The Tools We Made, the Soul We Sold

Autocorrect has betrayed me more times than I can count. More than once, it even changed a word into a woman’s name, nearly sparking an argument I never intended to start. Predictive text isn’t much better. Type a few letters and your phone rushes to finish the thought for you. Even our replies are drafted for us now, three little bubbles of “Maybe you meant this.”

We built tools to help us, but those tools started shaping us. Autocorrect doesn’t just fix typos, it changes tone and intent. Predictive search doesn’t just save time, it narrows curiosity into repetition. Bit by bit, we stop choosing our words and start letting the machine choose them for us.

And that’s the point: technology isn’t the enemy. Our complacency is.

This is the universal trade we keep making. We handed over math to calculators, maps to GPS, spelling to spellcheck, and memory to our phones. None of these trades looked catastrophic at the time. But the pattern is always the same: the more we outsource, the less we exercise. And what we don’t exercise, we lose.

It’s not just about convenience. It’s seduction. These tools sell us the same story over and over: Don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe. I’ll make sure you don’t fail. I’ll make life easier. And while they soothe us, they shrink us.

When Spike Jonze released Her in 2013, it felt like science fiction. A lonely man falling in love with the voice of his operating system. Now, AI “partners” and “friends” are sold to the masses. What could have been lifelines for people who genuinely struggle to connect have instead been turned into luxury toys. We didn’t just avoid risk, we programmed compliance and called it intimacy.

The real future we face isn’t rebellion against machines. It’s irrelevance. Not because the tools stole our souls, but because we sold them.

The good news is this: the soul isn’t for sale unless we hand it over. Tools can serve us, but only if we stay awake.

The Slow leak

When people picture collapse, they imagine something dramatic: alarms blaring, floods rushing in, fire and ruin. But that’s not how it usually happens.

We didn’t lose the sacred all at once. There was no alarm, no collapse, no flood warning us. It was just a slow leak. The leak matters, not because the past was better, but because what leaked out was the texture of being human. We traded tangible, lived experience for convenience. We outsourced memory, attention, and imagination to our devices, and in doing so, we let those muscles atrophy. When the sacred is gone, life doesn’t feel fuller, it feels thinner, flatter, like something essential got drained out.

I think about the little things we no longer do. There was a time when you memorized phone numbers because you had to carry them in your head. A time when you traced a map with your finger before leaving the house, memorizing turns and landmarks. Now we hand our phones to strangers to type in their number and let the device remember for us. Now we ask GPS to guide us through towns we’ve lived in for years.

We’ve also lost something quieter: the ability to touch the sources of our own story. For most of human history, wisdom, memory, and truth were carried in tangible forms like letters, journals, and original documents. To read them was to touch the past directly. Now we rely on summaries, interpretations, and filtered fragments delivered through a screen.

That slow leak didn’t just drain our memory. It drained our connection. We outsource not only our numbers and directions but our presence, our creativity, our sense of wonder. And it’s not dramatic enough to notice, until you look back and realize whole rooms of your life are empty.

The Truman Show was a comedy when it came out, but in hindsight it feels prophetic. A world where every moment is orchestrated, every view filtered, every connection manufactured. That’s not fiction anymore, that’s Tuesday night scrolling. The screen tells us what to buy, what to fear, what to dream about, and we call it choice. Meanwhile, we leak away the very things that make us human: our silence, our curiosity, our imagination, our soul.

The danger isn’t that someone stole these things from us. It’s that we traded them for convenience. Step by step, click by click, distraction by distraction, we chose ease over depth, entertainment over meaning, simulation over the raw and sacred texture of life.

But here’s the truth: the leak can be stopped. Not by throwing out your phone or raging against technology, that’s just noise in the other direction. It starts with noticing. With reclaiming one small sacred act at a time. Write a letter by hand. Memorize a number. Sit in silence long enough to hear your own thoughts instead of a feed telling you what to think.

We lost the sacred slowly, and that means we can reclaim it slowly too. One choice at a time.

The Faces of Anxiety

When I work with anxiety, depression, grief, or any heavy emotion, I don’t treat it like it’s the core of who you are. You are not “an anxious person” or “a depressed person.” Those labels collapse you into the problem.

