The First Rock
Gotta start somewhere, so here goes...
So here’s the first rock I’m throwing into this Substack pond.
Let’s watch where the ripples go.
I’ve been wanting to take some kind of action. Make a move, something forward. Something mine.
Because right now, my manuscript, Back To One, about my personal reconstruction after divorce, the humble acceptance, and trying to understand my side of the collapse of what was once my story, and also what comes after… is sitting in my ex-missus's hands.
Waiting to be read.
That’s a strange kind of limbo.
Years of reflection. Accountability. Growth. Printed and bound, handed over.
She was cool about it. Way cooler than my nervous system was, that’s for sure. I spent months figuring out how to tell her I wrote a book shaped by our story together. Our split wasn’t infidelity but death by a thousand cuts over time.
Two humans who reached a fork in the road.
Yet I imagined the “hell that hath no fury” raining down on me, even though there was no finger pointing or shame in the memoir except the ghosts of my own sense of failure.
Funny how narratives in our heads run the show, and most of the time are nowhere near reality. She was open about it and wanted to read it.
And now… silence.
I can’t control how she receives it.
I can’t edit it anymore either.
I can’t jump in and add footnotes to my own damn emotional evolution.
So instead of pacing the kitchen, rewriting imaginary conversations for the hundredth time, I figured I’d start here.
Throw a rock and make a ripple. Try to move my own creative needle and see where the universe takes things because I don’t live for outcomes anymore.
Let’s roll the dice.
The In-Between
This “limbo” isn’t just about waiting for feedback. In fact, it’s not limbo but rather my “becoming” during solitude.
It’s the undoing of decades of inherited patterns, societal expectations I both absorbed and rebelled against while trying to build my own version of manhood.
Rebuilding out of an old identity was dramatic and painful. Layer by layer, I had to question what I believed and who I thought I was.
The hardest shit I’ve gone through since my dad passed. That was over twenty years ago.
Time is a motherfucker. It tattoos moments onto your heart whether you like it or not.
I’m a Gen-X kid.
Grew up on Iron Maiden, Judas Priest. Then the Sunset Strip hedonism of the late ’80s. Faster Pussycat. Guns N’ Roses. Life was loud and reckless and a little invincible.
Those were the glory days, my boyhood wonder years.
Then the 90s hit, and grunge slowed the tempo down, brought life into focus, looking closer to reality when the party finally crashed, like the third act of Boogie Nights.
The cost of excess began to show up as casualties. And somewhere in there, I rode the whole thing out into my late 30’s when I started looking towards having a future and a family of my own.
Career. Marriage. Fatherhood. Sobriety. Responsibility.
Until what I thought was permanent… cracked.
And here’s the part I can’t escape: I had to learn most of my lessons the hard way.
Because this guy? Thick-headed.
Maybe it’s the latchkey kid in me.
The “I’ll figure it out on my own because I always have” wiring.
The Asian kid of immigrant parents who learned early to self-contain.
To not make waves.
To handle it.
I’ve always been a bit of a loner, even in rooms full of people.
So when my life split open, my instinct wasn’t to ask for help.
It was to solve it.
Fix it.
Control it.
White-knuckle it.
That strategy worked… until it didn’t.
Now I’m coming out of the rubble, dented but holding a “ clean-er” slate.
Not naive.
Not shiny.
More honest.
There’s a bittersweet peace here now.
Not because everything worked out the way I wanted… it didn’t.
But because I stopped fighting reality and started learning how to let go.
The ex-missus and I? We’re actually killing it as co-parents. There’s alignment there. And that matters more than my ego ever did.
Still… I’m not the husband anymore.
That still stings sometimes.
And I’m not interested in becoming the cliché newly single guy trying to reclaim lost youth with tight jeans and motivational quotes.
Although full disclosure, Matthew McConaughey motivational clips have somehow made their way onto my morning YouTube rotation.
I’m somewhere between the old me and the becoming me.
The Silver-Haired Samurai Era
I didn’t plan to be single in my 50s.
I didn’t plan to be learning how to curl my daughters’ hair while Googling, “how not to blow out your knee snowboarding at this age.”
But here we are.
Divorced.
Girl dad… twins by the way.
Silver at the temples.
Snowboarding like I’m 27 and indestructible.
(Spoiler: I’m not.)
This era includes cold mountains.
Falling on my ass.
Getting back up.
Doing uncomfortable shit on purpose to reinvent myself and write a new chapter.
Less proving. Less ego.
More experimenting.
More curiosity.
More humility.
The Silver-Haired Samurai doesn’t swing his sword unless he needs to.
Mostly he:
Shows up for his daughters.
Keeps his word.
Learns new things.
Leans into fatherhood. Realigns his masculinity.
Stays dangerous in the right ways.
Why Writing? Why Here?
The Why (Or Why The Fuck Not)
I’m scratching my head as I write this.
Why am I doing this? Why throw these thoughts into the void? Why be this raw with strangers on the internet?
I just answered the question for myself: Why the fuck not?
Look, I don’t have it figured out. I’m not here to pretend that I’ve got any answers. I’m looking for my why, just like you might be looking for yours. And maybe that’s the whole point… admitting that out loud instead of pretending I’ve got any answers at all.
Hell, maybe this is what a midlife crisis is all about. Nah fuck that. I’m here to plant a flag of sorts.
I’m giving myself permission to be messy here. Unfiltered.
To let whatever voice comes out actually come out, without the critic in my head telling me to soften it or make it more palatable.
The voice that’s angry sometimes. Confused. Hopeful. Uncertain. All of it.
Because that’s the only honest thing I know how to do anymore.
I didn’t start off as a writer. I still don’t really consider myself one. Journaling began as a way to survive. Angry pages. Confused pages. Bargaining pages. The kind of entries you hope no one ever reads. I started writing because my life caught fire.
But something happened along the way. I learned to observe again, and the more I wrote, the quieter my head got.
Writing didn’t fix my marriage.
It didn’t magically solve my pain.
It didn’t make me enlightened.
But it saved me during the hardest season of my life.
It became my therapy.
My processing. Rewired how I look at things.
My way of keeping the voices in my head from running the whole damn show.
Pattern recognition started happening, and I started to adjust what needed fixing, then
identity shifts started. Kinda cool actually.
That’s how Back to One, my memoir, was born. From journal entries and late-night ruminations.
And this Substack? This is just the continuation of that, as I keep learning to forge words into my own bladesmithing.
Field notes from a man rebuilding without burning everything down.
So if you’re somewhere in between too… rebuilding, recalibrating, stepping into a version of yourself you haven’t fully met yet, maybe these ripples reach you, and you can send yours back to me. I’m open to receiving them.
Or maybe I just threw a rock into the void.
Either way…
It felt good to move.
And yeah, sorry / not sorry if I’m bleeding a little on the page.
But I guess that’s kind of the point.