Wayward Grief
Healing isn’t escape. It’s the discipline to stand among the thorns, to feel what cuts, and to let the wound become instruction instead of infection.
Welcome to issue #3 of Wayward Purpose. This week’s personal essay.
Wayward Purpose exists to rebuild what breaks along the way; through faith, discipline, and direction. It’s about turning moral injury into moral leadership. This space is growing into a home for veterans, leaders, and wayward minds. For those who gave everything to a mission and lost themselves somewhere along the way.
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Content Warning: Suicide. This article contains discussion of suicide. If you or someone you know is in crisis, especially if you are an active-duty service member or veteran, please reach out immediately. Call the Veterans/Military Crisis Line by dialing 988, then press 1, or contact your local emergency number.
My mind flashed to a scene from an old Disney film; Fantasia, 1940. Mickey Mouse, sleeves rolled up, braced against a wooden door as enchanted brooms heave water filled buckets, water swelling through every crack. It’s a cartoon, sure. A nightmare as a kid, absolutely. But this week, it feels like a documentary. The first thought and feeling as I broke down this week in an prescribed exercise. Arms shaking. Back against the door. The water? Grief, gathering force?
My mother loved Disney. Now, here in this memory I was, knee-deep in her life, one taped box at a time, piles and a lifetime collection of possessions spread across the garage floor. Realizing how strange it is; the way we clutch objects until time erases their meaning. What we value. What we hide. What we leave behind. Grief is an archeologist’s curse: every discovery cuts both ways. Why didn’t those medieval hinges hold for little cartoon mouse?
This isn’t self-help. I don’t even believe self-help exists. The phrase “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” was meant to show the absurdity of the act. Try it sometime; you’ll just fall over. It implies we can fix everything alone, that self discipline and accountability can patch what’s missing in the soul. I’ve learned they can’t by themselves.
What I really believe we have is self-awareness, and even that’s rare. I feel most people today are globally aware, tuned into the noise of the world, but disconnected from their own interior landscape. For me, that awareness starts with faith. I’ve learned a lot about my mind; the neurodivergent, neurocomplex, ADHD mind, wired more so for patterns and external signals, but the harder work has always been inward: learning to sit with what’s real, not what’s urgent. Therapy to understand my own brain these past few years has been amazing.
And here’s what I know now this week, grief sucks. But ignored grief doesn’t just hurt you; it hollows you.
So, I begin.
Like one of my favorite fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, this is neither a beginning nor an end, but a turning of the wheel as it goes in the story; or in this self-awareness wayward journey of understanding grief: a place to start.
The day after my mother died, I kept that door shut with everything I had. I was that mouse. Mission mode. Paperwork lined up like dominos waiting to be pushed over; certificates, signatures, the obituary. Nurses, friends, and relatives said, “You’re so strong,” and handed me sympathy and sandwiches like stoicism was a food group. It is the most they could do. The military has taken me away from most family I have known the past two decades, and I also cut myself off from the world thinking I could do this on my own. I nodded and swallowed. Inside, I now realize, I was grief-blind: numb, tunneled, ticking boxes because my mom had no will, no husband, no directive: just me. It was easier to juggle logistics than to acknowledge what was happening.
Then came the turn-and-burn. Three storage units. Corrugated steel bellies full of a life and lingering cancerous smell I have long forgotten since quitting smoking many years ago (The Power of Habit is the book that finally helped me quit smoking if you are struggling). I cut the old locks. Replaced them with new. Paid late fees with money that tasted like pennies. Broke rusted latches, sorted the unsortable, filled a U-Haul until its spine creaked. Rain started the moment the door clanged shut on the trailer, like heaven couldn’t wait five minutes to make a point. I traded the remaining keys to a younger sibling for what they could scrape together; grace in small bills.