Instead, I treat these experiences as characters in your story. Separate voices. Roles that show up and try to take the microphone. You can listen to them, talk back to them, even laugh at them but you don’t have to hand them the script.

This comes out of a mix of approaches. In Narrative Therapy, we call it externalization: separating the person from the problem. In ACT, it’s defusion: stepping back from thoughts instead of fusing with them as absolute truth. In Gestalt, you might go so far as to put the character in an empty chair and talk to it directly. Different names, same point: when you create distance, you reclaim choice.

Anxiety in particular is slippery. It doesn’t wear one face it shifts. I often describe it to clients as four different characters you might meet.

The Scared Child

This face of anxiety wants nothing more than to hide under a blanket. The world feels too big, too loud, too unsafe. If you try to argue with the child, you’ll only make them cry harder. The job here is comfort. Wrap them in reassurance: You’re safe. I’ve got you. We’ll get through this together.

The Schoolyard Bully

This one is loud, mean, and convinced you don’t belong. It pushes, taunts, and sneers: You’re not enough. You’ll never make it. The right move isn’t to run away. It’s to stand your ground. Talk back. Argue. Defend yourself. The bully loses power when you refuse to cower.

The Overprotective Parent

This face of anxiety comes wrapped in love but coated with control. It’s the voice that won’t stop asking: Do you have your coat? Do you know the number to call? Did you pack extra toilet paper? (because for some unknown reason during Covid the world decided toilet paper was the ultimate survival tool). The parent means well, but they smother. Your job is to reassure them: I’ve got this. I’ll handle what comes. Staying behind won’t protect me, it’ll only hold me back.

The Babbling Kid Who Can’t Finish a Sentence

And then there’s this one: the face that never lands on a point. It spins out in endless loops of What if? What if? What if? like a kid who keeps restarting the same sentence and never gets past the third word. You can picture it: frustrating, a little funny, impossible to take seriously.

Here’s the trick: don’t fight it. Let the babbling kid speak out loud if you need to. When you actually hear it, three things happen:

You notice how incoherent and silly the thought process is.
You separate yourself from it. (You are not the babbling kid.)
You laugh. And laughter cracks anxiety’s grip.

Different Responses, Same Core

Each face of anxiety calls for something different:

Scared child → comfort. (Compassion, Grounding, Self-soothing)
Bully → push back. (Respond with strength and assertiveness, reframe the argument)
Overprotective parent → reassure. (Needs boundaries, self-trust, reality checking the argument)
Babbling kid → laugh. (Defuse from the argument, never feed the loop, don’t go down the rabbit whole of “what if”)

But the core doesn’t change: you’re meeting a character, not your identity. You don’t erase anxiety, but you take away its control.

That’s the work. Don’t collapse into anxiety. Step back. See which face is talking. And choose how you want to respond.

Choose your hard.

We live in a world where almost all the knowledge of human history, with only fragments lost, now fits into our pockets. It should be one of humanity’s most remarkable feats. Instead, it has made us lazy and complacent. Algorithms don’t just deliver information; they decide what is worth our attention. They trap us in echo chambers where opinions pose as truth, and anyone who dares question the script is quickly cast as “other”: bigot, fascist, whatever-phobe. In this world, truth isn’t about what is; it’s about what trends.

But the truth is this: we never meet the world directly. We live in interpretation, in our perception of what is real. Husserl argued that reality reaches us only through phenomena, as they appear. Heidegger pressed further: we are not neutral observers of the world but thrown into it, already interpreting. Sartre said it most plainly: existence precedes essence. We first find ourselves here, then decide what meaning to give it.

That’s not just philosophy, it’s everyday life. The way you scroll, the way you work, the way you decide who you are.

Reality is not a fixed script. It is filtered, interpreted, and lived. The stories we inherit, the roles we perform, and the systems that demand our attention all shape the lens through which we perceive what is true. We cannot escape the lens. But we are not prisoners of it, either. To reclaim your life is to take responsibility for the lens. To see the distortion, and to decide, deliberately, what you will give your power to.

The trade wasn’t sudden. It wasn’t a collapse or rebellion, but a slow leak. The sacred didn’t vanish; it was traded: presence for motion, silence for a screen, ritual for spectacle. We called it progress because it was new, because everyone else seemed fine, because pausing to ask if we were okay felt strange.

