The Reckoning I Chose and The Ones I Didn’t

March 14, 2026

Disclaimer: This blog post reflects on personal experiences with change, growth, and rebuilding. It is intended as a personal reflection.

There are moments in every adult life when the universe decides to flip the table. It doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t check your schedule. It doesn’t care that you’ve spent years building a life with the careful precision of a man assembling IKEA furniture without instructions. One day, you wake up and realize the life you thought you were living has been quietly dismantled, piece by piece, until you’re standing in the middle of a metaphorical living room holding a single screw and wondering what the hell happened. This moment is called starting over.

And I’ve started over more than once. Excluding the two dozen times I moved as a child with a military dad, I’ve started over four times in my adult life. And two of those times happened in the past two years.

The first time I truly had to rebuild my life was in my mid-twenties. I got married and moved to California because I was young and in love… and I thought we were starting a new life together. That part was my choice. A little over a year later, I discovered she was cheating on me… sending “I love you” to her fellow male airman via Myspace. There were other signs before that, but nevertheless, I was devastated and never saw it coming. The life I thought we were building together disappeared overnight, and I moved across the country to Jacksonville, Florida to start over again. That part wasn’t my choice.

And I guess, apparently… life likes patterns.

Fast forward almost two decades, and I found myself standing at another crossroads.

The first time I “started over” in this recent chapter was at 41, and that one was my choice. I walked away from my stable family home I’d lived in for thirteen years. I won’t get into the details of it, but I had known for awhile that I was going to do it. I didn’t feel like myself and I needed a change. I tore down the version of myself I’d been carrying for over a decade and stepped into uncertainty on purpose. I made the tough decision to split custody with the mother of my children and move on into the unknown. It wasn’t perfectly executed… I made many mistakes, but in many ways it was intentional. My choice. My timing. My terms.

Welp… fast forward to less than two years later… and the second phase didn’t give me a warning.

At 43, life hit me unexpectedly. I lost my job in July 2025 and everything shifted in a single moment. Like most of my life, I saw the snowball growing and I tried to prevent the crash. I had preemptively made decisions only months before the crash that would allow a clean split from the growing disaster, but then found myself locked into staying in it. I did it for what felt like the right reasons… but despite my intentions… in a shameful turn of events, I found myself exiting in a way that I could have never seen coming. It’s been a couple months and I am still only at the beginning of it. Almost 2 & 1/2 months later and I am still in shock.

This kind of reckoning… it’s painful. It’s the emotional equivalent of someone lighting me on fire inside a walk in freezer and locking the door behind them. I want so badly to change my life… I feel on fire on the inside… motivated to move… to change… to improve my situation… but at the same time, I’m stuck… frozen… inside of a situation that I have no control over. The situation is affecting me in ways I literally cannot put into words. This experience has forced me to learn quickly that you’re never too old to experience “firsts.” Also… the world is NOT going to pause for your personal crisis. Bills still arrive. The sun still rises. Taxes need to get paid. Your kids still expect you to function. And somehow, you do. Not because you’re fearless or enlightened or spiritually evolved, but because the alternative is collapsing… and collapsing is a luxury a father can’t afford. I have to make it through this. I feel like I’ve been jumping through flaming hoops in the fog for the last two years and they keep coming.

The Myth of the “Rock Bottom Revelation”

There’s this fantasy idea built into the “American Dream” that when life falls apart, you’re supposed to have some kind of grand awakening where you vow to change everything. But the truth is far less inspiring. Life is not a movie… real transformation doesn’t arrive with violins swelling in the background. It arrives in the form of small, unglamorous decisions: getting out of bed when you don’t want to. Showering… showing up for responsibilities even when your mind is somewhere else. Choosing not to react when your emotions are begging for an outlet. Learning to breathe through discomfort instead of trying to outrun it.

Growth is not a lightning strike. It’s erosion of what you once were… slow, steady, and often invisible until one day you look back and realize the landscape of your inner world has shifted.

