Here’s the thing nobody tells you: most of what feels automatic isn’t.

Something happens.
It doesn’t match what you expected.

And boom! Feeling, reaction, outcome, done.

Half the time you didn’t choose any of it.

It just ran.

And then somebody shrugs and says,

“That’s life,” as if the sequence were carved in stone before you were born.

It’s not. There’s a gap in there.

A real one.

A space between the thing that happened and what you do about it.

You just can’t see it most of the time because you’re asleep to it, not lazy, not broken, just running on autopilot like the rest of us.

I know this because I’ve got ten thousand hamsters on ten thousand wheels running laps in my skull at any given moment, and even I can sit down, get still, and find a minute, a full minute, with no thought in it.

Not counting breaths to stay “focused.” Just space. Nothing.

If I can find that gap, it’s there for you too.

I’m not telling you it’s easy.

The first few times you try, it’ll feel next to impossible.

But “hard” and “impossible” are not the same word, no matter how much they want to be.

What I actually mean by reframing

Reframing isn’t positive thinking.

It’s not “look on the bright side.”

It’s not pretending the bad thing didn’t happen.

It’s this: whatever lands in your lap, you’ve got a default way of seeing it.

A groove your mind drops into automatically.

Reframing is pausing, just pausing, long enough to ask if there’s another groove available.

There usually is.

I think about it like a disco ball.

There are as many ways to see that ball as there are mirrors on it.

Hundreds.

Maybe thousands, depending on the ball.

And the only completely clear view you ever get is your own reflection, bouncing back at you from one particular mirror.

That’s not nothing; that’s real, it’s yours, and it counts.

But it’s one mirror.

Most people know two or three.
Maybe half a dozen if they’ve done some work on themselves.
And somewhere along the way they convince themselves that’s every mirror on the whole ball.

It’s not arrogance, exactly.

It’s just how perspective works.

It feels complete from the inside even when it’s a sliver.

I’m unsure if anyone can.

Things change. You either keep learning or you calcify.

There’s no third option.

The story that taught me this works

I learned most of what I know about reframing in group therapy, and one session in particular still sits with me.

A woman was talking about her divorce.

Specifically, about a pattern in her ex-husband’s behavior that she’d never been able to tolerate, never been able to shake, even years out from the marriage.

She was still dragging it around like a bag of wet sand.

I wasn’t married to the guy.
I didn’t have her history, her hurt, her years of context.

What I had was distance, and distance, when you point it the right way, is useful.

I could hear the shape of her story without all the weight stapled to it.

Not because I didn’t care.
Because I cared enough to actually look at the mechanism instead of just nodding along with the pain.

And what came out of me, almost before I’d thought it through, was the phrase “suspend your belief.”

The way you do at a movie, you set aside what you know to be true for two hours so you can let something new in.

I said something like, “What if you suspended your belief about who he is, just long enough to look at what he does?”

Something clicked.

I watched it happen in real time.

She separated, right there, the person from the pattern.

She wasn’t upset with her ex-husband as a human being; she was upset with a specific behavior he kept producing.

The behavior was the problem.

The person and the problem had been fused in her mind for years, and the second they came apart, she could see both of them clearly for the first time.

That’s a reframe.

I felt something close to amazing after that.

Not because I was clever.

Because I’d watched someone carry a weight for years and then, in one sentence, set part of it down.

How it actually works, mechanically.

Here’s the part that sounds cold but isn’t.

To find a reframe for someone, you have to momentarily strip the emotion out.

I can be with someone with full empathy. Open heart, open energy, fully in someone’s feelings with them; no problem. And they have no idea.

But the actual reframe doesn’t come from that place.

It comes from going abstract.

Spock mode.

Stripping the story down to its mechanics so you can actually see what’s jammed.

The catch is you can’t hand it back that way.

Nobody wants Spock’s diagnosis read to them in a monotone.
Say it without warmth, and people hear.

“You don’t understand me,” even if you understood them perfectly.

So the real skill isn’t the analysis; anybody reasonably sharp can do the analysis.

The skill is doing the cold, clear thinking privately, then handing it back warmly.

Translating Spock into something a person can actually receive.

That’s the whole job.

Not just seeing the other mirrors on the ball.

Helping someone else see one of theirs in a way that doesn’t feel like getting handed a diagnosis.

The hokey pokey of it

People get stuck.

Foot in, foot out, shake it all about, never actually turn yourself around.

You can know a thing intellectually and still be wearing it like a coat you forgot you put on.

The reframe isn’t a trick, and it isn’t therapy-speak.

It’s just the plain fact that there’s a gap between what happens to you and what you do with it, and that gap is bigger and more available than your autopilot wants you to believe.

You don’t need to see the whole disco ball.

You just need to remember it has more than one mirror on it.

Be well.
Bert 🙏

I love that.

I really do.

Because I have lived in my head for 98.something% of my life.

Early in life I didn’t know there was anywhere else to live, any other way of being in the world.

It took a long time to realize there was any other way of being.

I was so “deep in it” I was the fish who asks.

“What water?”

So now, when people ask how I’m doing…

I’ve started giving them a weather report.

Not the local news kind.
The kind from inside my skull.

What’s the forecast this week?
Storms?
Clearing?
Fog rolling in off some other part of my life I forgot was even out there?

I call it “the weather up there.”

The Forecast Lately

Here’s the actual report, if you want it.

The last two weeks:

Rough.

Dark days, four of them in a row, where I swear I didn’t see the sun at all.

Just low gray clouds sitting on top of everything, the kind that don’t storm; they just sit there.

Heavy.

The last couple of days, though?

Clearer.
Felt the sunshine again.

But I also felt the heat.
And I mean that literally; there’s a heat advisory where I am right now.

It’s 10 p.m., and it’s still 85, maybe 90 degrees outside.

The air doesn’t move.
Everything just sits in it.

That’s the thing about weather.
Good and bad show up together more often than anyone tells you.

Sunshine and a heat advisory, same day.

Relief and exhaustion, in the same breath.

Share Barely, But Here.

No one taught me the difference between cause & effect.

I did not know what a trigger was, what a response was, or that there’s supposed to be a gap between the two, a place where you are able to choose.

So my whole operating system became trigger and response.

Trigger & Response.

And then, over time,
avoid the trigger,
because the response costs too much.

And the cost wasn’t just the feeling.

It was having to hide the feeling.

A Jedi mind trick.

These aren’t the reactions you’re looking for.

Except I was eight, and I was doing it to myself.

There was no Obi-Wan around to teach me how and definitely no Yoda showing up afterward to debrief.

I just had my weather.

And no guidebook for reading it.

Two Kinds of Storms

Here’s the part that’s actually new, though.

The part I’m still chewing on.

Some of the weather lately isn’t just showing up.

It’s not clouds rolling in from nowhere the way they did when I was a kid, generated entirely by things outside my control.

Some of this weather is mine.

I made it.

I’ve been taking action.

Real action, the kind with consequences attached, the kind that stirs things up.

And some of the storm I’m standing in right now is just a weather front meeting a weather front, me moving forward, colliding with everything that’s been sitting still.

I’m ready to go full Rambo on my own life at this point.

I’m done waiting.

I’m not getting any younger, and every day I’m not moving is a day I don’t get back.

So yeah, some of this is weather happening to me.

And some of it is weather I kicked up myself by finally walking again.

Both are real.

But they’re not the same thing.

And learning to tell them apart?

That’s new.

That’s not something eleven-year-old me could’ve done.

What the Storm Took

I’d be lying if I said all of this came free.

The last two weeks took something out of me.

Not the big, dramatic kind of something, more like the quiet stuff.

Some motivation.
Some of the mojo.

The chutzpah, that bone-marrow-deep drive that shows up when I’m chasing something I actually want.

It’s 10 p.m. and I’m wiped.

Been up since 6 a.m.

And even when I sleep, my brain doesn’t really clock out; it’s more like a beehive that just moves indoors for the night.

But here’s the part I actually want to point at, because it’s the only part that matters:

A month ago, two months ago, a stretch like this would’ve taken me out for weeks.

The darkness would’ve gone deeper.
The duration would’ve been longer.
I know, because I’ve tracked that pattern for most of my life.

This time?

A couple of weeks.
And I could feel the old pull, that familiar sinking, the ideation creeping back in, and I just... didn’t bite.

That’s it.
That’s the whole victory.

I didn’t bite.

It’s not nothing.

It’s actually everything.

The Undercurrent

There’s one more thing in the forecast that doesn’t really go away, no matter what the rest of the weather’s doing.

Underneath the storms and the clearing and the heat advisories, there’s this low, constant hum:

Where the fuck is the money?

That’s the real ceiling right now.

Not motivation.
Not mojo.
Not even the weather.

Just the practical, unglamorous fact that I need assets that give me agency before my life moves to the next level.

It’s the one front that’s always on the map, no matter what else is happening.

I’ve written about the financial side of rebuilding before, and it’s still sitting right there, doing its thing in the background.

Quietly.
Persistently.
Weather never fully clears; it just shifts.

The Long-Range Forecast

Right now, though?
The clouds I’m watching seem to be breaking up.

There’s travel on the horizon: Colorado and then California.

Underneath all of that, there’s a real, grounded sense that the income side of things will finally begin to move too.

I don’t know exactly what the next few months look like.

Nobody does.
That’s just weather.

But for the first time in a long time, I’m not bracing for the next storm.

If you’re up there right now, stuck inside your own weather, no guidebook, no language for any of it, just feeling the pressure change and bracing for impact, I see you.

You don’t need a forecast to be ready for what’s coming.
You just need to notice when the clouds start to move.

Until next time…

Be well.
Bert. 🙏

Not after.

Not during the damage.
Right before.

That split second where the thing is about to happen and I can feel it coming.

I’ve written before; that gap, between trigger and response, is everything.

It took me most of my life to find it.

Here’s the thing about patterns.

I didn’t even have the concept until maybe the last ten years.

Patterns of thinking.
Patterns of behavior.

The idea that you keep doing the same shit over and over and it keeps producing the same result, and you somehow keep being surprised by that.

Didn’t have it.

What I did have, since I was a little kid, were ripples.

You already know how ripples work.

Something hits the water.

The water responds.
That response moves outward.

And depending on how big the thing was that hit, a pebble or a boulder, the ripple is small and quick or massive and far-reaching.

That’s it.

That’s the whole model.

When I was a kid and my father was about to get mad about something I’d done, I was already calculating.

How big is this ripple going to be?

Is this small?
Or is this the kind that knocks everything over?

Because the larger the ripple, the more it impacts.

Way beyond you.
Way beyond the moment.

I was doing ‘ripple’ math before I knew what math was.

What I couldn’t do then was connect the ripple back to the pattern.

That came later.

Once I started seeing my own patterns, really seeing them, I could start mapping them to their ripple size.

I knew what a certain behavior was going to cost.
Not in theory.
In lived reference points.

A personal scale built from experience.

That scale is useful as hell.

You look at a situation and go, “Okay.”

If this goes sideways, it’s going to be that kind of bad.
I’ve been there.
I know what that looks like.

That’s not pessimism.
That’s being informed.

Here’s the question that tells me everything about where someone is.

How the fuck did I end up here again?

If you’re saying that, and I mean really saying it, I’m surprised you don’t have the pattern yet.

You’re not seeing it.
You’re living inside it, but you can’t see the shape of it from there.

And I get it. I’ve been that person.

The way out is to walk it backward.
Trace it.
Go from the outcome all the way back to the root.
Sometimes it’s simple.

Sometimes it goes somewhere deep and uncomfortable, and you have to be willing to go there.

You have to want it.

Thinking about changing your life does nothing. Taking action changes your life. That’s the whole sentence.

I still fall off the bike.

I want to be clear about that.

I’m human.
The patterns still show up.
Triggers still kick in.

But here’s the difference; I’m aware.