Most people don’t notice the hunger itself. They see the symptoms.
Restlessness.
The scroll reflex at red lights.
A room full of people and the sharp loneliness spreading like fog.
Sleep that doesn’t restore. Work that doesn’t fulfill. Lives that feel busy but thin, constantly moving but rarely alive.

Meanwhile, entire industries – political, corporate, algorithmic – exist to feed that hunger just enough to keep us running. Not satisfied. Just busy. If you’re constantly stimulated, you never stop long enough to feel what the noise is costing you. You won’t ask the dangerous questions.

Questions like:
• What if the things we were told to chase aren’t actually living?
• What if strength isn’t the mask, but the courage to take it off?
• What if grief, love, and silence aren’t obstacles, but the only doors to what’s real?

We are starving in a marketplace full of food. As a therapist, I sit with people who are exhausted, anxious, disconnected, and convinced that something is wrong with them. They aren’t broken. They’re living in a system where everything loud pushes out everything alive. Distraction numbs pain. But it numbs everything else, too. When the inevitable losses come, and they always do, an unpracticed soul shatters. Not because they’re defective, but because we taught them speed instead of grief, performance instead of presence, outrage instead of courage.

The cost is heavier than most people notice because it doesn’t hit all at once. It creeps. We trade attention for distraction until silence feels unbearable. We trade connection for performance until we feel unknown even in crowded rooms. We trade ritual for spectacle until grief rots beneath the surface and explodes sideways as rage or conspiracy.

This is the bill coming due.

The world won’t slow down. The algorithms won’t stop. The noise may never fade. But we don’t have to live hollow lives. Surviving awake is hard. Surviving hollow is harder.

So choose your hard, or it will be chosen for you

Full stop.

This isn’t a teaser. This is the whole chapter. Because this isn’t a finish line, it’s an arrival. And maybe you need to hear it now, not later.

You’ve been taught to treat life like a ladder: climb higher, move faster, keep reaching for the next rung. Freedom gets packaged as a finish line, as if one day you’ll wake up on some mountaintop and finally feel complete. But that’s not how it works. There is no moment where the confetti falls and the crowd cheers because you’ve “arrived.”

Arrival is quieter than that. It’s sitting in your own skin and realizing you don’t need to keep running. It’s not another title, another role, another chase. It’s the moment you stop negotiating with yourself and stop asking permission to exist. You’re not waiting anymore. You’re not hustling for approval anymore. You’ve put down the mask, and for the first time in a long time, you’re breathing without performing. That’s the arrival, not a destination at the top of the world, but a return to the home you never actually left.

There’s a version of you that doesn’t need explaining. Not to your family. Not to your friends. Not to strangers on the internet. That version of you isn’t softened to make anyone else more comfortable. It isn’t filtered to look more palatable or dressed up in justifications so people don’t misunderstand. It simply is.

Most of your life, you’ve been taught to negotiate your truth, to phrase it carefully so it won’t offend, to shrink it so it won’t intimidate, to delay it so it won’t inconvenience anyone. That’s how we learn to survive. But survival isn’t the same as living.

This is the moment to stop apologizing for your existence.

You are not too much. You are enough. You don’t need to perform a version of yourself to keep the peace. The final rebellion isn’t loud. It’s the quiet, steady choice to stand in the fullness of who you are, without permission, without preface, without compromise.

You don’t owe anyone a softer version of yourself.

For most of your life, applause has been the proof that you’re doing it “right.” Approval from bosses, partners, parents, and strangers online. Every clap told you the mask was working. Every silence made you wonder if you were failing. But the applause was never for you, it was for the performance. When you finally choose authenticity, the clapping stops. Some people will turn away. Others won’t even notice. And it stings at first, because silence feels like rejection. But silence is also freedom. No one’s watching. No one’s grading you. You can laugh too loudly, speak too honestly, rest without apology. That’s when you realize: you don’t need a stage anymore. You don’t need an audience. Wholeness doesn’t come with applause, it comes with peace. And peace doesn’t need witnesses.

Think back to the version of you who first opened this book. Maybe they were exhausted. Maybe they were desperate. Maybe they were numb and just curious enough to hope there was something more. Whoever they were, they are not the same person who sits here now.

You’ve faced grief. You’ve unlearned roles. You’ve stared down ghosts. You’ve stood your ground in quiet rebellions. You’ve let the mask slip. You’ve drawn boundaries. And piece by piece, you’ve stopped handing your life away.

