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.

---

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.

---

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.

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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.

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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.

There’s a moment in “Horton Hears a Who” by Dr. Seuss when the entire civilization of Whoville, a whole community, fully real, fully alive, fully present, is screaming into the void from a dandelion.

We are here.
We are here.
We are here.

And nothing can hear them.

Not because they aren’t loud enough.
Not because they aren’t real enough.

Because the world they’re screaming into doesn’t have the equipment to receive the signal.

I’ve been thinking about that A LOT lately.

I am here.

Two thousand-plus applications.
Five interviews.
Three years.

I am here.

The Math Nobody Talks About

Let me put those numbers in a row so they can be looked at directly.

2,000 applications.

5 interviews.

3 years.

That’s a 0.25% response rate.

Not rejection.
Response.

As in, someone acknowledged the signal existed at all.

The other 1,995 applications went somewhere, an inbox, an algorithm, or a black hole with a submit button, and produced nothing.

No. Thank you for applying.

We’ve decided to move in a different direction.

Nothing.

Just silence.

Which is its own kind of answer.

Here’s what that silence accumulates into over three years: not just disappointment.

Not just frustration.
Something more structural than that.
A recalibration of baseline.

A jadedness that sets in so gradually you don’t notice it until someone points out you’ve become blunt. Or harsh.

Or that the optimism that used to be your default setting has been quietly replaced by something flatter.

That’s not a character flaw.

That’s arithmetic.

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What the Government Doesn’t Count

Here’s something most people don’t know about unemployment statistics.

If you lose your job and file for unemployment insurance, you’re counted in the statistics you hear reported everywhere.

You exist in the data.
The government sees you.

But unemployment insurance runs out.

And when it does, if you’re still unemployed, still looking, still sending applications into the void, you disappear from the numbers.

You’re no longer counted as unemployed.

You become what economists quietly call “discouraged” or “long-term unemployed," and you get folded into a different category that doesn’t make the headline number.

The headline says the economy is doing fine.
You are not in the headline.

Now add this: I’m 1099.
Self-employed.

Which means I never qualified for unemployment insurance in the first place.

I’ve been paying into a system for thirty years that doesn’t pay out when the system fails me. And when paying self-employoment tax I feel like they’re double-dipping into my pocket, WTAF?

I believe the self-employed get stuck bending over to pickup the governments soap far too much.

The market said no 1,995 times, and the government said, "We don’t see you either.”

I am here.
The dandelion is on the ground.
Nobody heard it land.

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The Snow Globe

I’ve used this image before, and I keep coming back to it.

Imagine a snow globe.

Inside: warmth, light, a world that makes sense.

People with jobs and social lives and dinner plans and the particular ease that comes from having enough agency to make choices about your own life.

I’ve been on the outside of that globe for a long time.

Not pressing my face against it dramatically. Just outside.

Looking in at a world that seems to be operating by rules I used to understand.

The rejection didn’t put me outside the orbit.
The car did that years ago.

Thursday’s rejection didn’t create that feeling.

It just made it louder.

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The Unicorn Problem

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about why the numbers look the way they do.

The ‘job’ market in the U.S. is built for horses.

It has stables for horses.

It has categories and job titles for horses.

It has LinkedIn checkboxes and ATS systems all designed to identify, sort, and hire horses.

I am not a horse.

Thirty years.

Eight design disciplines.

Thirty business sectors.

A nervous system stress-tested at the extreme end of human experience and still operational.

A brain that thinks in 3D, connects dots across domains, translates the complex into the navigable, and has been doing it professionally since before the internet existed.

That’s not a resume gap.

That’s a unicorn.

And the market, the algorithm, and the recruiter with fifteen open roles and a twelve-minute window to screen candidates doesn’t have a checkbox for “unicorn.”

So the application goes into the void.

The silence comes back.

The math gets worse.

And the dandelion keeps screaming.

I am here.
I am here.
I am here.

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What Accumulates

This is the part that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it.

Rejection, when it arrives occasionally, is manageable.

You feel it.
You process it.
You move on.

But rejection at this scale:

• 2,000 times over three years,

• layered on top of living in the car for 16 months,

• layered on 5 years of losing all sense of identity,

• layered on top of a divorce being negotiated in real time,

• layered on living with 40 years of treatment-resistant depression,

doesn’t arrive as individual events anymore.

It arrives as weather.

And when the weather is bad enough for long enough, it stops being weather and starts being climate.

The baseline shifts.

The optimism that used to be default gets replaced by something that has to be chosen deliberately, consciously, every single morning.

• Some mornings that choice is easy.

• Some mornings it costs everything you have.

Thursday was the second kind.

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What It Hasn’t Taken

Here’s what three years of this has not managed to take from me.

My persistence of existence.

It has tried.
Consistently.
With considerable force.

It has not succeeded.

I am still here.

Still sending.

Still building.

Still recording walks and turning them into something that might reach someone who needs to know they’re not alone in this particular kind of invisibility.

I don’t say that as a triumph.

I say it as a fact.

The dandelion got stepped on.
Dropped.
Maybe mowed over.

But the Who’s are still in there.

Still making noise.

Still alive on a speck.

More soon.
Part 2 is this upcoming Thursday and where it gets more raw.

Thanks for being here, and for your attention.
Especially if you’re in this too.

Please share with others who might benefit.

