Different Seasons, Different Paths

I like many others have experienced many epiphanies in my life, and many of those moments never translated into anything more than a fleeting, seemingly meaningful moment.

As a kid, I experienced complicated grief after my dad died. In the years following this loss came lots of adversity, family conflict, anxiety, and a lot of uncertainty. Looking back, it makes sense that I developed ways of coping that helped me survive but created problems later. I became a people pleaser. I catastrophized. I spent a lot of time trying to avoid discomfort. Even in grade school I could disappear for hours into books, video games, movies, anywhere that wasn't the uncomfortable moment I was in. Over the years I found plenty of other ways to numb it. Some of them looked harmless from the outside. Some of them weren't. They worked for a while, until they created their own problems.

But even then, what I needed at that point wasn't the same thing I would need five years later.

There were a lot of patterns I could trace here. Let me pick the one that's easiest to say out loud. All through my teens and early twenties, I ran the same play in relationships. Often times, but not always, if a girl was kind to me and I was drawn to her, I'd become her friend. A great friend. Thoughtful, reliable, always there. And I'd quietly hope that being the good guy would eventually show her I was worth choosing. I never said anything. I never took the risk. I just waited, and got hurt anyway, watching people move on to someone who actually asked.

I want to be clear that the problem wasn't the hoping. It was that I already had all the information I needed about this pattern, about my own shame, and couldn't use it yet. I'd read the books. I could have explained attachment theory to you. Insight wasn't the missing piece. Readiness was. There's a version of inner work that's just collecting explanations for things you're not ready to change, and I did that for years. I don't say that with judgment. Some doors you can see clearly long before you can walk through them.

When I finally was ready, in my mid-twenties, after a lot of other work, what changed things had nothing to do with a better explanation. I started taking the risks I'd spent a decade avoiding. I called them reparative experiences, though at the time it mostly felt like volunteering to get hurt. It started small: telling someone I was attracted to her instead of orbiting her. Then asking someone out. Then taking a next step when it made sense. I got rejected. A lot. But the rejections didn't say what my old story said they would. One person passed on me for one reason, another liked the exact thing the first one didn't. It got hard to keep believing there was one damning thing wrong with me when the evidence wouldn't agree on what it was. Slowly, rejection stopped organizing my life. It wasn't that I toughened up. My experience just became different than the story I was telling myself about both these types of relationships and myself.

There were other seasons too. Seasons where I desperately needed connection but didn't believe I was good enough to have it. Seasons where what I needed most wasn't another insight, it was learning how to tolerate discomfort instead of running from it. Seasons where I needed someone to listen without trying to fix me, and seasons where I simply wasn't ready to work on the things that mattered most at the time.

And there were seasons where exercise helped more than reflection. Running was like that for me. I picked it up in a hard season as a coping strategy, a way to burn off what I couldn't sit with. But somewhere along the way it stopped being an escape hatch and became something with its own meaning, a flow state, a place I think and don't think at the same time. It's part of who I am now. Some tools you pick up in survival mode stay survival tools. A few turn out to be yours.

One thing I've realized is that almost everyone who tried to help me was helping in good faith. Therapists, friends, mentors, people who genuinely cared. The problem wasn't that their help was wrong. It's that the help was always filtered through another person's experience. Sometimes it fit exactly where I was, sometimes it didn't, and some of it only became valuable years later, long after I'd dismissed it.

And sometimes the most therapeutic thing I ever did was realizing an approach wasn't what I needed.

I remember working with a therapist who was kind and thoughtful. We'd go through worksheets together, week after week, and they just never resonated. I kept showing up anyway, nodding along, filling in the blanks, telling myself the problem was me not trying hard enough. Eventually I made the uncomfortable decision to stop seeing them. I felt guilty about it for a long time. I thought I was doing something wrong.

Looking back, firing that therapist was one of the most therapeutic things I could have done. They weren't a bad therapist. It's that leaving forced me to stop people-pleasing and start trusting my own experience.

Around that same time, someone told me I should start breaking harmless rules, especially social ones. That sounds like strange advice. But for someone who had spent his whole life trying to do everything right, it was exactly what I needed to hear. Leaving a text on read or jaywalking across the street in front of other people waiting for the light didn't seem like much of a rebellion, but for me it was practice at surviving my own disapproval. Not forever, just then.

Sometimes (when appropriate) I joke with clients that I'm a masochist, that I've learned to love pain. What I actually mean is that some of the most valuable moments of my life have been uncomfortable ones. But pain doesn't always look like heartbreak or rejection. Sometimes the most painful thing I've done is be kind to myself, because for someone raised on self-criticism, compassion is the unfamiliar move, the one that feels like getting away with something. These different seasons taught me a lot of both-ands: how to be flexible and how to be gentle, when a coping strategy is carrying me and when it's quietly become the problem. I haven't figured it all out. But I've figured out some things, and the picture is clearer than it used to be. The strangest thing is that the not-being-done is the part I've come to like.

I don't think my path was especially unique. What was unusual was how long I believed there was supposed to be one right way through it.

Looking back now, I realize I'd practiced ideas from ACT, CBT, parts work, somatic work, journaling, mindfulness, and attachment theory long before I knew what most of them were called. None of them were the answer. Many of them became part of the answer.

The biggest shift wasn't finding the right framework. It was learning to ask myself better questions. Instead of constantly asking "What should I do?", I slowly started asking "What do I need right now?" Those are very different questions. The first one hands your life to someone else's map. The second one makes you check the ground you're actually standing on.

When I started brainstorming Ninefold, I kept coming back to this. I didn't want to build something that tells people the path they should follow, or another program that assumes everyone begins in the same place and moves through the same sequence. That has never been my experience. People enter inner work through different doors. Grief for one person, relationships for another, the body, old beliefs, the search for meaning. And the door changes. The path that helps you today might not be the one you need a year from now.

I don't think anyone can fully understand another person. Not even a therapist. What we can do is ask better questions, and get a little more willing to trust our own experience while staying open to learning from others.

That's what I wanted Ninefold to be. It doesn't tell you who you are or what your path should be. It lays the work out, leaves the doors open, and lets you decide which one you walk through next.