It’s not that you erased your past. You didn’t. The scars are still there. The echoes are still there. But you’re not dragging them like chains anymore. You carry them differently now, not as proof of your brokenness, but as reminders of what it cost you to become whole. The point was never perfection. The point was never applause. The point was this: that you would stop betraying yourself, and come home.

You didn’t just shed old roles. You became someone worth coming home to. So look at yourself now, the one reading these words, and understand this truth: you’ve arrived. Not at some mountaintop, not at the end of a script, but at yourself.

And that was the point all along.

There’s an old story about a grandfather who told his grandson that inside every person, two wolves are fighting. One is fear, resentment, and self-betrayal. The other is presence, truth, and courage. The boy asks, “Which wolf wins?”

The grandfather answers, “The one you feed.”

You’ve met both wolves by now. One taught you how to play roles, how to perform, how to keep betraying yourself for safety or applause. That wolf will never leave. It will always whisper that numbness is easier, that masks are safer, that silence will cost you less. The other wolf, the one you’ve been slowly, quietly feeding, is different. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t beg. It just waits, steady and patient, for you to choose it again.

That choice is not a single moment. It’s not the dramatic climax of a movie where the music swells and you become “fixed.” It’s the choice you make today, and tomorrow, and the day after that. When the crowd cheers for the mask. When fear tells you it’s safer to shrink, when exhaustion tempts you back into performance.

Every time you choose presence, you feed the wolf that makes you whole. Every time you refuse to betray yourself, you strengthen it. And slowly, the life that once felt like a waiting room starts to feel like home. The rebellion doesn’t end here. It doesn’t end at all. It lives in every decision to keep feeding the right wolf.

And that’s the story you’re writing now.

This is the part where other books might give you a list of next steps, a challenge, or a tidy bow to wrap it all up. But life isn’t tidy. You don’t need a checklist to be real. You don’t need a script to be yourself. You’ve walked through the fire. You’ve stripped off the masks. You’ve faced the grief, the boundaries, the ghosts, and the quiet rebellion it takes to stand here. And now here you are.

Not perfect. Not finished. Not waiting for applause. Just you. Whole. Present. Alive.

The wolf you feed will shape your days, but it doesn’t change the truth you’ve already claimed: this is who I am. Not an apology. Not a performance. Not a draft waiting for edits. Full stop.

Some people won’t understand it. Some may even resent it. That’s fine. You don’t owe anyone a softer version of yourself. At some point, your life becomes less about what happened to you, and more about who you are becoming- less about the pain that shaped you, and more about the courage that carries you forward.

This isn’t the end. It’s the place where endings no longer matter. It’s not a finish line. It’s an arrival.

You are home.

Presence Over Performance

Performance Is Exhaustion Disguised as Connection

Performance is a hungry thing. It feeds on approval, applause, likes, and nods. For a while, it can feel like connection: the text back, the smile across the room, the compliment after the meeting. But a connection built on performance isn’t a connection at all.
It’s an exchange: I give you the version of me you want, and you give me enough validation to keep doing it.

That kind of connection is thin. It keeps you busy, but it keeps you hollow. You can spend years in that loop without realizing you’re trading your presence for approval. When you step out of it, you notice something:
The ones who can’t stop. The ones who’ve mistaken performance for presence, who cosplay self-awareness but can’t live without an audience. Some will be drawn to you, curious about your stillness, but they aren’t looking to join you there. They’re looking for a stage.

The alternative to performance isn’t isolation. It’s presence: grounded, unscripted, unarmored. It’s the weight of your shoulders dropping without you telling them to. It’s hearing your own breath without rushing to fill the silence. It’s realizing you don’t have to prove anything to belong here.

The hard part?
We’ve been trained to believe that slowing down is dangerous.
If you’re not moving, you’re falling behind.
If you’re not producing, you’re wasting potential.
If you’re not being seen, you’re disappearing.

That’s the trap.

We confuse movement with meaning.
We confuse visibility with worth.

If you need constant applause to feel alive, you’re not living, you’re auditioning. And you can only audition for so long before you forget who you were before the stage lights.

Stillness isn’t the absence of life, it’s where life catches up to you.