Be well.
Bert

Related Posts

I went into a quiet dissociation.

Not dramatic.
Not a blackout.

Just a split.

One part of me is sitting in the closing circle, actively listening to people say things about me.

Another part, my internal voice, is running a parallel track, stating:

That doesn’t sound like me.

They’re not talking about me.

That’s not who I am.

The online call was full of people who sat with me for thirteen weeks.
Three hours a day.
Three days a week.
107 hours spent together.

Nine hours a week of being inside the same Zoom call, inside the same kinds of pain.
Inside the same slow and nonlinear climb toward something that felt like functioning.

And they were saying things.

Very Specific Things.

Not ‘kind things’ in the vague, polite way people say when someone leaves a room.

Specific things.
Things with detail.
Things that cost something to say out loud.

And the voice in my head, the one that’s been running color commentary on my life since approximately kindergarten, just kept repeating itself over and over to the point of distraction.

That’s not you.

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The Voice Was Right

Here’s what I figured out after twenty minutes into writing this.

That voice was right.

It wasn’t talking about me.

That voice lives in my head.
And the head is where life is archived.

The triggers.
The reactions.
The five-decade archive of accumulated evidence about:

• who I am and

• what I’m worth and

• how much space I’m allowed to take up.

The head is where ‘getting smaller’ happens.
The apologizing for existing.
The getting invisible so other people don’t feel threatened by me.

The head knows all of that.
The head runs it on a loop.

So when people on the Zoom call were describing…

• Someone with a steady presence
  

• Someone whose honesty operated at a different level
  

• Someone who helped them see their obstacles differently purely by talking about it.
  

• Someone who was (I'm still not fully comfortable typing this) someone’s rock.
  

The head looked at that description and said,

"That's not in the file.

That’s not the story.

That doesn’t match.”

The head was right.

Because my dear new friends weren’t describing my head at all.

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Where It Actually Comes From

They were describing what happens when my head and my heart are in coherence.

When they meet at the vocal cords. That’s where it happens.

The heart generates something.

The head gives it shape.

And when the two are truly talking to each other and not running disparate programs, there are no barriers.

The head connects the heart with its archive of stories, insights, and experience, and then something emerges that other people find useful:

• A metaphor that lands.
  

• A question that reframes the whole challenge.
  

• A connection between two elements nobody had thought to connect.

I’ve been doing this work all my life without knowing I was doing it. It’s a flow to me.

• In thirty years of design work, sitting across from clients who couldn’t articulate what they needed—I was doing it.
  

• Listening past the words to the shape underneath.
  

• Finding the analogy that made the ambiguous suddenly navigable.
  

I thought that was a professional skill.

It turns out it’s just how I’m wired.

And thirteen weeks of group therapy nine hours a week of being ever-present with people in real pain, real confusion, and real moments of breakthrough didn’t teach me how to do it.

It just turned the volume up loud and clear.
And it sharpened me.

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The Translator

I want to say something carefully here.
Because it matters and I don’t want to oversell it.

I am not a therapist.

I am not a life coach.

I do not have psych or medical credentials after my name.

What I have is this:

I have lived inside the full sweep of the analog-to-digital transition.

I grew up in a world of rotary phones and handwritten letters and music you had to physically own; nothing was on demand.

I watched the Internet arrive.

I watched social media rewire human connection.

I watched an entire civilization

re-negotiate its relationship with reality

in real time, and its happening again now.

And I have, somewhere along that journey, accumulated a library.

A library made of cultural sediment.

Decades of music and film and technology and human behavior and metaphor.

A library that only exists because…

I was paying attention hypervigilantly, compulsively, often at great personal cost to everything around me for fifty-plus years.

That library is my translator’s toolkit.

When someone in the group was trying to articulate something she’d never been able to say about her ex-husband, something about the story she’d been carrying for a decade.

I suddenly heard the word “suspended” drop into my head, like a whisper.

And then “radical acceptance,” clearly stated.

And then the connection between them dropped in like a stone into still water.

Suspending belief is a flavor of radical acceptance.

She said it was like Windex on a window.

I see it so clearly now.

That moment, that Windex moment, is what I’m here for.

Not to be the smartest person in the room.

Not to perform visionary insight.

Not to collect the gratitude, though I am deeply grateful for it.

But to take the thing someone is carrying and hold it up to the light at a slightly different angle no one had before.

To find the metaphor, the frame, the phrase that makes the invisible suddenly visible.

Simply, elegantly, cleverly, and naturally.

That is the work.

And right now that is the definition of my work.

That is what the head and heart can do when they work together and begin translating.

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What the Gap Tells Me

The voice in my head that said,

"That's not me."

It was telling the truth about the wrong thing.

It was right that what those people described doesn’t live in my head.

However, it was wrong that it doesn’t live in me.

It lives in the place underneath the stories.

The place that doesn’t have an archive of evidence against it.

The place that didn’t spend fifty years learning to shrink.

The gap between the voice’s version of me and the version that showed up in group therapy for thirteen weeks is not a discrepancy.

It’s a distance.

And I’ve been closing it

Slowly.

Incrementally.

With a lot of breadcrumbs.
A fast-moving river.
And the occasional piano falling out of the sky.

But I’m closing it and damn near there 24/7.
Not just moments of my day.

When my head and my heart meet at my vocal cords…

That’s when you’ll hear me now.

