I am on the couch, writing. Michele is beside me. There are things that need attending — there are always things that need attending — and in this moment I am at peace.
Not because the things have been handled. Because I am here while they haven't been.
For most of my life I would not have called this peace. I would have called it an interval. The space between one problem and the next, useful mostly for bracing. Peace was something you earned once everything had been understood and resolved, and since nothing ever quite was, I kept earning and never collecting.
I am learning something different now. Slowly. Mostly on couches.
Maybe some things aren't asking to be figured out. Maybe they're asking to be seen.
There was no event. No moment I can point to and say, there, that is where it changed. It was an unfolding — an evolution more than a decision — a slow shaping of me into something more than my past. I have learned more about myself in the last two years than in the quarter century before them, and the first thing I learned was that I did not need to fix every perceived flaw inside me.
I had a list. I had carried it for decades.
Depression. Anxiety. Moods that swung without asking permission. A striving that did not know how to stop until it became collapse. The need to control the variables in nearly every situation, to hold a contingency for every disaster, every threat, every danger, named or imagined. The habit of fixing something for someone else while my own needs waited, and my fatigue waited, and my exhaustion waited quietly behind that.
I treated every item as a defect. Something to overcome, to manage, to apologize for in the privacy of my own head.
And yet. These are also what allowed me to be here. The depression made me look backward, and look honestly. The anxiety taught me to plan, to prepare, to stay agile when the ground moved. The striving gave me the fight — to get up, to come back, to keep swinging. And both of them, in their absence, taught me to recognize the peace in between and be grateful for it while it lasted.
I don't say this to make them gifts. They cost me, and some of them still do. But without the complexities I would not be me. Without the challenges, I think I would have lost interest in life, and in myself. What I had been calling flaws were facets — the angles where the light enters and leaves me changed.
What I set down was not the depression or the anxiety. Those remain, in whatever proportion the day allows. What I set down was the role.
The protector. The hero. The man who could survive anything without fear, without pain, without emotion. Impenetrable. Almost invincible. I wore it so long I mistook it for a body.
The role needed chaos to make sense of itself, so I found chaos, or made it. It needed a threat on every horizon, so I lived in a state of constant vigilance, scanning rooms I was already safe in. People praised this. They called it strength. I called it resilience.
It wasn't resilience. It was abandonment.
The protector protected everyone except the one inside the armor. Every contingency plan was for someone else's disaster. Every fix was for someone else's break. The man who needed no one had been needing someone the whole time, and had left himself waiting.
Resilience only comes after the fall. I know that now. And I had never allowed myself to fall — so what I had was not resilience at all. It was the refusal of the one thing resilience requires.
Setting the role down was not giving up. Giving up would have been easier; it leaves the story intact. Setting it down meant accepting that the story had been wrong, and that I could survive its being wrong.
Viktor Frankl wrote that meaning is what we hunger for most, and that it can be found even in suffering. I believe him. I have found meaning in mine.
But I have come to think the hunger is layered. Beneath the hunger for meaning is a hunger to understand — to know why. And beneath that is something harder to admit: a hunger to accept what we cannot know, and to be at peace with it anyway.
For most of my life I treated understanding as the highest respect I could pay to anything. If I could explain it, I had honored it. If I couldn't, I had failed it. So I explained. My moods, my past, other people, myself. I understood a remarkable amount and accepted almost nothing.
The two are not an either/or. They are not a sequence, either — understanding first, acceptance as the reward for finishing. Some things yield to understanding. Some yield only to acceptance. Some ask for both at once, in different parts of themselves. Learning to accept what I don't understand without trying to change it, while understanding what I can and do — that is the practice. Not an arrival. Not an achievement. Learning.
And acceptance is not agreement. It is not acquiescence, and it is not tolerating what is intolerable. I can accept that things are as they are — events, people, the weather of my own mind — without consenting to them. Expecting a person to be other than who and how they are is debilitating, for me and for the relationship. Accepting them as they are is not the same as staying. The freedom lives in the response. I can accept, and still leave. Accept, and still change what I do next.
That freedom is where the peace comes from. Not from understanding everything. From no longer needing to.
So the day has rituals now. Small ones. Lemon water in the morning. Sunlight. Movement. A page written before the world gets its turn at me. My well-being — mental, physical, energetic, spiritual — not a priority among priorities but the priority, the one the others arrange themselves around.
I still drink some evenings. It was never a drink, for me, and it was never a drunk. It was sips and swallows, taken strategically — enough to curb the edge, never enough to dull the knife. A way of leaving wherever I was by a few degrees. Now when I pour one, it is because I choose to. Same glass. Different reason. That is the whole distinction, lived small enough to hold.
The things that need attending are still there. They will be there tomorrow. Some of them I understand. Some I have stopped asking to explain themselves, and they have stopped asking me to.
I am accepting my life as I learn to understand myself more, and better. The order matters less than I once thought. Both are happening. Neither is finished.
Michele shifts beside me. The light moves a little further across the floor. Everything that needs attending can wait a few more minutes.
So, I am learning, can I.
—sh