Boundaries Are not Cruelty

Boundaries are not about punishment.
They’re about clarity. When you set a boundary and enforce it, you’re not pushing someone away, you’re saying, “This is where I end, and this is where you begin.” You’re making space for what matters most: your peace, your energy, your integrity.

The lie we inherit is that boundaries are selfish or cruel. The idea that saying no makes you a bad person. But boundaries are not about controlling others. They are about protecting what’s yours. They’re the strongest act of self-respect you can offer, and they are the kindest thing you can do for yourself and the people you love.

Clarity is not cruelty.
When you enforce a boundary, it doesn’t mean you don’t care about someone. It means you care enough about yourself to protect your peace. And that’s a gift. Protecting your peace is an act of love. When you stand firm in your boundaries, you show the world what’s acceptable, and you teach others to respect their own boundaries as well.

If someone reacts with guilt, anger, or manipulation when you set a boundary, that’s not your burden to carry. Their discomfort is not an indication you’re wrong; it’s proof you’ve stopped being an easy target. It’s proof you’ve stopped sacrificing your peace to avoid conflict.

Boundaries are invitations, not barriers.
When you draw a line, you’re not keeping people out; you’re making room for what’s aligned with your values. You’re choosing what and who gets access to your most precious resources, your time, your energy, your heart. And that’s not selfish. It’s necessary.

Remember: You can carry love and still protect your peace.
Your job is to keep moving forward, with clarity, strength, and an open heart, but never at the expense of your boundaries.

Grief and Ghosts

Some people are only meant to row beside you for a while. The rest of the trip is yours.

When you move forward, not everyone will stay in the boat. Some will step off quietly, their absence almost gentle, like a slow fading until you realize you haven’t heard their voice in miles. Others will leave in a storm, slamming the oars down on their way out. And sometimes, you’ll be the one asking them to go. It’s not cruelty. It’s clarity. Some people were only meant to row beside you for a certain stretch, and holding on past that point only weighs the boat down. The truth is, not everyone who started with you is meant to see where you’re going.

The first time you notice the empty seats, it’s a punch in the gut. You remember the way they once filled the quiet, the way their presence felt like ballast keeping you steady. But as the water stretches out in front of you, you notice something else: the boat moves more easily now. The noise is quieter. Your own voice comes back.

You can miss them and still be glad they’re gone. You can honor what they gave you without inviting them back aboard. And you can keep rowing, knowing the space they left isn’t a wound, but room for something new to grow.

Not everyone is meant to stay. That’s not loss. That’s life. And your job is still the same: row forward.

It’s tempting to glance over your shoulder, as if looking back hard enough will bring them back on board. But the farther you travel, the more you realize those seats aren’t mistakes. They’re part of the cost of moving forward.

Grief doesn’t vanish when the storm settles. It changes. It becomes a passenger who no longer shouts, but still sits in the corner, reminding you they’re there. You learn to row with their presence, not against it. You stop waiting for the deck to feel full again. You start accepting it, but you will never accept it in the same way, and that doesn’t make the journey any less worth taking.

Making peace with the empty seats doesn’t mean pretending they don’t matter.

It means knowing your boat can still move, still cut through the waves, even with those spaces unfilled.

The demons and the boat

Imagine you’re in a small boat at sea. The deck is crowded with demons fear, shame, old stories, judgments you’ve carried for years.

The moment you pick up the oars, they wake up.
They start shouting.
They tell you the storm’s too big. They tell you you’re not strong enough. They tell you to wait for the perfect day with clear skies and calm waters.

They know if you keep waiting for ideal conditions, you’ll never leave the spot you’re in.

Here’s the truth: committed action is a decision.
It’s not a mood, a burst of inspiration, or the day you finally “feel ready.”
If you wait until you feel like it, you’ll wait until you’re dead.

Perfection is the fantasy that keeps you anchored.
Movement is the reality that gets you somewhere.

Stop looking for the clean, cinematic version of growth the kind where the waves part, the sky opens, and you’re suddenly rowing with ease. Growth is messy. It’s salt in your eyes, water in your shoes, and your hands blistering around the oars.

You don’t have to enjoy it. You just have to keep moving.
Action is the only thing that changes the shoreline you see.

The demons will tell you to wait until you’ve planned it better. Until you’ve figured out how to row without getting wet. Until you’ve read three more books about rowing and mastered the perfect stroke.