Weeks later, a call to see if I wanted to make another late payment; they never emptied them. No. I got the closure I needed; and gave them a month to get what they needed out. I hung up. Sometime later; a tornado ate the units that never got cleared; a freak tornado for the area. By nothing but mercy, time made the decision I am sure someone was avoiding. People say time isn’t promised. Turns out neither are possessions. Dust to dust, and sometimes sooner than you planned. Reminds me, I need to start writing. Start an exercise in grief; walking through and naming what I’ve lost. We will see if the therapist is right.
Back home, base housing. Another temporary place with government paint and walls that echo when you breathe too hard. The garage exhaled like an ashtray. Old smoke baked into drywall, yellow air thick enough to fold coming from the boxes collected and brought to their final resting place. I thought digging would give me closure. Spoiler: Pandora’s box is real, and mine chewed nicotine.
I orbited the stacks like landmines. ADHD minds loves a mystery; grief made me terrified of solving it. So I did what my nervous system does when the heart’s on fire: I organized the flames. Books alphabetized. Boxes labeled. Everything arranged like God was coming for an upcoming home inspection. A friend noticed the smile people wear when they’re about to cry and politely said nothing. My wife, I’m sure, saw me rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, still trying to play the violin on the way down. Masking my ADHD. Masking my grief. Same theater, different costume.
But grief doesn’t take direction. Masks slip. And when they do, the orchestra stops pretending.
A month later it blew in at dinner. Peas rolling in green constellations on the plate because I’d cooked from one of Mom’s recipes. My wife asked, soft as a fingertip on glass, “Are you with us?”
“Of course I am,” I snapped; too sharp, too fast. I’m fine. The table went museum-quiet. My son using his hands to pick up his food, I look at him and say, “Use your fork.” He turned his fork over and scooped up a pea with the wrong end (is there really a wrong end?), turned it over like a little baton, and said, “You didn’t tell me how to use it.” Smart-ass. I thought, as a smirk displayed on my face. It was gone as fast as it came. Flashback entered for a moment: me in the back of Mom’s green Impala, mouthing off after being called a smart-ass myself as a kid. “I’d rather be a smart ass than a dumb ass,” I said, and young teenage me caught a slap and a smirk in the same heartbeat. I’m full. I have work to do. I’m fine.
I’ve never really talked about it. Not really. I’ve mentioned that it happened, sure, but I’ve never walked back through the halls, the rooms, the trailers, or the roller rinks of emotion. Roller rink; that was probably the third, maybe fourth job my mom worked just to keep us afloat. Free skating though. One visited memory at a time here. I am sure I’ve processed it all at this point; right?
My wife and I have been working through a lot this year. Recently, mid-conversation, she just stopped and said, “There’s still something off. You might not realize it, but you can’t get through a sentence about your mom without stopping still.” I wanted to laugh. I’m fine. I checked that box already like a computer-based training I clicked through just to make my name turn green on someone else’s checklist. It wasn’t an intervention, just a Tuesday. And still, her words landed.
She wasn’t judging me; she just missed me. I saw her, and she saw how I was still living on guard, running internal diagnostics like a mission brief. And she was right. Damn it. The therapist was right too. Fine. I’m not fine.
Then she said it soft, certain, like it had been waiting on the tip of her tongue for months: “You’re safe. No one’s leaving. It’s okay to let it out now. I’m not going anywhere.”
Something in me finally believed her. For the first time, I knew she was healing too. That we both are. That maybe this was what safety felt like; not control, not distance, but permission. She gave me permission to start to grieve. To stop performing strength and start practicing honesty.
At the beginning of the year, I wasn’t ready. But now, as she spoke, in her healing journey as well, I felt something shift. I’d been stalling, giving hour-long TED Talks about how fine I was, convincing her, maybe even myself. But she saw through it (as she has our entire marriage). And this week, I’m finally doing the work; naming it, writing it, letting it move through me.
