The Life I Lost. The Life I’m Trying to Build.

An attempt to explain what it feels like to grieve your own life while still living it.

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to understand why my brain works the way it does.

I’ve been dealing with depression and anxiety for what feels like an eternity. For most of my adult life, I’ve been on medication to try and manage it. But despite that, I’ve also struggled with addiction, using substances to calm the chaos in my head, which can be overwhelming at times.

But I wasn’t always this version of myself.

I used to feel like my life was complete. I was married for a decade, which was a big part of it. Building a business from scratch and running it for 13 years was another big accomplishment. I also had dogs that I loved dearly. My dad was still alive, and I had a strong support system of friends and family. I had a daily routine, a comfortable home, and a sense of direction. I thought I knew what the future held.

And then, slowly and sometimes all at once, that life came apart. My marriage ended in a painful divorce that dragged on for 3 years. Another relationship ended after 3 years. My dad died. Both of my dogs died. Eventually, I lost the business I’d spent 13 years building.

I hit rock bottom with my mental health, and it got to the point where I could hardly do anything. For 4 years, I had to move back in with my mom because my mind and body just felt completely drained and hopeless. I was also living with and saying goodbye to my Dad.

I wasn’t just losing people and things. I felt like I was disappearing, like the things that defined me were slipping away. And I don’t think I’ve ever fully processed what that means.

I Think I’m Grieving My Own Life

I’ve always taken photographs. Thousands and thousands of them. I have a good eye for moments, places, people and the emotions that exist between them. Without necessarily realizing it, I’ve spent 15 to 20 years documenting my own life.

I often catch myself scrolling through those old photos again and again. I’ve somehow made a perfect timeline of my life on Instagram, without even trying. I can scroll backward through 15 years and watch my entire life unfold. The happiness. The adventures. The relationships. The people I’ve loved. The places I’ve been. The person I used to be.

I can see the years when things were good. I can see the years when things started falling apart. Sometimes I can even recognize the sadness behind a photograph that probably looked happy to everyone else. For a long time, I couldn’t understand why. I think I’m beginning to.

I’m not just looking at old photographs. I’m visiting a life I haven’t finished grieving.

When I look at a photograph from 10 years ago, I’m not necessarily wishing I could return to that particular day or place. I’m wishing I could feel what I remember feeling back then. The security. The belonging. The excitement. The sense of possibility. The feeling that my life was going somewhere.

In those photographs, my dad is still alive. My dogs are still here. My marriage still exists. My business is still running.

And maybe that’s why I keep looking. Because those photographs are one of the only places where all the pieces of my old life still exist together.

Maybe I’m not trying to relive the past. Maybe I’m trying to feel whole again.

The Cruelty of Remembering Happiness

There’s something particularly painful about having such a detailed record of your own happiness when you’re struggling to feel happy in the present.

I look at those photographs because I miss being happy. Then I remember everything I’ve lost. Then I feel worse about where I am today. And eventually I go looking through them again. It’s a strange cycle. The very thing that reconnects me with happiness also reminds me how far away that happiness feels.

I know those years weren’t perfect. But memory has a way of preserving the warmth while allowing some of the pain to fade. And depression seems to do the opposite with the present. It magnifies what’s missing. It makes everything I’ve accomplished feel smaller than everything I’ve lost.

Sometimes I wonder whether I’ll ever be genuinely happy again. I’m not looking for a quick fix or a brief escape. Actually happy. The kind of happiness that comes from feeling safe in your own life.

I’m Also Grieving the Future I Thought I’d Have

I think one of the hardest things about approaching 40 is realizing how different my life looks from the one I imagined. I expected to still have some of the things I had worked so hard to build in my twenties and thirties. A marriage. A family. A business. A home. A sense of permanence.

Instead, I’m starting over in ways I never expected. I’m living alone in an apartment after spending years unable to live independently. I’m working for someone else after spending 13 years running my own company. I’m trying to figure out what I want the second half of my life to look like when I still haven’t fully recovered from the first.

And I’m tired. Not just physically tired. I’m tired of rebuilding. Tired of losing people. Tired of trying to feel normal. Tired of having to summon the strength to start again.

There is a kind of grief that comes from losing someone you love. But there’s another kind that comes from losing the future you thought you were going to have. Nobody holds a funeral for that. Nobody sends flowers when your identity disappears.

You’re just expected to move forward. And I’ve been trying.

I’m Building a New Life. I Just Can’t Feel It Yet.

Here’s the part I struggle to give myself credit for.

For years, I relied heavily on substances to quiet my mind and escape a reality that often felt unbearable. During the worst years of my divorce, watching my dad slowly die, and everything else falling apart around me, I was consuming roughly 100 milligrams of marijuana edibles every single night. Often accompanied by a couple of gin and tonics. This went on for nearly five years. Not because I wanted to party or have fun, but because I desperately wanted relief from my own thoughts and emotions.

