Life as I Knew it Is Ending

I'm heartbroken and lost, and don't know what's next.

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What I’m about to tell you is something that’s been coming for a long time.

I had hoped against all odds would never come to fruition.

This is hard as hell to write, so please forgive me for rambling. It feels so surreal I’m struggling to hit publish.

After 24 years as a couple, 22 years of marriage, and 8 children, my wife is filing for legal separation. Any future path to reconciliation is uncertain, but it doesn’t look very optimistic right now.

I am preparing to leave home in the next 24 hours, and I don’t know if I will ever get to come back for anything more than a visit.

As is always the case with such things, for legal reasons, I can’t talk about the specifics of the situation in any detail.

I can only talk about myself. My experiences. My failures.

And as far as that goes, I’m in a kind of agony I have never experienced. My nervous system most days feels like it’s on fire. I sometimes find myself physically shaking. I wake up sweating at night. I break down in tears at random moments as waves of grief overwhelm me. My ears ring. My guts are in perpetual knots.

And it’s been like this for months, growing steadily worse as the inevitable finally arrives. It makes me think about what it must be like to be on death row, knowing that eventually, the day will come.

And that day is here.

We have always had a tumultuous relationship, but we also had a lot of love for each other. We always saw everything so differently that we fought all the time. Not little arguments. Clash of the Titans stuff. Neither of us has ever met someone who could hold their own with either of us in conflict, but that only meant that our conflicts leveled everything around us like Superman fighting Zod.

But we also did our best to always reconcile and try again. I had always hoped we’d find a way to be at peace together. I never wanted to believe it would really come to this.

Even though she was trying to warn me.

Maybe I was just in denial.

But unbeknownst to me, I had a lot of festering emotional and neurological issues that made just living a normal family life incredibly difficult. I grew up in a volatile environment full of angry outbursts, and without ever meaning to, I repeated those patterns in my own marriage.

I was always intelligent, articulate, and personable — even charming — so I did a good job of “getting by” in my interactions at school and work.

But I would come home and fall apart.

Many things that came naturally to other people never did to me. I overcomplicate everything. I’m always worrying. Always distracted. Always working myself into a frenzy. Always ruminating on and expecting the worst possible scenarios — they call it “catastrophizing” in psychological terms.

My consistent fear when I was little was that something would happen and my parents would die and they would go to hell. It wasn’t rational. It didn’t have to be.

But I grew up to make my own personal hell right here in my head. Tormented by myself, lashing out at others, making those I love fear or resent me, making everything worse, having only myself to blame.

And I’ve been a wildly inconsistent provider.

It wasn’t that I wasn’t capable of doing just about anything I applied myself to. I learn quickly, I’m very smart, and I’m a hard worker. But it was the weird obstacle course I had to traverse to get there. Interviews felt like polygraph exams. I didn’t know how to play the psychological games or answer the trick questions in the way prospective employers were looking for. I never had a vision of where I was going to be in five years.

I felt like I was jumping through hoops, riding a pogo stick through a minefield, every single time.

Whenever someone did see what I was capable of and gave me a position, I was always the rockstar rookie for the first six months to a year. I acquired proficiency rapidly. I got tons of praise. But as the excitement of overcoming that initial challenge faded, I would plateau, and my interest would drop off a cliff. I couldn’t stay focused on work that didn’t feel meaningful, so after six months or a year at any given position I would start to burn out and hate everything. I’d get distracted and make mistakes or miss deadlines. I’d come home so stressed out that I was unbearable.

Although it doesn’t really lessen my shame, I’ve come to understand that this follows a common pattern among people like me.

And yet: I had a highly analytical mind, I was an unusually talented writer, I had a lot of good ideas, I had pretty strong interpersonal skills, and I was actually very good at diplomatic tasks like client relations or getting team members on the same page.

But I had very little executive function or pragmatic skill, and I could never make my initial performance level last longer than a year.

So my job history has been tumultuous. Never more than 3 years at any one position. Gaps in my resume. Lots of jumping around. Periods of unemployment where I just couldn’t bring myself to take anything that wasn’t at least a partial fit to my temperament and interests.

God, would I love to be able to live that. I would carry so much less shame. There I was, trying to live the traditional family model I believed in: the husband provides and protects, the wife stays home and raises the kids, and I just couldn’t do it consistently.