More articles soon; up next: Rejection in 2 parts.
Grateful for your attention and being here.

Be well.
Bert.

If you’ve ever been described by someone who knew you and didn't recognize yourself in it? This one’s for you. The head keeps the archive.
The heart keeps your truth.

I am not someone who takes things on faith. Not easily, anyway.

I’ve spent a lot of years being told things were going to be okay—by people who meant it, by people who didn't, and by a version of myself that was mostly just trying to get through the day.

I don’t reject those things. I understand why people say them. But there’s a part of my brain—the logical, sequential, show-me part—that has always needed more than that.

It needs proof.

So when my therapist said, at the end of our last session together, “I want to share my screen with you”—I leaned in.

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The Graph

What she showed me was simple.

A line graph. Psychological well-being over time.

Data points were collected every single session across thirteen weeks—questions about mood, sleep, energy, interest in life, anxiety, and functional capacity were on display.

All of it plotted.

All of it timestamped.

All of it is honest because I’d answered every survey without gaming it.
Just: How are you actually doing, on a scale, right now?

The line started low on the left side: depression and melancholy dominated at that time.

Then it moved.

Not linearly — she was careful to say that, and I already knew it from the inside.

Progress is not a straight line.
It never is.

There were weeks where the numbers went back up.
Weeks where I showed up to group in a fog and the data reflected it.

But the trend.

The overall arc.

It went down in distress.
It went up on well-being.
Consistently.
Across thirteen weeks.

Reflected right there in a graph I hadn’t been trying to influence — just answering honestly, session after session, not thinking about the cumulative picture.

Wow.

That was what came out of me.

Just: wow.

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The Spock Brain

There is a part of me I’ve always called the Spock brain.

Logical. Precise.

Unimpressed by feelings, anecdotes, or wishful thinking.

The part that says, "Show me the evidence.” The part that, for years, I tried to silence because it seemed to be working against me — demanding proof of progress I couldn’t yet see, measuring me against standards I couldn’t yet meet.

But sitting there looking at that graph, the Spock brain didn’t feel like an enemy.

It felt like a witness.

“There it is,” it said.

That is a measurement of your nervous system coming back online, plotted over time, by someone who had no reason to make it look better than it was.

There it is.

Proof in the pudding.

I cannot tell you how much that mattered.

Not just emotionally—though it did, enormously—but structurally.

The file exists.

The data is in it.

And the data says: you’re not imagining this.

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What the Numbers Actually Showed

Here’s what struck me most, sitting there watching her scroll through the charts.

The shift that felt most significant to me—the one I’d been describing to people as “these last few weeks have been different; something’s changed”—showed up right there in the data.

Around the same dates.
Synchronized.

Which means one of two things.

1. Either I was accurately perceiving a real shift in my own psychological state in real time.

2. Or the data was reflecting something I already knew in my body before I had language for it.

I think it was both.

That’s what the body does when the work is working.
It knows before the graph confirms it.

But the graph matters — because the Spock brain needs the graph.

And the Spock brain, it turns out, is not the enemy of healing.

It’s just a part of me that needed to be included in the process.

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Imperceptibly Glacial

Someone explained my pace of progress to me in a way that landed perfectly.

Imperceptibly glacial.

Moving.
Definitely moving.
Trust us, it’s moving.
But you cannot see it in real time because the increments are too small for the naked eye.

That’s what thirteen weeks of data on a graph actually shows you.

All those imperceptible increments, stacked.
Summed.
Rendered visible.

A glacier, time-lapsed.

And suddenly what felt like standing still — what felt, on the bad weeks, like going backward — resolves into a clear directional movement that was happening the whole time, whether I could feel it or not.

I’ve been trying to climb this hill for years.

These thirteen weeks were the farthest I’ve gone in the shortest period of time.

The graph confirmed what I hoped was true but couldn’t quite let myself believe.

What Comes After the Data

I want to be honest about something.

Seeing the graph didn’t fix anything.

My outer circumstances—the independence, the stability, the basic economic agency that every human being needs to function—those are still works in progress.

The graph doesn’t pay rent.
The data doesn’t resolve what still needs resolving on the outside of my life.

But it did something important.

It drew a line between what was and what is.

Before this program: operating at maybe forty percent.
Unable to focus for more than small snippets of time.
A nervous system that treated ordinary moments like incoming fire.

After: not fixed.
Not finished.
But different.

Measurably, objectively, graphably different.

And for a brain that runs on evidence—that has spent decades building a case against itself from cherry-picked data points—having the full dataset in front of me, timestamped and honest, meant something I’m still processing.

The case against me is not the only case.

There’s another file.

And it’s been filling up, quietly, the whole time.

More soon.
Thanks for being here.

Be well.
Bert

p.s. Some related posts:

— on the therapy container and liminal spaces

— the moment that people don’t believe exists

— on what the data doesn’t fix

— on the nervous system treating ordinary moments like incoming fire

I’ve been circling it.
In therapy.
In writing about life.
On walks in the cold.

So here it is.

I am the most aware and conscious version of myself I have ever been.

And I still can’t support myself.
I still can’t put a roof over my own head independently.
I still lack the basic agency that most people take completely for granted.

Both of those things are true at the same time.

Best internal version, near worst external version.

And the gap between them — between who I have become and what I am still unable to do — is a duality unlike anything I have ever lived.

