Facing Myself: I’m 43 & Learning How to Love

June 22, 2026

Something hit me on October 26, 2025 that changed me forever. Before then, I was the man who would barrel through shut doors for love. I would wait on the other side of a closed door in pain (literally and figuratively) believing that if I loved hard enough, sacrificed enough, or waited long enough, eventually the door would open. I believed persistence was love. I believed endurance was proof of devotion. These actions of love were never seen, but they were one of my many ways I loved fiercely. This moment and many after shattered my understanding of love and safety.

Right after it all hit me, I cancelled my lease, made my exit plan, and shut down emotionally. But even still, I kept choosing love. In November 2025, I reversed my decision to leave. Part of it was fear. Part of it was hope. And a large part of it was the simple fact that I couldn’t bear the thought of someone I loved facing uncertainty alone. Deep down, I believed we still had a future. I used the last $5,000 on my credit card to help pay rent for two months despite being unemployed for four months and terrified of what would happen to me financially. A week after shutting down emotionally, I still agreed to sign green card paperwork, even though I wasn’t ready. I even watched her dogs while she traveled. I kept showing up in whatever ways I still could.

These things were not words. They were actions. They were sacrifices. And whether they were seen or not, they happened.

At the time, I thought those choices proved how deeply I loved. Now I wonder how many of them came from fear instead. Fear of disappointing someone. Fear of abandonment. Fear that if I chose myself, I would lose the person I loved forever.

That is a difficult thing to admit.

Because for most of my life, I didn’t see myself as someone without boundaries. I saw myself as loyal. Devoted. The person who would never give up. But there is a difference between love and self-abandonment, and I crossed that line more times than I can count.

Then January 2026 arrived, and with it came another moment that divided my life into a before and after. That was the week of a nightmare that I have lived daily since it happened. It’s in my dreams. It’s the first thing I’ve thought about for months. And in these months of silence I replayed every decision I had ever made. I grieved the relationship, the future I thought I was building, and the version of myself that believed love could overcome anything. I held onto hope that someday I would be able to explain myself, that someday the quiet ways I loved would matter as much as the loudest moments of my failures.

Then today I learned this wasn’t ending anytime soon. I had been crying almost everyday since January, but today, I cried so much that I almost threw up. I finally understood that some stories never get a mutual ending. Sometimes one person moves on while the other is left carrying memories, regrets, and love that no longer has anywhere to go. Sometimes the things you did quietly… the sacrifices, the compromises, the moments you chose someone else’s safety over your own… remain unseen forever.

That realization broke something in me, but it also forced me to finally look at myself: the parts shaped by childhood, the patterns I carried into adulthood, and the desperate need I had to be understood. This is not a story about blame. It’s a story about learning who I am after losing almost everything I thought defined me.

I’m also at the age that has forced me to face myself in a way I never had to before. There’s something about hitting what feels like the halfway point of your life that strips away the noise and leaves you alone with the parts of yourself you’ve avoided. I can’t outrun my patterns anymore, and I can’t hide behind distractions or pretend that the way I’ve been moving through my relationships is sustainable. Most mornings I wake up with a heaviness in my chest before I even open my eyes, a strange mix of heat and cold, like my insides are burning while the rest of me feels stuck in a walk‑in freezer. The pain shows up in my body in ways I don’t fully understand yet. And even with all of that, I know what I want at the core of it: I want my person. I want someone to grow old with, someone to share quiet moments with, someone to watch the sun set beside. But wanting something simple doesn’t mean the path to it is simple. The older I get, the more I realize that what I’m longing for won’t come from looking outward before I’ve looked inward. Maybe the first step toward the kind of love I want is giving myself the time and space to understand who I am before I try to build anything with anyone else.

“Wanting something simple does not mean the path to it is simple.”

The Childhood That Shaped Me

To understand what I want now, I have had to dig deep in my weekly therapy sessions and talk about where I came from. My childhood wasn’t all bad or all good. It was a mix of both. My parents were young and overwhelmed, doing the best they could with what they had, and there were moments of connection and an idea of family that still matters to me. But there were also constant moves because of military life, unpredictable emotions, my parents separating over and over, a father that wasn’t always present, a mother who was always depressed or stressed, strange men coming and going, new homes every time I got used to the last one, constantly having to make new friends every two years, and situations that were too heavy for a kid to make sense of. One of the most defining memories I have is being left on the side of the road for crying when I was four or five. My mother drove off and in that moment, I shut down. She drove back and picked me up. That moment taught me early that it was safer to stay quiet and stay small. I learned to read the room before I ever learned to read a book. I learned to anticipate moods, to adjust myself to keep the peace, and to take responsibility for things that were never mine to carry. At the same time, I learned how to adapt, how to show up even when I was hurting, how to take care of others, and how to survive instability. I was the fixer. I was the glue. It was my job.