So it either stops before it gets out, or it gets caught fast.

I’ve even had friends call me out.

And I welcome that.
Genuinely.

Because someone naming the thing helps me lock in the definition of it.

Which leads to something I think matters.

When you’re trying to identify what you’re feeling or what’s happening inside you, don’t just try to name what it is.

Name what it isn’t.

Process of elimination.

Attack it from the other side.

Because sometimes all you can say is,

That’s a real place to be. And you can still work with it. Start crossing things off.

Catalog your ripples.
Small to large.

They’re your reference points. Your internal navigation system. Hard-won and specific to you.

Nobody else has your scale.

But you do.

Until next time…

Be well.
Bert.

My nervous system was dysregulated my entire life.

Every conscious hour, for as long as I can remember.

I know because I discovered what the opposite of dysregulation feels like.

What a regulated nervous system actually feels like inside the body.

It’s as if you were a completely different person.

Not a better version.

A different person.

When you’re dysregulated, everyone else’s problems are suddenly yours to solve.

Everyone else’s emotion is yours to process.

You don’t choose that.
It simply happens.

If you’re empathic, you may relate.
I’m a mega empath.
I have zero control over it.

However, I have Jedi-level detection for disturbances.

It’s like having an antenna I was born with.
I pick up on people’s energy whether I want to or not.

You can call it metaphysical. Fine.

Call it whatever you want.
I know it’s real because I’ve lived inside it my entire life.

Simply because science lacks the tools to detect it doesn’t make it non-existent.

Here’s what my dysregulation looks like from the inside.

Hypervigilant.
Always on. 24/7.

Scanning for danger.
Scanning for things to avoid.
Scanning for what’s coming at you next.
Every trigger you can possibly detect…
You’re clocking it before it arrives.

That’s the whole operating mode.

Detect and avoid.

That’s it.

And here’s what nobody tells you about living like that.

It makes long-term memories difficult to build.

Everything is so immediate.

So in the moment.

You’re never in reflection long enough to warehouse your experiences.
To actually keep them.
They simply burn away.

You survive the moment.
Then there’s another moment.
Survive that one too.

No storage.
No archive.

Just the next thing, and that never ends.

The contrast between the two states is the entire thing.

Once you feel regulated, really feel it, you don’t want anything else.

There is no going back.
You’ve had a taste, and that’s that.

Here’s how I’d describe it.

A mountaintop lake.
Glass surface.
Completely still.
Not a single thing disturbing it.
A perfect mirror of the mountain range behind it.

That’s what it feels like.

Serene.

That word is exactly right.
Not relaxed.

Not calm in a tired way.

Serene. A comforting stillness.

Like the world stopped vibrating for a minute.

That’s a regulated nervous system.

Now I’m able to describe the feeling, and that’s my reference point.

That point began showing up between late February and early March of this year.

A slow unfolding.
A little better each day.

It was imperceptible at first, because there are always “flash in the pan” moments where for perhaps 10 seconds you genuinely laugh until the dysregulation reminds you why you shouldn’t be.

Sometimes the reminders bring a host of heavy mental luggage no one wants to carry.

That said, I’ve been meditating daily.

1,450 days

One thousand four hundred and fifty days.

That’s what my meditation app congratulated me on yesterday.

My 149th milestone was achieved in my meditation practice with this announcement.

I don’t keep track of these things; the app does.
It provides all milestone reminders.

I had no idea.

And it occurred to me that was beyond 3 years, but I wasn’t sure exactly how much time 1,450 days is.

• 1,450 days ≈ 3.97 years

• That’s about 3 years and 355 days

• Or roughly 4 years minus 10 days

So as of today, I am 9 days away from my 150th milestone.

4 years of daily meditation practice.

Every.

Single.

Day.

Whether you want to show up or not.

Especially when you don’t want to show up.

That’s doing real work.

Centering.
Grounding.
Keeping me in it.

My situation right now is not what I’d choose.
It’s not ideal.
Not even close.

However, making myself miserable about it is going backwards.

I’m creating my new problem on top of my problem.

So I choose not to go there.

If you’ve spent your whole life dysregulated, you might not even know it.

Because you lack anything to compare it to.

You simply think that’s what life feels like.
Or perhaps you’ve never thought about it at all.

Never crossed your mind for whatever reason

That constant hum of being on alert.
That low-grade exhaustion of always being on.

Normal. Right?

It’s not.

Until next time…

Be well.
Bert.

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There’s a word for the place I lived for two years and eleven months.

Liminal.

It means threshold.

The space between what was and what’s next.

Not before. Not the after.

The gap, the hallway.

I moved into that hallway in June of 2023.

I’m still finding my way out.

Most people think of liminal space as a brief thing.

A transition.
Something you pass through on the way to somewhere else.

A few weeks between jobs.
A month after a breakup.
The strange floating feeling after a funeral when people are eating sandwiches and you’re not sure what you’re supposed to feel.

That kind of liminality.

Mine lasted nearly three years.

What Nobody Tells You About the Hallway

It doesn’t feel like transition when you’re inside it.

It feels like everything in your world stopped.

The world keeps moving.
You can see it through the glass.

People going to work.
Making plans.
Complaining about their mortgages.
Arguing about impossibly small things from where you’re standing.

And you’re just.
In the “hallway.”

Not moving forward.
Not going back.
Not sure the door behind you still exists.

...the shame of that is its own thing entirely.
I’ll get there another time.

What I want to talk about is what actually happened inside those years. Because from the outside it looked like nothing.

And I know that.
I know exactly how it looked.

From the inside it was the most significant growth of my life.

The Moat

The first thing I did when I got off the road was build a “moat.”

Not a metaphorical moat in a casual sense.

I mean I deliberately, consciously, systematically withdrew from almost everything and everyone.

I built walls around whatever was left of me.

And inside those walls I built a sphere around my heart specifically.

Something impenetrable.
Something nothing else could get into.

Because too much had already gotten in.
And the damage from that was still being tallied.

People look at withdrawal and they see dysfunction.
Avoidance.
Something to fix.

The moat may be the most intelligent thing I did during those years.

I needed to be unreachable.

Not forever.

Just long enough to stop bleeding.

Learning to Hang Out With Yourself

Here’s something they don’t put in the brochure about recovery.

At some point you have to spend serious, extended, unavoidable time alone with yourself.

Not meditating.

Not journaling.

Not doing the work.

Just. Being there. With you.

And for most of my life I would have done anything to avoid that.

Living in my car removed all of that.

There was no avoiding me anymore.

And what I found when I finally stopped running from the encounter was not the monster I expected.

Just a person. Tired. Damaged in specific ways. Funny when given space to be. Curious about almost everything. Capable of sitting still in a way I never had been before.

Turns out I’m not bad company.

That realization took most of the two years and nine months to arrive at.

Growing Through Stillness

This is the paradox I keep coming back to.

I was standing still.
For years.
By any external measure.

No job title.
No address.
No forward motion visible to anyone watching.

And I was growing faster than at any other point in my life.

Not in ways that show on a resume.

Not in ways that make sense in a conversation with someone who asks what you’ve been up to.

But in ways that matter.

I was learning what I actually thought about things when nobody was requiring me to think anything in particular.

I was learning which of my opinions were actually mine and which ones I’d borrowed from roles I no longer held.

I was learning what brought me genuine peace versus what I’d told myself brought me peace because it was easier than admitting the truth.

The Hermit Quality

I’ve always had it.

Even when I was coaching three seasons a year.

Even when I was fully embedded in the performance of a full life.

An ever-present part of me wanted to disappear into my own world constantly.

Little projects.
Ideas to noodle on.
The specific pleasure of a long, quiet, unstructured stretch of time with nothing required of me.

I spent most of my life treating that quality as something to manage.
To apologize for.
To vaporize in social situations by being smaller or less available.

The liminal years gave me permission to just be that.

I could stop apologizing for needing silence the way other people need company.

I could stop treating my preference for solitude as a symptom of something wrong.

...it is possible to be genuinely content in your own company and also profoundly lonely.

Both things were true for me simultaneously.

They don’t cancel each other out.

They just coexist.

What Was Actually Happening

From the outside: a man going nowhere.

From the inside: a complete dismantling and slow, careful reconstruction of every assumption I’d ever made about who I was and what I needed.

Every role I’d used to define myself was gone.

Which meant every answer I’d defaulted to for the question “who are you?” was gone too.

And what that forced, slowly, unglamorously, without ceremony, was the actual answer.

Not the resume version.
Not the social version.
Not the version calibrated to make the other person comfortable.

The actual one.

The observer underneath the disco ball.

The consciousness that was still running even when all the mirrors had been stripped away.

Still here.

Still watching.

Barely. But here.

Nearly

I want to be honest about where I am right now.

I’ve nearly all the ducks in a row. Nearly.

The inner work: more is done than I ever thought possible.

The clarity about who I am and what I’m building is sharper than it’s ever been.

The capacity to sit still without it feeling like defeat. in a way that wasn’t possible before.

The one thing that remains is the one thing you actually need to participate in this society.

Financial stability.

Not wealth.
Not abundance in the Elon sense.

Just enough to pay a bill without counting backwards from zero.
Just enough to have an accident without it being a catastrophe.
Just enough to stop doing the math every single morning before I get out of bed.

That part is still in progress.

And I’m working on it every day.

...
there’s a specific exhaustion that comes from having done all the internal work and still not being able to fully re-enter the world because the external piece hasn’t caught up yet.

It’s its own kind of liminal.
Smaller than the first one.

But real.

What the Hallway Gave Me

I didn’t choose liminal space.

It chose me.

I lost everything I’d been using to locate and define myself in the world, and I had no choice but to find out what was left.

What was left turned out to be enough to build from.

That’s not inspiration.
That’s just what happened.

The hallway was long.

Longer than anyone who hasn’t been in one would believe.

And I’m still technically in it.

But I know which direction I’m walking now.

And the door at the other end is visible.

Barely. But there.

Until next time…
Be well.
Bert 🙏

I was sitting in my car.

Starbucks parking lot.
Ventura, California.
Right next to the freeway.

You know the intersection: Chick-fil-A on one side, Burlington Coat Factory, Chuck E. Cheese, and WinCo supermarket that’s open 24 hours where all the homeless people hang out at 2 a.m. with nothing else to do.

I know because I was there.
I was one of them.

I had woken up behind Burlington in my car on Westinghouse Street.

At 6:00 a.m., early-morning delivery drivers go by and wake me up in the car from the low vibrations of their barely warm diesel engines going by my windows.

Get the car switched from “sleep mode” to “day mode.”

Roll up the sleeping bag.
Pull down rear window coverings.
A black bedsheet, cut in half.

They were held with a clothesline cut to fit, carabiners, and a few knots.
Remove the front window tin foil-looking cover; you know the kind.
Fold it up and under the front passenger seat.

Each front-side window had its own circle-shaped window covering.
The kind that folds in on itself and you can never make work.
Each was wedged and bent in a unique way that kept it in place.

Open the door to step out and stretch.
Move gear from the front passenger seat to the rear.

Open the back hatch and fold up the back seats, making room.
Digging out my shoes from under the driver’s seat while sitting in it and putting them on.

Listening to the morning news to see what other messes the world was in.

The routine became so efficient I didn’t have to think.

Similar to parking at your destination and being unable to remember the trip.

And in a matter of less than 10 minutes, had driven the 0.05 miles to the Starbucks lot.

And just... sat there.

Watching.

Morning Rush

It was rush hour.

One of the busiest intersections in the city.

Cars pulling up to the light.
Sitting.
Then taking off.
A distinct pattern requiring 15 to 20 minutes to accurately forecast the next move.

Over and over.

People on their way somewhere.

Jobs, schools, routines.

The machine of normal life does what it does every single morning, whether you participate or not.

I watched all of it from my front seat.

And my mind was wandering.

All over the place.

