’t just show up in writing. It shows up in every goal we chase but can’t seem to reach. The habits we can’t quit. The relationships we can’t escape. The futures we keep postponing.

They’re all the same conflict.

We want the change, but we want comfort even more.

I wish I could give you a clear answer on how to break that cycle forever. I can’t.

But if you’re reading this, it means I finally did the one thing I avoided all year: I stopped protecting myself and hit publish anyway.
And for today, that’s enough.

There are countless opportunities I missed out on because it felt safer avoiding them.

Yet, the benefits of these opportunities are incredible: Deeper relationships, core memories to look back on, and perspectives that impact me forever.

Who wouldn’t want that?

Except my scared, insecure self kept those benefits from ever happening.

I kept myself safe.

If the survival tool you used when you were younger is still being used as an adult, chances are what keeps you safe is also holding you back. Keeping yourself small, waiting for just the right opportunity to come to you, and avoiding putting yourself in the spotlight are the same mechanisms that keep you from growing, creating meaningful connections, and finding real security.

If this sounds like you, the good news is you aren’t stuck that way.

The answer is in the opportunity you’re afraid of.

The opportunities we ignore

As my girlfriend and I pull into the campground, I’m beaming. Sure, it’s been a four hour drive, but I’m going to make every ounce of this trip worth it. The area looks beautiful and clean, there are trails nearby to explore, and it’s finally our chance to get away and relax.

If these benefits are so profound, they must come from massive, life changing opportunities — the kind that knock on your door and stop you in your tracks.

They’re not. These are moments that present themselves every day.

What do they look like?

For me, it was when a college friend invited me to play Texas Hold’em with their group. Hours beforehand, I told them I had to drive my mother to an emergency dental appointment. On a Saturday. At 9pm.

It was when I decided my idea wasn’t worth sharing during a brain-storm meeting at work. Someone else proposed the very same idea. It was celebrated.

It was when I stood waiting in line with strangers for hours at an event, waiting for the doors to open. I wanted to strike up a conversation, but was overly worried about saying the right thing. Even after they started chatting with each other, I said nothing. That would have been awkward, I decided. And as I listened, I couldn’t help but notice — it was a great conversation.

These are moments that present themselves every day.

In every moment I told myself ‘I’d rather not.’

Breaking out of that mindset is easier said than done. Your worries take free reign and you make the choice that keeps you safe.

But those worries are lying — they’re not keeping you safe, they’re keeping you comfortable.

Keeping you from meeting someone that could radically influence your life.

Keeping you from a moment that — even if it goes sideways — teaches you a lesson that shapes who you are.

Keeping you from living — instead, just surviving.

An uncomfortable yes

The visitor center is bigger than I expected. I scan the room as we wait for the park ranger to bring our camping permits. Flyers lined the walls.

There is usually some event being advertising at these parks. None of these involved my own plan, so I had little interest in them. Likely obvious enough to my girlfriend, who was met with a, “Oh, yeah, mhm, neat…” when she pointed out one in particular.

This event is early tomorrow morning. It involves meeting with a group of other people. There’s some type of assigned task.

No, thank you. That sounds awful.

After a gracious goodbye to the ranger, I eagerly walk back to the car. Adventure awaited.

“Hey, are you sure you’re not interested?” my girlfriend asks. Her voice is hopeful.

Actually, I am interested. It even sounds like fun.

But that’s not the problem.

Now, the full weight of choice on me. I ruminated for a moment. My choice is between what I know will work out, or something else I didn’t know and felt uncomfortable with.

She really wants to try it.

I say yes, not entirely certain of my choice.

I wish I could say this really wasn’t a hard decision. Just go do the thing, right? I consider myself adventurous.

But it was hard. My discomfort outweighed reason.

The fear was absolutely real.

I could list a dozen reasons why saying ‘yes’ would be fine. But logic didn’t matter. My gremlins were already whispering:

“You’ll feel out of place. You won’t know what to do. What if you regret it?”

These are exactly the opportunities to say ‘yes’ to.

It’s when an opportunity presents itself and your go-to response is, ‘I’d rather not.’

When emotional discomfort begs you to stick with what you know.

When the opportunity is something you’re actually curious about.

