Sometimes readers see us more clearly than we see ourselves.

A Message I Didn’t Expect

My friend Jan from the senior center messaged me recently after reading one of my latest blogs about our Lansing trip. I figured it would be a quick reaction about the story itself or maybe a comment about the photos.

Instead, she read between every line.

She told me the piece was heartfelt and said the real power behind it wasn’t just the story itself. It was the way my writing connected ordinary moments to something bigger emotionally.

Then she said something I honestly didn’t expect.

She compared my writing to Mitch Albom.

Not because of news and sports writing or our journalism backgrounds, although we both spent time around that world. What she meant was the deeper part of his work. The way he tells personal stories while weaving in themes about life, relationships, grief, hope, faith, second chances, and the emotional questions people quietly ask themselves after they finish reading.

The retired schoolteacher also said my writing reminded her of the way Mitch eventually moved beyond reporting scores and headlines and started writing about what it actually means to be human.

That one caught me off guard. No one has ever said anything like that to me before.

Truthfully, back in my newspaper days I was mostly in straight reporter mode. Political writing, local features, deadlines, facts. I wasn’t writing emotional reflections about life. There wasn’t much room for that type of creativity in any of it.

Then life happened.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped writing altogether.

The Years I Went Silent

When I told Jan I hadn’t written anything since 1995 and didn’t start this website until 2023, she couldn’t believe it.

My writing didn’t disappear for a few years. It disappeared for nearly three decades. That single fact probably explains more about me than most people realize.

For years I was surviving more than living. Somewhere between divorce, disappointments, work, routine, and just trying to make it through adulthood, I disconnected from parts of myself I didn’t know how to reclaim.

For almost 30 years, I convinced myself I had merely moved on from the keyboards, pens and notebooks as it just wasn’t meant to be. Looking back now, I think part of me had simply stopped believing my voice mattered.

Maybe that’s why this blog eventually became something much bigger than I intended it to be. What started as a way to win someone’s friendship back slowly turned into storytelling, then excavation. Every piece uncovered another emotion and memory I had buried years before.

Jan noticed all of it. Even things I didn’t realize I was revealing.

Trying To Understand What I Felt

At one point in the conversation, Jan asked me something that has stayed with me since.

“What would you do if you had one more day with Casey?”

Three years later, I still had to sit with that question. Hell, she’s the very reason I started writing again to begin with. It wasn’t just losing Casey as a friend. It was realizing that I had been in love with her all along.

By then it was too late.

What makes that realization even harder is how long I spent trying to understand my own emotions afterward. During those years, I’ve worked with a couple of therapists and even a meditation coach who had once been a psychiatrist.

A lot of those conversations weren’t just about Casey specifically. They were about trying to understand myself, my reactions, my fears, my emotional shutdown, and why certain losses stayed with me the way they did.

People think heartbreak always arrives immediately and with a big bang but sometimes love takes shape slowly beneath everything else life piles on top of you. Fear. Exhaustion. Survival mode. Emotional numbness. You don’t fully recognize what you’re feeling until absence forces you to.

And once you truly love someone, I don’t think it ever completely disappears. I tried anger and forgetting. I tried convincing myself none of it mattered but that didn’t help either. If anything, those things only made it worse.

Eventually, I realized some people become part of your emotional landscape. You stop trying to erase them and instead learn how to carry the love differently.

Something else I told her during our exchange that probably explains me better than most things I’ve ever written is that I didn’t even realize I was in love with Casey until four years into our friendship. Then only after I learned she was with someone else.

That realization changes a person. Not because the love disappeared, but because I suddenly understood what I lost only after it was gone.

I never answered Jan’s question directly, but here it is after days of pondering.

I’d hope we could go to Disneyland and have an exciting time before saying goodbyes properly. That would definitely clarify the relationship we had as something real. I’d never want to ruin what she has now. Especially if she’s happy.

The Screenshot

Earlier in the week, during our trip to Michigan’s State Capitol, all our phones went off with one of those emergency weather alerts. I grabbed a screenshot and posted it in the story because it was a notable addition.

What I didn’t think about was what people could see underneath it.

My screen saver of Maya. (That story is in the above link)

Jan immediately noticed who was on my phone and mentioned it during our conversation. She said she had been trying to piece together the emotional subtext behind my recent writing and that screenshot suddenly made certain things clearer.

It’s strange how one accidental image can quietly reveal what an entire essay doesn’t. At one point during our exchange, I admitted something that says more than I realized at the time.

“I might not be full-blown in love with Maya yet, but you know what? That picture says a lot. She’s devilish like me and has good taste.”

Maybe that sounds cocky to other people. To me, it matters. Because for someone who spent decades emotionally disconnected from himself, honesty like that feels important now.

And no, I’m not pretending this is some perfect movie script ending where old heartbreak vanishes overnight and suddenly everything becomes simple again. Life doesn’t work that cleanly.

But Maya is good to me. Good for me. She’s understanding. Smart. Funny. Patient. She loves baseball, Star Wars, and somehow appreciates my strange sense of humor. There’s comfort there. Peace too.

Maybe what the screenshot really reveals isn’t simply that Maya is my phone background. Maybe it’s revealing that despite everything I’ve lived through, some part of me is still open to connection, hope, affection, and possibility again.

Mental Health Awareness Month

As Mental Health Awareness Month comes to a close, I keep thinking about something else Jan said during our conversation.

She told me she felt like my writing was revealing more than stories. That readers weren’t watching someone tell memories from his life. They were watching someone slowly work through life in real time.

She was right. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing. And that’s why writing again has changed me more than I expected.

Not because it solved everything. But because it forced honesty.

Honesty about grief, regret, fear, loneliness, and how deeply life affected me after years of carrying things without fully processing them.

For years, I convinced myself I was fine because I was functioning. I kept moving forward, handled responsibilities. I survived heart disease and cancer. But mentally and emotionally, parts of me had gone quiet long before.

That’s the dangerous thing about emotional numbness. It rarely looks dramatic from the outside, only existing on the inside.

Near the end of our conversation, Jan told me one last thing that has stayed with me too.

“Perhaps your blog has finally come full circle, allowing you to use your writing career to achieve inner peace and get back to your true God-created self.”

That’s exactly what this journey has turned into.

Not becoming someone new. But finding my way back to the person life nearly convinced me I wasn’t anymore.

For more Real Talk click that link.

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