The Dissociation

Here’s what I won’t dress up:

I was dissociated.

Not in a dramatic, cinematic way.

Just... not fully there.

Present enough to see the cars. Present enough to feel the seat beneath me. But some significant part of me had checked out.

Because that’s what you do when you can’t reconcile where you are with who you believed you were.

Parts of me were living it physically. I was in that parking lot. No question.

But parts of my mind did not want to accept it. Refused to file it under “This is your life now.”

And there was a third part, quiet, stubborn, exhausted, that didn’t love any of it but knew.

Knew I had to push through it.
That there had to be something on the other side.
Because this could not go on forever.

Nothing ever does.

How I Got Here

Six months.

That’s how fast it happened.

The marriage ended.

The job ended.

The finances evaporated.

The home I’d lived in for nearly a quarter century and raised my children, no more.

Each one was its own wound.

All of them together?

The Gutting

There’s a Japanese ritual named the Seppuku (切腹) or Harakiri (腹切り).

When a samurai had done something dishonorable, dishonored their family, or dishonored their clan, they might perform the ceremony.

They take their sword and drive it through their own abdomen.

A gutting.
Ceremonial.
Deliberate.

That’s what it felt like.

Except nobody handed me a sword.

Life just handed me the circumstances.

And the gutting happened anyway.

It killed old Bert.

That’s the only honest way to say it.

Old Bert died in those six months by metaphorical exsanguination.

The Roles That Disappeared

I had been a soccer coach for six years. Non-stop.

Three seasons a year. I coached the team to win the league.

Coached at the high school level.
Made it to the California state championship finals.
Lost five to four in one hell of a game.

I was a husband for 22 years.
I was a father, present, every single day.

Mornings. Meals. Bedtimes through grade school.
Every day until I moved out.

I was an employed technologist and designer.
30 years. Eight disciplines.
Thirty business sectors.

Each of those roles was a room I lived in.

And when you’ve lived in rooms long enough, you may stop knowing that the rooms aren’t you.

You believe you ARE the room.
Except the beliefs are subconscious.
Most may never wake up to their performance until the role is nearly over.

So when all your rooms disappear within six months, you’re left standing naked in a vast, empty mental landscape wondering what the hell just happened.

You simply cannot answer the question, “Who are you?”

Because every answer you had to offer in reply is gone.

You got nothing to work with.

What Dissociation Actually Feels Like

People use the word “dissociation,” and it sounds clinical.

Like something that happens to other people.
In hospitals.

It’s not like that.

It’s more like:

You’re watching yourself from the outside.

Or maybe the inside.
It’s sometimes hard to tell.

You’re going through motions, but the wires between action and meaning have been cut.

You wash your face. You start the car. You drive.

But there’s a delay.

A lag.

Like you’re a few seconds behind yourself.
Watching it happen without being fully in it.

I had dissociated as a kid to survive.

Same mechanism, same purpose. Survival.

But this was different.

This was dissociating as an adult.

With a serious, clinically diagnosed treatment-resistant major depressive disorder.

No place is home, and there is no map to show me the way through.

I’m having to show up for people, people I’ve known for years, and perform as if I’m completely fine and my life is undisturbed.

Never said a word to anyone of them.

Some of them simply don’t know I’m sharing in this space.

Unless, of course, they’ve read my writing.

Screaming Downhill

That’s what it felt like.

Screaming down the hill of life.
Blinders on my eyes.
Hands off the handlebars.
Feet kicked up in the air. Leaned back.

Just going.

And three times during that stretch, the dark side came for me.

I won’t be dramatic about it.

I wasn’t fighting.
I was tolerating.
Just putting up with whatever got thrown at me.
Going numb to it.

You say a word enough times, and it stops meaning anything.

It’s still there.
But it doesn’t register anymore.

That’s what I did.

Not because I was strong.
Because what other option was there?

The Parking Lot Moment

Back to Ventura.

Back to that morning.

Back to the front seat.

I was watching the cars, and at some point I couldn’t identify where I was.

Not, “I don’t want to be here.”

Something deeper than that.

I couldn’t locate ‘myself.’

Couldn’t find the Bert who drove to work at a ‘normal job,’ who coached soccer on weekends, and who knew what was happening tomorrow or next week.

That person wasn’t in the car with me.

And the man who was in the car, the one watching the traffic, dissociated, quietly surviving…

I didn’t fully recognize him either.

That’s the moment identity collapses.

Not when things fall apart.

After.

When you’re sitting in the quiet and you reach for yourself and find nothing there to grab.

Sitting in the VW, looking at the floor, and crying uncontrollably because the sense of feeling lost inside my own mind was overwhelming.

I was able to take on this feeling later, but in that moment I was absent from my physical body.

Dissociated to not slide into a nervous breakdown or, worse, contend with suicidal ideation.

An unwanted old friend of mine. More about him another time.

What I Held Onto

There had to be something on the other side of this experience.

That’s it.
That’s all I had.

Not certainty.
Not faith in any traditional sense.

Just that stubborn, quiet, indignant “This cannot go on forever!”

Forget forever. Nothing ever does.

And after my marriage vaporized, sending me to live in my car on the streets, I was convinced more than ever that literally nothing lasts a lifetime.

The liminal space I ended up in, that parking lot that morning, being one moment inside it, lasted from June 2023 to the beginning of March 2026.

That’s not a typo.

The math comes out to…

Two Years and Nine Months of Wandering.

Largely numb.
Largely dissociated.

I built a moat around whatever metaphorical castle I had so nothing else could get in. And inside the castle, I built an impenetrable sphere around my heart. Nothing was getting in.

And slowly, very slowly, over a period of months, living in the car, learning to hang out with myself without completely despising me, or whatever I thought of as ‘me’ at the time.

I’m harder on myself than I would ever be with another human being. The way I treated myself was from a place of hate.

I would never consciously treat another living creature the way I felt inside towards myself.

It was not dislike; rather, it was pure, visceral hatred.

I learned that the observer underneath all those roles didn’t die when the roles did.

It was still there.

Watching.

Wondering.

Waiting.

Quiet.

The same consciousness that lights up behind the eyeballs every morning.

Still on. Still here. Still “me.”

On Liminal Space

“Liminal” means “threshold.”

You’re not where you were.
You’re not yet where you’re going.

You’re in the hallway.

And the hallway can last a lot longer than anyone tells you it will.

That’s not failure; that’s the process.

The only way to escape liminal space is to go through it.

There are no shortcuts.

And eventually, you do find your way out the other side.

---

I’m still working on “sticking my landing” when the universe decides it’s time to grant me full agency over my life again.

And I’m no longer in the Starbucks parking lot.

I’m not where I want to be, and I’m in motion.

I am working every damn day on work that’s pulling me through and out of this chapter of my life.

That work is accelerating everything, with the unpredictable “brake pump” from the universe to calm down my excitement.

Until next time…

Be well,
Bert🙏

There’s a question people often ask when they first meet someone.

Seven or eight times out of ten, it’s the same one.

You’re at a party. Might be a family thing where there are new people. You shake someone’s hand to meet them. They smile and they say:

So, what do you do?

Not who are you?

What do you do?

And I want you to sit with that for a minute.
Because that question isn’t neutral.

It’s not curiosity.
It’s judgment.

It comes from somewhere deep in the subconscious.

That “little filing clerk in your brain” who needs to know where to categorize this new person they’re seeing into their subconscious hierarchy of people.

Subconsciously the ego has to judge and take measure of someone or something new.

Is this person safe? How much can I reveal?

Otherwise, it doesn’t know what to show them to stay safe.

So…

What shelf do they go on?

What do they do for work?

What company do they work for?

What are they worth? Net worth?

What value, if any, do they have for me?

What kind of car do they drive?

Do they have a second home?

Do they live in the nice neighborhood?

And for most of my life, I had answers when I needed them.

Father, husband, designer, coach, tech support, artist, dart player, or nothing.

I could hand people a neat little stack of identity cards and let them sort me.

But that question, the right one, the harder one… I couldn’t answer that at all.

Who are you?

I’m still working on it, and below is some of what I’ve figured out so far.

What’s Behind the Eyeballs?

Strip everything away.

The job title.
The relationships.
The roles.
The labels people put on you and the ones you put on yourself.

Who is left?

I’ll tell you who’s left: the observer.
The consciousness that lights up behind the eyeballs every morning.

That observer.
That witness.

The part that can watch your ego throw a tantrum.
Watch your brain get hijacked by a trigger.
Watch yourself make a decision you know you’ll regret, and just... observe it.

Don’t judge it.
Not fight it.
Just see it.

That observer is the who.

Not your hobbies.
Not your résumé.
Not the names other people call you.

The observer.
The witness.
The being, presence, and consciousness underneath all the performance.

The ego is the part that says “me and mine“ and “I need” and “they did this to me.”

The ego constructs identity out of roles and gets genuinely devastated when those roles are challenged, questioned, or disappear entirely.

And they do disappear.

Roles always do.
Nothing lasts forever.
The ego wasn’t built for that bullshit.

The observer just watches.
And keeps watching.
Through all of it.

I’m not done.

I’m not sure anyone ever finishes this project.
It’s part of life, part of the program, part of the matrix.

And I can tell you the difference between the two.

Between living from the ego and living from the observer.

Enter: The Disco Ball

This is a metaphor I keep coming back to, because it’s the most honest one I’ve found.

I am a disco ball.
You are a disco ball.
Every human is their own unique disco ball.

Because why not?

Disco balls mean dancing, and that is fun and full of joy.

It’s not a “Disco Ball” in the look at me, center of attention way.

It’s in the multifaceted, showing different mirrors to different people way.

Think about how a disco ball actually works.

It’s one object.

One continuous surface. But depending on where you’re standing, you see different panels of it.

Different light. Different angles.

And the people on the other side of the room?
They’re seeing something different than you are.

That’s me with people.
The same thing.

Every group I’m part of, every combination of human beings in a room, gets a different set of my mirrors shown to them.

Some facets are warm and open.
Some are quiet and observational.
Some are strategic.
Some are funny.
Some are deeply philosophical at midnight.
Some are completely closed off, giving nothing, conserving everything.
Some are invisible and can leave a room without being noticed.

And before you get it twisted: that’s not fake.
It’s not manipulation. It’s not lying.
And it’s not two-faced or conceited.

It’s learned survival.

The Equipment I Was Born With.

Here’s the thing about me and the disco ball… I didn’t build it on purpose.

I was born with very sensitive equipment and no instruction manuals, and life taught me how to use them by circumstance.

I came into this world with what one might call high-fidelity sensors and antennas.

INFJ, metacognitive, trauma-born empath.
I feel your suffering and see your perspective easily.
I plan far in advance for any and all possible outcomes.
I preprocess emotions of loss or fear so they’re not an issue should they show up.

Whatever framework you want to use, the result is the same:

I receive everything.
I’m picking up a signal from across the room.
Shifts in energy.
Subtle tension between people who are pretending everything’s fine.
The discomfort on display by a handful.
The weight behind a word that someone said too quickly.

Most people get white noise.
I get 8K, Dolby Surround, omnidirectional, infrared, and x-ray.

And the empathy?
It’s not just emotional.
It’s physical.

When I walk into a room, I feel the energy in it.

Not in some woo-woo, crystals-and-incense way.
I mean a genuine somatic response.

Hairs on the back of the neck. Stomach dropping.
Something tightening in the chest. The body picks it up before the brain even processes it. I’m reading the room with my senses and body before I’ve said a word.

I was born a sensitive kid with all my sensors wide open.

And from the start and for a long time, people kept “bumping into them.”

Screaming into the microphone, basically. That throws things off. It just does. My body learned to turn the sensitivity down — not off, but down, WAY down. Because fully open was too much in order to survive.

My sensors have slowly been recalibrating and healing.

Why the Facets Exist

Let me tell you where the disco ball actually came from.