“I learned to stay small long before I ever learned to feel safe.”

Unfortunately, those early experiences shaped the way I attached to people. The majority of my relationships were short and unstable because I didn’t know how to set boundaries and trust calm. I was always bracing for something to shift, always waiting for the ground to move. There has only been one long relationship… thirteen years… where I actually had stability, and it’s where I became a father, which is the greatest part of my life. But even in that stability and strong foundation, I felt unseen. It wasn’t her fault. I just didn’t know how to feel secure without verbal reassurance, and I didn’t know how to ask for what I needed. I was looking for validation instead of connection, and I didn’t understand that at the time. Looking back, I can see how all of that came from the same place. My childhood gave me strengths and wounds at the same time, and both shaped the man I became. And here’s the truth I can finally say without shame: I carried those unresolved patterns into every relationship I’ve ever been in. Not on purpose, not out of malice, but because I didn’t know any other way. I didn’t know how to slow down, how to set boundaries, how to communicate my needs, or how to trust stability. I’m not taking all the blame for every relationship I’ve been in, but I’m taking responsibility for the parts that were mine.

Looking back, I can see that some of the things I called love were actually fear. I was terrified of disappointing people. Terrified of being abandoned. Terrified that if I chose myself, I would lose the person I loved forever. So I crossed my own boundaries over and over. I spent money I couldn’t afford to spend. I agreed to commitments I wasn’t emotionally ready to make. I ignored what my body was telling me. I put my own needs aside and, at times, even the needs of my children aside because I believed sacrifice was proof of love. I don’t believe that anymore. Love isn’t abandoning yourself to save someone else. Real love requires boundaries, honesty, and the courage to say, “I love you, but I can’t lose myself trying to keep you.”

The Kind of Love I Want Now

For most of my adult life, I did not stop long enough to ask myself what kind of love I actually needed. I moved quickly, adapted constantly, and tried to hold everything together even when the ground beneath me was shifting. I mistook urgency for connection and emotional intensity for depth. I thought closeness meant compatibility, even when my body was telling me something different. Now, at 43, after watching so much of my life fall apart, I have finally had the time to understand what I want.

I want a love that grows at a natural pace, something that gives me room to breathe and think and actually understand what I am stepping into. I want a relationship where I am not pushed into life altering commitments before I am ready, and where the parts of my life outside the relationship, my children, are treated with respect when it comes to decisions that affect all of us. I want someone who understands that clarity takes time and that time is not hesitation. I want a connection that stays steady when emotions rise, where conversations stay grounded and disagreements lead to understanding instead of fear or distance. I want a partner who does not shut down when things get hard, who does not use silence as a weapon, and who does not disappear when I need them to stay present. I want a love where kindness is spoken out loud, where appreciation is not withheld, and where I do not have to guess whether I matter.

“I want a love that feels like a place where I can rest, not something I have to recover from.”

The Kind of Love I Don’t Want Anymore

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become clearer about the kind of love I can no longer accept. I don’t want a relationship that moves faster than my heart can keep up with or one that pushes me into commitments before I’m ready. I don’t want conflict that spirals into something unpredictable or conversations that turn into emotional storms. I don’t want a partner who shuts down when things get hard or uses silence as a way to create distance. I don’t want to feel like I’m standing alone in the middle of a problem we’re supposed to be facing together. I don’t want to be in a relationship where kindness is rare, where compliments never come, where nothing I do is acknowledged, and where I’m left wondering if I matter. I don’t want to feel like I’m constantly trying to earn basic affection or approval. I don’t want my role as a father to be treated like an inconvenience or something I have to defend. My kids are woven into who I am, and I need someone who respects that. I don’t want to be punished for needing space or clarity, and I don’t want to feel like my boundaries are tests I’m expected to fail. I don’t want a relationship that destabilizes my life or pulls me into emotional chaos. I want calm, clarity, and steadiness. I want a connection that supports my growth instead of draining it. These aren’t demands. They’re truths. They’re the result of years of learning what my heart can and cannot carry.

When I am ready, I want a love that feels like a team. I want a close friend to experience the elder part of life with. I want a connection that grows slowly and naturally, where both people show up as themselves without fear. I want communication that is clear, boundaries that are respected, emotions that are safe, and conflict that is handled with care. I want affection that is mutual and trust that is built over time. I want presence that is consistent and connection that is steady. I want a love that feels like home, not a place I have to earn my way into or fight to keep.