So my wife always wound up having to step in. Fill in the gaps. Pinch hit for me when I fell flat on my face again.

All of this is why the best thing I ever did professionally was to found OnePeterFive. I had seven solid years of success and growth and, after the second year, financial stability. It utilized everything I’m good at, every skill I picked up along my smorgasbord of disparate jobs, and it all came together in the harmony of my pathological hyperfocus.

And I provided well for my family. My wife didn’t have to work during those years.

But even there, I still couldn’t hold on. And even while I was, work and work-related activities became my obsession — to the exclusion of the time I owed to my family.

Being good at fooling people into thinking you’re a smart, capable, normal guy when your insides are some bizarre combination of a Rube Goldberg perpetual motion machine and the chaos of hell is a survival mechanism that works surprisingly well.

Right up until it doesn’t.

And it wreaks havoc on your relationships, because the people you’re closest to, the ones you trust the most? They get to see all the ugly come out. They’re the only ones you really feel safe taking the mask off for. You feel safe showing them your brokenness, your fear, your anger, your lack of emotional control, your analysis paralysis. And because it’s all pent up from pretending like you’re “just a normal person” all the time, it’s like an explosive pressure relief valve.

That’s what the people who love me have gotten to deal with.

It’s destructive and unfair.

No matter how much you love a person like me, it eventually becomes too much.

I understand this, but I am no less devastated by it. I didn’t ask to be this way. I have tried to fight to do the internal work I can to improve, and have succeeded in some areas.

But not enough.

And the bill has come due.

Unable to accept that life as I knew it — my dream of having a wife and kids and growing old together and watching the children grow up, get married, and come home to visit with their kids — is over, I keep freaking out. I have emotional outbursts after I promise myself and everyone else that I won’t. And every time I do, it only makes everything worse.

My wife has been my safe space, my home, my reassurance when my brain becomes too much for me, the person I go to with everything, the one who has always helped me make sense of the world, for over two decades.

But now I can’t go to her anymore with the worst tailspin I’ve ever been in, because I have used up even her seemingly inexhaustible internal resources. I have overwhelmed her with my dysregulation, and to protect her and the kids, I have to leave, even though it feels like dying.

“When you write, you sound sane. You sound like you have it together. People have no idea what it’s like.”

She said this to me this morning.

I didn’t argue. She’s correct.

That’s the mask.

THIS — the writing, the analysis, the abstract thinking — is the only place I really feel normal. This is the part of my brain, for whatever reason, that remains unaffected by all the chaos inside. In fact, my hypersensitivity and intuition and overactive pattern recognition and deep empathy and threat awareness and penchant for verbal mimicry and the rest of my eclectic assortment of attributes that make me bad at relationships are also what make me good at this. They help me see what’s really going on in the world. They help me see through bullshit, and isolate truth from nonsense. They help me notice things before other people do.

And when I write, it stops the chaos from being an endless buzz in my head, and allows me to externalize and identify what I really think.

Going forward, that may be the key to my survival.

To write not just about the pain, but through it.

To be honest, it feels like a betrayal of this chasm-deep grief every time I write about anything else, or post a tweet about some current event, or watch a football game, or laugh at a funny video, or do anything that feels good.

Like I’m at my own funeral and I need to be appropriately somber at all times.

Does a drowning man get to do any of those things as he’s being lost beneath the waves?

To return to the reason for this post, let me say this:

It doesn’t matter how good my intentions are.

It only matters what I do, and what I have failed to do.

Although it often feels like it in my darker moments, I know she isn’t just abandoning me. I don’t want people to blame her because they think I’m one thing, when I’m really something else. She and the kids are the only ones who get to see the real me, and the real me is often an embarrassing disaster. I can see and feel the toll I have taken on her, and that may actually be the worst thing of all.

Even so, she continues to offer me help and support, but she is protecting what’s left of her own sanity, her health, her ability to function, and the wellbeing of our kids.

Giving her the space to do that is quite literally the least I can do for her and my kids.

I owe it to them.

If I can’t protect them right now in the traditional sense, I can at least protect them from me by removing myself from the situation and trying to become a whole and healed person, instead of the shattered remnants of a failed façade.

I feel so much sorrow and shame for putting her in a position where she has had to come to this point.