It wasn’t a design decision.
It was a coping mechanism to survive psychologically.

When I was young, there was no safe space to be fully myself, free of judgment, where love felt something other than transactional.

No room where you could fall apart and have someone catch you or hold space for you.

No place to just feel whatever you were feeling without someone making you regret it.

You learn fast; you show people what they can handle.

You show them what keeps the peace.
You rotate the disco ball.

Stop it right now, or I’ll give you a real reason to cry.

That’s the origin story of my disco ball.

Learning to give people the version of me that wouldn’t get me in trouble.

That wouldn’t invite punishment.

That wouldn’t make the situation worse.

That was to be seen and not heard.

The facets started as protection.

Then I became fluent, then a master, then a Jedi.

So when people meet me and they get one version of me:

The calm, measured, thoughtful one;
or the sharp and funny one;
or the quiet one in the corner who’s taking in everything…
They’re not getting a fake.

They’re getting the mirror I’ve determined is safest to show them right now.

Based on information they don’t even know I’m collecting in real time.

That’s not dishonesty.
That’s calibration.

The question, the one I’m still sitting with, is this:

The Cost of Always Scanning

Here’s what I won’t sugarcoat.

Living this way is goddamn exhausting.

The high-fidelity reception NEVER turns off.

I’m reading rooms I didn’t even choose to enter.

I’m pre-calculating outcomes in conversations before they’ve started.

I’m running scenarios.

What they might say, what I’ll say back, what that might mean, and how to position myself before any of it actually happens.

It’s a chess game I never agreed to play.

It started the moment I was born.

And I’ve been playing it mostly alone.

The cost is this: you lose track of yourself.

You get so good at showing people what they need to see that one day you’re standing in the middle of your own life and you genuinely cannot remember which facets are the real ones.

No particular collection of mirrors can answer “who are you?”

You’ve been so many different mirrors for so many different people that the question, Who are you, actually? starts to feel like a trick question.

That’s not depression, exactly.
It’s something quieter than that.
More fundamental.

It’s the feeling of possessing very sophisticated instrumentation that nobody ever told you about or taught you how to handle properly.

You are born, and it’s on.

The Observer Doesn’t Need a Role

The ego panics when the roles disappear.

When there is nothing for it to do, pay attention to, or worry about.

Because the ego is the role.

Strip those away, and the ego is standing there in its underwear.

The observer doesn’t panic.
The observer just watches.
Says: Okay. That’s gone. What’s here now?

That’s the distinction I’ve been working toward my entire life and only started actually living in the last couple of years.

The observer doesn’t need to be a father or a coach or a designer to know it exists.

It exists underneath all of that, independent of all of that, unaffected by the loss of any of that.

The disco ball spins.

The facets catch light and scatter it everywhere.

But the ball itself, the core, doesn’t move.

That’s the part I know now.

Some of it is intimate, some of it is fresh.

I feel there are things I’ve yet to tap into in ways never experienced.

It all feels much bigger than me, too.
Something is shifting on a deeper level.

Until next time…

Be well.
Bert 🙏

I could knee-jerk into this.

Feel a bit excited and a bit fearful.

Rattle off something that sounds like reflection but isn’t necessarily “of the moment.”

Not really examined.

Instead, I came to a full stop.

We’re going to read this one phrase at a time.

“What does it feel like…”

Feel?

That’s a body thing.
Not a thinking thing.

And right there, that throws me, albeit blindly.

Because I have spent more than 98.somthing% of my 57 years inside my head.

Very little time in my heart.
Very little time in my body.

So when the question leads with feel, my instinct is to think about a feeling rather than find one.

Slow down.
Search the body.
What’s actually there?

“to imagine…”

Now we’re using the head again.

So the question is asking,

“What does it feel like in your body when your mind imagines something?”

That’s a different question than it first appeared to be.

“the person you truly want to become.”

Here’s where it stops me completely.

If I’m imagining the person I truly want to become…

Then right now, in this moment, I am something else, because I’m not who I want to truly become.

That’s what the question assumes.

You are here.

That person I “truly want to become” is somewhere else.

Out there.

In imagination.

In the future.

Someday.

And someday is the day that never comes.

I want to push back on the entire framing of the question.

I submit that I am not becoming anything.
I am in a continual state of being.
Of existing.

Because I can only be in this moment.

Being in any other place is mental time travel; you aren’t here right now.

Your mind is off on what my father calls a “boondoggle.”

When you think about the future, you are a time traveler.

Your brain leaves “here & now” and goes somewhere that hasn’t happened yet.

Which in most cases means people freaking themselves out about things that may never arrive.

Old Bert lived nearly his entire life in the future.

Pre-suffering bad outcomes to be ready for what may show up; prepare yourself.

Then beating myself up whenever I revisit something that I had the chance to avoid so I can thoroughly whip my own ass into shape (thats what I believe was the motivation)

That was fucking exhausting.

And it didn’t work.

And I’m done with that.

When you think about the past, you’re a time traveler too.

Bemoaning past actions and results that you cannot escape.

There is no Ctrl-Z.

There is no undoing it.

There is no do-over.

It is what it is, and that is that.

Time moves forward whether I’m present or not.

I am being brought through time on a line.

We all are.

We experience time in one dimension, and we cannot escape that until we cease to exist in this carbon-based humanoid form.

What does it feel like right now?

I’m tentatively “Okay.“

My head is metaphorically above water.
Arms and legs underneath, treading.

I’m working to stay up.
Not drowning.
Not swimming freely either.

But above the surface. Working to stay there.

And what would be powerful, what I want to pour my energy into, are things that get people out of their heads.

• Out of their bubbles.

• Out from under their bridge.

• Out of the basement.

• Out of the attic.

• Out of the man cave.

• Out of the she-shed.

Actually out.
Actually connecting.

I was ready to call life quits more than once in the past three years.

And I didn’t.

And I can only be in this moment, and what I do right now determines where I show up next.

So maybe there is a better question than…

Maybe it’s this

Until next time,
Be well.
Bert 🙏

Things that show up after you haven’t seen them for a while.

Things that used to be persistent. Multiple times a day kind of thing.

And then, through work, through time, through whatever combination of grace and effort got you there, they go quiet.

And you forget they exist.

Until they don’t.

...which is unfortunate. But it is what it is.

I’d been feeling great.

Well. My version of great is someone else’s really down day.

But that’s shifting for me. I feel it and I see it.

And I’m glad for that.

So the reminder, in my case, wasn’t about a thing.

No specific object or person or situation.
Because I could insert any focus into this line of thinking.
Any trigger. Any reason.

What it’s actually about is a behavior.

Here’s the behavior in the abstract.

You’re going about your day.
Maybe you have a game plan.
Shit you want to get done.
Or it’s a laissez-faire day; things roll how they roll.

This was not that day.
This was a 35-foot-long list, and I needed to get some shit done.

So when this behavior shows up, number one, it’s annoying in itself.
Just the behavior, before anything else.

Number two, there’s whatever the behavior is focused on.

And then number three, if you’re a lucky chap like myself, you have the metacognitive ability to float your brain outside the whole scenario and watch yourself get fucked over by you.

So. I woke up.

Going about my business. I had my list.
And I read something that, when I reflect on it now, I can see clearly why it triggered me.

But that specific thing isn’t the point.
The point is what happened next.

There was a stimulus. A trigger.

And then there was the response. And I didn’t feel the pause.

I just went…

reactive.

Instantly. Completely.

Like a doctor tapping your knee and watching your leg kick out.
Not a goddamn thing you can do to stop it.
It just goes.

And the response was a typical story.
A fiction.

A manufactured scenario that existed entirely inside my head.
All of it is as true as stories in a Dr. Seuss book.
None of it is true.

...I say that with full respect and props to Dr. Seuss.

I had a trigger. And a response.

With no pause between them.

And it took me down a very typical, very worn path.

This is a path I have walked my whole life.

The trigger can be anything. The behavior can be anything.

The reason for doing the behavior is to “insert whatever you like.”

What I’m talking about is the framework.
The larger architecture of the system at play.

When you’re caught in these thought loops, it’s a high-level system you’re caught inside.

I stayed in that pattern for two hours.

Continuing to tell myself the story.

To the point where part of me was consciously unwilling to take the next step.

I found that interesting.

Fear was getting to drive the bus.

But I consciously took the next step anyway.

And then the one after that.

And it turned out that everything I had dreamt up in those two hours was make-believe.

Complete fiction.

That produced headache, heartache, high blood pressure, and unhappiness for no one but me.

So. After those two hours.

After sitting with the realization that you just did this to yourself.

It feels like you’ve lived an entire day in two hours.
Energetically. Psychologically.

You’re not tired like you slept; you’re tired like you ran a full day completely inside your own skull.

Because it’s a triple whammy.

Getting triggered and pulled in, that’s annoying at a base level.

Then fueling the fire and keeping it going, that’s on you.

And then waking up to it.

Catching yourself.

And then being upset with yourself for beating yourself up.

Think about that for a minute.

You get upset with yourself because you just caught yourself beating yourself up.

You’re the only person involved. And no one is winning.

There are no winners in automatic patterned responses that adversely affect your emotional and psychological being.

If you did this to someone else’s nervous system the way you do it to your own, legally, that might be considered real harassment.

Psychological torture.

What the hell?

That’s what I’m sitting with today.

The reminder that the old behavior still lives in there.
Quieter than it was.
Less frequent. But alive.
Waiting for the right knock on the door.

And the real work isn’t eliminating the trigger.

It’s learning to feel the pause before your knee kicks out.

I’m there. Barely, but there.

And I’m aware of it now in a way I wasn’t before.

And that’s the distance between where I was and where I am.

Which, on a day like today, has to be enough.

There are no winners when you’re the only one in the room.

Be well.

Bert 🙏

It’s primarily about indifference.

What happens when you’re doing the work?
You know you’re doing the work, and you see results in yourself.
People close enough to see you acknowledge the change, the shift.

You’re ready to go.
You’re looking to plug back in.
To the world.
To society.
To the economy.

I had this image come to mind earlier.

I was on a boat. The boat that was my life.
I went through a violent storm and fell off.
Sank lower and lower until I wanted to go lower.
As if an evil part of me was punishing me.

I went to the depths where there was no light.

I was in the abyss.

I became the singularity.

I know what it’s like to have my toes over the edge, looking down into black infinity, ready to take the step.

But I didn’t.

I stuck around.

And I’m ready to go.

It’s a form of punishment.
It feels like it.
Weirdly.

I know it’s not.
But that feeling when you keep showing up day after day after day and nobody responds in the way that takes you that one next step.

That one breadcrumb on the trail.

Let me be clear about something.
Between January and now, my life has changed.

Good things have come into my life through intention and stepping outside my “comfort zone.”

People, places, and things I wouldn’t trade for anything.
They have more value to me than money.

I’ve wept with gratitude to the universe about these things.
They’re very important to me.

And right now they feel incredibly tenuous.

Partly because of my inability to plug into the economy.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

I could build the coolest digital shit this side of planet Earth, and I’m invisible. It’s like I don’t exist.
Yet my stuff is online.

I was one of the first 25 million people on the internet in 1994.
There are billions now. I get it.
And I can’t get a single nibble.

Not one.

It’s as if no tool or technique will work.
As if I’m on some metaphorical blacklist.

I’m doing everything right.
And the universe is not meeting me in that one spot.

This isn’t rejection.

Rejection you can work with.
Rejection has information.

This is indifference.
A silence.
A ghosting.

You build something.
You publish it.
You put yourself out there.
You show up honestly, rawly, completely.

And you get crickets.

I’m not asking for millions.

I’m asking for enough so I don’t have to think about it.
So it’s not a struggle.
So it’s not nonexistent the way it feels right now.

Three years without steady employment.

This May. May 15th, 2023, was when my last gig ended.

