My Story How This Work Was Forged
A story of work, marriage, ambition, collapse, and rebuilding
Arriving faster than life could form me
I didn’t ease into adulthood.
I stepped straight into it.
I met my wife, Zelda, in my junior year of high school. We started dating in May of my senior year, just weeks before I left for Africa for the summer. That trip mattered more than I knew at the time.
I went back the next summer. And then again.
Africa got under my skin. The place, the people, the sense of purpose. By my late teens, I had a picture in my mind of the life I thought I was heading toward. Aid work. Relief work. Maybe missions. Living overseas. Giving my life to something that felt meaningful and real.
Zelda was part of that vision. We got married young in part because that future felt close and concrete. I was just twenty. On our honeymoon, I remember a waiter offering us complimentary champagne and having to turn it down because I wasn’t old enough to legally drink it.
That still makes me smile, and wince a bit, too. It also says something about how young we were.
The plan to live overseas, to train and prepare for that kind of life, is what ultimately brought us to North Central Pennsylvania, where we continue to live nearly three decades later. Months after becoming parents to the first of our six kids, we arrived believing we were stepping into the foundation of our future as a couple and family.
Soon after arriving in Pennsylvania, we began to experience quite a bit of conflict with the organization we had joined for our training.
Each day became a bit of a battle to overcome the gap between what we had been promised and sold and what was beginning to unfold in our day-to-day life. It was a stressful experience, to say the least, especially for a new husband and father who wasn’t that far past the age he could legally drink champagne
Around the same time, in the midst of managing this daily stress, Zelda informed me that she didn’t feel the same way about me anymore. I didn’t quite know what to do with that.
Divorce wasn’t something I could imagine. Leaving wasn’t an option I was willing to consider. I had made commitments, and I intended to keep them, even though I had no idea how to live inside them well.
So I did what made sense to me at the time.
I tightened up and kept going.
Within months, the organization we had partnered with to bring our dreams to fruition decided we were not a good fit. Fortunately, we felt the same way, and while that would be one of the best things to ever happen to us, it didn’t feel that way at the time.
Leaving Pennsylvania wasn’t realistic. Returning to the greater Washington, D.C. area, where we were from and had lived as newlyweds, wasn’t financially possible on one income. We were young, committed, and suddenly stuck with very few options.
That’s how we ended up where we live now, not by careful design, but because momentum carried us into a place we hadn’t known existed, and for many years after, couldn’t figure out how to leave.
Stepping into a weight I wasn’t built for yet
Up to that point, Zelda and I had been full-time students.
The plan we were living within included generous financial support from people who believed in what we were training to do. There was an understanding that our work was formation, not creating income. That story came with margin, even if it was thin.
When we stepped out of it, that margin disappeared within weeks.
There was no gradual transition. No runway. One day, we were training for a future that assumed support and shared burden, and the next day, we were looking for a new life. Suddenly, I found myself responsible for keeping a young family afloat with nothing underneath us.
I didn’t have a trade. I didn’t have credentials. I didn’t have skills that translated cleanly into work that paid enough and still allowed me to be present at home. I took what I could find, not because it fit me, but because it existed. I was pretty green as a husband and a father, and now facing being a sole provider.
I found entry-level work at a local software company. The work paid just enough to keep us from sinking, but not enough to breathe.
I was learning adulthood while living it; “Building the airplane while flying it,” as the saying goes. Learning how to provide while being responsible for others and how to be a new kind of man while already being one in name, age (barely), gender, and obligation.
There was no room to ask whether this pace made sense. There was only the question of whether I could keep going.
So I did.
I focused on being reliable. On not dropping the ball. On doing what needed to be done, even if I didn’t feel equipped for it.
I didn’t think of this as pressure at the time. I thought of it as responsibility.
Looking back, I can see how quickly my world narrowed.
When comparison entered the room
By then, life had settled into a new, narrower rhythm.
I was working full-time in a job I mostly enjoyed, but had taken out of necessity, not direction. We were building a life around what was available, not what we had trained for or imagined. The days were full, the margins thin, and most of my energy went into simply keeping things moving forward.
At the same time, our world was getting bigger in another way.