More intense duality, in some ways, than “homeless, living in my car” times.

At least then, the problem and the cause were the same thing.
Survival. Clear and immediate.
Nearly in black-and-white thinking.

This is different.

This is standing at the edge of a river.
Fresh snowmelt is rising in its tide—moving fast, powerfully, and loudly.

Frustration of knowing exactly where you want to go—and not yet having the footing to cross.

And wise enough to know the frustration is rooted in my wanting something I cannot have immediately, because there are things outside of me I don’t control.

And without their cooperation and timing, “things” seemingly never “click.”

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Taking Stock

I’ve been through a lot, and I’m still in some of it. I know that.

I’ve processed my life “baggage.”

What some call “processing your sh*t.”
I know I have done that too.

I’ve healed things I wasn’t sure could be healed.
Things I had no awareness of.
Things I didn’t even have language for until recently.
Things that lived in my body long after they stopped living in my circumstances.

And I want to be careful here, because the word “myself” carries a lot of ego with it.

What I’m describing is closer to the ‘inner sense of self,’ one’s being.

The version of me that exists underneath the constructed identity and masks,

Underneath the story I told myself for years about who I was and what I was worth.

My inner being is clearer now than ever.

It is not the ego talking when I say I’m ready.

It’s something quieter than that. More certain & less loud.

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Waiting for the Breadcrumbs

An amazing, wonderful new friend shared something with me recently that landed hard.

The idea of waiting for the breadcrumbs.

And that’s exactly what it feels like.

I’ve done the work.
I’ve made my preferences clear.

To myself, to the universe, to whatever process is unfolding underneath all of “this.”

I know what I want.
I know what I’m capable of.
I know what the next chapter looks like in broad brush strokes.

And now I’m waiting.
Not passively.
Not with resignation.

I’m waiting for the outside world to shift.
It needs to meet me where I am.

And I’m done contorting myself while I wait.

I’m no longer bending my opinions and emotions to people please.

Or conform to someone else’s idea of “excellence”” or “genius” and ass-kiss your way through life.

I’m waiting the way a river waits at a bend—full of energy and movement, banked by the terrain, going where it goes.

The snow is still melting.
The melt is still running.
The river is fast and loud and “somewhat channeled.”

That’s okay.
That’s what snowmelt looks like before it settles and finds its course.

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The Troll Under the Bridge

Here’s a raw, honest admission.

I am alone in a basement of a 195-year-old Victorian-era home most evenings, teaching myself and tinkering with the bleeding edge of AI on my laptop.

Or making art, paintings and portraits expressing some of the more difficult periods of mental distress I went through.

I have been a hermit and hiding from the world for a very long time.
I have fewer than a handful of people I consider friends.
Alas, they are not part of my physical reality.

I’ve also not felt any form of affectionate touch in over two years.

And I’m not alluding to sexual affection. I wish.
I’m monastic in that department by choice.

I’m speaking of a gentle hand put on someone’s back as a show of support when it’s clear they are struggling in some capacity.

Holding someone’s hand when they show they need someone.

A simple hug, squeeze, or embrace that releases all sorts of good hormones inside.

And yet, not having any of that for as long as I have has morphed into something new.

I no longer need to seek that affection outside myself as a way to validate my existence and that it’s ok I occupy the roughly 9 square feet of earth that I do.

During all of this time the ‘not fit for purpose’ mentality dominated my thinking.

The “I’m not ready and the world is not ready” mindset.

Since the new year I’ve been outside fewer times than the 10 digits on my hands can register.

I call it the cave mind.
The troll-under-the-bridge mode.
The long winter hibernation.

It follows a kind of death—the death of the self I had constructed.

The identity I believed was me.

The story I told myself for decades.

About…
who Bert was and
what Bert did and
what Bert was worth without questioning it.
Just blind acceptance, nearly an obedience of sorts.

That constructed self seeking validation and love outside themselves is gone.

Toast.

I don’t miss it.

I am aware of its absence the way you’re aware of a tooth that’s been pulled. Not pain, exactly, but a strange new space where something used to be. And you can’t stop fiddling your tongue around it, exploring new textures and new spaces.

What’s emerging in its place is in motion.

There are ideas under consideration and promises made and to be made that I am looking forward to as newness develops day by day.

Winter doesn’t apologize for being long.
The cave doesn’t rush the thaw.

I’m learning to be okay with that and so many other matters outside of me.

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The One Thing

If I had to name the single thing standing between where I am and where I’m going—not the ten things, not the list, the one thing…

It’s agency.

Specifically: Economic agency. One’s ability to support themselves.

The simple, foundational, non-negotiable capacity to generate enough to live on. To have a roof that’s mine, resources that are mine, and stability that I built and can count on.

Not selfishness, self-dependence.

That’s it.
That’s the gap.

Everything else — the awareness, the clarity, the healed nervous system, the sharpened intuition, the ability to sit with those suffering and help them find words for it — all of that is present and accounted for.

It’s standing at the top of the stairs, hand on the rail, foot lifted.

The step just needs to be there.

And right now, at this moment, I am working on multiple fronts.
Not lying on the couch, consuming, and doom scrolling.

I am creating.

I have multiple works of art in process: paintings, poster designs, shirt designs—all quite niche.

4 software projects AI is helping me with, and I’m installing my own local, private, free AI on my laptop.

