Essays on Transition, Reinvention, and What Comes Next

Your Next Chapter: When No Becomes A Choice “When I give myself permission to say yes, no becomes an authentic choice.” I said that recently on Cat York’s Recovery Catalyst podcast after she asked how grief had affected my recovery. After twenty-five years of struggle, grief forced me to confront the fact that I couldn’t keep treating abstinence as a pass-fail test. And for the first time, that was OK. Listening back, I realized my answer was about more than alcohol. It was about...

Your Next Chapter: Entering a New Season I never really registered that my mother Rachael’s birthday was in the first week of fall. That first September after her death, the grief was still overwhelming. Back then, I relived her last few years on an endless loop. The start of her Alzheimer’s journey. The changes after COVID-19 isolation. Sitting with her every Thursday at the senior center. The look in her eyes told me she didn’t know me. My wife Marcia would say, “She knows we’re kind people...

Your Next Chapter: Hearing the Water I’ve learned over time that transition has three parts: an ending, a messy middle, and a new beginning. For the last three years, life has been one long series of endings. Leaving full-time work. Family losses. An abrupt move. Health changes. Lately, I’ve been wondering if I’m finally working my way through the messy middle. Last week, Marcia and I were hiking in the Sierras toward a small waterfall. A sign near the trailhead told us the regular path was...

Your Next Chapter: Finding New Containers As a kid, my world could change without notice. When you learn early that the landscape isn’t stable, it doesn’t make much sense to plan. Planning for the next school year or even the second half of the current one meant assuming I’d still be there. That assumption wasn’t valid. That pattern carried over into the first half of my adult life. My energy was scattered—uncontained. I created a life of constant change. In and out of college, in and out of...

Your Next Chapter: What Comes After Expertise? For much of my life, when I learned something that helped me, I had to tell others how it would help them. I became an evangelist. I’d say, “You should try this,” and push you toward my answer. During a dark season in my late teens, I was treated for anxiety, and my life changed. I went back to school, changed my major to psychology, and talked about stress reduction. Everywhere. I was a campus peer counselor; I interned in the community with...

Your Next Chapter: Loosening the Finger Trap When I was a kid, I always smiled when a finger trap showed up in a birthday-party goody bag. The harder you pulled, the more stuck you became. I guess I had so much fun with them I kept recreating them in my life. For a long time, I responded to uncertainty by pulling harder. I’d stay busy, search for answers, and try to force my way forward. Time after time, I’d find myself in another finger trap, stuck while I pulled in different directions....

Your Next Chapter: I’m Still Changing “Most of my clients aren’t lost. They’re just at a turning point.”That’s the first sentence of the first issue of this newsletter. In March 2025, my goal was simple: find coaching clients and prove I understand midlife transition. I had no idea how much I was about to learn. When I wrote, “Midlife change isn’t something I just talk about—it’s something I’ve done.” I had the evidence to back it up. I bounced through twenty jobs in fifteen years before...

Your Next Chapter: When Reality Clears Its Throat Most mornings, I read a piece that begins: "Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today."I've read those words hundreds of times. Yet I found myself in Sedona, Arizona, unwilling to accept that a 3,000-foot altitude gain was kicking my ass. We arrived with plans. Trails to explore. Places to see.Instead, my body let me know it wasn't consulted.The altitude forced me to slow down. And by slow down, I mean come to a dead stop. The...

Your Next Chapter: Finding Common Ground I just finished a ten-week memoir writing class. On the final session, we submitted our work to a small group for discussion. But we really did more than that. We opened ourselves up for scrutiny in a way that doesn’t often happen in midlife. We didn’t just share our work; we shared our stories—our real stories. At our core, we all asked versions of the same question: Who am I, and how did I become this person? On the surface, we had little in common....