You can’t think your way into the life you want; you have to row your way there.

And when you row in the storm you’ve got, you discover something the demons don’t want you to know: they can shout, but they can’t steer.

The Voice in your head isn’t you

“Not every voice deserves a microphone.”

How many years have you let that voice run the show?

You know the voice.

The one that says you’re falling behind.
The one that second-guesses every move you make.
The one that replays every awkward moment like it’s on a loop.
The one that whispers you’re too much, too little, too late.

Somewhere along the way, it started sounding like the truth.

But it’s not.
It’s just a voice.
And it’s not even yours.

You weren’t born with that critic.
You picked it up.

From the parent who never let up.
From the teacher who only noticed when you messed up.
From the friend who made you feel like you had to earn your space.
From a culture that sells inadequacy as motivation.

And you? You absorbed it.
Because that’s what people do to survive.

You made it sound like you.
You gave it your tone, your timing, your language.
And then, without even realizing it, you started following its rules:

Be smaller.
Be quieter.
Be better.
Be less.

But here’s the thing:

You’re not the voice in your head.
You’re the one who’s listening.

If you want to know who you are, turn down the volume on who you’re not.

Not every voice in your head deserves authority.
And once you know that, you don’t have to believe everything you hear.

Some voices come in like bullies—loud, sharp, relentless.
Others sneak in like anxious protectors, trying to keep you from feeling hurt, judged, or not enough.

But just because a voice is familiar doesn’t mean it’s true.
Just because it’s loud doesn’t mean it’s wise.
Just because it sounds like you doesn’t mean it’s for you.

Once you stop mistaking that voice for truth, you can start rewriting the story.

In therapy, we call it externalizing the narrative—giving the voice a character, a shape, even a name.

You can name it.
You can separate it from your identity.
You can treat it like a character, not the narrator.

The anxious one? Maybe it’s a scared child who needs reassurance.
The critical one? Maybe it’s an old echo of someone who didn’t know how to love you well.
The one that spirals and catastrophizes? Maybe that toddler just needs to be allowed to ride quietly in the shopping cart until the tantrum passes.

Not every voice deserves a microphone.
And not every thought is a truth.

That’s the moment everything shifts. When you realize you can notice a thought without obeying it.
You can pause. Question it. Even rewrite it.

Viktor Frankl once wrote:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Because your thoughts are not orders.
Your fears are not facts.
And the voice in your head, however loud it’s been, is not the same as your voice.

You are allowed to turn the volume down.

And in doing so, you make room for a different kind of voice.
One that feels unfamiliar at first, because it’s not trying to scare you into compliance or shame you into silence.

It’s the voice that says:

You’re still here.
You’re still worthy.
You’re not behind.
You’re becoming.

The voice in your head isn’t you.

But the one who just noticed it?
That’s the real you.

And you’re stronger than you think.

A quiet Rebllion

A Quiet Rebellion

Most people don’t rebel.

They reflect someone else’s life back at the world and call it their own. They smile when they’re supposed to, nod when it’s expected, and shrink when something real starts to rise up in their chest. They tell themselves it’s fine. This is just what life is. It’s Grown-up stuff. I’m being responsible.

But deep down, they know it’s not enough.

Not really.

Rebellion doesn’t always look like fire. Sometimes it looks like silence. Like putting down your phone and sitting with the ache. Like saying no when your voice is shaking. Like asking a question no one taught you to ask:

Who am I when no one’s watching?

There’s nothing wrong with you for wanting more.
It isn’t selfish to refuse to live someone else’s script.
But the hardest part? Choosing to live truthfully in a world that rewards performance.

That is what we are doing here. We aren’t blowing everything up. We’re not starting a war.
It is something quieter, stronger. It is a rebellion that begins the moment you stop nodding.

A knock at the door

A Knock at the Door

What if there’s nothing wrong with you?

Not in the way you’ve been told, anyway.
What if the heaviness you’ve been carrying isn’t because you’re broken, but because you’ve been lied to about who you’re supposed to be?

It wasn’t one lie. It was a thousand small lies. It was rules about how to live, what to want, what’s “acceptable.” It was in the roles handed to you without asking, and in the masks you’ve worn so long, they feel like skin. Maybe you played along because it felt safer, or easier, or because everyone else seemed fine pretending, so why not you?