Her words sat in the room like a brick. Breathe in, hold, breathe out. Fine is what you say when you don’t want to know the truth. It isn’t presence; it’s camouflage, a mask with a mouth hole. And nothing in uniform prepared me for the slow death you can’t classify; hours that feel like years, and years that pass like minutes.
I’ve seen plenty of death through screens and reports, the kind you file and exhale afterward. Where enemy killed in action becomes a bullet point for an award or performance report. But this was close; ventilator in, ventilator out, the rise and fall of a chest that taught me to count breaths like the rosary I’m just learning to pray. Machines making noises they shouldn’t. A hospital room nicer than anything my mother had been in for years. Stubborn to the end. She waited until I left to die. One last protective lie: He can’t watch this. I won’t let him. No life support. Just willpower and love. I whispered it then, and I’ll say it again now: I love you.
Turns out love and pain braid tight. She taught me how to braid. A skill I use on my daughters today. A French braid of love and pain. But you need three strands. Is that grief? Dang emotions.
You’d think emotions would have flooded then in the hospital. It slipped just a few times. But mostly; stone. Delayed grief is real I have found. “Nothing” feels safer than “everything.” But “nothing” is a room with the oxygen slowly leaking out. Hairline fractures formed, then widened. A hair thin crack that spiderwebs an entire windshield if not acknowledged.
I opened another box in my mind. Brown tape tearing like old scabs. Scent and emotions bleeding all over my garage floor and hands. Letters from the version of her who still hoped. Things held onto, wrote; letters between parents a son should never read. Breathe. Receipts from the version of someone who just survived. Trinkets that once meant something; now just evidence that someone was here.
I found things that weren’t mine, or I didn’t want and shipped them to siblings. No invoice. No grudge. Just closure by post.
But grief doesn’t clock out when the garage is clean I have learned. It circles back like bombers over the same target (C.S. Lewis was right). Some days it detonates overhead; other days it smolders quietly, a campfire that refuses to die. And then there are the missions that don’t matter, those endless runs to take out the ball-bearing factories of memory.
I used to treat faith like a possession. Something you either had or didn’t, like a flashlight you could loan out. Grief taught me it’s a verb. Ex opere operantis. By the work of the worker. Grace hums in the wiring, but the room stays dark until you reach for the switch. I prayed like a man with no script: God, I’m furious and hurt. Walk with me anyway. The answer wasn’t fireworks. It was dawn. Not control, but companionship. Not polish, but presence.
Presence saved me. It meant I could be a wreck on a cold garage floor, my wife checking in hour by hour, and still be healing, because wrecked and present beats tidy and absent every time. But healing isn’t processing grief I’ve learned. You can’t show up on the first day of a new job and say, “Nice to meet you, I just watched my mother die.” So you suppress. You compartmentalize. You make small talk with ghosts.
Eventually, though, you stop stalling, or life stops you. Maybe not with a burning bush, but with a slap of reality. (Or, in the old mIRC chat room days, a trout across the face.)
So here I am this week; ready to stop dodging and finally do the work. Time to walk through it. Fine. I’ll do the exercise.
Before the garage, before the letters, there was the house that wasn’t a house. Windows staring at nothing. The air thick with cheap tobacco and something sharper underneath; like regret, or ammonia. A glass bowl sat on the table, in a smoke-filled fog of a house, filled with scooped-out cigarette butts, a makeshift ashtray with no more room for what burned out. Stealing left over tobacco from used cigarettes to roll new ones. The bed looked slept in by ghosts; blankets twisted, the outline of absence still warm. Needles. Pills. Letters. And the suitcase I’d bought her; still there. Packed, on the floor.
I had to leave it. That killed me. It was supposed to make it to us; to me, to the grandkids who barely knew her but still asked questions I couldn’t answer. In that room, the suitcase looked like another body. An attempt at someone my mother wanted to be. It felt like a scene out of a bad movie. The kind where the camera pans across a cracked doorway and the audience whispers, don’t go in there. Only this time, it was real. The kind of place cops kick in the door for, and I was the one already inside.