Zelda began forming connections with other young mothers in the area. MOPS, Playgroups. Book clubs. Long afternoons spent together while I was at work. Through her, we were gradually pulled into a wider social circle.
On the surface, this was a good thing. We were meeting people. Finding community. Putting down roots.
But something shifted for me as our social world expanded.
The families we spent time with were further along. The men were older, more established, and more settled in their lives. They had careers, resources, and confidence. Their lives looked like adulthood done properly. I had a very entry-level job, and here we were hanging out with doctors, judges, and executives.
No one pointed out that disparity directly. No one needed to.
Simply being around them made me more aware of where I stood.
I started to feel the distance between where I was and where I thought I should be. Not just financially, but in competence, confidence, and direction. I was still learning how to be a husband, a father, and now a provider, while watching other men who seemed to have already arrived at those roles.
Around this time, Zelda began expressing a desire for more. More stability. More ease. More of what these other families appeared to have. She’d witness her friends excitedly talking about an upcoming trip, a lavish spa day, or a beach vacation. She was grocery shopping with a calculator, trying to figure out how we would make it til the next paycheck. She wasn’t harsh about it, but I felt it.
And layered on top of that was something I never quite set down– that time she had told me she didn’t feel the same way about me anymore. That moment was a year or more ago by now, and we continued on as husband and wife, building a life, raising children, doing what needed to be done.
But she never came back later and said she felt differently.
So I carried those words quietly, not as a crisis, but as pressure.
Every expression of dissatisfaction, every longing for something better, every comparison I imagined she was making felt amplified by the fear that I might not be enough. Not as a man. Not as a lover. Not as a provider. Not as a husband.
I didn’t talk about this. I didn’t know how.
I told myself this was just how it is, and that this must be what responsibility felt like. That wanting more was reasonable, and that maybe, if I worked hard enough, I could just rise to the occasion, things would settle.
So I did what I knew how to do.
I took the pressure inward and tried to meet it with effort. Looking back, I now understand this as insecurity, but back then, I just thought of it as “motivation.”
Working harder without knowing why
I responded the only way I knew how.
I worked harder.
At first, it was practical. I needed skills. I needed options. I needed a way forward that didn’t require starting over every few years or being trapped in work that barely kept us afloat.
So after dinner, after baths and bedtime stories, after a little time on the floor with the kids, I would head up to the attic.
That’s where I taught myself HTML. Then CSS. Then JavaScript. Then web design. Then development.
Night after night, I stayed up late teaching myself how things worked. I took on small projects. Built simple sites. Learned by breaking things and fixing them. Slowly, I became useful in ways I hadn’t been before.
What started as extra credit became a side hustle.
I built a small web design business. I took on clients. I learned faster. I got better. Over time, that work opened doors. I moved from design into development, from development into more complex systems, and eventually into enterprise web applications.
Over the next two decades, I kept climbing.
I became an application architect. I consulted. I worked with large organizations and, eventually, Fortune 500 companies. I earned the kind of credibility, income, and professional respect I had once believed would finally make everything feel settled.
From the outside, it worked.
From the inside, something else was happening.
My evenings followed a pattern. Work all day. Come home. Eat dinner. Play with the kids. And then disappear into some dark corner of the house to keep pushing, learning, building, and improving.
To me, this felt responsible. Necessary. Even noble. I was living out the “self-made man” and the classic “against-all-odds” underdog story. I’d show those doctors and judges what I could do! (I know… big eyeroll)
To Zelda, who had been home with young children all day, these times when I focused on us by sharpening my abilities felt like distance, disconnection, and abandonment.
From my vantage point, she didn’t express that calmly or clearly. It came out sideways. As criticism. As complaint. As frustration. As what sounded to me at times like entitlement or ingratitude. Lots of “you always…” and “you never…”
I didn’t hear need. I heard attack.
Those times became the moment when I responded with my own litany of “you alawys…” and “you never…” statements, and all the ways I was unhappy.
Where was the respect, appreciation, and kindness for all my hard work? Where was the fawning sexual attention, warmth, and kindness?
Now… some of that was on her, sure. She hadn’t learned how to name what she wanted or needed in a way I could receive it.
But a lot of it was on me.