I’m exhausted from surviving, not living.

What do you do when you’ve controlled the controllables?
Your effort.
Your attitude.
The energy you’re putting in.

Where the focus goes, the energy flows.

And right now my focus has been on getting dollars in my door.

It isn’t happening.

I feel like I’m in a giant canyon shouting, “Hello…” and I just hear my voice going way off into the distance.

Nothing ever comes back.

Not a fucking sound or a soul.

I’m surfing.

I’m picking my waves, watching the sets come in.

I’m riding them and getting back to shore.

But everybody else is walking home with the money.

And people don’t even see me surfing.

Growing through stillness.

Standing still, yet you’re growing.

Maybe capitalism should take a hint from that one.

So what do you do?

You just keep fucking showing up.

Because you don’t have any other choice.

Well… you do.
But it’s a choice no one wants to take.

And I’m not in that place.
My head isn’t there.
I want to be clear about that.

I’m just in the canyon. Saying hello.

Hearing my own voice go off into the distance.

And showing up again tomorrow anyway.

Because…

Until next time…
Be well.
Bert 🙏

I was born at 11:11pm under a Scorpio moon.

On May 1st at 1:23PM Eastern, the moon returned to Scorpio, the same placement it held when I entered the world in 1969.

And it’s a New Moon in Taurus, my sun sign.

This isn’t coincidence. This is alignment.

Within the first 24 hours of the new moon, the window of maximum manifestation, I faced south at 1:23pm EST and recorded this audio declaration and meditated on my journey. I’m introducing new forms of ceremony and new ways of expression.

---

The Birth Chart Assignment:

Scorpio Moon

Intensity, transformation, seeing what’s beneath the surface

Taurus Sun

Stability, roots, building something solid

Sagittarius Rising

Truth, freedom, no bullshit

--

That’s the cosmic blueprint I’ve been living in for 57 years.

After 5 years of living with my life on fire (22-year marriage collapse, career and financial loss, homelessness, psychiatric hospitalization, and 16 months living in my car), I’m done surviving as a lifestyle.

This is New Bert Time.

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What I’m Declaring:

I’m done being the minimum of myself to be the maximum for others.

I’m done editing out the hard parts to make other people comfortable.

I’m done waiting for the right time, the right conditions, and the right approval.

This is the right time.

And I’m moving forward whether anyone else understands it or not.

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Scorpio moons don’t do gentle rebirths. We burn it all down first. And I’ve been in that fire for five years.

But the fire doesn’t destroy you. It reveals what’s underneath.

And what’s underneath is someone who’s done hiding the hard parts.

Someone who’s done performing fine.

Someone who’s done waiting for permission.

If you’re in your own fire, if you’re burning down who you were to make space for who you’re becoming, this is for you.

New Bert Time.

Subscribe if you’re ready to stop hiding your own hard parts.

This work is about to get even more honest.

What’s Next:

This video is a new angle.
Beyond the essays, I’m expanding into the audio and video space.

Stay tuned.

Be well.
Bert 🙏

Support This Work

I’ve never liked my birthday.
Not because of the number.

Because the whole idea of celebrating “me” required the belief I was worth celebrating.

And for most of my life, I didn’t.

So I’d show up.
Sit there.
Perform grateful.

Go home relieved it was over.

Performative birthdays.

Brings to mind “Unhappy Birthday” by The Smiths.

Ironically, I love singing that song ON my birthday.
I’m a glutton for self-torture.

This one is different.

Not because turning 57 feels like some kind of arrival.

It doesn’t.

But because for the first time in as long as I can remember, I know exactly what I’m graduating from.

• Husband.

• Father.

• Coach.

• Designer.

• Family man.

I didn’t lose a title. I lost all of them.

At once. Without asking.

• A 22-year marriage.

• My family.

• My job.

• My finances.

• My home.
  

Each one of those wasn’t just a thing I had.

Each one was a thing that I was.

There was no independent self.

I was either fulfilling my role or somewhere on the depression spectrum.

And when the titles and roles went, I didn’t know what was left.

Other than being left thinking…

“Who the fuck am I now?”

For a long time, I wasn’t sure who I was.

And that led to feeling non-existent.

”The Snow Globe Times.”

When I could pass between worlds fluidly.

The unknown aspect with this level of loss is the work of rebuilding leaves no visible output.

It lives in the cloud and the ether.

In therapy sessions.
In 3am journal entries.
In the slow, excruciating excavation of who you are when every sense of identity has been stripped away.

People look at you and see someone “doing nothing.”

Someone “comfortable.”

Someone who must “enjoy where they are,” because why else would they still be there?

That’s the cruelty of invisible progress.

You can be making the most important breakthroughs of your life and have it read as laziness.

As “avoidance.”

As “enjoying the situation.”

I want the fuck out of here.
I have wanted out since day one.
I dislike this liminal space I’ve been in for 5 years.
And I am closer than I have ever been to getting out.

I spent 55 years surviving, not living.

Anxious. Afraid. Head somewhere else.

Not present for my own life.

I look at photos from years I don’t remember to see what I missed because I wasn’t completely mentally there.

My body showed up.

The rest of me was already worrying…
about the next thing.
regretting the last thing,
earning conditional love,
staying small,
keeping the peace,
always making busy,
thinking about everything & nothing,
preparing and abandoning,
assessing and discounting,
and in dire emergencies,
creating whatever is needed to keep the “surface of the pond” like glass.

I am done.

Done ‘surviving’ as a way of living.

Done putting myself on the back burner so someone else doesn’t have to feel something uncomfortable.

Done performing fine when I am anything but.

I am off the shelf.
Off the backlog.
Off the back burner.

I am now the priority project.

Every day.
All day.
Full stop.

This birthday isn’t a number.
It’s a graduation.

No ceremony.
No cap and gown.
No dean handing me anything.

So I’m printing my own.

The curriculum was

• lose everything,

  • including yourself.

• Find out what’s left.

• Figure out if that’s enough to build from.

• Decide that it is,

  • even when the universe hasn’t confirmed it yet.

I passed.

Barely. But here.

A crack is what people imagine when they picture someone ending up homeless.

A gap in the system.
A failure point.
Someone who slipped through because the net had a hole.

“Falling through the cracks” narrative is comfortable because it implies the net mostly works. That the people who fall are the exception. That it couldn’t happen to you because you’re not standing near a crack.

A table is different.

A table means you were on something solid.
Something you built, earned, stood on for years. And then…

…not because of a crack, not because of a single failure, a row of dominoes fell. One thing knocked into another knocked into another knocked into another. And you went off the edge.

Not through a gap in the floor, not through a crack.

Off a table.

And now you’re on the floor, looking up at the surface you used to stand on, trying to figure out how to get back up there.

And the people still on the table are going about their day.

And nobody is extending a hand.

That’s not a “falling in the cracks” story.
That’s a “falling off the table” story.

Mine is a table story.

And so are most of the ones I heard in those parking lots.

There’s a version of homelessness that people can picture.

It’s the version that confirms what they already think.
The addiction.
The mental illness that was there long before the crisis.
The person who made bad choices at every fork in the road until the road ran out.

I’m not saying those stories don’t exist.
I’m saying they are not the majority of what I saw.

What I saw, night after night, parking lot after parking lot, was people who looked like me.

Middle-aged. Capable. Regular people who’d held jobs — real jobs, skilled jobs, jobs that required expertise and responsibility and years to develop.

People who’d owned things.
Built things.
Contributed things.

People who had, at some point recently, done everything right.

And then the dominoes fell.

Divorce and job loss in the same month. Medical debt that took the savings and then the apartment. A company that closed, a lease that ended, a safety net that turned out to be thinner than anyone told them. Five stressors arriving simultaneously when the research says even one is enough to break most people.

I met PhDs in those parking lots.
I met veterans.
I met people whose LinkedIn profiles, had they been able to afford the subscription, would have looked impressive.

They weren’t broken people who ended up in cars.

They were people who got knocked off a table and couldn’t find the ladder back up.

The outside world doesn’t see this.

And I’m not being harsh about that, I didn’t see it either.

How could I?

You can’t see it from inside the snow globe.

The glass between you and the parking lot is transparent enough that you can look through it and still not see what’s on the other side.

What I know now, what the car taught me that no amount of empathy from the inside could have, is that the people on the floor are often invisible in a specific and particularly cruel way.

They look fine.

They’ve learned to move through the world without the tells.
Without the smell, without the erratic behavior, without the visible signs that the tidy mental image of homelessness requires.

They’ve learned, by necessity, by survival instinct, by the daily performance of normalcy that costs enormous energy, how to appear as though they’re still on the table.

I was one of them.

You could sit across from me at a coffee shop and have no idea.
I made sure of it.

Not out of shame, out of practicality.

The moment people know, the way they treat you changes.

The jobs stop.
The opportunities close.
The invitations disappear.

Society has a way of deciding you’re not worth the risk once it knows you’re on the floor.

So you perform the table.
Indefinitely.
Exhaustingly.

While inside, you’re fighting a war that nobody gives you a Purple Heart for.

Here’s what I want to say to the people who are still on the floor.

Not the people who are watching from the table, they have their own work to do and I’ll get to that. But the ones who are where I was.

Who are doing the performance.
Who are moving the car, door-dashing for gas money, sleeping diagonal in the back seat, waking up every morning to here we go again.

You are not the crack.

You are not a cautionary tale or a character flaw or a statistical aberration. You are a person who got knocked off something solid by a set of circumstances that would have knocked most people off.

The difference between you and the people on the table is not virtue or intelligence or work ethic.

It’s dominoes. That’s it.

And here is the other thing:

Ready is a real thing.
You can be genuinely, structurally, fully ready to get back on the table.

Inner world repaired, skills intact, capacity restored, and still be on the floor because the ladder hasn’t appeared yet.

That is not failure.
That is timing.
That is a system that doesn’t extend hands easily to people it has already categorized.

I know because I’m there.

Inner world: ready.
Both feet: not quite under me yet.
Ladder: still looking.

And I’m not telling you that to be discouraging.
I’m telling you because the narrative that says if you just work hard enough and believe hard enough the ladder will appear is, with respect, incomplete.

Sometimes the ladder is the part that requires help from outside yourself. And asking for it, finding the people who will give it, is not weakness.

It is the next step.

I want to go back to the table for a second.

The people still on it.

Most of them are good people.
Most of them are not callous or indifferent, they just can’t see what they can’t see.

The glass is real.
And I’m not in the business of blaming people for the limits of their vantage point.

But I will say this:

If you are on the table and you know someone who got knocked off, a former colleague, an old friend, a person in your network whose posts have gone quiet and whose availability has become conspicuously flexible, look more carefully.

The performance is convincing.
Deliberately so.

But underneath it, they are treading water.
They are doing the math at the grocery store.
They are moving their car.
They are waking up to here we go again and going to sleep to please let this be the last one.

You don’t have to fix it.

But you could extend a hand.
A real one.
Not the sympathy hand, the here’s a connection, here’s a reference, here’s a door I can open hand.
The practical hand.

That’s what actually helps people get back on the table.

Not faith.
Not hope.
A hand.

This is the end of the three-part series.

For now.

There are a couple hundred transcripts sitting in a folder I recorded during the year in the car. Field notes from a territory most people never see. I haven’t opened most of them since I made them.

I will.

When I do, there will be more pieces.

More pieces means more of this, the thing that Barely, But Here was built to do.

Say the parts that most people edit out.
Say them clearly.
Say them for the people who lived it and need to hear it named, and for the people who didn’t and need to understand what they’re looking at when they see someone on the floor.

This is hard-won wisdom from a not-fun place.

The car was the most not-fun place I’ve ever been.

And it gave me everything I needed to finally find my way back to the table.

I’m climbing.

Be well.
Bert.