Why I Am Not Ready Yet

I am not seeking new connections for a while. Judging by the way I have felt all year, this feels like it may take the rest of my forties to recover from. I am not just dealing with the shock of what happened this past year. I am also facing decades of trauma for the first time in my life, and I am deep in the middle of the work. Everything is hurting at once, and I am just trying to understand how to breathe again. I am still rebuilding my confidence and learning what healthy love looks like after years of moving through relationships without the tools I needed. I want to choose love from clarity, not loneliness. I want to build a stable life before I invite someone into it. I want to break patterns, not repeat them.

Part of why I am not ready is because I am still untangling myself from the emotional aftermath of being misunderstood. In the weeks after everything fell apart, I came across things online that felt connected to my situation, or at least to a version of me that didn’t match the truth I lived. I connected with the tone, the timing, the references. I felt exactly what it could be pointing to. And it is a strange kind of pain to see yourself reflected through someone else’s hurt while knowing how much of the story is missing.

It is strange to watch a narrative form in the world that focuses only on the final moments of a long story… the moments when I was shutting down, overwhelmed, drowning, while ignoring the entire period before that. The period where I was showing up in ways that cost me pieces of myself. The countless times I chased, fixed, apologized, absorbed, and all while running on empty. The entire weekends spent crying over conflict only to be laughed at for crying. The moments where my feelings did not seem to matter at all.

“It is painful to see only the final chapter held up as the whole book.”

Because the truth is, I know how I loved. I know what I gave. I know what I sacrificed. I know what I put aside. I know the ways I tried, the ways I bent, the ways I showed up. I can go back through the texts and photos to see the proof of who I was, even when I have doubted it in my lowest moments. I put my needs aside more times than I can count. I put my kids’ needs aside in ways I am still forgiving myself for. I made decisions out of fear, urgency, pressure, and love. I stayed when I should have left. I agreed to things my kids were not ready for. I moved faster than was healthy for them. I tried to be a source of safety in a situation that was becoming unsafe for everyone. I used the last of my money to try to get out, only to be convinced into staying. I signed paperwork I was not emotionally ready to file. I carried stress that was not mine to carry. I tried to hold everything together while quietly falling apart. And none of it was seen for what it was: love.

Instead, the focus became the ending, the part where I was exhausted, shut down, overwhelmed, and no longer able to keep performing at the level I had been. The part where I had nothing left to give. The part where my silence was interpreted as indifference instead of collapse. It is painful to see myself portrayed as uncaring when I was caring so much it was destroying me. It is painful to see the story told without the parts that broke me too.

But the hardest part has been accepting that I cannot control any of that. I cannot control how someone else remembers me. I cannot control which parts of the story they choose to tell. I cannot control what they leave out. I cannot control the version of me they needed to believe in order to make sense of their own pain. All I can do is tell the truth of my experience, not to argue, not to defend, not to correct, but to finally stop abandoning myself in the process. And somewhere in the middle of all of that reflection, I had to face the reality of where I actually ended up.

Caught Between Two Worlds With No Place to Stand

There is a part of this chapter that has been difficult to put into words, and it’s the feeling of being caught between two worlds without belonging fully to either one. I wasn’t holding onto my past… I had already outgrown it. I decide it was done in 2018, worked on myself, and launched the “new me” into the world in 2024. My past is not a place I’m trying to return to. It’s a place I’ve spent years trying to heal from. The only reason I am physically in the same space as before is because I lost my home, my income, and my stability so suddenly that I had nowhere else to go. I tried to live with my brother and it didn’t work. I tried with mother… that lasted two days. I was traveling to the mother of my children’s house daily to drive the kids to school, but had no income for gas, so at one point I asked for her help. She decided to take me in for a few months while things settled, not realizing the road that was ahead. She didn’t take me in because of any unsettled connection on either side. She took me in because she didn’t want the father of her children sleeping in a car while trying to rebuild his life. That is not attachment. That is compassion. That is co‑parenting. That is basic humanity. Is it normal? No. But it’s the only way for our kids not see their dad become homeless.

I wasn’t resisting a new future. I was overwhelmed by the present and clawing for stability in a world that felt like chaos. So as a father, I was trying to protect the only stable part of my life: my children. And while I was trying to build a future… my home, my finances, my sense of safety, my identity… all of it disappeared away faster than I could catch it.

