I Didn’t Realize How Much of Myself I’d Lost
Act II: Adventure 0.5
The sailboat dream disappeared so completely that I never thought about it. Not because I had rejected it, but because I had interred it.
Life moved on.
Years later I reconnected with someone I had met in the early days of internet chat rooms. I visited her in Michigan a few times and decided I’d be moving my life across the border.
A few months before moving to Michigan, my brother passed away. I’m not going to tell that story here. What matters for this story is what happened afterward. I was the one who found him. In the hours that followed, there were police officers, a detective, a coroner, and a team of social workers helping us navigate the shock of it all.
At one point, one of them asked me a question I’ll never forget. Did this make me want to live more, or live less? The answer came immediately.
Live more.
There wasn’t even a moment of hesitation. Life suddenly felt precious in a way I had never experienced before. Fragile. Temporary. A gift that could disappear without warning. I remember feeling a responsibility to live fully. Almost as though I had been suddenly entrusted with something valuable. For a while, that clarity burned brightly.
I moved to Michigan and we got married and continued working in the culinary industry. I built a life. Work. Responsibilities. Routines. The ordinary rhythms of adulthood.
Then over the years the clarity grew quieter and gradually faded.
So quietly that I barely noticed it happening.
That’s part of what made the problem so difficult to see. I wasn’t miserable. I wasn’t waking up every morning dreading my life. There was no dramatic crisis. No obvious disaster. If someone had asked me how things were going, I probably would have said, “Good.” and I would have meant it.
Mostly.
Underneath that answer was a feeling I couldn’t quite explain. Something felt off. Nothing was objectively wrong and yet I felt like I was going nowhere. The best way I can describe it is that I felt disconnected from myself. I was living a life I had built without ever stopping to ask whether it was actually mine.
I didn’t have those words at the time and had become very good at functioning and very bad at listening. Very good at doing what was expected and being responsible. Very good at appearing okay.
One evening I was sitting around a campfire talking with an acquaintance. Someone I didn’t know particularly well. It was just us two. Oddly enough, I think that’s part of why the conversation mattered. There was no history. No expectations. Just two people bitching about their lives.
I remember talking about feeling like all I could see in my future was exactly what I was living at that moment. Like I kept running into the same walls over and over again. Actually, I’d say not even trying to change because I couldn’t even see the possibility of change. That’s what happens when you’re deep in it. It’s like sailing through dense fog.
At one point I joked that maybe I should pull a George Costanza from Seinfeld and simply do the opposite of every instinct I had.
We laughed.
The conversation moved on.
But the idea didn’t.
Not because I wanted to start making terrible decisions on purpose. The joke had exposed something I hadn’t seen before. If I wanted my life to change, I probably had to do something differently. Yeah, no shit Sherlock.
It feels painfully obvious now yet at the time, it felt like a revelation.
I had spent years hoping things would somehow feel different while continuing to make the same choices. I don’t know what I was truly expecting.
The campfire eventually burned down. The conversation ended, but that idea stayed with me. Maybe I didn’t need to become a different person. Maybe I just needed to start making different choices. That thought opened a door.
Soon afterward I began exploring the idea of personal growth more seriously. “But where do I even start?”, I thought. I’m still in a fog. No direction. I could do anything, and anything is like having the Cheesecake Factory menu and trying to decide. Too many possibilities which somehow felt just as paralyzing as having none.
I started by focusing on what was measurable. Cleaned up some eating habits and started exercising. Maybe after that I would think more clearly. I also explored various ideas I wanted to try from the books I had read. Some were helpful, others not so much.
But they all pointed me toward a question I had spent years avoiding. What do I actually want? One exercise asked me to identify my core values and then rate how well I was living them. How much I was actually embodying them. I remember sitting at home staring at the page.
Adventure.
Authenticity.
Simplicity.
Those were easy. The difficult part came when I had to score them. Then I got to adventure… I sat there for a while. What number do you give yourself when something is deeply important to you but almost completely absent from your life? Eventually I wrote it down.
0.5 out of 10
Half a point?
That’s what my life scored for adventure?
Well.
That explains a few things.
I realized just how far I had drifted from the life I wanted to be living. Guarantees and proof were needed. I wanted to know exactly how things would work before taking the first step. Life doesn’t offer that kind of deal. The thought of my brother came back to mind.
Live more.
Yeah.
I wasn’t doing that.
That’s a hell of a reality check. I decided to experiment. Nothing dramatic. Just small things. Trying the new restaurant, planning a fun activity on the weekend. Then one day I decided to go for a hike. No revelation. No Eureka moment. Just a trail.
I wasn’t trying to find answers. I just wanted to do something different. There has always been something about nature that helps me hear myself more clearly. Maybe it’s because trees don’t seem particularly concerned with what you should be doing with your life. Whatever the reason, I needed it.
I remember walking through the woods and feeling something I hadn’t felt in a very long time. Peace.
Not excitement.
Not happiness.
Peace.
The kind that settles softly into your chest. It doesn’t need to prove anything. A quiet knowing that I was on the right path and for the first time in years, I felt connected to myself. That feeling stayed with me. I experienced a deep sense of presence. And once I felt it, I wanted more of it. Not more hiking necessarily but more alignment. More moments where my life felt like my own.
So I kept experimenting. I tried more things. Some worked and some didn’t. Some were uncomfortable and some were downright intimidating.
The funny thing is that none of these experiments were particularly impressive. Most of them were small. Sometimes embarrassingly small. Yet every time I did something that scared me a little, or kept a promise to myself, I trusted myself a little more. I was proving something. Not to other people.
To myself.
Faith.
Faith that I could take a step without seeing the entire path and that I would figure things out. Trusting that uncertainty wasn’t something to avoid, it was something to walk into.
I didn’t know it at the time, but the tomb was already cracking.
And buried beneath twenty years of doubt, something was beginning to wake up.
📷Examples of things I tried. Those were all awesome.
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