The funny thing is, once you stop expecting transformation to feel good, it becomes easier to accept the pain. There’s a strange freedom in admitting that you don’t have everything figured out. That you’re still learning. That you’re still capable of becoming someone better than the person you were yesterday. That type of humility isn’t a punishment. It’s a reset button.

And once the initial shock of starting over fades, the real work begins.

The Quiet Work of Emotional Reconstruction

One of the most surprising parts of rebuilding your life is discovering how much of your identity was tied to things outside of you. A home. A routine. A relationship. A sense of belonging. When those things disappear, you’re forced to ask a question most people avoid until much later in life: “Who am I without the structures that used to define me?”

It’s not an easy question. It’s not even a comfortable one. But it’s necessary.

You start noticing the difference between reacting and responding. You start recognizing the moments when your emotions are trying to hijack your behavior. You start understanding that self‑control isn’t about suppressing feelings… it’s about not letting them drive the car.

And you learn that rebuilding isn’t something anyone can do for you. Nobody is going to save you from yourself.

Granted… people can support you… and I’m realizing more now than ever how lucky I am to have my dad, my mom, my brother, and my sister walking with me through this… I found a great male therapist who has been a lifesaver during this time… and it’s also made it crystal clear who my true friends are… but the internal work is mine. The discipline is mine. The responsibility is mine. The showing up is mine. Especially for my kids, who both deserve a father who doesn’t disappear into the chaos.

The irony is that the more you work on yourself, the less you feel the need to prove anything to anyone. You stop performing. You stop defending. You stop trying to curate a version of yourself for public consumption. You start living in a way that feels honest, even if it’s not always pretty.

And don’t get me wrong… I’m not perfect, but I feel authentic.

Letting Go Without Becoming Bitter

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes from losing a future you thought you were building. The grief is not from the loss of a place or a plan. It’s the loss of a version of your future self that no longer exists. And the hardest part isn’t letting go of what happened. It’s letting go of the idea of life you were attached to. It’s taking responsibility for your choices and accepting that growth sometimes begins with the uncomfortable realization that you were not the person you needed to be in the moment you needed it most.

For a while, you keep trying to fix it anyway. You replay conversations. You rethink decisions. You imagine alternate outcomes where one different sentence or one different choice somehow repairs everything. But eventually you realize you’ve been trying to fill a cup that is already cracked… the whole time. And no matter how much you pour into a cracked cup, it will never hold what it once did.

At some point, you have to stop pouring. You have to learn to let go.

And here’s the paradoxical truth: letting go doesn’t mean you stop loving and caring. It doesn’t mean you erase the past. It doesn’t mean you pretend you’re unaffected. Letting go simply means accepting that you can’t control the outcome anymore. You can’t control how others think of you. You can’t control how others choose to heal themselves. You can’t control the method of anyone else’s growth.

You can only control who you will become out of this pain.

The Strange Freedom of Not Knowing What Comes Next

Starting over means facing the future with a mix of fear and possibility. And at the ripe ole age of 43, I’m old enough to understand the weight of consequences, but young enough to rebuild something meaningful. I am seasoned enough to know what matters, but open enough to redefine my life on my own terms.

The future stops being a destination and becomes a construction project. I will build it through small, consistent choices: choosing stability over chaos, choosing growth over avoidance, choosing responsibility over impulse. I am going to stop waiting for life to “go back to normal” and start creating a new normal… one that reflects who I am becoming, not who I used to be.

I am still capable of becoming someone stronger, wiser, and more grounded than the person I was before everything fell apart.

The Bottom Line

Rebuilding your life at 43 isn’t a tragedy. It’s a reckoning. It’s a chance to confront the parts of yourself you ignored, to grow in ways you never would have chosen voluntarily, and to build a future that’s rooted in authenticity rather than illusion. It’s not easy. It’s not glamorous. It’s not quick.

But it’s real…. and for the first time in a long time, so am I.

Oh… and since you made it this far, here’s a picture of me at the Gate River Run surrounded by a bunch of Gumbys and Pokey. Because even when life is burning down around you, the universe still throws you weird, hilarious moments to remind you you’re alive.