Outside the room, my wife stood, watching. Probably half-praying I’d find what I needed, half-watching to make sure the woman tweaking in the house didn’t decide to come at me with whatever was left of her. I could feel her eyes through the door; steady, ready, not blinking. She knows when I’m standing too close to something that still burns. I stood there anyway. Staring at that suitcase, choking on the stale smoke filled air and the impossible question echoing in my head.
Damn it, Mom…why didn’t you call?
Or worse; did you, and I just didn’t pick up? Because I was busy. Because I thought something else was more important. Because I thought there would always be another call. Pink blotches still stains the walls of the house from her silly string attack. Breathe.
I signed the forms, ask a priest to say the rites, not Catholic yet...no idea what to do. I did the last earthly thing I could for her: made sure she was seen, named, blessed, returned to the One who knew her better than she knew herself. Some departures aren’t meant to return from. This is one of them.
Sixth boyfriend? Seventh? The details blur but not the bile. Pristine board. He wanted a game. “If I win, you don’t marry my mother,” I said, a kid negotiating with gunpowder. I won. He laughed it off; I didn’t. Who bets a woman’s life on a joke with her son? My mom wanted love so badly towards the end she tried to sign it anywhere someone promised. That was her courage and her wound. A guarded memory cataloged and probably forgotten, but presented itself without knowing today. A kids name wrote on a cigarette in a plea to stop. Back into the freezer. Mom you need help.
Five feet of dynamite; well four-ten in the end. She’d square up with anyone if it meant protecting her kids or the ones she loved. Most elephants backed down. Plenty didn’t. She took the tusks and loved loud anyway. The mighty chihuahua that little woman she was. Naming the memory. What I lost. Processing it all. This mental exercise this week to process grief.
The pain; more memories unlocked; the dentist with no Novocain.
I can still smell the faint sweetness of fluoride and fear. The vinyl chair creaked beneath me, its armrests cold and sticky against my palms. We didn’t have insurance; just four cavities and a dentist who believed grit was cheaper than anesthesia. I told Mom I was fine. “I’m big and strong,” I said, because that’s what you say when the person who loves you most already looks guilty for not being able to afford comfort or care. She tried her best.
The drill screamed before I did. Pain burst like lightning through bone until my vision curled at the edges. I still have no idea how I didn’t pass out. Almost breaking my mom’s hand holding hers. We had the technology to numb it. We just didn’t have the money. Maybe a late child support check? Who knows. That day taught me the difference between fixing and healing. You can fix teeth with drills, but you heal a child by refusing to let them endure unnecessary pain. I smiled so she didn’t see the pain. Those four fillings are still there; tiny silver fossils of endurance, pain, grit. I think about them when I think about pain. Institutions can patch our wounds with programs and procedures, but only people can sit beside us, hold our shaking hands, and say softly, “I got you.” More grief to process another time; back to the exercise at hand.
On a small patio, smoke twisting into cold air, she told me the trip I’d bought her to come to me saved her life. I laughed it off because I didn’t know what to do with a sentence like that. Then she said she’d already tried once; soft voice, eyes on the horizon. A son shouldn’t hear those words; a son who must send her back to that life hears worse. Still, I like to think that plane ticket bought more time. She made every birth of the kids but the first. She loved her grandkids like birthdays were holy days, even if she forgot to call. I would most likely have to pay postage the price of a person to get the things she collected for them and forgot to mail. Survival narrows your world. I used to be angry. Now I understand the math: oxygen mask first.
After she died, I called her number for weeks. Just to hear the beep and the voice that saw me when no one else did; unconditional forgotten love. It took a long time to delete her texts. Buried into the electronic graveyard of the void. One of my teachers pressed my high school diploma into my hand and whispered, “Your grandma is proud of you.” He said it like a benediction. The day my grandmothers number recycled, the same exercised voicemail memory; that chapter closed with a click. Some tech, bored on a Tuesday, gave me mercy by leaving it running longer than policy. Two memories now linked. Two memories tied with grief, pain, love, happiness.
