One year ago today, my life changed.
It happened in the middle of a fight with my wife.
I don't remember everything that was said anymore.
I'm surprised by how little I care about the details now.
At the time, of course, they seemed enormously important.
But I remember one sentence.
"I think you need to find your own place."
She meant that I needed to move out.
A year later, I realize she was right.
Just not in the way she intended.
I did need to find my own place.
Because somewhere along the way, I had made her my place.
My marriage was my place.
Her happiness, her unhappiness, our plans, our problems, the temperature of the relationship - all of it had become gravitational.
I had slowly organized too much of my internal world around something outside of myself.
I don't think I understood that then.
I just knew that the person I loved was telling me to leave.
And I was terrified.
Terrified of losing her.
Terrified of being alone.
Terrified that the life I thought I was living was disappearing.
Terrified, if I'm being completely truthful, that without the marriage I might discover there wasn't enough of me left underneath it.
There was.
But finding him took some work.
Almost exactly one year later, at about 1:30 this morning, I was sitting beside an alpine lake in the Cascade Mountains.
Above me was a sky so dark that the stars seemed innumerable.
The Perseid meteor shower was underway. Every few minutes another streak of light crossed the sky and disappeared.
A friend I am slowly getting to know was there with me.
At some point she took a photograph.
I'm standing in silhouette beneath the stars, almost indistinguishable from the mountains and trees around me.
She didn't know what day it was.
I did.
And standing there beneath an incomprehensibly large universe, I thought about the year between those two moments.
What a fucking year.
I could measure it in accomplishments.
I started The Guy's Guy.
I got my contractor's license and turned a handyman business into a small but quickly growing construction company.
I got my first coaching client. And then another. . .
I trained.
I changed my body.
I stopped drinking and learned what life felt like without routinely anesthetizing the difficult parts of it.
I got back on a motorcycle and disappeared down forest roads for the first time since I was a kid.
I moved my mother out of a situation that was making her unhappy.
I let go of possessions I'd been dragging from place to place for years because I'd confused keeping the objects with keeping the life they represented.
I rediscovered that the creative part of me hadn't disappeared when I left Hollywood.
I wrote.
I thought.
I built things.
I made money with my hands.
I started making money with my mind again.
But none of those things are really what I'm proud of.
They're evidence of something else.
This year I buried my dog.
Ellie was deeply woven into my life, and when the time came to let her go, there was nowhere to hide from what needed to be done.
So I stayed.
I was present.
I loved her through the last difficult act of loving her.
And afterward, beneath the grief, I noticed another feeling.
It surprised me.
I felt clean.
Not happy.
Not relieved.
Clean.
I had handled something terrible well.
That experience taught me something about self-respect that I don't think I understood before.
Self-respect is accumulated evidence.
You don't get it because somebody tells you you're a good man.
You don't get it from affirmations.
You don't get it by imagining the man you'd like to be.
You earn it by watching yourself.
When you're frightened and you stay.
Evidence.
You don't know how to solve the problem and you keep working until you do.
Evidence.
You're lonely and you don't immediately reach for something or someone to make the feeling disappear.
Evidence.
Money gets tight and you go earn more.
Evidence.
Someone you love needs you and you show up.
Evidence.
Your heart gets broken and you refuse to let heartbreak turn you bitter.
Evidence.
You train when nobody is watching.
Evidence.
You keep promises you've made to yourself.
Evidence.
And eventually something interesting happens.
You stop having to convince yourself who you are.
You know.
There were hundreds of small moments like that this year.
Jobs where I stood looking at something I had never done before and genuinely didn't know how I was going to solve it.
So I stayed in the work.
I researched.
I thought.
I tried something.
Sometimes I got it wrong.
Then I tried something else.
Eventually I figured it out.
Over and over again.
And slowly I realized that competence isn't knowing how to do everything.
It's developing enough trust in yourself to believe that you can probably figure out what you don't know yet.
That realization traveled well beyond construction.
I began to understand that uncertainty wasn't something I needed to eliminate before moving forward.
I could move forward while uncertain.
That changed things.
I also discovered that when you change the way you move through the world, the world begins responding differently to you.
People started telling me things.
Friends asked for counsel.
Strangers started conversations.
People I barely knew reflected things back to me about my presence, my energy, things I'd said or done that had affected them.
Some told me I'd inspired them to change something in their own lives.
And that affected me too.
Because I started understanding that the way we carry ourselves doesn't belong entirely to us.
Our presence enters rooms before our advice does.
Our behavior gives other people permission.
Our discipline communicates something.
Our peace communicates something.
So does our bitterness.
So does our chaos.
I began paying closer attention to what I was bringing with me.
I found faith again this year.
Or perhaps I simply remembered that I'd never really lost it.
I believe there is something much greater than me at work here.
I don't pretend to understand it.
In fact, the older I get, the less interested I am in pretending to understand things that are beyond my understanding.
But I have become deeply interested in humility.
And gratitude.
I wake up grateful.
I work grateful.
I train grateful.
I try to notice my life while I'm actually living it.
Because another thing this year taught me is that almost everything we think is permanent isn't.
The marriage.
The dog.
The house.
The body.
The money.
The people we love.
Us.
Everything is passing through.
That doesn't make life meaningless.
It makes it precious.
A year ago, I might have described what happened to me as getting knocked down.
And there is a version of this story where I put my mouthpiece back in, stand up and come out swinging.
I understand the appeal of that metaphor.
Men like battle metaphors.
Fight.
Conquer.
Dominate.
Win.
But looking back, I don't think fighting was the most important thing I did this year.
I surrendered some things.
I grieved others.
I threw things away.
I forgave.
I learned.
I worked.
I prayed.
I trained.
I helped people.
I let people help me.
I spent time alone.
I allowed myself to be uncertain.
I allowed myself to change.
I didn't fight my way back to my old life.
I built a new one.
And that brings me back to the sentence.
"I think you need to find your own place."
For a long time, I thought finding your place meant finding the right person.
The right career.
The right house.
The right city.
The right amount of money.
The right tribe.
And all of those things matter.
But I think a man needs another kind of place first.
An internal home sturdy enough that other people can enter it without becoming its foundation.
A place where you can love someone enormously without making them responsible for your existence.
A place where you can lose something precious without losing yourself with it.
A place where success can visit without defining you and failure can visit without destroying you.
A place where you can be alone without believing you've been abandoned.
A place from which you can venture into the world rather than constantly asking the world to tell you where you belong.
Maybe that's what I've been building this year.
Not independence.
Not invulnerability.
Certainly not perfection.
A home.
At 1:30 this morning, I sat beneath the stars while meteors crossed the sky above me.
Beside me was another human being whose company I was grateful for.
Behind me was a year I never would have chosen.
Ahead of me was a life I couldn't yet see.
And for once, I didn't need to.
I just sat there.
Small beneath something enormous.
Grateful.
Peaceful.
Home.
One year ago somebody told me I needed to find my own place.
It took me a year to understand what she meant.
I found it.