No cloud.
No $ub$criptions.
Private and FREE.
Whoopee!

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What “Ready” Actually Looks Like

I think most people imagine healing as a kind of arrival.

You do the work, and you come out the other side.

The clouds part.
A beam of light hits magically in an uplifting and enlightening way.
And things begin falling into order.
Everything in its right place.

That’s not how it works.

Or at least it’s not how it’s working for me.

What I’ve arrived at is clarity. Not comfort. Not ease. Not a fixed life.

Clarity.

I know who I am more precisely than I ever have.

I know what I’m capable of.
I know what I want to build.
I know what I’m willing to do, and more importantly, what I’m not.

That clarity is what therapy gave me that I didn’t expect to show up.

And paradoxically it’s what makes the current circumstances harder to sit with.

When you can see exactly where you want to go, undesired immobility feels louder than it used to.

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The River

I walked today in light snow.
Fast-moving river beside me.
Cold, gray, and loud.

Video from my walk.

Snowmelt from a long winter.
A river running hard and a little haphazard.
Channeled by the banks but still looping back on itself in places.
Powerful but not yet clean in its direction.

That’s the image I keep coming back to.

Not stuck.
Not lost.
Not broken.

Moving. Loudly.
With a lot of energy that isn’t yet fully directed.

And the river always finds its way.

That’s not optimism.

That’s physics.

More soon. Thanks for being here—and for reading something that wasn’t easy to write or click “publish” on.

Be well.
Bert.

Other posts in this series:

Are you choosing what fills your life?

Or is it just arriving?

Sit with that for a second.

Not the big stuff.
Not career or relationships or where you live.

The small stuff.
The daily texture of your hours.

The mood that descends without warning.

The reaction that fires before you even know you’re reacting.

The afternoon that just happens to you.

Most of us, if we’re honest, are living on the arriving end of that spectrum more than we’d like to admit.

I know I was.

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The Reflex Hammer

You’ve been to the doctor.

You know the move — the little rubber hammer, the tap just below the kneecap, the involuntary kick that follows.

No decision made.
No gap between stimulus and response.
Just tap and kick.

That’s a reflex.
Pure, mechanical, hardwired.

Now here’s the thing.

A lot of us are living our emotional lives exactly like that knee.

Something lands —
a harsh word,
a missed deadline,
a look from across the room,
a lost wallet —
and we react.

Automatically.
Habitually.

With the same response we’ve always used, because it’s the one that got wired in earliest and deepest.

And we experience it as inevitable.

As if we had no choice.

As if the hammer always produces the kick.

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The Lie We Tell Ourselves

“I just react that way.”

“That’s just how I am.”

“I can’t help it.”

I’ve heard these in group therapy.
I’ve said versions of them myself.

And I get it.
I genuinely do.
I was there.

When you’ve spent years — sometimes decades — responding to the world from a place of survival, your reactions stop feeling like reactions.

They start feeling like a personality.
Like identity.

That’s not weakness.
That’s adaptation.

But here’s what nobody tells you early enough:

There is a gap between the hammer and the knee.

A small one.
Sometimes microscopic.

But it’s there.

And in that gap lives a type of liberation you thought impossible, or never even knew existed—you didn’t know that you didn’t know.

Share Barely, But Here.

The Gap

Viktor Frankl wrote about this—

the space between stimulus and response where our freedom lives.

I’m not going to dress it up more than that, because he already said it perfectly.

But I will tell you what it feels like from the inside.
From someone who spent a long time with no access to that space at all.

It feels, at first, like nothing.

You don’t notice it because you’ve never had to.

The reaction just fires, and you’re already in it—
already defending,
already shutting down,
already spiraling—
before any conscious thought shows up.

Then, slowly, through the work — therapy, reflection, practice, and time — you start to catch it after the fact.

You blew up.

And three hours later you think, huh, I didn’t have to do that.

Then you catch it mid-action.

You’re in it, and some small part of you observes:

That is a real “holy sh*t” moment.

You realize it’s happening in the middle of it but can’t stop it.
Your awareness suddenly woke up in the middle of it all.
Observer and participant at the same time.

Then — and this takes a while — you start catching it before.

The hammer moves.
You feel it coming.
And you have a choice.

That progression isn’t fast.
It isn’t linear.
But it’s real and I believe achievable by any human being.

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Arriving vs. Choosing

So back to the original question.

Arriving is the piano that falls out of the sky.

The bad afternoon.

The news that lands wrong.

The stuff that just shows up whether you wanted it or not.

That’s always going to happen. That’s life.

But what you do with what arrives.

How you respond,
what meaning or label you assign it,
and how long you let it occupy the room.

That part is yours.

More than you think.

More than you’ve probably been told.

I spent a long time believing I had very little agency over my own inner life.

That things happened to me.
And I responded for myself.

The gap between those two things was basically nothing.

Therapy—specifically the group container I was in for thirteen weeks—helped me find the gaps again.

Even better than before and intentionally repeatable.

Not as a concept. As a lived experience.

Nine hours a week of watching other people catch their gaps,
miss their gaps and practice their gaps intentionally, sometimes declaring it out loud—a form of speaking your truth.

Of being seen mid-reaction and gently asked,

"Did you choose that?”

Sometimes the answer was yes.
Sometimes it was no.
But the question itself changed something.

Because once you know the gap exists and is there, you can’t un-know it.