Another motherly-soul. Wendy. Plans changed; hospice stole the introduction to my wife. A trip planned, and changed. I drove eight hours praying like a man building a bridge as he ran across it. I told God to give her my message: I won’t make it; I have to be with my mom on her last days. I’m all she has. I still don’t know if prayer changed heaven or just kept me from breaking in half. Maybe both. I miss you both.
Soundtrack unlocked. Riding the river of grief today.
Time is like that river, and we are only a cup. No matter when you dip it in, the water you catch will never be the same again: unrepeatable, unrecoverable. When you pour it back, it’s changed, and so are you. That’s grief: never the same river twice. Never the same glass of water. In my head, Eminem’s “I’m Not Afraid” loops in the background. People hear the cussing; I hear the mirror. A kid from broken places promising to step forward with people, not at them. The military gave me structure. Marshall gave me a dictionary of rage I learned to bend into resolve. Just like I’m not for everyone, neither is he.
Not long after the process, if you can even call it that, there was no funeral. Just ashes scattered in lonely corners of the world. A cremation special for those who could not afford to bury their dead. It was all I could afford. It was all on me. I checked the boxes, wrote off her death as just another part of life. Put my uniform back on and went back to work. No one knew. No one asked. I had a job to do.
Then came the separation. Two soulmates, each blinded by the oil on their own glasses. Both lashing out. Both drowning quietly in grief, frustration, and the slow corrosion of everything life had thrown at them. A time apart that shouldn’t have happened, but did. Selling a treadmill, Venmo-splitting the cash like strangers passing in a Starbucks line; slowly waiting to hear our mispronounced names. Grief does that. It warps time and logic. The clock melts like Dali’s. The persistence of memory, only heavier, like it knows something you don’t. Like it’s watching you repeat a lesson it already learned the hard way.
Those stories from that stretch between my wife and I deserve their own pages and another exercise for another time, but what matters is this: we found our way back. Not by winning arguments, but by choosing accountability over performance. Love stopped being a feeling and started being a verb. It meant showing up. It meant holding mirrors instead of grudges. I held one to my wife; she held one to me. And I thank her every day for not flinching when it reflected both the man I was and the man I’m still becoming.
This one took more out of me than I expected. Even transferring it from my journal to here felt like reliving it. But it’s a start. The first real step. I’ve finally reached out for a grief counselor to help me walk through what’s left unspoken.
Hours later, after writing through these aches, my mind finally tapped out. I reached for something on my shelf, and found a forgotten daily reader, one of those books with a single question for each date. I flipped to October 9, the day I was writing, and my stomach dropped.
The question stared back like a dare, like cosmic timing, like the universe winking when you least expect it:
“If you could say anything to your mother right now—whether she’s living or not—what would it be?”
Just a beginning, not an end. The real work starts now. The kind that claws for accountability, consistency, and the discipline to keep showing up when you’d rather disappear. Healing from grief isn’t automatic it appears; it’s not some neat scab that hardens into a scar. It’s earned, one honest day at a time. One paragraph at a time. Sometimes one shaky breath at a time.
ADHD and grief make a hell of a dance floor. Masking was my specialty. Do the work, perform fine, hide the chaos. It got me promotions, a few plaques, and at least one ulcer, but it also delayed real help. Like flipping through a magical manual written in Latin, trying to command a broom army that won’t stop hauling buckets of my own making. If masking can delay diagnosis, it can delay mourning too. You can color-code the calendar and alphabetize the spices, but eventually your soul files an HR complaint. Mine did. On concrete, next to yellowed boxes that smelled like the decade I tried to forget.