Series:

1. Part 1: Signal — The clarity.
   The snow globe. What you see from outside the glass.

2. Part 2: 3am — The cost.
   The nervous system. The body keeping score.

3. Part 3: The Table — The people.
   The system. The hand nobody extends. (this piece)

Well-lit.
Quiet neighborhood.

The kind of place that feels safe because nothing has happened there yet.

I’d slept there probably forty times over the course of the year 2024, more than anywhere else.

It was one of the reliable ones.

You develop a mental map when you live in your car.

• Which lots are monitored.

• Which ones have security that actually patrols versus security that just exists on a sign.

• Which neighborhoods leave you alone.

• Which ones call it in.

Forty times in this lot.

Nothing.

Until 3am on a Tuesday.

Or a Wednesday. I honestly don’t remember which.

I was asleep.

Diagonal across the back seat of a Volkswagen Golf — the only position that accommodated five feet ten inches of human being. Head near the rear window. Blackout screens on all the glass, windows cracked just enough for air.

From the outside, the car looked unoccupied. That was the point.

I was deep enough asleep that I didn’t hear the footsteps. Didn’t hear the car pull in. Didn’t hear anything until the sound hit the glass right next to my head.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Hard. Deliberate. A cop’s baton on a car window sounds different from anything else. There’s a specificity to it. An authority. Your nervous system recognizes it before your brain does.

I came awake in a single violent second.

And then I did something I didn’t decide to do.

I didn’t move. Didn’t make a sound. Didn’t breathe louder than I had to. My body went completely still and completely quiet before I’d had a single conscious thought about what was happening.

Survival instinct is not a metaphor.

It is a physical fact.
Your body has protocols your brain doesn’t get a vote on.

“Hey. Hey.”

I had to answer.
So I did.
Kept my voice flat.

Yes.

You can’t be here.
We see you again, you’re getting a ticket.
Consider this your warning.

Footsteps.
Car doors.
Engine.
The sound of them pulling away.

And then silence.

I lay there in the dark and waited for my body to get the message that the danger had passed.

It didn’t get the message.

My nervous system was completely lit up.

Heart rate, breath, the specific electric feeling in your hands and chest that is your body preparing to fight something or run from something when there is nothing to fight and nowhere to run.

Dysregulation.

That’s the clinical word.
Your system activates and then can’t find the off switch.

I didn’t sleep again that night.

I lay there until the sky started to grey, then I drove to Starbucks and sat there until I could think straight.

Here is what I want you to understand about that night.

It wasn’t the worst night.
Not even close.

It was a Tuesday.
Or a Wednesday.

It was a cop doing his job, technically, in a system that has quietly decided that not having a home is a condition that requires management.

It is, functionally, illegal to be homeless in most American cities.

In some of the statute books, in certain states and communitites.
And put into practice.

I was on the receiving end.

• In the 3am knock.

• In the consider this your warning.

• In the ordinances about vehicles occupied overnight.

• In the culture that looks at a person sleeping in a car and sees a problem to be moved rather than a person to be helped.

The thing about living in a state of chronic threat is that it changes you structurally.

Not emotionally. Structurally.

Your nervous system is not a feeling.

It’s a biological operating system.

And like any operating system, it adapts to its environment.

Run it in survival mode long enough and it stops knowing how to run any other way.

I woke up in that car every morning knowing I didn’t know where I was sleeping that night.

That’s not a thought you have and move on from.

That’s a low-grade alarm running in the background of every single thing you do.

Every decision.
Every interaction.
Every moment of stillness that your body won’t let you have because stillness stopped feeling safe a long time ago.

The body keeps score.

That’s not a metaphor I invented. It’s the title of a book about trauma.
And it is a medical fact.

Every night in the car, every 3am knock, every morning of here we go again — the body was writing it down.

By the time I got out of the car, I had CPTSD.

Not as a diagnosis I was chasing.

As a description of what was already true.

The score the body had been keeping had a name.

I want to sit with that for a second because I think it’s easy to read a sentence like that and absorb it as information rather than feel it as weight.

Each one asking for something that didn’t come.

I’m not telling you this to perform suffering.

I’m telling you because there is a version of this story that skips the nights, that jumps from I was homeless to I survived and makes it sound like a chapter that closed cleanly.

It didn’t close cleanly.

The nights are still in my body.
The 3am is still in there somewhere.
The specific sound of a baton on glass…
I don’t need to hear it again to know exactly what it would do to me.

That’s what trauma is. Not a memory.

A resident.

Here’s the other thing the nights taught me.

There are a lot of people in those parking lots.

Not just drifters, not just addicts, not just the people that the tidy mental image of homelessness conjures up. PhDs. Veterans. People who ran businesses.

I talked to some of them.

We recognized each other the way people do when they’re in the same situation, not by looking homeless, because most of us were working very hard not to look homeless, but by the small tells.

Where you park.

When you move.

See the same people, at the same places, at odd hours.

The particular way you hold your coffee at Starbucks at 6am like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

And the difference matters, because a crack implies the system mostly works with some gaps.

A table implies you were on something solid that you got knocked off of.

And now you’re on the floor, looking up, trying to find a way back up, and nobody is extending a hand.

That’s Part 3. The table, the ladder, and the people who need one.

For now I’ll leave you with this:

I got out.

Not cleanly.
Not quickly.
Not without cost.

The CPTSD came with me.
The hypervigilance came with me.
The way my body still sometimes runs its 3am protocols in perfectly safe situations, that came with me too.

But I got out.

And I am not broken.

Dysregulated, for a while.
Genuinely and profoundly dysregulated.

But dysregulation has a way back.

I know because I found it.

The way back is long.
And it requires more than willpower.

It requires someone who understands that the nervous system is not a character flaw, it’s a biological response to an unlivable situation, and that healing it means teaching it, slowly and patiently, that the threat is gone.

The threat is gone.

Most days I believe that.

The nights are getting easier.

Be well.
Bert

If this landed — if you’ve had your own version of a 3am knock — you probably know someone else who needs to read this.

Barely But Here is where the parts most people edit out get said out loud.
If that work matters to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
No perks. Just the work, and knowing you’re helping it continue.

Subscribe now

Not a breakdown. Not a revelation.
Not some cinematic moment where the clouds part and the universe hands you a lesson on a card.

It’s quieter than that.

What happens is the noise stops.

And in the silence, real silence, the kind that only comes when there’s nothing left to lose and nowhere to be and no one expecting anything from you, you start to see.

Clearly. Maybe for the first time.

I lived in my car for over a year.

A 2019 Volkswagen e-Golf.
Drove across the United States twice, all electric.

I’m five foot ten, sleeping on the diagonal across the back because there was no other way to fit inside.

Blackout screens on the windows.
A crack of fresh air on each side.
Food is stored in the back, dry, non-perishable, and rationed.
Ten dollars or less most nights.
Some nights nothing.

I’m not telling you this for sympathy.

I’m telling you because what that year gave me, alongside the CPTSD, alongside the suicidal ideation, alongside the daily terror of not knowing where I’d sleep that night, was a pair of glasses.

Glasses I can never take off.

And what I see through them is something most people will never see.

Not because they’re not capable.
But because they’re inside the snow globe.
And you can’t see the glass from inside the glass.

Let me explain the snow globe.

Picture the world most people live in:
the job,
the apartment,
the routine,
the coffee order,
the commute,
and the weekend plans.

It’s a contained world.

Warm. Familiar.
Self-reinforcing.

Now picture a glass shell around all of it.

Inside the shell, you can move freely.
You have agency.
You have choices.
You have the low hum of stability that you’ve had so long you’ve stopped noticing it, the way you stop hearing the refrigerator until it turns off.

When I lost everything, I got pushed through the glass.

And for a long time, I could move back through it when I needed to, seamlessly and invisibly, molecules slipping right through the shell.

Nobody knew.

I could walk into a Starbucks and look like everyone else.
I could hold a conversation.
I could perform normalcy with the precision of someone who’d practiced it for decades.

But I was on the outside.
And being on the outside changes what you see.

Here’s the first thing you notice:

Nobody means what they say.

Not in a sinister way. Not deliberately.
Just, automatically.

“How you doing?”

“Good.”

No pause.
No actual check.
No space between the question and the answer because there was never any intention of answering it.

It’s a script. A social handshake.
A sound people make when they pass each other.

I’d always known this intellectually.
But from outside the snow globe, I could see it.

The gap between the signal and the response, the tiny space where actual honesty could live if anyone wanted it to, is just gone.
Automated.
Closed.

It’s not a criticism.
It’s just what visibility does.

It shows you the machinery.

The second thing you notice is what people take for granted.

And I don’t mean this as judgment.

I mean it as inventory.

The ability to plan beyond 48 hours is gone when you don’t know where you’re sleeping tonight.

The ability to make a decision at the grocery store without doing math that determines whether you eat tomorrow is gone when you’ve got seven dollars and you’re choosing between protein and hydration.

The ability to sleep through the night without a nightstick tapping your window at 3am.

That one happened to me in a parking lot I’d used thirty, forty times.
A parking lot I thought was safe.

Bright lights, quiet neighborhood, no trouble.

I was asleep.
Diagonal across the back.
Deep enough that when the tapping started, sharp, hard, a cop’s baton against glass, my nervous system went to full emergency before I was even awake.

“Hey. You can’t be here. If we see you again, you’re getting a ticket.”

Car doors.
Engine.
Gone.

I lay there until my body stopped shaking.

Then I lay there some more.
Then I stayed awake until Starbucks opened and spent the rest of the day there.

And I thought, "It is illegal to not have a home.”

Not literally. But functionally.
Practically. You can’t stay still.
You can’t exist in public space without a transaction.

You can’t be visible without permission.

That’s a thing most people will never know they don’t know.

The woulda-coulda-shoulda left first.

That surprised me.

I expected the car to be a loop of regret, every decision that led there, every fork in the road I’d taken to be wrong.

And for a while, early on, it was.

But at some point that tape just... stopped.

Not because things were fine.
Because there was no bandwidth for it.

Survival doesn’t leave room for the retrospective.

You wake up and you deal with today.
What you can eat. Where you can be.
How you keep the phone charged because the phone is your connection to any work, any money, any lifeline at all.

And something quietly remarkable happens in that space:

You find out who you are without the story.

Not who you were.
Not who you’re trying to become.

Just who you actually are when there’s nothing propping you up, nothing to perform, no one to manage, and no identity to protect.

It was the first time in a long time I met myself without the backpack on.

I want to be careful here.

I’m not romanticizing this.
There is nothing romantic about not knowing if you’re safe tonight.
About doing the math on seven dollars.
About the specific shame of walking into a Starbucks to use the bathroom and charge your phone and hoping nobody looks at you too long.

But the clarity is real.
The merit badge is real.

I earned a way of seeing the world that cannot be taught, cannot be shortcut, and cannot be explained to anyone who hasn’t lived it.

I can describe it and I’m trying to right now, but a description is a map, and a map is not the territory.

The territory is the car.
The diagonal.
The blackout screens.
The 3am tap on the glass.

And the extraordinary, undeniable, almost absurd gift of finally seeing the snow globe from outside.

There’s more to say about the car.

A lot more.

There are a couple hundred transcripts sitting in a folder I haven’t opened since I recorded them.

Field notes from inside a year most people will never live.

I’ll get there.
Carefully.
When the time is right.

But for now, this is the first thing the car taught me.

Noise is not normal.

You just forget what silence sounds like until everything gets taken away.

And in the silence, if you survive it, there’s a signal.

Pure.
Unfiltered.
Signal.

Be well.
Bert.

If you’ve ever felt like you were watching the world through glass or been pushed through it, this series is for you.

“Barely, But Here” is where the parts most people edit out get said aloud.

And while there is a free subscription, if that means something to you, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

No perks. No tiers. Just the work, and knowing you’re helping it continue.

Subscribe now

Make a One-Time Donation

What The Car Taught Me, a 3-Part Series:

• Part 1: Signal: This piece. The clarity. The snow globe. The merit badge.

