From My Unmoored Soul To Yours

I don’t know how you got here. I don’t know why you’re here. But I know that every once in a while, you are.

Ten to twenty views a day doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things, but to me, it’s huge.

Those are people checking in to see how things are going. People learning how things have gone. People returning after a particular update to see what happened next. Maybe you arrived because of a topic I wrote about. Maybe it was a catchy title. Maybe you know me personally and care more than I realize. Whatever brought you here, you’re here—and I wanted to say hello.

I don’t think very much about an audience when I write these things. They’re mostly for me, for my son to read someday, and for future generations who might be interested in what happened during this life.

I don’t have any great ambition to become an influencer or someone widely known. That doesn’t interest me as much as you might think. I suspect I would get caught up in the attention, the recognition, and everything that comes along with it. So I’m content where I am.

I don’t advertise as much as I probably should. I don’t always add the right tags, study my SEO, or do all the little things my AI sometimes kicks and screams that I should be doing.

I just do what I do.

I write what feels right at the time. I write about whatever is occupying my mind. I use this platform to let things go—to say, “This interests me. I don’t have anyone here to talk about it with, so let me imagine someone who might care and tell them what’s going on.”

Only now, apparently, some of you aren’t imaginary.

The tragedy here, if there is one, isn’t any of the many individual things I’ve written about. It isn’t any particular loss, illness, mistake, breakdown, or change.

The tragedy is that even in a life where I reach out to people—often through Facebook Messenger, just to check in and keep a connection alive—modern life still doesn’t contain enough real connection to make me feel deeply connected to someone.

That isn’t necessarily anyone’s fault. We are scattered. We are busy. We communicate constantly without always saying very much. We can know what someone ate for dinner, where they went on vacation, and which political post made them angry without knowing what they are afraid of when they wake up at three in the morning.

We are visible to one another without always being known.

At the same time, I’m not prepared—or particularly interested—in taking my whole life and dividing it with someone else right now. I need parts of this life to be mine. I need to concentrate on myself.

That may sound contradictory. I want deeper connection, but I also want independence. I want to know people without disappearing into them. I want real relationships, but I don’t want to surrender a life I’m only beginning to understand.

I’m just learning who I am at forty-seven years old.

I’m just learning what I like. I’m learning to cast off what I once had—or thought I had to be—in order to create something new. That feels precious, precarious, and sometimes monumental.

I’m also highly aware that I’m approaching a point where I will have to share myself more openly with people I don’t know. I’m preparing to become a therapist. That will mean meeting people who may judge me, misunderstand me, or think some of the same cruel things I think about myself during my darkest moments.

Some people may encounter everything I’ve put into the world and decide they understand me before I ever enter the room.

But their judgments will say as much about them—their experiences, fears, and ways of seeing the world—as they ever could about me.

I have already shared so much of myself that I can’t pretend to have any real sense of privacy left. Strangely enough, I’m okay with that. I spent too much of my life living dishonestly, hiding pieces of myself, and presenting versions of myself that never said what I truly wanted to say.

I have also spent so much time alone that perhaps solitude simply feels normal now. Maybe I’ve become more comfortable with silence and my own company than I am with being fully known.

Maybe that’s a bad thing.

Maybe it’s a good thing.

Most likely, it’s both.

But this is the life I have been given, and I appreciate every moment of it—even the painful ones, once I have traveled far enough beyond them to understand what they gave me.

When I think about becoming a therapist and the life I’m preparing to enter, I don’t think very much about myself. I think about what I can bring with the knowledge I’ve gained and the experiences I’ve survived—but I never want that to make someone else’s therapy about me.

My life may help me remain in the room with someone else’s pain. It may help me resist the urge to look away, rush them forward, or pretend that an easy answer exists. But their story still has to belong to them.

I hope my experiences have given me enough empathy to look someone honestly in the eyes and say, “I understand.”

Those words can sound so trite. People say them all the time without really meaning them. But they can also carry tremendous weight when you realize that, yes, this person understands at least some part of the magnitude of what you’re feeling.

They may not have lived your particular life, but they recognize the territory.

Maybe that is what I am trying to do here too.

I tell you where I have been in the hope that you might recognize something—not because our lives are identical, but because some part of the emotional landscape looks familiar. Then maybe you will tell me where you have been. Maybe we will discover that we have been traveling across some of the same ground without knowing it.

If you really are here, I’m glad you are.

I want to know who you are, what is happening in your life, and what your story—or your side of things—might be.

Maybe you’re only here to hate on me. Maybe I have a small collection of haters checking in to see what idiocy I’ve said today. That’s where my negative brain immediately goes.

Or maybe you’re someone I don’t know cares about me more than it seems.

That would be pretty awesome.

Either way, reach out. Say hello. I would genuinely love to see a community grow around some of these ideas, stories, presentations—or whatever you want to call this bullshit that keeps coming out of my mouth.

The strange thing is that I’ve already gotten a couple of people writing—not reading my work, necessarily, but writing more about their own lives.

That means more to me than any book sale ever could.

One of those people is my father. His writing may be tapering off a little now, but I hope we can reconnect with it soon because I want to hear more of his stories. When I wrote him a letter asking him to look more closely at his life—and asking specific questions about stories I had never fully understood—the engagement and connection between us grew enormously.

A lot of us think, “We know each other. I know my parents. I’ve heard enough information already. As a matter of fact, I may have heard too much.”

But perhaps the information we have is only the surface layer.

Maybe you can hear the same story for the thousandth time and, because you are older now, discover something you couldn’t see when you first heard it as a child. Maybe one new question will unlock an entire layer of someone’s life. Maybe there is a story hiding there that you never knew at all.

I didn’t learn until I was much older that my grandfather had been married before and had children who lived in Greenville. My father told me that when he came to Furman University, he thought they might reach out to him. He tried reaching out to them, but was met mostly with silence.

That was profound for me to learn.

My father must have carried feelings I never knew he carried. In his own way, perhaps he understood something about what it felt like for me to grow up adopted.

I never questioned whether my parents loved me. But I did question myself. I questioned where I fit in the world because some part of me always knew that I was unmoored.

It took me a long time to understand that being unmoored doesn’t only mean being lost.

It can also mean being free.

You may spend years trying to cling to the ship or the dock you were once tied to. You may mistake the rope for safety, even after it has begun to chafe. Or perhaps the current will carry you toward new lands and new adventures. Maybe, slowly and imperfectly, you will learn how to row your own boat.

And maybe, one day, you’ll find your way back home—not because you are still tethered there, and not because the past has become simple, but because you have traveled far enough to see it clearly.

The dock may look smaller than you remembered. The water may have changed. The people who stood there may be older, gone, or waiting in ways you never knew how to recognize before.

But you will understand that home was never only the place where you began. It was also the place you carried with you, even when you were drifting.

And when you return, you may not be returning to be held in place.

You may be returning with your own oars in your hands, able to look back across the water and say: I was lost, perhaps. But I was also becoming free.