I didn’t know the things I know and show men today. I didn’t know how to be grounded, calm, or stay present under pressure. I didn’t know how to hear vulnerability without filtering it through my own fear, anxieties, and insecurities. And I didn’t yet see how much of my drive was fueled by a quiet sense that I still wasn’t enough.
So we missed each other.
She felt alone and unseen.
I felt criticized and unappreciated.
We were both young and tired, and we were both trying to make something work without the tools to do it well (despite pre-engagement and pre-marital counseling!).
At the time, I didn’t know we were entering a stage of disillusionment and power struggle that most couples pass through. I didn’t know there was a name for it. I only knew that the harder I worked to fix our situation, the worse things seemed to get between us.
I believed that if I could just get good enough, earn enough, and become enough, the tension would ease.
So I kept going.
Inside, something was shrinking.
When success failed to save anything
By the time I had money, property, and professional credibility, my marriage was the worst it had ever been.
From the outside, my life finally looked stable. I had done what I set out to do. I had become capable, respected, and financially secure. I had built something real.
Inside the relationship, none of that translated.
I felt unseen and unwanted. Not rejected loudly, but bypassed quietly. I experienced myself less as a man and more as a function. A provider. A problem-solver. A utility. My value felt tied to endurance and output, not presence or trust.
I had followed the script as faithfully as I knew how.
It didn’t work.
Instead of easing the tension, success seemed to sharpen it. The harder I worked, the more distant things felt. Our relationship continued to deteriorate. My intentions were questioned. My character was scrutinized. I felt increasingly alone inside a life I had worked hard to build.
And something else began to surface.
I started to notice women again. Not in a reckless or predatory way, but in a hungry, aching way. I found myself aware of the idea of being seen, desired, wanted by someone who didn’t already carry a long ledger of disappointment and history with me.
I began to long for the possibility of another woman. Not a specific plan, not an affair, but the fantasy of being met differently. Of being admired instead of evaluated. Of being received instead of measured.
There were moments when I got eye-wateringly close enough to that energy to feel it. Not acted out, but near enough to taste. Conversations. Attention. Validation. Flirting. The intoxicating sense that I mattered simply because I existed, not because of what I provided or endured.
I never crossed the line. But I leaned toward it emotionally.
And that mattered.
That attention fed something in me that was deeply wounded and deeply insecure, even though I didn’t yet understand it that way. At the time, it just felt like oxygen.
Alongside that longing came thoughts I’m not proud of.
At my lowest points, I caught myself imagining an escape that didn’t require a decision. Fantasies where my marriage ended without me having to end it. Thoughts where Zelda simply didn’t wake up one morning.
Those thoughts horrified me.
They also told the truth about how trapped and exhausted I felt.
They weren’t about wanting her gone. They were about wanting the pain to stop without having to destroy everything I had committed to or become someone I didn’t recognize.
I carried those thoughts silently. I never spoke them aloud. I felt ashamed of them, even as they continued to surface.
I didn’t want to be in my marriage anymore, and I didn’t believe I was allowed to leave.
So I lived in between.
Physically present. Emotionally gone. Performing responsibility while privately unraveling. Fantasizing about another life while continuing to play my role in this one.
By then, I wasn’t just tired.
I was hollow.
And I was closer than I had ever been to walking away, even if I didn’t yet know how.
As I was wrestling with these frustrations, I also felt a quieter, more persistent ache. I had a father who loved me, and I never doubted that. But we were never emotionally close, and he simply wasn’t equipped to help me navigate these deeper questions about identity, direction, relationships, or what it actually meant to become a mature man. There was no cruelty there, just absence.
That absence followed me. I remember repeatedly finding myself asking the same question, sometimes out loud, sometimes internally: Where are all the older, wiser men who can help me figure this out? I tried starting conversations with men I encountered. I looked for guidance, perspective, and grounding. Most of the time, I found goodwill but very little clarity or depth. The conversations never quite went anywhere, and the questions remained.
At the time, I didn’t realize how formative that experience would become. I only knew that something essential was missing, and that the lack of guidance itself was shaping me, even as I kept moving forward without it.
During that season, there was one place I could speak honestly without being corrected, fixed, or shamed.
I began meeting with my Uncle Ed, who isn’t really an uncle, but was a long-time family friend back in my hometown (unfortunately, several hours away). Not because he had answers, but because he could listen without flinching.
