Starting Over Isn’t Starting From Zero

At 38 years old, I moved out after an eight-year relationship with the mother of my three children.

If you had shown 28-year-old me a picture of that moment and told me where I'd be ten years later, I probably wouldn't have believed you.

Three kids.

A career.

Bills.

Responsibilities.

A whole life that had been built around another person.

And then I was packing my things and leaving.

I was angry. I was hurt.

But I wasn't sitting there wishing I could somehow preserve the relationship at any cost.

I knew how I had been treated. I knew what the relationship had become. And somewhere underneath all the anger and uncertainty, I knew something else:

I didn't want to live that way anymore.

Sometimes the end of something can hurt while still being the right ending.

Those two things can be true at the same time.

I Wasn't Starting From Zero

It certainly felt like it for a while.

At 38, you're supposed to have figured things out.

At least that's the bullshit we tell ourselves.

You're supposed to have the career, the family, the house and some reasonably clear idea of what the next twenty years are going to look like.

Life doesn't particularly care about your timeline.

Suddenly I had to figure out what my life looked like separately.

And I had a choice.

I could spend the next several years feeling sorry for myself.

Or I could build.

I chose to build.

Self-Pity Is an Easy Place to Live

I'm not saying you shouldn't hurt.

You should.

Pretending something doesn't bother you isn't strength.

An eight-year relationship ending is painful. Having three children involved makes everything more complicated. There were emotions that needed to be processed and realities that needed to be accepted.

But there's a difference between experiencing pain and building your identity around it.

I refused to let what happened become the explanation for everything that happened afterward.

I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life saying:

Look what happened to me.

Eventually the question had to become:

What am I going to do now?

That question changed everything.

When Everything Else Moved, I Grounded Myself in God

There's another part of rebuilding that doesn't fit neatly into a financial spreadsheet or a before-and-after picture.

My faith.

I've learned something through the difficult periods of my life.

People can leave.

Plans can collapse.

Money can disappear.

Relationships can end.

People you love can die.

Your entire idea of what the next chapter was supposed to look like can change without asking your permission.

God stays.

There's a line in Psalms that I've come to understand differently as I've gotten older:

“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted.”

When life is going well, faith can sometimes exist quietly in the background.

When everything goes wrong, you find out whether you actually believe it.

I learned to ground myself in God when the other things I had grounded myself in weren't there anymore.

That didn't mean everything immediately became easy.

It didn't mean I suddenly understood why everything happened.

Faith didn't eliminate the work required to rebuild my life.

It gave me somewhere solid to stand while I did the work.

And looking back over every genuinely difficult period of my life, that's one lesson that keeps repeating itself.

When I've been at my lowest, I've never found God farther away.

I've found Him closer.

Then I Started Fixing the Things I Could Control

Faith didn't mean sitting around waiting for God to fix my credit score.

Unfortunately.

There was still work to do.

I had debt.

So I attacked the debt.

I started thinking differently about money.

Saving mattered more.

Investing mattered more.

Planning mattered more.

Slowly, the financial part of my life started becoming stronger.

Then I bought a house.

I remember what that represented to me.

A few years earlier, I'd been moving out of the life I'd known.

Now I was unlocking the front door to something I'd built afterward.

It wasn't about proving anything to anybody else.

It was proof to myself that one chapter ending hadn't ended the story.

I Rebuilt My Body Too

This is something I think men dramatically underestimate.

Exercise is one of the most powerful tools available when your life feels like shit.

We usually talk about the gym in terms of appearance.

Lose fat.

Build muscle.

Get stronger.

Look better.

And yeah—I'm not going to pretend looking better doesn't feel good.

It does.

But that wasn't the biggest benefit.

The gym gave me something concrete to work on.

When life feels chaotic, there's something incredibly grounding about walking into a place where the rules are simple.

Show up.

Do the work.

Come back.

The weights don't care about your divorce.

They don't care about your bank account.

They don't care whether you're angry, sad or having the best day of your life.

They respond to consistency.

And eventually the mirror starts showing you evidence of that consistency.

Your body changes.

You get stronger.

Your confidence starts coming back.

You begin carrying yourself differently.

Exercise didn't solve my problems.

It made me stronger while I solved them.

There's a difference.

My Kids Gave Me Another Reason

I also had three boys watching me.

Someday they're going to get hurt.

I hate that, but it's true.

Somebody will break their heart.

They'll fail at something.

They'll make a terrible financial decision.

They'll lose somebody they love.

They'll experience something that makes them wonder whether life is ever going to feel normal again.

I won't always be able to fix it for them.

But maybe I can give them an example.

Not of a father who never got knocked down.

That's bullshit.

I want them to remember a father who got back up.

A father who prayed.

A father who worked.

A father who admitted when things hurt.

A father who didn't use that hurt as permission to quit.

That's something I can actually give them.

Five Years Can Change Everything

I'm 43 now.

Five years ago, I was starting again.

Since then I've paid off debt.

I've bought a home.

I've rebuilt my body.

I've continued building my career.

I've gone back to school.

I've invested.

I've started thinking seriously about another career someday.

I've traveled.

I've made new memories with my children.

I've loved again.

And now I've somehow created a website called The Evil Daddy, which was definitely not on the five-year plan.

That's another thing I've learned.

Sometimes losing the future you planned creates room for a future you couldn't have planned.

Starting Over Isn't Starting From Zero

When my relationship ended at 38, I wasn't actually starting from nothing.

I had my children.

I had my career.

I had my experience.

I had lessons I'd already paid dearly to learn.

And most importantly, I had God.

The foundation was still there.

I just had to build something different on top of it.

That's what I want somebody going through their own version of this to understand.

Maybe you're moving out.

Maybe the relationship ended.

Maybe you're staring at debt.

Maybe you hate what you see in the mirror.

Maybe the life you thought you'd have isn't happening.

You're allowed to be hurt.

You're allowed to be angry.

You're allowed to have absolutely no fucking idea what happens next.

Just don't confuse being hurt with being finished.

The Evil Daddy Bottom Line

At 38, part of my life ended.

At 43, I don't look back at those five years and see a man who started from zero.

I see somebody who rebuilt.

Financially.

Physically.

Emotionally.

Spiritually.

Not perfectly.

Not quickly.

And definitely not without making additional mistakes along the way.

But I kept moving.

That's what starting again really is.

You take whatever survived the storm.

You thank God you're still standing.

And you start building with it.

Because sometimes the life you rebuild isn't the life you originally planned.

Sometimes it's better.

And if you're standing in the wreckage right now wondering whether that's possible, I'll leave you with the lesson difficult moments have taught me over and over:

God stays near to the brokenhearted.

You still have to get up.

You still have to do the work.

But you don't have to do it alone.