I still love her, and I hate that I’m hurting her. I hate the trauma loop we’re tangled up in, and the way it insidiously transforms attempts at vulnerability into argument and blame. We’ve been stepping on each other’s wounds for so long, it’s all we can feel.

So I will own this. I’m not going to pretend that she’s perfect, or that I have no grievances of my own, but when it comes to things having reached this point, blame me.

Even so, I still exist. And I still have to find some way to survive this.

I have agreed to try therapy again, but this time we at least know I need trauma-informed therapy with someone trained to recognize the unique challenges of my particular disorders. I am skeptical and anxious about doing any more interior work right now, because I am exhausted.

This time, I have a map. I’ve done a lot of research to come to an understanding of my root causes.

But it’s hard as hell to heal when your life is still actively falling apart.

I also have to find some way to deal with the fact that with this latest development, I have now lost everything I have ever truly cared about over the past five years: my faith, my career, my ability to provide, my once-close relationship with my family of origin, and now my wife, and my daily presence in the lives of my children.

I am staggered by it.

I cannot find rhyme or reason in it.

I beg the God I’m not sure I can even believe in to help me make sense of it.

I want to lash out every time I hear someone say, “Everything happens for a reason.”

What’s the damn reason, then?? Just the total destruction of a guy who was trying and failing to do his best to live a normal, decent life??

My identity is shattered. I have no idea who or what I am anymore.

What is my purpose? Why am I here? Was this all just inevitable?

I don’t know if these answers will come. I hope I will find them in time.

I don’t have anywhere permanent to go. What money I make is through this Substack and through gig work like Instacart and the occasional voiceover job. It’s not enough, at least not consistently, to fully support myself. I have had no luck in the job market thus far, and I’m frankly too demoralized to take a job at a grocery store only so I can come home to an empty rented room.

I will be visiting friends, and living out of the back of my van, at least temporarily. It’s not adequate for “van life,” but I’ve got a cot, a power station, some basic cooking supplies, and a laptop.

Right now, I need to stabilize. I need to grieve. I need to breathe. I have to find a way to come to terms with this new reality. I have to find a way to live without the daily presence of my children in my life, all of whom I love very much. Most of my kids are older now, but it’s especially hard with the little ones, because they change so fast. I hate to miss a single minute.

But I don’t really have a choice anymore. I have to fix myself, and the clock has run out.

I’ve already asked so much from my audience, so I hate to ask for more, but if you would like to help I’m pretty much at rock bottom.

My van is in need of some essential work I’ve been putting off, and its registration has been expired for a year. Part of that is because the DMV here in North Carolina is impossible to get into — if you can even book an appointment they’re months away, and walk in lines start before sunrise and go around the block — and part is because I haven’t been able to cover the taxes and registration fees.

If I had to estimate, this is what I’m looking at in order to hit a kind of bare minimum subsistence:

• Vehicle tax & registration: ~$500

• New tires: ~$800

• New Windshield: ~$500

• Supplies: ~$200

• Getting caught up on van payments: ~$3,200

So not counting miscellaneous travel expenses like food and gas, I need about $5,000 to get into a livable position.

After what I’ve already purchased, I’ve got about $500 left.

In the event more than that comes in, I’ll use it for paying other bills and living expenses. I’m finding working to be very difficult right now, so every inch of buffer helps.

And just to be clear: I don’t expect anything from anyone. Many of you have been incredibly generous with me over the past year, and I couldn’t possibly expect more. But I’m desperate, so I’m asking just in case anyone is able. If you are so inclined, and can assist me in just trying to survive this crisis without things getting worse, I would be eternally grateful.

If you’d like to help, you can do so through Stripe or Paypal or Venmo. (If you would prefer to use something like Zelle or some other method, please send me a message.)

In exchange, I promise I will do my best to keep writing from wherever I am.

I’ll be honest, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. I feel like a massive failure.

Many of you have carried me at times when I couldn’t even stand up to walk. I can’t thank you enough. But if I’ve learned anything during this trial, it’s that you just can’t weather every storm on your own.

That said, I hope you’ll understand that I am not in a place where I can answer every personal message. I will read every one of them, but I’m so heartbroken, I just have to focus on getting my stuff together and heading out. The first couple of days are going to be absolutely brutal. I don’t know how I’m going to get through this.

Thank you for reading, and thanks in advance for any help you can offer in this exceptionally difficult time.

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Writing is my profession and calling. If you find value in my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support it.