Then you discover it’s everywhere you look.

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What This Looks Like Now

I still have bad afternoons.

I still lose my wallet and spend an hour in a headspace I didn’t choose and wouldn’t pick from a menu.

But I know—now—that the headspace isn’t the whole story.

It’s weather. It passes.

And the next gap is always coming.

The work isn’t to eliminate arrival.

We’re not repressing.

We’re giving ourselves a chance to choose how we respond to anything with consideration, rather than the lifelong reflexive replies.

The work is to expand the space between what arrives and how you respond.

One gap at a time.

More soon. Thanks for being here.

Be well.
Bert

You’ve seen the images.

Endless corridors. Fluorescent light that hums more than it illuminates. Hallways that lead somewhere—probably—but offer no evidence of it. Empty malls at 3am. Pools nobody swims in.

The internet calls it liminal space. That word—liminal—comes from the Latin limen. Threshold. The place between what was and what’s next.

It sounds poetic.

It doesn’t always feel that way.

It Lives in the Body

When I attempt to locate transition in my body—not as a concept, but as a physical sensation—what I find is movement.

Kinetic energy. Not stillness in the stuck sense. Not stasis.

It’s motion. Something in me is already going.

That’s the new Bert.

There was a time when the in-between lived in my body very differently.
A time when I was, literally, in between—between homes, between chapters, between versions of myself I didn’t yet have words for.

I was living out of my car.
The in-between wasn’t a hallway then.
It was a weight. It lived in my joints, my chest, my jaw, and my brain.

The body keeps the score.

That phrase gets quoted a lot. But you don’t really understand it until your body is keeping score of something you’d rather forget completely, and in this case the body holds on whether you’re aware of it or not.

I’ll leave that topic there for now. I’ll go into the body score deeper another time.

The point is, transition has a different texture now.

It used to feel like drowning in place.
Now it feels like current and movement.

“The more you care, the closer you’ll be to the fire.
That’s not a character flaw.
That’s what caring does.”

Too Close to the Fire

I catch myself saying this phrase—I'm too close to the fire—whenever I’m trying to think clearly about something I care deeply about.

What I mean is proximity distorts perception.

When you’re emotionally invested in something, you lose the ability to see it clearly.

Not because you’re weak.
Because you care.

Caring closes the distance.
And the closer you are, the harder it is to see the whole shape of anything.

Think about it this way.

If you’re standing at the edge of a fire, it fills your entire field of vision.

You feel its heat on your face.
Your eyes adjust to its light.
Everything else goes dark.

But walk to the other side of a parking lot—and that same fire becomes a campfire.

Small.
Contained.
Manageable.

The fire didn’t change.

Your position did.

The paradox here is real: the more you care, the closer you’ll be.

That’s not a character flaw.
That’s what caring does.
It pulls you in.
It narrows the frame.

So the question is not whether to care.

It’s whether you can step back without letting go.

Whether you can hold something important at a slightly greater distance without abandoning it.

I think you can.
I’m currently developing this skill to be even stronger.

“Transition used to feel like drowning in place. Now it feels like current.”

What Therapy Gave Me—and What It Didn’t

My most recent chapter of therapy just ended.

Group. Intensive. Three hours a day, three days a week, thirteen weeks straight.

Nine hours a week of being in a Zoom call with people who were, like me, trying to make sense of things.

When it ended, I took stock.

What I shed

The nervous attachment to outcomes.

That low-grade hum of

• What if they don’t like it?

• What if I miss the deadline?

• What if I say the wrong thing?

• What if, what if, what if?

It’s much quieter now.
Not completely gone—but much, much quieter.

I’m publishing these words on Substack, about the human condition in all its raw glory. This goes out into the world, and I’m not hiding.

Publishing and sharing used to feel impossible for over 30 years.
I was afraid of being seen or noticed because of potentially harmful consequences.

What I kept—or more accurately, rediscovered.

Bravery.

The particular kind that comes from writing honestly about my experience of the human condition and hitting publish anyway.

Writing about your garden hobby is brave.

Writing about the inside of a mind that’s been through the grinder—hoping someone reads it and feels less alone—is something else entirely.

I’ve kept the bravery ongoing this entire year. It feels quite different.

What I didn’t expect to gain.

Strengthening my ability to sit with someone who is suffering and unable to clearly articulate their experiences and causalities.

I help them find the words for the baggage they’re carrying and are unable to explain to others to help them understand their own human condition.

Not by lecturing.
Not by solving.

By finding an analogy or a metaphor that gives their experience a shape. Discovering a word or a phrase, they can finally point to it and say, “That’s how I see it, and that's what it’s like.”

Visualize it like this.

We’re sitting in a giant stadium—the Rose Bowl, Wembley, or whatever image of stadia works for you.

We’re all looking at the same event in the middle.

But every seat offers a different view.
A different angle.
A different slice of truth.
Your truth.

My mission is to help people figure out which seat they’re in. And how to explain what the field looks like from where they are in a way that makes sense and is relatable.

And when they’ve never been able to do that before in a simple way, it’s a profound experience for them and me.

Helping someone see and speak clearly about an internal struggle they lacked language for, to me, is a conundrum worth solving.

The answers are there within; all I need is a conversation to get clear.
The process is very much like “discovery” when meeting a new client.

Tell me about yourself, your business, and your top pain points, and I'll take the lead from there.

