Anchor Essay
I Don't Love You Right Now
Why do I have to win? Why do I have to give my entire self to everything I put myself into? Why can’t enough be enough?
And why does it matter so much that I please the people I admire? Not about appearances. Not about how I’m viewed by the world. Something deeper. The handful of people I actually hold in high regard — the ones you’d hold like a father or a mother. You understand the man is fallible and you still hold him in high esteem. Our fathers are our models for gods. And if our fathers failed us, what does that say about our gods?
That’s where this starts.
My first real memory is opening our red front door. Looking up from the living room to the top of the stairs. My father holding my older sister Julianne suspended in the air, hands on her throat. Her legs flailing. Her face turning purple. Her mouth so dry that yelling won’t even leave her lips.
I couldn’t have been more than seven. I ran up the stairs using my arms and hands to thrust myself faster. I started attacking my father — striking his legs so he would hit me instead of her. He dropped my sister and moved to me.
At that moment I decided it was my duty as the only male to protect the others. Where I was powerless to fight back, I could take hits. Sacrificing for others became a core tenant. That was the first one.
The second one came later.
My older sister was born in ’87. I was born in 1990. She has her 8th grade graduation and I am invited to read a Bible verse in front of the entire assembly. I don’t prepare. I’d already read the Bible cover to cover twice. I’d gone to Christian school my whole life, church every Sunday. I figured I’d wing it.
I get called up. Walk from the back of the room to the front. Get on stage. And I realize I don’t know where the fuck Deuteronomy is.
I find the page. I find the verse. I’m reading through and everything’s going great. And then I encounter a word I have never seen in my life. A kid who did Hooked on Phonics. Extra reading classes in the summer because he was behind. A CH word.
Cherubim.
I can say it now.
Back then I had no idea. I stood at the podium in front of four hundred people and said:
Cha. Cha. Cherubin.
And the room laughed.
Not the gentle laughter of people who want you to know it’s okay. The laughter of four hundred people who are delighted by the failure of a child.
I walked back to my seat. My face was hot. My older sister wouldn’t look at me. I sat down next to my mother. She was not looking at me either. And then — quietly, so that only I could hear it — she said:
I don’t love you right now.
I have thought about that sentence for thirty years.
Not every day. Not even every year. But it is always there, available, the way certain memories are always available — not because they are the worst thing that happened, but because they were the first thing that named something true about the world.
What my mother meant, I think, was that she was embarrassed. What she said was something else entirely. She said: my love for you is conditional. It is subject to performance. It can be withdrawn.
I spent the next twenty years trying to earn it back.
I am going to skip some things. Not because they don’t matter — they do — but because this is not that book. The institutions. The schools I was sent to. The halfway house in Chicago at twelve where I learned to fight before I learned to shave. The boarding ranch in Montana. The private school in Indiana where I was given a typewriter and started writing poems because it was the only thing I could do that no one could take away from me.
What I will tell you is that by sixteen I had a high school diploma and a $500 Jeep Cherokee with a fiberglass body and a blue-and-yellow Florida interior. I paid my own car insurance. My own cell phone. I was my own man from then on, which is either the saddest or the most clarifying sentence I have ever written, and I am still not sure which.
The Air Force was the best decision I made before I was old enough to make good decisions.
I went in at eighteen. I was stationed in Wyoming. I worked in the missile field — Minuteman III ICBMs, the actual ones, buried in silos across the high desert. I drove out in the middle of the night to check on nuclear weapons, which is a sentence I still cannot fully believe describes my life.
I deployed. I came back. I got out.
What the military gave me — beyond the structure and the training and the clearance — was a set of men who held a standard. Who showed me, by example, what it looked like to be competent and accountable and present. Who did not praise me when I didn’t deserve it. Who did not coddle what needed to be corrected.
I had been looking for that my entire life without knowing I was looking for it.
His name was Brent.
He was my manager in my first real civilian job, and he was the first person in a position of authority who treated me like I was capable of something. Not in a soft way. In a hard way. The way that says: I am going to hold you to a standard because I believe you can meet it, and if I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t bother.
He told me the truth. He told me when I was wrong in a way that made me want to be right. He was not my friend — not then — he was something more useful: a man who was invested in who I was becoming.
I have thought about Brent every time I have been in a position to lead someone. I have asked myself: am I showing up the way he showed up? Am I holding the standard? Am I telling the truth in a way that serves the person rather than the moment?
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. But the question is always there.
There are things I haven’t talked about publicly.
The divorce. The specific texture of what it is like to watch a marriage end from the inside — to be the person who did not leave, who held on, who tried, who eventually had to accept that trying was not enough. The loneliness of that. The specific shame of failure at the thing that is supposed to be the most important.
I’m not going to talk about them here.
What I will say is that at some point during that season, I started doing EMDR therapy. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — it sounds like science fiction, and sitting in the chair for the first time it felt like it. But what it does, in practice, is give you a way to access old memories without being inside them. To watch them from outside. To update the story.
I watched the red front door. I watched my father’s hands on my sister’s throat. I watched the seven-year-old boy run up the stairs.
And for the first time in my life, I did not feel it as something that was happening to me.
I felt it as something that had happened. Past tense. Finished. A thing I survived, not a thing I was still surviving.
There is a concept in neuroscience about neural pathways. The idea that the routes our thoughts travel are like trails in the woods — the more you walk them, the clearer they become. The trail worn by thirty years of believing that love has to be earned, that performance determines worth, that failure means withdrawal of affection — that trail is deep. It goes down to bedrock.
You don’t erase it. You can’t.
What you can do is build a new one. Walk it enough times that it becomes the path your feet find by default. That is the work. Not the dramatic moment of insight, not the breakthrough session, not the single conversation that changes everything — the daily choice to walk the new path even when the old one is right there, familiar, easy, worn smooth.
That work is what IMUA means to me.
My daughter’s name is Evelyn.
She was born in 2014. She is one of two children I am raising, and she is the one who reset the clock.
When Evelyn was born I was standing in a delivery room at five in the morning, watching something happen that I had no framework for. I had been in the missile field. I had worked around weapons that could end a city. I had been in places that were supposed to feel significant.
Nothing had prepared me for this.
What I felt, looking at her, was not the love I had been taught to perform. Not the love that was conditional on behavior. Not the love that could be withdrawn.
It was the other kind.
And standing there at five in the morning, I understood for the first time in my life what love is supposed to feel like. Not earned. Not conditional. Not subject to performance review. Just: you exist, and that is enough, and I will be here.
I understood, holding her, what my mother had taken from me with a sentence. And I understood what I was going to give back.
The path, in neural terms, has been under construction ever since.
You walk the same trail until the brush stops growing, the ground goes soft, and your feet find it without thinking. The new path — the one you had to earn — you have to walk through the thicket. And if you’re not paying attention it is incredibly easy to step right back onto the old one. That’s what’s comfortable. That’s what the muscle memory knows.
So you walk through the thicket until the thicket becomes a worn path. And the old one closes — with sand, with dirt, with growth, with weeds — until the trees grow there and not on the new one.
Josh is still last on the list when it relates to order of where he must be excellent.
But he doesn’t hate himself when he strikes out in a moment. Even if it is game seven under the lights for every moment he steps to the plate.
Evelyn was the reset. EMDR was the new setup screen. And somewhere on the other side of all of it, a man got to open his eyes and decide — not from survival, not from fear, not from the need to earn what should have been free — who he was going to be.
These are the values he chose.
This is where the choosing started.