I told him about the longing, the fantasies, and the pressure building inside me to escape my life and start over with someone else. I expected judgment, warning, or fear.
Instead, he offered something I had almost never experienced from another man: acceptance and calm presence. He normalized the experience without excusing destructive choices. He didn’t tell me I was broken or immoral for feeling what I felt. He also didn’t tell me to act on it.
What he gave me was a place where desire could be spoken without becoming destiny, and inspired me to see that there may be a deeper destiny for me ahead.
The moment everything cracked
What finally broke me wasn’t temptation itself.
It was how hard I was working to not cross a line, and how invisible that effort was to everyone else.
By that point, I was exhausted from restraint. I was carrying the weight of responsibility, the pressure to provide, the ache of being unseen, and the constant internal effort of saying no to something that promised relief, validation, and a sense of being alive again.
I was denying myself not out of clarity, but out of duty.
And then, in the middle of that restraint, I was falsely labeled as the very thing I had been fighting not to become.
Rumors surfaced. My integrity was questioned. Things that had never happened were spoken as though they had. I was suddenly cast in a role I had worked desperately to avoid.
That did something to me.
It wasn’t just anger. It was collapse.
I felt misunderstood, judged, and stripped of the one thing I thought I still had left: the story that I was at least doing the right thing, even if I was miserable.
That was the moment I lost my footing.
I remember thinking, If I’m already being seen as guilty, then what exactly am I protecting anymore? I might as well have committed adultery, because I’m being treated as though I had! Not because I wanted to act out, but because the internal scaffolding I had been using to hold myself together finally gave way.
I didn’t want permission to have an affair.
I wanted permission to stop hurting.
I wanted someone to tell me whether the way I was living made any sense at all.
That’s when I stumbled across a man on the internet named Steve Horsmon.
Now, I wasn’t looking for a coach. I wasn’t looking for answers. I wasn’t actively searching for anyone. I just happened to notice a thumbnail in a Google search result about who knows what. Here was this guy named Hormon talking about women, marriage, and horses. I clicked to see what it was about more from curitosity.
Woah… He was saying stuff that made a lot of sense.
I had been looking for someone—anyone—who could see clearly enough to tell me whether I was crazy, broken, selfish, weak, or simply in over my head.
Steve offered a free call.
I almost didn’t take it.
Reaching out felt like admitting failure. Like confessing that all the discipline, endurance, and self-control I had relied on weren’t working anymore.
But I did.
And that conversation changed everything.
Not because he told me what to do. He didn’t.
But because, for the first time, someone reflected me back to myself without judgment, without shaming me, and without reinforcing the story that my problem was my wife, my circumstances, or my lack of effort.
He helped me see something I had never been shown.
My wounds–and the invitation life was giving me to heal and grow from them.
The next steps I didn’t think I was allowed to take
After that first conversation, Steve didn’t offer me advice.
He offered me an invitation.
Two of them, actually.
One was to join a private online group of men he was working with. The other was an invitation to a week-long retreat in Mexico with a small group of men I had never met.
On the surface, neither of those things made any sense for someone in my position.
By then, I was a father of six. I was still the sole breadwinner. I owned a business. I had a homestead with animals to care for. I carried a lot of responsibility, a lot of pressure, and very little margin. I was already stretched thin, and my marriage felt fragile. Taking time, money, and energy for me felt irresponsible at best and dangerous at worst.
At the same time, something in me felt strangely alive at the idea.
That contradiction alone scared me.
For most of my adult life, I had lived in a near-constant state of self-emptying. I made myself last. My needs were unspoken. My desires were treated as liabilities. I told myself this was maturity, sacrifice, and love.
What I didn’t name was the resentment that came with it.
I had learned to endure quietly, then punish myself internally. To give and give while feeling unseen. To swallow longing and then feel justified in my bitterness. If the language had been more popular on social media back then, I probably would have been labeled terms like vulnerable narcissist, covert narcissist, or cerebral narcissist and felt a chill of recognition. Labels like those would have seemed to confirm my worst fears and the accusations I already carried in my head: that wanting anything for myself was selfish, manipulative, or dangerous.
Spending resources on myself felt like it would be used as proof of guilt.
Time felt stolen.