Same concept in practice, however a different and far more important human impact.

Thirteen weeks of group sharpened that superpower in me.
Not because I was trying.

“Every seat in the stadium offers a different view. My mission is to help people figure out which seat they’re in.”

Because doing something that comes naturally to you for nine hours a week tends to expand and deepen the abilities that make you better at getting to the center of matters.

The Absence of Structure

Therapy gives you a container.
Boundaries. Walls. A schedule.
A time and place where the hard, challenging, and good stuff is supposed to happen. And then it ends.
And the container disappears.

What fills the space when the interactions with others and sharing vulnerability are gone?
I found that to be the real question.

I find this breaks down into something simpler.
Perhaps one of the simplest psychological questions there is:

Are you choosing what fills your time, or is it just arriving?

There’s a doctor’s reflex hammer somewhere in this analogy.

You know the one.
Hits your knee, knee pops out.
No decision made.
No gap between stimulus and response.

Just: a thing happens, and a reaction follows.

That’s how a majority of human beings live.
Especially early in the work of healing.

Something lands, and we react.
Automatically. Habitually.
And we experience it as inevitable—as if we had no choice, no agency.

But there’s always a moment. A small one.
A beat between the hammer and the knee.

And in that beat lives the possibility of something different.
A chance to choose something else.

Therapy helped me find that beat and step into an entirely new rhythm of life I am discovering now.

So, now that the container of group therapy is gone, can I keep finding it on my own?

So far: a large-sized yes.
More times than not.

It starts with the first time, then a few times.
And before you know it, things click, and it’s happening more often.

However, sometimes a piano falls out of the sky—
a lost wallet,
a cascading bad afternoon,
the alternate day just ‘showed up’ without my permission—
and I’m back in the hallway,
fluorescent light humming,
No exits visible.

But I know the hallway now.
I’ve been here before and know the terrain and temperament.

And I know it leads somewhere.

More soon. Thanks for being here, reading, and subscribing.

Be well,
Bert

There’s an old Tootsie Pop commercial from the ‘70s. An owl tries to figure out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop.

One. Two. Three.

Then he bites into it. Impatient.
Unwilling to do the work.

That’s most of us. We want the reward without the patience.
We want to skip the layers and get straight to the center.

But you can’t shortcut it.
You have to put in the work.

The Shells We Build

We all build shells around ourselves. Layers of padding. Protection mechanisms.

Sometimes they’re conscious boundaries we set intentionally. “I will not tolerate this. I’ve had enough.”

But most of the time? They’re unconscious.

The masks we wear are automatic, built from fear, and designed to keep us safe from something we can’t always name.

I became hyper-aware of my shells when I was homeless, living in my car for 16 months.

I’d walk into stores—grocery stores, Starbucks, anywhere—and I’d switch masks depending on where I was.

The functional mask in public: Just to survive. To not break down crying in the middle of the cereal aisle while looking at food I used to buy but couldn’t afford anymore. That fucks with your head.

The survival mask in the car: Making it through every day. One hour at a time.

The invisible mask: Used in coffee shops. Don’t draw attention. Don’t let anyone see you’re homeless. Blend in. Disappear.

I was a chameleon. The mask changed depending on the setting, the context, my mood, and my energy level. All these variables are in flux, and I’d adjust to fit the situation.

If this resonates, subscribe for stories from the parts of life most people edit out. It’s free.

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When Protection Becomes Prison

Here’s the thing about shells: they can protect you, or they can trap you.

Fear-based shells are automatic. Unconscious.

You don’t even know you’re wearing them.
They’re invisible—to you and everyone else.

Boundaries are conscious choices. You know why you’re setting them. You’re aware. You’re choosing.

Before I became homeless, I didn’t really have boundaries.

I wanted so badly to be liked, to not be abandoned, that I tolerated things I shouldn’t have. I didn’t have a line in the sand.

Now? I do. I have shit I will not tolerate.
The shells became boundaries.
Or maybe the boundaries replaced the shells.
Either way, something shifted.

Head and Heart Coherence

There’s a balance—an equilibrium—between your head and your heart.
When they’re aligned, you get coherence. Clarity.

For me, that coherence shows up most when I’m in conversation with people. I notice it a lot in group therapy. Someone’s talking through a problem, and suddenly I can see the connection they’re missing. The dots they can’t connect.

It’s not that I’m seeing “layers.” It’s that I’m connecting dots. Giving language to what they’re feeling but can’t articulate.

And I don’t present it in psychobabble. I search for a metaphor. Something within their world, their context. That’s how it lands.

When I don’t have that coherence—when head and heart aren’t aligned—I self-isolate. I don’t want to show up. I fall into depression.

I’m coming out of that now. So head and heart coherence feels new and fresh again.

These essays help people feel less alone.
Subscribe for free, or share with someone who gets it.

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Back to the Tootsie Pop.

Most of my life, I was too anxious. Too impatient. I’d bite through instead of doing the work.

But living in my car taught me patience. I was forced into it. I had no agency. No ability to change my situation in those moments. So I learned to wait.

And here’s what I learned: doing the licks looks like showing up. That’s it.

Not some profound epiphany. Not a cricket bat to the skull moment (though if you get one of those, awesome—soak in it).

Just tiny movements. Glacial progress. Little things, every day.

Even if it’s just an observation day. You showed up. That matters.