When you have no idea what’s on the other side.

As you feel the fear in these moments, recognize it is telling you a story. You can choose to believe it or not.

When we let fear dictate our choices, there is more at stake than just comfort. Every choice you make out of fear impacts how you feel about yourself.

I could list a dozen reasons why saying ‘yes’ would be fine. But logic didn’t matter.

You give up your integrity for the sake of comfort.

These moments might seem small, but they leave a mark. Every time you make a choice that bets against yourself, it stings. These small choices influence how you see yourself.

The good news? The choice always available to you.

You can absolutely bet on yourself.

And the benefits are incredible.

‘Yes’ becomes unforgettable

A dozen or so people make their way towards the cabin while the park ranger waits to give instructions.

Every year, newly hatched turtles seek out the wetlands that will serve as their permanent homes. They could end up traveling many miles towards their destination.

The problem is what’s often between them — in this case, a busy highway.

Our job is to help these baby turtles safely across.

As the park ranger explains, I finally let myself get excited. She explains the process, the different types of turtles we might find, and how to log everything properly.

My worries settle as I realize this isn’t nearly going to be as bad as I thought.

My day continued with one conclusion:

This is pretty damn great.

And it’s wild to me that it almost didn’t happen.

As we left, there was even a local watermelon festival we were ecstatic to check out.

This is a moment I get to hold and proudly share the story of. It goes beyond even cute turtles: This is my moment of choosing courage over safety.

Some of my most cherished memories came from moments I didn’t plan. A close friendship, incredible sights, and even negative events that have shaped my values and greatly impact who I am today.

Those all came from moments I found myself in — in opportunities that present themselves.

A great deal of it is out of our control, yet key moments depend on the choices that lead us there.

Where would I be if I had said no instead?

This is my moment of choosing courage over safety.

These are the lessons and experiences that saying ‘yes’ to opportunities grants us.

It’s from stepping outside of what we do know and into what we don’t.

And I have good news.

Since I decided to say yes to opportunities, not one has turned out as badly as I feared. Some even gave me gifts I can’t imagine being without.

I suspect you’ll find the same.

Say ‘yes’ to opportunities despite the instinct to say no.

The desire to lean into comfort and what you know doesn’t go away.

You must actively choose the life you want to lead.

It wasn’t an accident that brought this opportunity to me. It is because I decided to say yes to something instead of, ‘I’d rather not.’

Look back on your life. How many opportunities did you say ‘yes’ to that didn’t go nearly as badly as you were worried they would?

How many did you say ‘no’ to because your fear took the steering wheel?

And how many of those could have added to your life?

Your choices aren’t over yet.

Here’s how you start

As you pursue this new goal for yourself, here are some milestones you can adopt. Milestones can help you see progress where you might have overlooked it. They are small wins you can celebrate during your broader journey. These are just examples — feel free to make your own.

1) Acknowledge the fear.

Recognize your discomfort when an opportunity presents itself to you. Notice your reaction and tendency to remain in comfort and safety. Pause before instinctively saying no. Interrupt the worried conversation in your head that’s already begun. Consider instead: What if you said yes?

2) Make a small yes.

Practice choosing something low-stakes but still within your control such as trying a coffee shop you haven’t been to before, taking a different route home, join a trivia night or even a nearby conversation.

We do this to practice courage for when an unexpected opportunity comes our way.

3) Reflect after your yes.

As you find yourself in situations that you might normally avoid, deliberately notice how it is going compared to how you worried it would go. Even as you find yourself uncomfortable, is it as bad as you thought it would be?

4) An unexpected yes.

An opportunity presented itself to you — an invitation by someone else, an event flyer on the wall, or a class — something that caught your curiosity which your discomfort clearly tells you to avoid, despite your interest.

Do it. Say yes.

5) Recognize your growth.

Is the fear quieter even if it’s present? Recognize that what once felt terrifying now feels manageable or even normal.

You have my absolute permission and encouragement to give yourself a high-five.

Moving baby turtles to safety is absolutely a highlight in my life. If you’d like to know more about this process and turtle safety, you do so through the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

Big shout-out to the beautiful Whitewater State Park where all of this was allowed to happen.

Originally published at

https://michaelstefl.com

on February 2, 2025.