Money felt reckless.
Attention felt disloyal.
I was used to falling on my sword. I wasn’t used to asking whether the sword needed to be there at all. Giving up your life for others to have a good life was what good men are supposed to do, right? I thought I was noble and virtuous for these mindsets. Why then was my life so disappointing and screwed up?
So when Steve invited me into spaces that required investment, presence, and risk, my first instinct was to say no. Not because I didn’t want it, but because I didn’t believe I was allowed to want it.
What would this say about me?
What would Zelda and the kids think?
What kind of husband or father does this?
And underneath all of that was a quieter fear: What if I focused on myself and everything fell apart?
Still, somehow… I said yes.
I joined the group. I went on the retreat. I even took a wild step and purchased first-class airfare to push myself even further into discomfort as a guy who did not love himself.
For the first time in decades—really, since before kids—I put intentional energy into taking care of myself, not as an escape, but as an experiment.
And it changed more than I expected. Everything actually. My life, marriage, family, mission, and career.
In that group, I met men I had long ago stopped believing existed. Men who could be honest without collapsing. Men who could be strong without posturing. Men who weren’t interested in trading war stories or validating each other’s brokenness, but who also weren’t playing the shallow toughness games I’d seen so often in men’s spaces.
There was no performative vulnerability or spiritual bypassing. No endless circle of confession and self-flagellation without movement. No pancake breakfasts and “you need to do better and try harder” meetings.
Instead, there was depth, challenge, reflection, and accountability. Men who expected more of themselves and of each other.
I learned to see other men without comparison and to let myself be seen without hiding or performing.
I learned how to step into fear instead of tightening against it.
Most unsettling of all, I began to experience the paradox I had never believed was possible: that investing in myself didn’t weaken my marriage or my family.
It strengthened them.
I didn’t trust that at first. I watched it carefully. I half-expected it to backfire.
Instead, things began to shift.
Not because I fixed anything yet, nor because I had new answers.
But because I had finally stopped collapsing and disappearing.
What actually changed
What changed wasn’t my circumstances first.
It was finally seeing how little ground I had been standing on inside myself.
For most of my life, I didn’t think of myself as insecure. I wouldn’t have used that word. I was responsible. Capable. Reliable. I carried weight. People depended on me. I grew my food. Produced my own electricity. Heated our home with wood I cut, split, and stacked by hand. I thought all that made me a good, strong man. From the outside, I looked like a man with his life together.
What I didn’t see was how thin and performative my sense of worth actually was.
I didn’t believe I mattered unless I was successful and useful.
My value lived downstream of performance, productivity, and being needed. If I was providing, fixing, producing, or holding things together, I felt temporarily okay. If not, something in me dropped quickly into anxiety, defensiveness, or quiet self-contempt.
That wasn’t obvious to me at the time. It just felt like pressure, responsibility, and well… adulthood!
Underneath it all was shame.
Not the emotion, or the dramatic, public shame. The quieter kind. The kind that says, If you slow down, you’ll be exposed, and everyone will know that there is something deeply wrong with you.
It’s kind of a shame that whispers, if you stop producing, there’s nothing left.
The kind that keeps a man moving so he doesn’t have to feel much. (The 10-12% ABV Belgian beers I had grown to love helped with that numbing, too 😬.)
Until that shame was addressed, nothing else could really change.
The work I stepped into didn’t start with fixing my marriage or managing my behavior. It started with learning how to be with myself without contempt. How to notice insecurity instead of obeying it. How to stay present when discomfort showed up instead of immediately turning it into effort, withdrawal, or self-denial. This was where my focus on Unconditional High Regard was born.
I began to see how often I had abandoned myself in the name of responsibility.
I had learned to confuse endurance with strength, sacrifice with love, and self-erasure with maturity.
As that started to unwind, something fundamental shifted.
I stopped organizing my life around avoiding failure and rejection.
I slowly moved away from trying to earn my place through output.
I questioned whether treating my worth as something that had to be proven daily.
That didn’t make life easier overnight, but it gave me somewhere to stand.
From that place, I could hear Zelda without collapsing or counterattacking.
I could feel tension without disappearing into work and tolerate dissatisfaction without immediately turning it into panic or self-judgment.