• Part 2: 3am: the visceral piece. The cop. The parking lot. The body keeps score.

• Part 3: The Table: The systemic piece. The PhDs in cars. The ladder no one extends. Bridges into Skilled Invisibility.

  ---

The first one almost kills you.

You pay for it with everything you have:
your savings,
your sleep,
your sense of self,
and your address.

For me, it took my home. My income. My footing. It put me in a car for over a year and handed me CPTSD as a going-away gift.

I paid that bill.

I sat with suicidal ideation every single day for a month and a half while living out of that car.

Every morning I woke up and thought, “Here we go again.”

Every night I thought, "Please let this be the last night of this.”

It never was.

I paid that bill too.

And then, once the worst had passed, once the therapy was working, once I could feel something other than dread again, the second bill arrived.

It was bigger.

Incomprehensibly bigger. Like the difference between a dollar and a trillion dollars. You cannot hold both numbers in your head at the same time. The scale breaks your imagination.

Nobody warned me.

There’s a word people use when they talk about going through hard things.

It’s everywhere. It’s on posters and in LinkedIn posts and in TED Talks, and it’s become the word we use when we want to give someone credit for surviving without having to actually look at what surviving cost them.

I’m done with that word.

Resilience is peewee soccer.

You show up.
You get a trophy.
And nobody keeps score.

What I’m talking about is something heavier.

Sharper. Fortitude.

The kind of grit that isn’t a bumper sticker is the thing that gets you moving when your body has nothing left and your brain is filing paperwork to give up.

The only reason you take the next step is because you’ve forgotten how to stop.

That’s not resilience.

That’s survival.
And survival is not living.

The gap between the two, between still standing and actually living, isn’t a crack in the sidewalk.

It’s like the Grand Canyon.

Here’s the image I keep coming back to.

You’ve spent your whole life “climbing a mountain.”

Decades of work and love.
Real work. Real love.
The kind that leaves lifelong memories.

You can see the summit.

You’re close, closer than you’ve ever been.

And then something knocks you off your feet.

You slide on your back down the ice.
All the way to the bottom.
Every inch of it.

And when you stop sliding, you lie there for a minute.
Maybe longer.

And then, if you survived it, and not everyone does, you get up.

You brush yourself off.
And you start the climb again.

You don’t get to say, "At least I’m young; I have time.”

You don’t get the cushion of decades ahead to absorb the fall.

You just get the climb.

Again.

With older legs and a body that remembers what the fall felt like.

I’m in the canyon now.

Not the fall.
Not the car.
Not the darkest part.
That’s behind me.

But the canyon, the “Grand Canyon” of rebuilding a life, is where I am.

And I will tell you something nobody tells you about this place:

No GPS.
No satellite signal.
No cell coverage.
No one’s been here and left trail markers.

The people who made it out either can’t explain what they did or aren’t talking.

The people on the rim, the ones who never fell, they lean over the edge and shout helpful things.

Have faith.

Keep hope alive.

You’ve got this.

And I know they mean it.
I know the sentiment is real.
But when you’re down here, really down here, those words have been said so many times they stop meaning anything.

You say “faith” five hundred times in the dark, and it becomes a sound.
Syllables.
Gobbledygook.

“Hope” was another word that stopped working.
For a long time, it was just a sound people made.

What got me up wasn’t faith or hope.

It was habit.
It was stubbornness.
It was one foot in front of the other because the alternative was unacceptable even when it felt preferable.

Here’s what I didn’t expect about the other side of survival:

I’d have to refill.

Not reinvent. Not rebrand. Not pivot.

Refill.

The tank went dry, keeping me alive.
And now I have to figure out what goes back in.
And more importantly, what doesn’t.

Some things, I’ve discovered, I don’t want back.

I don’t want the low-level hum of anxiety that used to be my baseline. That constant, under-the-skin sense of dread that I thought was just how life felt. It wasn’t. That was fear. Chronic, managed, unacknowledged fear.

I don’t want the habit of swallowing my opinions to keep other people comfortable. Of biting my tongue because someone might get their feelings hurt.

Life is short, and I’ve been through too much to fold my truth into a shape that fits more neatly in someone else’s hand.

I don’t want the backpack.

Thirty, forty years of repression, stored stories, inherited shame, and carried weight.

I know what I feel like without it now.
I’ve walked around without it.
It feels like being several inches taller.

It’s staying off.

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What I do want back is simple.

Rest.

I haven’t rested, deeply rested, without the voice in my head screaming, "How can you sit down when you don’t have a floor under you?"—in years.

Maybe longer.

The fatigue I’m carrying right now is bone marrow deep.
It’s not tiredness or fatigue. It’s full depletion.
The kind that sleep alone doesn’t fix.

I want to refill slowly.
With the right things.

With rest and work that means something, and people who don’t require me to perform wellness that I don’t feel.

The strange thing about where I am now is this:

My inner world is ready.

I can feel it. The internal machinery has been repaired, not perfectly, not completely, but enough.

Enough to want things again.
Enough to feel something when good things happen.
Enough to plan beyond 2 days.

The outer world isn’t ready for me yet.

Or maybe it is and I just can’t see it from inside the canyon.

Either way, I haven’t had a day off since before COVID.

Not really. The day my last gig ended, I was looking the next morning.

I’ve been working every weekend, every gap, every quiet moment, because quiet moments used to feel dangerous, like the silence right before something else collapsed.

I’m still working.

Still climbing.

Still here.

This is the part that gets me most some days.

I’ve had seven of the top ten life stressors hit me simultaneously.

• Divorce.

• Job loss.

• Financial hardships.

• Family breakup.

• Grieving the loss of a living spouse.

• Homelessness.

• Ongoing depressive mental health crises.

• Mental hospital stay.

• Loss of identity.

• Social isolation.

• Socioeconomic exclusion and ageism.

And I’m still standing.

Not on solid ground yet.
Not with both feet under me.
But standing.

When people say, "Have faith" or "You've got this.”
I know what they mean.
I feel the care in it.

But I also want to say I'm not doing this on faith.

I’m doing this on whatever the word is that's
harder than resilience,
heavier than hope,
and older than either one.

The word that has no poster.

The word that just gets up.

I’m in the canyon.

There’s no map.
No signal.

But I know which way is up.

That’s enough for today.

Take care of yourselves.

Be well.
Bert.

I’m leaving New York in two months.

Heading back to Colorado.

I’ve been there before, during some of the hardest chapters of my life.

Colorado is where I came off the road.

Where I went from living in my car for nearly sixteen months straight to having a roof over my head for the first time consistently in over a year.

I remember driving across the desert, something wrong with the car, a U-Haul trailer behind me, three hundred miles of open road between me and the next version of my life.

That was the end of one thing and the beginning of another.

This feels similar.

Different variables.
Same energy.

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What I’m Bringing Back

The person who left Colorado and eventually landed in New York?

Gone.

Old Bert is gone. I’m not being dramatic about that. I mean it structurally.

The version of me that arrived in New York,
still not well, still not through it,
stalled in ways I couldn’t fully see at the time,
that’s not who’s making this trip.

What I’m bringing back this time:

• Being grounded.

• Courage.

• Determination.

• Persistence

• Direction.

• Something to work toward.

• Someone to share the experience of creating it with.

And something I didn’t have before, a bit of optimism that isn’t forced.

Not performed optimism.

Not things will probably work out optimism.

The quiet kind.
The kind that comes from having data.

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What I’m Leaving Behind

I wasn’t well.
I wasn’t through it.
And New York, for all its energy,
all its proximity to family,
all its familiar geography,
didn’t help me get through it faster.

If anything, I stalled.
Stopped progressing.
Took steps backward in ways I only understand now, with distance.

What I’m leaving behind is that version of stuck.

The poverty mindset.

The money is scarce frequency I’ve been living on for years, not as a character flaw, but as a nervous system adaptation to years of actual scarcity.

It gets wired in.
It runs in the background.
It colors everything.

I’m leaving that behind.

Or at least, I’m leaving with the conscious intention to leave it behind.

Which is how all real leaving works.

You don’t wait until it’s gone.
You let it go, and in letting go you let it do some of the work.

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What I Actually Need

I’m going to say the obvious thing because it needs to be said plainly.

What I need most right now,
more than a new perspective,
more than more hours of reflection,
more than any internal shift I could work toward,
is financial abundance.

I know how that sounds.

Shallow.
Materialistic.
Like I’m missing the point of everything I’ve been building toward.

I’m not.

Here’s what financial stability actually is when you’ve lived without it for as long as I have:

• It’s foundation.

• It’s the thing that stops the worry loop from running 24 hours a day.

• It’s what makes everything else,

  • the writing,

  • the work,

  • the connection,

  • the showing up fully, actually possible.

I’ve been collecting as much of my experience and journet as depression allowed.

I’ve been doing this work in survival mode for three years.

This is my 4th, FOURTH, try at something to communicate all my weird shit.

Imagine what it looks like when survival mode is finally, actually off.

I'm interested, because I haven’t the faintest.

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The Shape of What’s Coming

Colorado at the end of May.
A week or two to get settled.

Then a trip at the end of june, something which I’ll share more about later

A new collaboration.
A new chapter.
A new version of this life taking shape in real time.

Longmont is temporary.

I know that.
It’s a waypoint, and a good one.

Near good people,
near mountains,
near everything I need to stabilize and launch from.

The last time I left New York for somewhere new, it was 1993.

I was headed to California in May.

Twenty-three years old.
No idea what was coming.

Thirty-three years later, in May, same energy.

Different Bert.
Better Bert.
Ready Bert.

Heading back.

More on all of this soon.

The move, the collaboration, what’s being built.

Thanks for being here for this part of the journey.

Be well.
Bert

I had to contemplate that for a second.

Because I knew the answer.

The honest answer is unexpected by most people.

No.

I upset me, or I upset myself.

What That Actually Means

Here’s the thing about triggers.

They don’t arrive from outside.

They get activated from outside.
by a word, a pitch, a piece of information,
or something someone puts out in the world
that lands on you in a certain way.

But the trigger itself?

Already in there.
Already loaded.
Waiting for the right key.

So when the key turned, when I heard something that my brain, on autopilot, immediately filed as rejection, the feeling that followed wasn’t caused by the other person.

I caused it.

By my interpretation.
My filing system.
My ancient, deeply worn pattern of receiving certain kinds of information and knowing immediately, automatically, without choosing it, exactly what category it belongs in.

Rejection.
Loss.
The potential for something deeper, suddenly vanished.

That’s mine.
That’s my internal dialogue.
It’s the storyteller whose interests and motivations conflict with mine.
That’s always been and will be mine.

And owning it, not as self-blame, but as self-agency, is the whole game.

The Ride

I’m going to walk you through what the insides of that day actually looked like.

Not the clean version. The real one.

It started with something I heard. I needed to hear it twice to make sure I heard clearly. I did.

And from that moment of confirmation, what followed was five hours of this:

• Crying.

• An entirely incomprehensible and illogical experience.

• Feeling a profound sense of loss beyond my comprehension.

• Feeling the loss of something ephemeral

  • The potentiality for something is lost.

  • A deeper connection.

  • The rare kind.

  • The Mariana Trench kind of deep.

• The kind that makes you wonder how long you’ve lived life without feeling anything like it.

• And realize that you’re certain you’ve never felt anything near it in your life.

That’s what I was grieving.
Not a fact.

And the grief was real.

It's completely real, and the potentiality is also real.

Share Barely, But Here.

The Old Pattern Shows Its Face

Here’s what the wake-up slap did.

It woke up a pattern as old as my memories.

Reading any information in certain emotional contexts as pure rejection.

Defaulting there.
Automatically.
Without passing go.

KneeHammerKick.

Nothing between them.

