The Ruins of All We Avoid

What happens when the stories we tell ourselves fall apart?

There are moments in life that force us to look at ourselves more deeply than we were ever prepared to.

This year my divorce will be finalized. An eighteen-year relationship is reaching a new milestone. When a marriage ends, it's not only the relationship that changes. Sometimes the stories we've been telling ourselves for decades fall apart.

Over the last few years I've been questioning a lot of assumptions about my life:

What happiness looks like.

What success looks like.

What family looks like.

What it means to be a man.

What it means to be myself.

Sometimes the stories we tell ourselves don’t help us—they perpetuate painful experiences and keep us trapped in old ways of seeing ourselves. And they are worth a second look.

When I was a kid, I carried a lot of shame. I often felt invisible and different from the people around me. I carried this into my adult life for many years.

In my early professional life, I looked at people with certain titles and responsibilities and assumed they innately possessed something I somehow lacked. That sense of impostor syndrome created its own challenges, especially when I eventually found myself in leadership roles. If I didn't trust my own judgment, how could others trust it?

Then there were the "nice guy" dynamics I carried into relationships. Patterns that seemed helpful on the surface, but often came at the expense of authenticity, healthy boundaries, and my own needs.

There is comfort even in dysfunction when it is familiar to us. The familiar gives us a sense of stability. Over time, and often in collaboration with the people around us, these stories become the framework through which we understand ourselves and the world.

And then something happens.

Someone dies.

A marriage ends.

A role we once held no longer fits.

We lose a job.

A dream falls apart.

There is a kind of "ego death" when our identity is attached to stories that now no longer serve us.

Suddenly our assumptions are exposed.

The life that once felt so solid is now a glass house that has been shattered.

We are in a new reality. A blank slate. A terrifying void.

I am not the same person I once was. But there lies the opportunity.

We can discover who remains once the old stories fall away.

Beneath the fallen layers of what we once believed to be true are the things that actually matter to us:

Our deeper values.

Our desires.

The truths that were buried beneath expectation.

We become visible to ourselves.

It takes courage because we may feel foolish, and we really don't know what comes next.

If nothing else I have learned that there is no standard human being.

There is no perfect template we are failing to live up to.

There is no point at which we finally become complete and stop making mistakes.

There is only the ongoing process of understanding ourselves more honestly and making choices that align with what we discover.

What we avoid does not disappear.

Eventually life has a way of bringing us face to face with it. Maybe that is why this period of my life, despite all its challenges, feels less like rebuilding and more like creating.

Not a better version of my old life.

A more honest version of my life now.

If we can look at these stories, we can choose which ones to keep and which ones to leave behind.

We can write a new story.

We can become visible to ourselves.

If you're standing in the ruins of an old story without a roadmap for what comes next, I'm right there with you. Hang in there.