This week, I went back to the basics. During a mindfulness exercise in a leadership coaching cohort, I found my mind dragged back to something I hadn't really thought about in a few years.

“I have never really had a home.”

I’ve been sitting with it all week. Which is strange. I’ve been a husband and a father of four, with almost twenty years in uniform. I’ve had plenty of houses. Apartments. Duty stations. Many different addresses where the mail knew how to find me.

But ask me where I’m from, and I still don’t have a good answer.

I grew up moving between places that never quite became mine. Trailers, borrowed couches, a shack built in the middle of the woods, sent back and forth between parents, and temporary arrangements. Sometimes in my childhood years, I’d measure my height against a friend’s doorframe, knowing I’d probably be gone before anyone thought to make another mark.

My life fit inside a battered trunk my mother bought me during my troubled teenage years. First, it held my childhood valuables, then clothes, then memories tucked away. It followed me for decades, and I finally unpacked it for good last year.

And you know, there is something peculiar about carrying everything you own for so long that you stop expecting to unpack. I learned to live that way, and for a long time, it worked.

It’s also probably why the military drew me in early. It gave me what I’d spent my childhood looking for. Structure. Rules that were mostly clear. A place where everyone counted on each other. People who knew my name and expected me to show up tomorrow. I belonged somewhere. Or at least I knew where I was supposed to be. When you’ve grown up without either, those can feel like the same thing.

I’m very grateful for what has become of my time serving in the military. It has had its ups and downs, but most of it has been good, and it built much of what I have, including a family that means more to me than any accomplishment could.

But somewhere back on the path, I developed a private rule for how I thought belonging worked.

Be useful. Become exceptionally good at something. Be the one who solves the problem or sees what everyone else missed. Have a role, live by its conditions, and if people need you, they’ll keep you around.

The conditional love I was raised on bled into my work, then into my relationships, then into my marriage. And if you’re anything like me, you got extraordinarily good at being needed.

Archimedes is credited with saying, give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the world.

We remember the lever. I know I certainly did. Most of my adult life has gone into making my levers longer and stronger: education, experience, responsibility, a set of skills for problems most people would rather avoid. Even the six-hour rabbit hole at two in the morning, learning the history of something that doesn’t matter to anyone, but me. Something to be used later, or not.

A good lever can feed a family and serve a community. There’s nothing wrong with building one.

But Archimedes needed something else we don’t talk much about. A place to stand.

I wonder how many of us get so consumed with our ability to move the world that we never look at what we’re standing on. We become indispensable at work while quietly feeling replaceable everywhere else. We treat the people closest to us like problems to solve. We learn to be valuable to almost anyone, and struggle to believe someone might want us around when we have nothing to offer. At least, I know I did.

Being needed can feel an awful lot like being loved, especially when usefulness was one of the first ways you learned to belong. And damn, that’s hard to untangle, because the lever works.

Now, don’t get me wrong here, people really do need us. But, what happens when we’ve made our usefulness the foundation of our belonging, and we need somewhere to stand ourselves?

This week got me thinking about that six-foot, rough-edged board again.

I wrote about it in my very first attempt at a newsletter. A simple wooden board leaned against the hallway wall, covered in pencil, pen, and marker from years of moves. Now it’s screwed into that wall. Every one of my children has been measured against it. Even the pets.

One autumn afternoon, my four kiddos leaned their backs against it at the start of another school year. Another year older. Another line. The sound of graphite on wood. One small fixed point in a spinning world.

I thought I understood why it mattered. These days, I understand something a little different.

I once stood against someone else’s doorframe, wondering whether I’d be around long enough for another mark. Wondering why that family cared enough to add my story to their home.

My children have a board that follows them. The houses change. The walls change. The addresses change. The marks come with us. And every mark says something remarkably ordinary. Someone was there. Someone noticed. Someone cared enough to remember.

Nobody earned a line on that board. No award, no promotion, no list of accomplishments, no conditions. Just a back against the wood, and someone willing to stop, look, mark, and care.

Now, I spent decades learning to move things with my levers and become someone people could depend on. My family, meanwhile, has been quietly building something none of that could give me: a place where our lives are recorded alongside one another, and growing another inch is worth stopping for.

And after all these year, that’s the part I’m still learning.

The military taught me to be comfortable being the one others depend on, and my weapon of choice was whichever lever I’d built. A chaotic, conditional life taught me to be far less comfortable depending on anyone else’s.

Luckily, years of therapy and coaching have shown me how to set boundaries, and how to sit beside someone without needing to solve their problems. Extending that same grace to myself has been a lot harder.

For those of us with always-on minds, who have built our lives around being the one everyone leans on, that’s worth sitting with. The hardest part I’ve learned isn’t about when to stop giving, but learning to receive without feeling the need to give something back. To be cared for without being useful. To be loved without earning it.

Nearly twenty years of being useful doesn’t disappear overnight because I’ve noticed this. Nor should it. Those gifts have let me serve, provide, and do remarkable things for people I love. But somewhere along the way, I started asking my usefulness to answer a question it was never built to answer.

“Am I still worth keeping around when I have nothing left to give?”

The lever was never meant to be the ground.

I think that’s what the board has been quietly teaching me every time I walk past it and notice it. I still wonder why it’s so easy to believe my children deserve that kind of love, and so hard to believe the same might be true for me.

Some days I’m better at it than others. There are still moments I catch myself confusing someone’s disappointment in me with my own worth.

I still don’t really have a hometown. Maybe when I take off the uniform, I’ll find one. Maybe I won’t.

But I have a battered trunk that finally got unpacked, six feet of wood covered in marks from the people (and pets) I love most, and people who want me beside them for no other reason than being me.

The board will collect another line, and then another. I hope I’ll be there to notice.

And with that, this was another small step further down the wayward path, learning to restore togetherness.

More soon. Take care of yourself this week, and until next time, keep wayfinding.