And then, in the quiet, there’s that knock.

It’s not loud. It’s the flicker of unease when the screen goes dark.
It’s the 3am stare at the ceiling, wondering if this life even feels like yours.
It’s the part of you that’s tired of performing, that doesn’t care about “acceptable” anymore. It just wants real, even if real is messy.

You can drown it out. Most people do. They fill every gap with work, noise, and endless scrolling, surviving their days while that knock keeps tapping, asking: Is this really it? Is this really you?

So here’s the question only you can answer:

What would your life look like if you stopped numbing and started noticing?
If you noticed what actually matters, not the script, not the expectations, not the distractions.
If you noticed who you are under the masks.
If you noticed the knock and finally opened the door.

It doesn’t start with fixing yourself.
It doesn’t start with becoming someone new.
It starts with the courage to be real especially when it scares you.

You don’t have to be ready, you just need to answer.

When the song knew First

It started with a doctor, not a priest, not a therapist. Just a VA doc telling me I was too sedentary.

I didn’t argue. I walked.

At one point, I was living in Florida with an old friend. He was working on his VA rating and talked me into applying. I did, and the rating was good enough to get medical care. I scheduled an appointment, ran some tests. Overweight yeah, I’d been stationed at Fort Couch too long. I used to stay in decent shape after the military, but a knee injury during the 2014 Tough Mudder in Seattle gave me the excuse I needed to stop.

High cholesterol? Sure. Garbage diet.

My partner calls me mapache , Spanish for “raccoon”, partly because I never sleep, so I’ve got the dark circles around my eyes. But I say it’s because my diet belongs in a trash can.

Pre-diabetic. Sedentary. Working from a chair.

So the doc told me: walk.

And I did. Every night, after work, for a year. Sometimes at 9 p.m., sometimes closer to midnight. I’d go out and walk for about 45 minutes. Oklahoma nights are quiet in that in-between hour, when the day’s noise is gone but the world hasn’t quite gone to sleep.

My usual route curved past a Roman Catholic church with a Marian shrine. At first, it was just a halfway mark. A point to turn around. A visual checkpoint that made the loop feel complete.

It wasn’t symbolic. Not then.

But somewhere along the way, a client conversation flipped everything upside down. We were talking about avoidance. About how avoiding the things that remind us of our pain doesn’t protect us, it preserves the power of the person who caused it.

That hit like a wave.

I hadn’t turned away from faith in a sudden storm. It had been a long tide, starting in a childhood where obedience was about avoiding pain. I spent four decades on that drift. Not out of rebellion but because I didn’t know that love without fear could exist. It had been fear, fear shaped by the memory of a man who used scripture like a weapon. When I was a child, my mother dated a deacon in a Southern Baptist church. He was horribly abusive. By avoiding faith, I wasn’t healing. I was handing over the reins to someone who should never have held them. And every night I walked past the shrine but wouldn’t face it, I was letting him stand between me and something I hadn’t even had the chance to define for myself.

At first, it was just a glance. Then a pause. Then one night, I sat quietly still not praying, just remembering.

I never meant to pray. Not in any way I’d admit to, anyway. I wasn’t looking for faith. Not even peace.

I just wanted to feel something.

After everything I’d experienced what I grew up with, what was stolen in the name of God, what the uniform hardened in me I’d gone cold somewhere inside. I didn’t need a miracle. I just wanted one ember to flicker.

That night I asked for nothing specific. I said quietly, “I don’t need a miracle. I don’t need a grand sign that clears away my doubt. I just want to feel something again.”

On the walk home, I put in my earbuds, shuffling YouTube. And “Arms” by Christina Perri started playing. A song I’d probably heard a thousand times without hearing it at all. By the first chorus, I was crying. Full, unguarded tears. Not sadness. Not even release. More like recognition like the song knew something before I did. That I was ready. I sat on a bench outside the church and let it happen. No visions. No revelations. Just the feeling of being… seen. And the strange sense that something call it God, grace, presence had answered, not with words, but with music.

“I tried my best to never let you in to see the truth
And I’ve never opened up, I’ve never truly loved
‘Til you put your arms around me
And I believe that it’s easier for you to let me go”

Christina Perri

I’ve always been skeptical of pop. Too polished. Too packaged. But Christina Perri had always felt like an exception. Not flashy, not forced just honest. And in that honesty, beautiful. I’d heard Arms before, but I hadn’t listened. Not until that night, cracked open by silence and longing.