Simply:

1. Input received.

2. Rejection confirmed.

3. Loss initiated.

That’s the pattern, and that’s what showed its face.

And here’s the part that’s both the hardest and the most useful thing about having done this work.

When you have heightened awareness around something like this, the contrast when it fires is overwhelming.

Because you can see it happening.
You can name it mid-ride.
You can walk it backward to the root in real time.

And none of that makes it hurt any less in the moment.

It just means you don’t stay lost in it.

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The Soldier on the Beach

By the time I was out walking, attempting to ground myself, I envisioned this scene.

A soldier on a beach. Crawling forward.
People are trying to pick him off with gunfire.

Today felt like a graze.

Not a direct hit.
A little sting.
Maybe a little cut.
Maybe a little blood.

But not down.

I'm still moving.

And that’s the thing about working at this long enough: the hits don’t stop coming.

The world doesn’t suddenly start being gentle because you’ve earned it.

But the recovery time changes.

Five hours used to be five weeks.
Five weeks used to be five months.

The hits land. The pattern fires.
If you've done the work, the tools are in you, not just in a workbook.

You find the beat.
You pause.
You choose your response.
And you keep moving.

The Sticky Notes

I want to leave you with something that came to me on that walk.

Imagine you’re holding a stack of sticky notes.

Every time you say “I feel…”

• I feel rejected.
  Peel one off. Put it down.

• I feel loss.
  Peel one off. Put it down.

• I feel like something was taken from me.
  Peel one off. Put it down.

Keep going until the stack is empty.

Now look at all those sticky notes on the floor.

Every single one of them is a label.
And every label is an attachment.
And every attachment is to an outcome.

The outcome you wanted.
The outcome that didn’t happen.
The outcome that your nervous system had begun building a life around before the information even finished landing.

Here’s the thing about attachment to outcomes:

You are perpetuating a cycle of self-destruction.

The outcome you want so badly doesn’t happen.
Because you’re mentally attached to that outcome so badly.

Because the sticky notes are already written, placed, and telling the story.

The suffering comes.
The mental torture comes.

And the invitation, the challenging, simple, non-negotiable invitation, is to release how badly you want that outcome.

Not to stop caring.
Not to become indifferent.
Not to become cold and dissociated.

But to hold it lightly enough that if it doesn’t arrive, you won’t be left standing in a room full of sticky notes, reading your handwriting, and wondering why you harmed yourself again.

It took me a lot to learn that.

A lot of hurt.
A lot of loss.
A lot of reflection in places I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

But here it is.

Lightly held.
Outcome released.
Still moving.

Today was a motherfucker.

And I’m still here.

Be well.
Bert

previous post, context for the trigger

on the beat between stimulus and response

on agency and the closed loop

on head vs. heart

I found an article.

Not looking for it.

Just there it was.

I started reading.

And something happened that I don’t have a clean word for yet.

The closest I’ve come is this:

Emotional intoxication.

That’s what the first few days felt like.

Blown over.

My mind triggered like a squirrel's, checking every stone, every leaf in the garden, going everywhere at once, unable to settle.

In the best possible way.

The Tower

Here’s something I haven’t written about directly yet.

Over the years, through everything, I built something around my heart.

Not metaphorically small.

A granite tower.
Full height.
Complete with a moat.
Crocodiles in the moat.

I built it deliberately, incrementally, one stone at a time.

Because the alternative, leaving the heart exposed to what was happening outside it, was not survivable.

So I built the tower.

I got very good at living in it.

I learned to be present, warm, connected, and even generous, all from inside the tower, without ever actually opening the gate.

The castle and the moat stayed intact.

The heart stayed in the back room.

Safe. Managed. Unexposed.

And then.

Without a single conscious decision, without a plan or a strategy or a risk assessment, the drawbridge came down.

And I went running across it.

The Head vs. The Heart

My entire life has been head-dominant.

The head is the one in charge.

The little scientist is sitting in a chair with controls, orchestrating all the human moves, like something out of a movie.

Running the patterns.
Recognizing the signals.
Keeping everything categorized and filed and manageable.

Whereas the heart has always played second fiddle.

Not because I don’t have one.

Because leading with it never felt safe.

So here’s what was different this time.

This wasn’t the head.

The head wasn’t consulted.
The head didn’t run its pattern recognition.
The head didn’t file anything or assess anything or weigh the variables.

This was something else entirely, something that arrived already decided, already certain, already in motion before I knew I was moving.

Heart dominant.

For possibly the first time in my adult life.

And I have no language for it yet.
Not complete language.
Which tells me everything I need to know about where it lives.

Technicolor

The best way I can describe the last few weeks is this.

You know the moment in The Wizard of Oz, the shift from black and white to color?

Dorothy stepping in the ruby slippers, catching the light for the first time?

That.
That’s the closest visual I have.

Everything that was flat and muted and gray in life, not dramatically, not all at once, but gradually, over years of just getting through suddenly had color in it again.

Not just warmth.
Technicolor.

The contrast was overwhelming.
Is overwhelming.

Because here’s the honest part:

Maybe longer.

The nervous system that had been calibrated for survival,
for gray,
for managed,
for safe,
suddenly had to handle something it hadn’t processed in years.

My nervous system didn’t really know what to do with it.

Neither did I.

What It Means to Receive

Here’s the question underneath all of it.

After everything, the tower, the moat, the years of closed loop, the isolation, the car, and the long winter, what does it mean to simply be open to receive?

Not strategically open.
Not carefully open with terms and conditions.
Just open.

Drawbridge down.
Running across without thinking.

I’ve been sitting with that question.

And what I keep coming back to is this:

I didn’t decide to be open.
I just was.

Which means the tower, for all its granite and crocodiles and carefully maintained walls, never actually got to the heart.

It protected it.
It didn’t bury it.

The heart was in there the whole time.

Waiting.

Not dormant.
Just waiting for the right signal.

And when the signal came, it didn’t ask the head for permission.

It just recognized something.

Instant knowing.
Instant impulse.

In all the “-ology” kind of ways.

The New Jacket

Something is telling me I need to try something on.

A “heart-first” existence.

Like a new jacket or a new pair of boots that needs breaking in.

Worn differently than anything I’ve worn before.

It might be uncomfortable at first.
It might require adjustment.
It will almost certainly require me to slow down, recalibrate, and stop running so far ahead of myself.

But.

If it fits, if this is what it feels like to lead from the heart instead of always from the head, it might be the most comfortable I’ve ever been in my entire life.

And what a thing that would be.

After everything.

To arrive here.

Barely. But here.

And, for the first time in a long time, alive in this moment in Technicolor.

More soon.
Thanks for being here.

Be well.
Bert.

CONTENT NOTE: This post discusses suicidal ideation honestly and without graphic detail. It is written from the other side of the weather. If you are currently in crisis, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988.

It was 9:24am.

I didn’t even need to open the email.

My intuition spoke first, the way it always does when something is wrong.

Clear.
Immediate.
Correct.

It’s funny how I spent the middle years of my life doubting that voice.

Overriding it.

Explaining it away.

It cost me every time.

The email confirmed what I already knew.

They made the hire.
It wasn’t me.

Again.

And something that was held together by the thinnest possible thread, the hope that this one might be different, that this interview might be the one where I was finally seen, came undone.

All at once.
At 9:24am on a Tuesday.
While it was snowing.
In spring.

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What Came With It

The rejection didn’t arrive alone. It typically never does.

It brought my time living in my car with it.
It brought three years of silence with it.
It brought five years of a contracting social world with it.
It brought the divorce with it.
All of it landed at once.

And my nervous system, the one that has been slowly, measurably, graphed coming back online, went straight back to incoming fire.

I was triggered.

Blood pressure high.
Trembling, literally shaking, inside my skin.
Crying and unable to stop.

Not performing grief.
Not processing it cleanly.

Just: inside it.

Completely.

The feeling of sucking at everything.
Of not being good enough.
Of being invisible to a world that should be able to see exactly what I am.

And I’ve been in this space for too long.

But I need to feel my feelings.

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The Snow Globe Cracks

There’s a version of rejection that’s manageable.

You feel it.
You sit with it.
You put it in a jar on a metaphorical shelf and you keep moving.

I know how to do that. I’ve gotten good at it.

But Thursday wasn’t that kind of rejection.

Thursday was the kind that cracks the snow globe.

Suddenly I’m outside again, not metaphorically, but viscerally.

The glass between me and the warm world on the other side of it felt less like a concept and more like a physical wall.

And the voice that came with it wasn’t the measured, aware, therapy-sharpened voice I’ve been cultivating for thirteen weeks.

It was the old voice.

The one from before.

The one that said:

“Nothing is ever going to go your way.”

“You’ve been waiting for years.”

“How many more fucking years do you wait for the world to meet you where you are?”

“What a loser!”

I know that voice all too well.

I know it’s not accurate.

I know it’s my head running its archive on repeat.

Knowing that didn’t make it quieter.

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The Part I Almost Didn’t Write

I’m going to say something directly because this publication is called “Barely But Here” and that’s what this is about..

That morning, the ideation came back.

Not as a plan. Not as an intention.

As a feeling.

The particular exhausted feeling of “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“I don’t want to wake up to more of this bullshit.”

I’ve been in that space before; deeper, longer, living in a car with nowhere to go and nothing to hold onto.

I know the difference between weather and climate now.

I knew, even inside it, that this was weather.

But weather can be severe.

And that morning was severe.

What kept me here?

I’m saying this plainly because someone reading this needs to hear it said plainly.

It was one thing.

A new friend in my life told me recently,
“I am glad that you exist.”

That sentence. Those six words.

That’s what I had. And it was enough.

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The Duality Nobody Talks About

Here’s what I want to name directly because I haven’t seen it written about honestly enough.

There is a particular kind of suffering that comes not from being broken, but from being “ready to get TF on with it” and still stuck.

• The most aware and conscious version of myself I have ever been.

• The most isolated I have been in five years.

• The most skilled at human connection.

• The least connected to other humans.

• The clearest about what I want to build.

• The least able to build it.

Best internal version.
Near worst external version.

And the cruel, airtight logic underneath all of it:

• No agency means no mobility.

• No mobility means no social life.

• No social life means no connection.

• No connection means the cave gets deeper.

It’s a closed loop.

There’s no entry point from the outside.

Five years of that.

Not laziness.

Not giving up.

Not a character flaw.

A closed loop that I am working, every single day, to find the opening in.

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What the Jar Actually Is

By afternoon, the weather had passed.

Not resolved. Not fixed.

Passed.

I went for a walk. I regulated.

I came back.

I put it in the jar.

And I want to be clear about what that jar actually is, because it’s not avoidance and it’s not suppression and it’s not the old way of stuffing things down until they explode sideways six months later.

The jar is a skill.

It’s the beat between the hammer and the knee. It’s the space between stimulus and response where something other than the reflex lives.

I felt everything that morning.

All of it.

Without flinching.

And then I chose where to put it.

Not forever. Just for now.

The jar goes on the shelf. The shelf is visible. I know it’s there.

And when I’m ready, when there’s enough distance to write about it without being inside it, I take it down.

Just like this.

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Why I’m Still Here

I’m still here for a few reasons.

One is that six-word sentence.

One is that the weather has always passed before, even in the car, even at the worst of it — and I have enough data now to trust that pattern even when I can’t feel it.

One is this.

The writing.
The recording.
The sending it out into the world with the quiet hope that someone reads it and feels less alone in their own particular version of invisible.

That’s not nothing.
That’s actually everything.

Because somewhere out there is someone who is also at 0.25%.
Also outside the snow globe.
Also shaking inside their skin on a Tuesday morning in spring.

Also barely, but here.

And if this reaches them, if these words are the six that land when they need six words, then the dandelion wasn’t mowed over.

It just went to seed.

And seeds go everywhere.

Thanks for being here.
Especially today.
Especially if today is hard.

Be well.
Bert.