What’s at the center of your Tootsie Pop? Whatever you’re working toward right now.

For some people, it’s materialistic goals. Cool. Chase it.

For me, in this moment, it’s just establishing myself.
Getting back on my own two feet.

Shells and Connection

Here’s the paradox: I’m masterful at connecting with people. Authentically. Deeply.

But I’m also skillful at not letting people get close.

Can people see through my shell? Yeah. They do.
I’ve gotten enough feedback to know they see something real in me.

But the shell is still there. And depending on the situation, I adjust it.

In public, around people I don’t know?
I want invisibility. I want people to not see me.

With the right people, in the right context?
The shell drops. Or at least thins out.

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Breaking Through

Do you need to break through your own shell to understand others?

No. But it helps.

I could always pick up on other people’s masks, even before I dealt with my own. But I was so weighed down by my own stuff that I couldn’t really take in outside perspectives.

Now that I’ve seen through my own shells—now that I’m on the other side—it’s far easier to see them in others. Because it’s staring me right in the face.

The Takeaway

You can’t bite through to the center. You have to put in the work.

One at a time. Patiently. Endlessly patient.

It’s slow. It’s glacial. But it’s the only way through.

Be well.
Bert.

Something hit me while I was shoveling snow the other night.

The balance between giving yourself grace and pushing yourself forward isn’t a choice between one or the other.

It’s more like finding the sweet spot with a clutch.

If you’ve ever driven a manual transmission, you know what I mean.

You press the clutch, shift gears, and then—here’s the critical part—you have to find the release point.

That exact moment where the clutch engages without stalling the engine or jerking the car forward.

Every car is different. Some clutches are loose. Some are tight. Some have a narrow release window that’ll jerk you around if you let the pedal off too fast.

The key is feelings.
You learn where that sweet spot is.

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Too Much Grace, Too Much Push

Here’s how this applies to life:

Too much grace and you stall out. You give yourself so much leeway that you stop making progress. You fall into what I call the “grace trap”—where compassion becomes an excuse, and you lose awareness that you’re not moving at all.

Too much push and you burn out the clutch. You jerk yourself forward with aggression aimed at yourself. You get upset that you’re not moving fast enough, and you grind yourself down. Burnout. Self-harm. The engine overheats.

The sweet spot is just enough push without damaging yourself.
Not extreme in either direction.
Not teetering one way or the other.

It’s balance.
And like driving stick, it’s all about feel.

The Rams in Your Head

But here’s where it gets tricky.

Sometimes you’re not just balancing grace and push. You’re holding two opposing emotions or thoughts at the same time—and they’re fighting.

Think of it like two rams up in the mountains, battling for mating rights. They charge at each other, horns colliding, over and over. That’s what it feels like inside your head when conflicting emotions go to war.

You’re aware of the suffering it generates. But you’re unaware you’re caught in a loop.

I’ve lived this. During the 16 months I spent homeless, living in my car, I was stuck in these loops constantly.

Depression and masking had already worn me down, and the internal conflict—grief vs. survival, shame vs. defiance, hope vs. resignation—just kept knocking, endlessly.

The goal isn’t to make one side win. It’s to hold both without conflict so you can clearly see what’s going on. From there, you’re empowered to make a choice and end the banging.

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Examples of Dualities We All Face

Grace and push are just one pair. There are others:

• Anger and sadness — Sometimes you’re furious about what happened, but underneath, you’re just heartbroken.

• Happiness and regret — You can be genuinely glad about where you are now while mourning what you lost to get here.

• Fear and excitement — Starting something new can feel terrifying and thrilling at the same time.

• Acceptance and resistance — You know you need to let go, but part of you isn’t ready yet.

In color theory, there’s a concept called complementary colors—hues that sit opposite each other on the color wheel.

Red and green.
Blue and orange.
Yellow and purple.

They’re opposites, but when placed side by side, they create the most vibrant contrast.

That’s what emotional dualities can do if you hold them right.
They don’t have to cancel each other out.
They can coexist, creating depth and clarity instead of chaos.

The Fish and the Water

Here’s the danger: when the ram-knocking cycle becomes habitual, you lose awareness of it. It just becomes your reality.

It’s like asking a fish, “What do you think about the water?” and the fish looks back confused: “What water?”

That’s what happened to me. For years, I would get blindsided by trigger → emotion → reaction, and it would mess me up.

I had zero awareness of the stories running my internal operating system.

The loops were so woven into how I functioned that they felt like breathing. Just how I operated.

I had bugs. Subroutines stuck in infinite loops.
And I didn’t even know the code was broken.

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What Changed

So what shifted?

Awareness.

I developed the ability to create space before following worn-out paths.

That space—even just a half-second—gave me the freedom to choose what I wanted instead of letting emotion dictate everything.

It didn’t happen overnight. And honestly? It’s still ongoing.

No human ever “finishes” this work.
You just get better at it.
More attuned.
You learn to feel the clutch.
You recognize the rams before they start knocking.
You see the water you’ve been swimming in.

There is no there there.

It’s just continuous practice.

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The Takeaway

We’re human.
The balancing of dualities never ends.

Grace and push.
Anger and sadness.
Fear and excitement.
Acceptance and resistance.

You don’t have to pick a side.
You don’t have to let them fight.

You just have to find the sweet spot—and keep finding it, over and over, every day.

Be well.
Bert.