Perri once said the song is about the fight between the heart and the mind, the heart that wants love, and the head that says you can’t. It’s a love song, but it hits something deeper. How many times has your heart yearned for acceptance, only for the voice of pain to whisper: you don’t deserve this? It was like she gave language to something I hadn’t been able to name. It wasn’t just a song it was someone standing beside me in the dark, saying: I see you.

If the words hadn’t been so raw, so brave, they wouldn’t have reached me.

But they were.

And they did.

And maybe that’s why, in that moment, I didn’t need a hymn. I just needed her.

But the bigger shift came later, in reflection. That night didn’t just reopen faith. It reframed my entire life. I started to see that the pieces of my story, the ones I wanted to cut out, were actually chapters that led me exactly where I needed to be. In the days that followed, the signs weren’t grand. A video that named an old question I’d never voiced. A comment thread that mirrored my thoughts. Little moments that felt more like winks than messages. And somehow, that was enough.

I didn’t rejoin a church. I didn’t proclaim a faith. But something shifted. I stopped walking away and started walking with.

If I hadn’t been hurt, would I have understood the true depths of despair? If I hadn’t been so broken I was just existing, would I have woken up needing to do something more? Without the Navy, I wouldn’t have become someone I could respect. I wouldn’t have found discipline, purpose, or even school. I started in computer science. Hated it. Graveyard shift, late-night commercial: “Become a medical assistant.” That led to addiction medicine. That led to nursing. That led to organic chemistry, which nearly broke me, but also led to psychology. I loved the psych classes. so I kept going.

Addiction counseling came next, but I disagreed with core philosophies there. A supervisor told me, “You need to learn to crawl before you try to run.” That unsatisfying answer? It pushed me forward toward counseling psychology, toward therapy, toward exactly where I needed to be. Every detour school, mistakes, burned-out jobs, even that knee injury led right here. And if I hadn’t walked every step of that strange, painful road… I wouldn’t be able to help others find footing in the fog.

Even my relationship long-distance, unconventional, cross-cultural became part of that path. I used to ask, “Why does she have to be so far away?” The answer came, unexpectedly, through a video:

“I didn’t know how to love them the way they needed to be loved.”

That was it. I had to learn. And I wanted to. Another video said:

“Love is a choice, not a feeling. You wake up and choose it. Choose them. Every day.”

I wasn’t just learning to believe again. I was learning to love again. To stay. To be present. To be a partner, not just a person.

Even my teasing about testing God circled back. A verse I hadn’t searched for popped up in a video:

“You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”

My only reply:

“Okay. Message received.”

I used to think stories needed a clear message. But most of mine didn’t look like lessons until I was already living the next chapter. If there is a message in this one, it might be this:

Sometimes, life draws your path in reverse.

I didn’t become a therapist to fix anyone. I followed a spark. Got curious. Took a class, and somewhere between psychology and philosophy, I realized this wasn’t a job, it was a calling. Not to lead, but to walk beside. Not to have answers, but To ask better questions.

Even the nearly forty-year exile from faith had its place. I was a Christian once out of fear, trained to obey with clenched fists. I had to leave it behind to come back with open arms. Not because I was afraid not to love God, but because I wanted to. In my own language. At my own pace.

The shrine never was meant to convert me, and this chapter isn’t here to convert you. What I hope it offers is something quieter:

Avoidance may protect you in the short term.

But it gives the wound permanent lodging.

Facing it takes courage, but it’s the only way I’ve ever seen someone truly heal. Including myself.

That pop song? I still joke that pop can be soulless. But this one… This one cut through everything. I still tear up when she sings, “I hope that you see right through my walls…”

She did.

And I did.

And maybe if you’re still reading this you do too.

None of this was planned, but here I am, writing it. Somehow, every broken road feels like it was pointing here all along. Not to a finish line. But to a bench outside a shrine… Where one man sat down long enough to feel what he’d been missing.

And maybe that is the invitation here.

Not to believe what I believe. Not even to feel what I felt. Just to stop long enough… To notice what is already waiting for you.

The song knew first. The rest was just catching up.