Two Parts

XXXVIII

My therapist told me to acknowledge the sides within that want to have a voice.

Come on, doc.

What if I like the dark side? What if I don’t want to call it mental health? Why can’t we just call it life?

You go to work. You answer texts. You pay bills. You post photos. You make jokes. You keep moving while inside feels like dragging a meatsuit through this earthrock of existence.

I told her I was exhausted. She said it’s one of the worst things she hears from veterans because more often than not it leads down the wrong path. Emotionally overextended. Spiritually threadbare. The kind of tired where even gratitude feels difficult to access and life ends.

And she says that’s the part that fills you with guilt. Because you should feel grateful.

Should. Can we just eliminate this word? I have a daughter and I refuse to should her into anything. She’s already a confused little kid trying to figure out the world. She doesn’t need my inherited vocabulary of obligation on top of it.

Oh, how rare George? Another midlife man crisis where you built your entire life around other people’s expectations.

The mission. The marriage. The role. The performance of being okay.

At some point you look up and realize you have no idea what’s actually yours.

The endless internal negotiations. The replaying. The pressure to hold everything together while quietly wondering how much longer you can carry it this way and still somehow there’s a part of you that keeps going while you die inside.

You show up for your kid not because you’re healed, but because she needs you.

I know people carrying heavier things who still smile more than I do and I still can’t find the reasonign why my brain still feel like a war zone half the time when my life, from the outside, looks okay?

That’s the conversation nobody really wants to have except a few good friends who will listen and pull you back to the real version.

Not the Substack version. Not the Meta version. The real one.

Last week I went to reset.

Hut on a brook. Rain won’t stop. Dog breathing. Music in the chest not the ears.

Took some magic chocolates. Don’t explain yourself to anyone. Body got heavy. First time. The good heavy. The kind that means the running stopped. Fingers moving. Words coming out that sober hands won’t touch. Novel third of the way through. Man who disappears. Wonder where I got the idea.

Dog’s heartbeat. Actual heartbeat. Under the palm. More honest than any human in three years. Writing like I knew nothing about writing and everything at the same time. Closed the laptop. Haven’t opened it since.

Then the motorcycle. Bought a Royal Enfield 2022, Classic 350. Learning to ride is another level in life and it’s possibly the first time where the noise just stops.

Not joy. Not healing. Not a breakthrough you can put in a caption.

Silence.

No past chasing you down the road. No future waiting at the next light. No version of yourself you’re supposed to be performing. Just the bike and the road and the specific mercy of having to pay attention to exactly one thing or you die.

I’m learning guitar too. Same reason. Different shape.

Freedom and fear living in the same place at the same time. Feeling like a kid again except the stakes are real now. You can lose a limb. You can lose a life. That edge.

I like it and somewhere in those two things I finally understood what I’ve actually been chasing this whole time.

Not happiness.Not healing. Not the version of okay that looks good from the outside.

Just relief. A break from myself. Five minutes where the war inside goes quiet and there’s only road, only chord, only now.

And that’s good enough for me becauase the parts of me that are miserable?

They’re not me. They’re the versions of me that were built for everyone else. The Marine. The husband. The guy who held it together. The one who performed okayness for so long he forgot what real felt like. Those parts are exhausted because they were never really alive in the first place.

They were roles. Of course they want out.

The part learning guitar? The one who took the motorcycle out and found silence? The dad who refuses to should his daughter into anything? The guy arguing back at his therapist?

That part isn’t miserable. That part is actually kind of awake.

I spent my whole life being real for everyone else. I wrote a book thinking it would save me. Thinking if I could just get it all down and organized and finished, I’d close the cover and feel different.

I didn’t.

Which is somehow worse than not writing it because now I can’t even tell myself if I just write it down I’ll be okay. Already did that. Receipt’s on the shelf.

But I’m still here writing to strangers on Substack about motorcycles and my daughter and a therapist I keep arguing with.

Maybe writing isn’t anything except just the place you go to not drown.

Ride ends.Park the bike. Helmet off. Silence gone now. Just the other kind.

Back to the job that drains you. Back to the dog. Back to the book on the shelf that knows too much. Back to the man who wrote it wondering if sober hands will ever open it again.

Nothing resolved. Nothing healed.Just a man who found three days in the woods and thirty minutes of quiet on a machine that could kill him and called it a win.

Maybe that’s all there is. Not the stubborn hope. Not the lighter someday.

Just this.
Still here.
Don’t know why.
Don’t need to.