But something changed. As of today, I’ve been completely free of marijuana for 547 days. In that same period, I’ve reduced my alcohol consumption by an estimated 98 to 99 percent compared to how I used to drink. And now, I’m confronting another dependency. I’ve stopped taking kratom entirely and am currently around day 11 or 12 of withdrawal. After years of relying on substances to regulate how I feel, I’m trying to learn how to exist inside my own mind without chemically escaping it. I’m doing that while still battling the same depression, anxiety, grief and loneliness that drove me toward those substances in the first place. In some ways, I’m now experiencing them more intensely than ever.

And it’s extraordinarily difficult.

I moved into my own place 14 months ago. I’ve started a new job. I’ve adopted another dog as of 30 days ago. I’ve rediscovered climbing and pushed myself physically and mentally in ways I once wouldn’t have imagined. I’m trying to travel. Meet people. Build genuine friendships. Find love. Create a life that feels meaningful again.

On paper, those are significant accomplishments. But emotionally, I often feel disconnected from all of them. It’s as though I’m doing everything a person is supposed to do to rebuild a life, but the part of my brain responsible for feeling satisfied hasn’t caught up.

And that’s one of the cruelest parts of depression. It doesn’t just make life painful. It can make the possibility of future happiness feel unbelievable.

I’ve got a ton of old photos that show I was really happy back then. I don’t have any pictures to show that I’ll be happy again.

So the past feels real. And the future feels hypothetical.

I think I’m just struggling to get used to my new life, not failing at it. Maybe with time, I’ll learn to make this new life feel like home.

I Don’t Want to Forget Who I Was

I don’t want to stop looking at my photographs. I don’t want to erase the past or pretend those years weren’t important. I loved that life. I loved having a sense of purpose and belonging.

Those things mattered. And losing them changed me.

But I also don’t want to spend the rest of my life treating my memories as evidence that everything worthwhile has already happened. Because I don’t actually know that.

Depression tells me that the best parts are behind me. Grief tells me that nothing will ever feel the same. Fear tells me that rebuilding is pointless because everything I love can eventually disappear.

Those feelings are real. But they aren’t necessarily telling me the truth.

And perhaps the hardest thing I have to learn is that the life I build next doesn’t have to resemble the life I lost to be worth living.

I’m Still Hangin’ Out

I’m not sure I need to completely change who I am. The person who built a company from nothing is still somewhere inside me. The person who loved deeply is still here. The person who traveled, explored, created, photographed and found beauty in ordinary moments hasn’t disappeared.

Those parts of me survived. What disappeared were many of the relationships, routines and structures that gave those parts of me somewhere to belong.

And maybe that’s what I’m really searching for. Not my old marriage. Not my old business. Not even my old life. A sense of belonging inside my own existence again.

I don’t know when that feeling will return. I don’t want to make it seem like getting better is a simple, straight line journey where everything falls into place.

Sometimes it’s ugly. Sometimes it’s exhausting. Sometimes it feels like I’m making progress everywhere except inside my own head.

But there’s something I want to remember.

I am not necessarily someone whose happiest years are over.

Maybe someday I’ll look back at the photographs I’m taking right now and realize that these weren’t just the years when I was struggling. Maybe they were also the years when I was quietly rebuilding.

My past is proof that I’ve been happy. It is not proof that I’ll never be happy again.

And maybe, for now, that’s enough.

The Good Parts, Right Now

I don’t want to end this without saying something else that’s just as true.

There’s a lot of good in my life right now. Not someday. Now.

Climbing has become one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. On the wall, my head goes quiet in a way it almost never does anywhere else. There’s no room to replay the past when all that matters is the next hold. I’ve been pushing myself on real rock, getting stronger, figuring things out, and every so often getting scared and doing it anyway. I love it more than I know how to explain.

And through climbing, I found my people. Over the past couple of years, I’ve made friends who actually show up. Friends I road trip with, camp with, jump in lakes with, and trust with the other end of my rope. Laughing in a car crammed with gear. Sitting around a fire at the end of a long day. Flexing for a photo at the bottom of a crag. They’re exactly the kind of moments I thought were behind me.

And then there’s Hamlin. I adopted Hamlin a month ago, and my apartment already feels more like a home. Professional cuddler. Expert couch hog. Looks at me like I’m the best thing in the whole world. Coming home to that has changed my days in ways I didn’t expect.

Earlier I said I don’t have any pictures to show that I’ll be happy again. It turns out that wasn’t quite right. I do. They’re right here. I just hadn’t been looking at them that way yet.

Friends

Climbing

Around Cleveland

Hamlin