“Fine” is a costume. Presence is the person wearing it. And for too long, I’ve been the clown at my own funeral. Layer unprocessed grief onto a neurodivergent brain and you get an awkward tango. Three partners stepping on the same foot, each convinced the other’s leading. Loss that feels like betrayal hardens into complicated grief: stickier, slower to metabolize, like emotional molasses from a tree that doesn’t want tapped. Add the ADHD amplifiers; time-blindness, hypersensitivity, executive overload, and the cycle loops. Hyperfocus delays the loss, avoidance builds, and the brooms keep filling the room you swore was dry. (Hold the door…Hodor.)
But here’s the small miracle: I’m learning the steps now thanks to my wife and those I am asking for help from. Shame loosens. Identity clears. I’m done living as an apology. I’m learning to live as a person, one with mismatched socks, addressing lifelong questionable coping skills, and a slow-growing peace that maybe this mess is part of the method. I am human.
I’ve finally learned the vocabulary for what my body already knew. Moral injury isn’t some abstract term, it’s the ache of betraying, or being betrayed in, your deepest values. Mine started to heal in the most unexpected place, Lourdes, France, where holiness smells like stone and damp hope. Moral injury sounds like this: I was made to do what I believe is wrong. Leaders violated the covenant. I failed someone who depended on me. Faith has helped me with moral injury.
Now add unprocessed grief and ADHD’s special sauce; time-blindness, intensity, executive overload, and you get the loop: hyperfocus on systems, avoidance of feelings, drafting a white paper on how to order and replace medieval hinges that failed a cartoon mouse trying to hold back brooms and buckets of unprocessed water, while your family asks if you’re okay.
Spoiler: I was not fine. But at least now, I can be honest about it.
Grief asks: What did I lose, and how do I carry love forward?
Moral injury asks: What value broke, and how do I repair trust with God, self, and institution?
Neurodivergence asks: What does my nervous system need so I don’t mask myself out of my own life as I do both?
I watched my mother’s unprocessed pain spill through late-night texts and broken breath calls until her voice blurred behind both the damage, the broken nose, and the story she kept trying to retell.
Systems do this to people when they are reduced to a function. They flatten them into problems to be managed, turn empathy into paperwork, and call it progress. Check the box here to get healthy, please. When pressure rises, connection is always the first casualty. Productivity without humanity isn’t efficiency, it’s elegant despair. When someone keeps reaching out, saying the same thing from new angles, it’s not stubbornness, pride, or arrogance. It’s a heartbeat saying, please understand me, because right now I don’t understand myself. Don’t correct them from your ledge. Cross the street. Meet them where they stand. Ask, gently: What are you really trying to figure out here?
That’s where we are building Wayward Purpose to begin. Connection before correction; before catastrophe. Presence before performance. We won’t fix disengagement with platforms or policies. We fix it by showing up; in the next conversation, the next silence, and making sure the person in front of us feels seen, heard, and valued. Doing the hard thing. Transformation without the hype of just motivation and inspiration. There’s a Navajo proverb I heard this week: Assume your guest is tired, cold, and hungry, and act accordingly. Translate that to life: assume the human in front of you feels unseen and carry the extra blanket.
This past year, I learned the hardest personal lesson: I lost the ability to safely unmask with the one person who’s always understood me, my wife. I never realized how vital that ability was until it was gone. To unmask around someone you trust is to breathe without checking the room for permission. Losing that hurt more than anything else I can name. An exercise for another time.
But, I like to believe it saved us. She knows where the dams crack and how to hold my hand while I let the water through. Presence means I can be a wreck on a garage floor and still be healing, because I’m in my life now, not dodging it. And since this story is about grief, I do need to name a part where my grief bled into blame. In trying to show how systems mislabel people, I reframed my wife through my confusion and pain. It wasn’t fair. The system failed us; I failed her. Intention doesn’t erase impact, and neither is an excuse.
To my wife: I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve to have your character bent by my fog. You’ve shown me grace I didn’t earn. I will honor it, in word and deed. I love you. And for everything else that belongs knee-to-knee and eye-to-eye: banana hammock.
