There’s a version of you that got away.
You know the one. The version that was going to dream bigger, love harder, create something that mattered. The version that truly believed that the life you imagined for yourself was still possible.
And then somewhere along the way, quietly, without one specific dramatic moment you could point to, you stopped. Not all at once, but gradually. Kinda like how a fire slowly goes out when nobody tends to it. You called yourself a realist. You told yourself you were just being practical. You were just behaving the way a grown up should. But what you were really doing was grieving something you hadn’t even named yet.
I know because I did the same thing.
For many years of my life, I made music. Then one day, I didn’t. I told myself the same things you probably told yourself about whatever you let go of. That the timing wasn’t right. That you’d get back to it soon. That life had other priorities, or that maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.
I went quiet. And what I didn’t realize at the time was I hadn’t simply stopped because the music wasn’t there anymore.
I went quiet because I hadn’t found my inspiration to start again. My reason.
That reason arrived in the spring of 2023.
I’m not going to tell you the whole story here. That story is being written, slowly and honestly, in a book that will say everything this page cannot. What I will tell you is this.
Someone came into my life and showed me a version of myself I had stopped believing in. Not by telling me who I could be. By making me want to become him. That’s when the music came back. Not as a career again, and not as a hobby. As a calling. Then, I hired a personal trainer for the first time in my life. As I started writing again and started making real investments in my health, I started becoming the man I had always suspected was in there somewhere but had never before found his reason to show up.
And then, through circumstances I’m still learning to understand and accept, that person was taken from my life.
What do you do with a love that simply has nowhere to go?
What do you do when you’ve learned to feel something at a depth you never thought you were capable of feeling, and the person who opened that door is suddenly, inexplicably, on the other side of a wall you cannot reach through?
I’ve spent a long time sitting with those questions now. I won’t pretend I have definitive answers. What I have is what I made in the absence of answers.
The music I’m now making.
The book I’m now writing.
The public presence I’m now establishing on the slightest chance that making something true and real and human might reach across a distance that nothing else so far has been able to cross.
I truly believe that we are living through a moment in human history when the things that make us most human are becoming the rarest and most valuable things in our world.
Not our productivity. Not our efficiency. Not the things we can do that a machine might someday do better.
Our capacity to love someone…even if it’s someone we can’t reach or can’t receive anything back from.
Our willingness to try and make something honest in the middle of our own unresolved pain.
Or our stubborn, irrational, beautiful insistence on believing that a story isn’t over just because we can’t yet see how it ends.
That’s not weakness. That’s humanity. And right now, that’s everything.
I don’t know yet how my story ends. I’m living in the middle of it right now the same way you’re living in the middle of yours.
But somewhere along the way I had to make a decision. To keep believing that the story wasn’t finished even when I couldn’t see any evidence that it wasn’t. That decision changed everything about how I move through the world now.
Choosing to share my story is my way of saying I know I’m not alone in this. You’ve had your own version of these questions. Your own wall you couldn’t reach through. Your own love or dream or version of yourself that went somewhere you couldn’t follow.
If any of this sounds like something you might recognize…in your own life, your own losses, your own quietly surrendered dreams…then I think you already know you’re in the right place.
Stay a while. The best of what I have to share is still coming.