The Way Back

It’s a strange feeling when you realize you don’t really know yourself anymore. You know your job, your responsibilities, your routines, and the roles you play for other people, but somewhere along the way, you stopped being a person and became a collection of expectations. I didn’t notice when it happened. My guess is it was years ago, somewhere buried in my desire to put my career first, before myself, before my family, before my dreams. I did notice when I started trying to find my way back. It felt like a dense fog along Interstate 64 in the mountains of West Virginia was lifting, allowing the light I had carried internally to break through, shining across the landscape of spring, with wildflowers and rosemary growing as if to remind me of the beauty I had held so tightly that I nearly smothered it to death.

Life had become unstable in ways I hadn’t planned for. Divorce still in progress. Two children. A puppy. The loss of a significant relationship I thought would last, crushed under the weight of the chaos of my life. Then losing my job without explanation. It felt like everything unstable decided to collapse at once. I started journaling just to keep my thoughts straight. Most of it was grief, confusion, regret, and questions about how I had shown up in love and why I missed what now feels obvious. Journaling was dumping thoughts, telling myself you will be okay. Writing the same feelings over and over, as if repeating them enough times would conjure something back that was already gone.

Then I came across a writing challenge. Twenty-eight days. Twenty minutes a day. A prompt you don’t see until that morning. No outline. No preparation. Just you and whatever rises to the surface. I signed up because I needed somewhere to put everything I was carrying, and I was running out of room.

It sounded simple, but it wasn’t. Writing without preparation meant writing honestly. There was nowhere to hide.

This felt different than journaling. It felt like digging into my soul. Every prompt felt like a shovel hitting something I had buried years ago. Memories I hadn’t thought about in decades showed up without warning. Some made me laugh. Some made me uncomfortable. Some made me realize I had been telling myself stories about my life that weren’t entirely true.

One prompt brought me back to a photograph on my phone. A sunset I had taken in Hawaii with my children. Volcanic rock and thick green vegetation in the foreground. Low clouds over the water. A narrow band of gold where the sun broke through, reflecting across the ocean. I wrote about how I had been standing there with my children, crying, and still reached for the camera. About how the lens had made me lose precious moments of being present, how I had stepped outside the moment in order to record it. I wrote that the photo showed the light, the water, the rock, the sky. It did not show the tears. It did not show the history that made that sunset matter. Writing about it, I realized I had been doing the same thing in relationships for years. Stepping back to manage the moment rather than living inside it. Fixing instead of feeling. The camera was just the most honest version of a habit I had carried everywhere.

Writing forced me to slow down long enough to see patterns in myself I had never noticed before.

Somewhere during those twenty-eight days, something unexpected happened. I started to recognize the person who was writing. Not the version of me that shows up to meetings, pays bills, solves problems, and keeps everything moving forward. The version that notices things. The version that thinks too much, that feels deeply, that used to read and write and ask questions and believe that life was something you explored instead of something you managed.

Around that same time, we started walking at night. The kids, the dog, and me. The neighborhood was quiet and cool, the kind of spring air that carries the smell of cut grass and something faintly blooming from a yard you can’t quite identify. Three distinct sets of footsteps and some puppy paws clicking along behind us. The flag at the end of the street moved in the wind. The night had an open, unhurried feeling to it. The kind of air that makes conversations easier.

One night I read out loud to them something I had written during the challenge, a line from the piece about the sunset photograph: “I will let the sun sink without proof. I will let it live only in us.” They laughed and said it sounded like AI. My children are witty and have built humor into a kind of armor for working through moments like these. We kept walking.

I asked my son how he was doing. He responded with silence. I have come to cherish these walks partly because they create space for that kind of silence, a way for us to be together without a screen, without performance. That night I could tell there was more. As the quiet stretched, I saw a look I recognized. The look of pushing back feelings. Pushing back tears. I had seen that look in the mirror before.

Gently, so I wouldn’t startle him or pull him out of the moment, I put my arm around him and said quietly, “I’m here.”

He cried. He let go of the emotions he had been holding, the ones he had bottled up to please the people in his life. Through tears, he said, “I’m tired of people pleasing. I want to have feelings and have them be heard.”

I held that for a second before saying anything. It was an extraordinary thing for him to put into words.

As he started to speak more clearly, I saw my daughter start to cry too. I asked her if we could hug, and she nodded with her teenage reluctance, and we all embraced right there in the street.

That moment was pure and open and not braced. No one was pretending. No one was fixing anything. We were just there, present, together. A few months earlier, I don’t think I would have known how to be in that moment. I would have tried to solve it. Fixing had been my default for so long that I had confused it for love. I was good at it. What it cost me, I am still working to understand.

I realized something standing there in the dark with my arms around both of them. Writing had helped me reconnect with myself. Reconnecting with myself had helped me show up for them. It unwittingly reopened something that had been there in my youth: curiosity, a willingness to ask questions and hear the answers without trying to fix them. Not just checking a box of being a dad, but actually being present long enough to build something that outlasts the interaction.

I thought I had joined a writing challenge. I thought I was forming a connection with writing again, with old memories, or with parts of my life I didn’t yet understand. But I think what I was really reconnecting with was something I had forgotten. Something that had been shoved into a corner, not seeing the light of day in a very long time.

Myself.

Sometimes we think we are searching for new places, new people, new lives. But sometimes we are just trying to find our way back to a person we used to be before life got loud.

And sometimes the unknown thing we form a connection with is not a stranger, or a memory, or a place.

Sometimes it’s the version of ourselves that we forgot we left behind.