To you reading this: I’ll keep telling my truth, my experience; but ensure I continue to aim it to heal, not to harm. Growth isn’t erasing the past; it’s understanding how we got here, why we did what we did, what we’ve learned, and how we’ll do better. I’ll do better and be better. I am learning how to process grief now.
The older I get, the more I realize institutions don’t care for people; people care for people. Institutions bake structure; love cooks. Baking is 350° for 45 minutes. People are a thousand micro-adjustments; improvised recipes, mistakes salvaged with humor, tears on a garage floor at midnight, whiskey over a board game, Minecraft servers and dance parties at inconvenient times. Presence over performance. Muddy boots over shiny plaques. And Crocs never in sport mode. These are the small truths that keep me from the lazy cynicism of pretending nothing matters. It all matters.
The military trained me to sprint through the crisis and do a hot-wash debrief later (I prefer warm-washes). Grief laughs at the debrief. It doesn’t check boxes; it changes weather. Not a staircase, more like microclimates moving over a mountain range. Time doesn’t heal what you refuse to feel. Attention is an act of will. You either let grief reorganize your inner ecosystem, or you spend your life holding the door. And that has sucked to learn the hard way.
So this week I practiced the simple things I’ve been counseled to try:
Name it. Say what I lost and what it meant; out loud, on paper, here.
Feel it. Let the wave pass instead of bracing until my muscles shake.
Connect. Not parasocial (a term used for people who end up having a one-sided, unreciprocated sense of intimacy to a person they follow online) noise, actual faces: meals, coffee, shared silence.
Rebuild. Slowly. Coaching other leaders. Movies with my girls. Spartan races with my kids. More walks with my wife. Texts and phone calls to the ones I love. The lifelong process that is growth.
Grief also taught me something about work and home: people don’t break because they’re weak; they break when the environment forgets they’re people. I’ve felt like just a roommate, and just another office machine. Those invitations to hopelessness spin like a dirty wash cycle. Naming that is why my relationship with God, and a military parish that treats me like a person, not a problem; has felt like air when I couldn’t breathe.
Caring isn’t charity; it’s operational excellence. The best teams know productivity and well-being aren’t rivals, they reinforce each other. To me, it’s really simple: when people feel seen, they bring creativity, resilience, and commitment. When they feel like parts, they count ceiling tiles. The miracle is you don’t need a medical degree to care. You just have to be human.
Sometimes that looks like refusing to split a burger with your cousin. Letting him order his own because he’s too proud to let anyone do anything for him. A teenager who’s spent his life believing every act of kindness comes with a price tag or a string attached. So you sit across from him, half smiling, saying, “I got you,” and then explaining with absolute conviction why selling pull-tabs is still a solid business model.
But I digress. For most of my life, I treated loss, disappointment, and moral injury like the price of admission. Then I finally got an ADHD diagnosis and realized my brain runs on a different operating system. In therapy, when the light clicked on that not everyone processes every stimulus the way I do it was two parts relief, one part terror.
I’m learning to unmask and walk through grief, and that’s part of the framework we’re building at Wayward Purpose. It’s still forming, because I’m still living it, but as shame loosens, identity clears. I’m done living as an apology. I’m learning to live as a person and continue to build my relationship with God.
Grief in the military and workplace are stories for another time. But they’re why I keep a personal rule for leadership: be careful what you say; you only say it once, but it might play a thousand times in someone else’s head. When someone moves out on your guidance before the institution or organization agrees, the blast radius lands on the doer; discipline without cover. Standards without policy. That’s not just career pain; it’s moral injury for those who followed. Another story, for another week.