Not because I became more disciplined, but because I became more rooted.
That internal shift didn’t magically fix everything.
But it made real change possible for the first time.
And once that ground was in place, the rest of my life—my marriage, my work, my sense of purpose—finally had something solid to grow from.
How this became my work and mission
As I started doing my own work more honestly, something unexpected happened.
I began sharing parts of my story in Steve’s group. Not as teaching or advice. But more like a man sharing field notes, naming what I was seeing, what I was learning, and what was actually helping me change.
Men started reaching out.
At first, it was a few private messages. Then more. Men from different countries, different professions, different stages of life, all saying some version of the same thing:
Your story sounds like mine.
What you’re describing feels familiar.
What are you doing that’s actually helping?
So we talked.
A lot.
I found myself having long conversations with men who were stuck in places I recognized intimately. Marriages on the brink. Quiet desperation. Performative strength. Hidden shame. The same patterns I had lived inside for years.
Those conversations added up. When I eventually looked back, I realized I was spending close to a thousand hours a year talking with men this way. Not as a job, or business, or for any form of compensation. But because I remembered deeply what it felt like to feel so stuck and without help, and I couldn’t not do it.
It was already a part-time vocation before I had language for it. Steve noticed and eventually invited me to apprentice and train as a certified coach with GoodGuys2GreatMen. I said yes, not because I was looking for a career change, but because I wanted to understand more clearly what was happening and how to do it well.
By the time I finished that training, something else had become clear.
There was a real need, and thus a demand for this work. Enough that I was effectively living two lives: one inside enterprise consulting, sitting in endless meetings about software systems that would be replaced in a few years, and another inside deeply human conversations that were helping men and families avoid the kind of collapse I had nearly lived through myself.
The contrast was stark.
One paid well and felt increasingly hollow.
The other felt risky, uncertain, and profoundly alive.
Eventually, I told Zelda I wanted to give my time to this work full-time.
I expected resistance. By then, our life was comfortable. Stable. Walking away from consulting meant an immediate and significant reduction in material comfort… like… 80% reduction. It meant uncertainty again. Maybe grocery shopping with a calculator kinda stuff.
Instead, she surprised me.
She looked at me and said, “I think you should do it. You were born for this.”
I still get choked up thinking about that moment.
Here was the woman who, not many years earlier, had seemed unable to see me clearly or speak a kind word about me, now recognizing something true in me and willingly stepping into that risk alongside me.
I wrapped up my remaining consulting contracts at the end of 2021 and stepped into this work full-time.
Looking back now, I can see how the same patterns I had lived were playing out everywhere.
Men stuck in relational gridlock without understanding why. Being reactive without knowing what they were reacting to. Men carrying resentment they couldn’t name, and confusing endurance for leadership and performance for strength.
Over time, those observations became the worldview and perspectives I now articulate and share.
This is the lens through which I understand marriage, masculinity, leadership, conflict, faith, and emotional strength. It’s also why my work focuses on internal authority, emotional sovereignty, and self-trust rather than scripts, techniques, or behavioral control.
Why I’m sharing this
I’m not sharing this story because it’s unique, but because I’ve learned just how common it is.
There are a lot of men moving through life quietly, carrying more than they know how to hold. Men who look functional, responsible, and capable on the outside, while feeling hollow, tense, or unseen on the inside. Men who are trying to do the right thing, yet slowly losing themselves in the process.
If any part of this felt familiar, you’re not broken. You’re not weak. And you don’t need to be and feel alone.
And if you’re a woman reading this because you’re in a relationship with a man like that, I want you to know something too. Many men aren’t withholding because they don’t care. They’re constricted because they don’t know how to stand on internal ground yet. They’ve learned to endure, not to feel. To provide, not to trust themselves. To perform, not to be present.
I share my story in the hope that it helps someone recognize themselves a little sooner than I did. I hope it names something that has been difficult to articulate and loosens the sense of isolation that keeps so many people stuck.
If this resonated, I’d genuinely love to hear from you.
Not because you need to sign up for anything. Not because you need to be “ready.” But because connection is often the first real step out of isolation.
Whether you’re a man who sees his own story reflected here, or someone who loves a man who feels far away, you’re welcome to reach out.
I read every message.
And I’m always open to a conversation.