Now I’m in a strange place where I don’t belong to the past, and I don’t belong to the future. I’m standing in the middle, without a place of my own, trying to figure out how to rebuild a life that doesn’t leave me homeless in every direction. Life has a way of leaving you in the very places you thought you’d already outgrown.

The Aftermath I’m Still Trying to Survive

There is another part of this story that I am still living through, and it’s the part almost no one sees. When everything collapsed, it didn’t just break my heart… it broke my stability in ways it will take years to recover from. Something happened during that time that sent shockwaves through every corner of my life. It was the kind of moment that quietly shuts doors you once walked through easily, the kind that follows you into places you never expected it to reach. Before all of this, I could apply for a job and feel confident. I could rely on my work ethic, my talent, my experience, and my reputation. But now, even months later, I am still dealing with the fallout of that moment. I waited over a year for delivery driver jobs to open up, but they all rejected me. Opportunities that used to be beneath me, now slip away before I can even get to the starting line. Applications go unanswered. Interviews disappear. The only good news is that I am FINALLY months away from being employable again, and none of it is because of a lack of effort or ability… it’s because of something completely outside my control is finally settling. I just have to wait… wait… wait.

The loss of income has been devastating, but the loss of direction has been even harder. I went from being someone who provided for others to someone who can’t even provide for himself. I went from having a home, a routine, and a sense of purpose to waking up in a place that isn’t mine, trying to figure out how to rebuild from nothing. And none of this is visible from the outside. People see the good moments I share, but they don’t see the collapse underneath. They see the mask, but they don’t see the tears. I’m not writing this to point fingers. I’m writing it because it is part of the truth, and I’m finally allowing myself to tell the whole truth of my experience.

Looking back, I can see how easily I absorbed the emotional tension around me. What began as me trying to offer stability slowly turned into me carrying instability that wasn’t originally mine. The ground beneath me started to feel like it was shifting in ways I couldn’t explain. I went from being the one who felt grounded to being the one who felt unsteady. I went from trying to help someone else feel safe to realizing that I no longer felt safe myself. It’s a strange thing to recognize… that the very experiences someone else describes as their own eventually became the reality I was living. And now I’m the one left trying to rebuild a sense of stability inside myself. It’s the kind of emotional transfer that happens quietly, almost invisibly, until one day you wake up and realize you’re standing on the same shaky ground someone else once stood on.

The Fear of Being Misunderstood

There is a fear that has shaped me more than almost anything else in my life, and it’s the fear of being misunderstood. It’s a fear that goes deeper than embarrassment or insecurity…. it is the button for my anger and it’s tied to the earliest parts of my story, the parts where speaking up felt unsafe and staying quiet felt like survival. Even now, as an adult trying to do the inner work, that fear still sits in my chest. It shows up when I try to express myself, when I try to be vulnerable, when I try to let people see who I actually am beneath the layers I’ve built. It’s the fear that my intentions will be misread, that my heart will be interpreted through the wrong lens, that the truth of who I am will get lost somewhere between my mind and the outside world. It’s why I created my series Walking To Myself… not to perform, not to impress, but to practice being seen without shrinking. One of the reels in that series is about this exact fear, because for most of my life, even when I wanted to be understood, I didn’t know how to let myself be visible. I didn’t know how to believe I deserved to be seen clearly. Sharing these pieces of myself is uncomfortable, but it’s part of the work. It’s me teaching my brain that being seen isn’t dangerous, that being understood isn’t a threat, and that my voice doesn’t have to stay hidden just to feel safe.

Choosing Myself First

For the first time in my life, I am trying to choose myself in a real and intentional way. Not in a selfish way, and not in a way that shuts the world out, but in a way that finally asks, Who am I when I am not performing, fixing, chasing, or holding everything together. It is strange to realize how much of my identity has been built on things outside of me, being a father, being a partner, being the one who shows up, being the one who absorbs the impact. Those roles matter, and they are part of me, but they are not the whole story. The hard part now is figuring out who I am without all the noise, without the expectations, without the pressure to be everything for everyone. It is uncomfortable to sit with myself without the distractions I used to rely on. It is uncomfortable to admit that I do not fully know who I am outside of the roles I have played. But that is the work I am doing. I am learning how to stand on my own two feet without needing someone else to define me. I am learning how to build a life that feels steady from the inside out. And when I am ready, I will choose love again, the kind that does not require me to lose myself to keep it. Until then, I am here, doing the slow, honest work of becoming someone who can love well, starting with learning how to love myself.

“I am learning how to love myself with the same intensity I have always given away.”