I’ve learned that ignoring grief is like skipping an oil change. Everything still runs, until it doesn’t. Meanwhile, the analytic part of me is redlining at 9,000 RPM, cataloging every system failure, drafting procurement notes on why the castle staff team should’ve budgeted for iron door hinges last fiscal year so this fiasco never happens again. My family’s asking, “Are you okay?” and I’m over here writing a white paper on medieval hardware. Grief meets control. Logic meets loss. And somehow, they both think they’re in charge.
So I go back to the lamp.
Connection isn’t a soft skill; it’s the foundation that makes the hard things possible. So I keep flipping the light on: learning the Sacraments, prayer, confession, Eucharist. Long walks. Honest talks. Dumb jokes. Deep sighs. Ex opere operantis; the work of the worker. No matter what: I got you.
When grief swallowed my horizon, Scripture stopped feeling like a rulebook and started reading like a field manual. Not the kind for torque specs (though I do miss the calibrated elbow from the flight line days), but the kind like Psalms, where someone else’s raw voice says, me too.
Now, there’s a line about seeds falling among thorns I’ve read this week; choked by worry, riches, doubts, and pleasure. The inward thinking mindset. I didn’t need a commentary to understand it. I’ve seen the thorns.
This week, my wife showed me her drawing last; she wouldn’t let me see it until after I’d written through this process. Somehow, she’d drawn my grief without reading a word. Black graphite twisting across the page, tangled around a bowed figure, butterflies clawing their way toward light. It’s what my mind felt like this week; beauty and pain sharing the same space. Love surviving in the cracks.
The thorns aren’t abstract. They’re my life; the mirror she held up. Thorns threaded through every good intention. The constant worry: am I doing it right? The fear of taking a knee when the world rewards standing tall. The numbing through busyness, the grief I filed under “later.” Her drawing caught all of it. This is “I’m fine.” Bowed over, the kind of pain that looks almost graceful if you squint. She didn’t draw what I told her; she drew what I hide. The way love still breathes inside the tangle. The butterflies my grandmother told me to follow. If the seed is love, the thorns are everything pretending to be more urgent.
Grief blinded me in that same thorn-thick way. Not denial; just tunnel vision on survival. Psychology calls it dissociation; Catholic tradition calls it the night, the veil, walking by faith and not by sight. Either way, the soul dims the lights so you don’t shatter. But you can’t live your whole life in night mode. Maybe that’s why the last generation invented clap-on lamps; to remind us we still have agency. Or maybe they were just tired of getting up. Either way, the point stands: you still have to reach for the light.
Ex opere operantis. The work of the worker. That phrase alone carried me from atheism to Protestantism to Catholicism. If grace is electricity, my choices are the switch, or maybe the clapping (I would probably choose to snap). The answer wasn’t fireworks; it was presence. My wife in a cold garage, wrapping her arms around a grown man ugly-crying on concrete. An old priest reminding me forgiveness is a door you open again and again. A parish that kept setting out chairs even when I stood in the back. The taking a knee and praying for what your grateful for.
Presence over perfection. That’s grace in motion.
I still listen for my grandmother’s voice on a line that no longer exists. I still wish Wendy had met my wife. I still smell old smoke and let it sting, because even pain can tether us to what was good. I try to be the man my mother hoped I’d become. The man my wife sees when she holds up the mirror, the father my kids mean when they say, Dad. The friend people reach out to, when they just need someone to say, “No matter what, I got you.”
If you’ve stayed with me this far, thank you. This one went deep. But as I am learning, so does grief. I’m still doing the work; faith, counseling, accountability, small daily repairs. No polish, just presence. My grief isn’t something to escape; it’s something to grow through. And maybe, as I learn to walk this wayward path, something here helps you name your own.
Because this isn’t just my story, it’s why we are building Wayward Purpose: to remind us that healing isn’t a seminar or a slogan; it’s the quiet, daily decision to show up. To choose connection over collapse. To believe again that your life, however wayward it feels, still carries purpose.
So if something here resonated, subscribe, share it with someone who might need it, or just keep walking with me. We’ll figure this out together. It will all buff out.
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