When Everything Falls Apart, Who Are You?
When Everything Falls Apart, Who Are You?
There was a song I was listening to recently. The lyrics talked about how it's through the wreckage, through the fury, through the life-altering moments, that people are truly revealed.
And it stopped me cold.
Because as a man, as a father, as a friend, as a neighbor, as just a human being trying to contribute something good to this world, I realized I had never really sat down and thought about that. We go through life mostly on autopilot. Things are fine, we coast. Then something hits. And suddenly, who we actually are gets exposed.
You've heard the saying. True colors. Right? You see them when things get hard.
So the question I kept asking myself was this: How do we show up as parents when the pressure is on? When chaos hits. When things get rough. When life gets messy in a real way. How do we engage? How do we react? What do our kids see when they watch us move through that?
Because they are watching. Every single time.
Do we stand on good moral character when it matters most? Or do we throw everything we know is right straight out the window? Do we show our kids what accountability looks like when we mess up, or do we dodge it and pretend it never happened?
Here is the honest truth. We are not going to be perfect. None of us. The goal was never perfection. But the goal absolutely should be intention. Being aware of how we show up. Caring about it. Asking ourselves the hard questions even when we do not like the answers.
And I want to be clear about something. A lot of my writing is about parenting and kids. But really, it is about us. Because our kids are people with their own minds, and we are people with our own minds. This is not just a parenting conversation. This is a human one.
I have been on the wrong side of this. I am not writing from some high horse. I am writing from the trenches, from years of making bad choices, from showing up in ways I am not proud of, from letting the pressure of life turn me into a version of myself I did not recognize and honestly did not like.
For a long time, I was living in a facade. I was not showing up as who I actually am at my core. And I was miserable because of it. Deep down, I knew it. I knew I was performing some version of myself that did not belong to me, and it was eating me alive. And of course, that bled straight into my parenting.
It took real work to change that. Learning accountability. Getting to the root cause of why I kept making the same kinds of choices. And then, what I call clearing the clutter. Stripping away everything I thought I was supposed to be for the world, for society, for whatever image I had built up, and getting back to who I actually am.
That process was the most important thing I have ever done for myself. Mental freedom. Emotional freedom. Freedom from the chains I had put on myself without even realizing it.
And now I write children's books. Now I want to talk to people and help people and maybe inspire a few of them. Do I still have challenges? Absolutely. Do I still feel like losing my mind sometimes? One hundred percent yes. But now I ask myself a different question before I react. How do I want to show up here?
That one question has changed everything.
So here is what I want to leave you with.
Our kids are going to make mistakes. No matter how well we model things, no matter how hard we try, they are going to stumble. That is life. But let's not let our mistakes die in vain. We do not have to hand them a full detailed account of every bad choice we ever made. But we can teach through our experiences. We can let them see that even adults fall down and get back up. We can show them what it looks like to own something, learn from it, and move forward with integrity.
Because how we show up in the hard moments reveals who we are. And if we do not like what we see when we look at that honestly, we can change it.
I did.
In the words of Rocky Balboa, “If I can change, and you can change, everyone can change”. Believe that.
All the best,
Don!
