Find Out Who You Are and Do It On Purpose

I've been stuck on what to write for a while now.

There's so much happening in the world, and every time I sit down I think: is this just noise? Most people have a small window of free time in a day, and there is already an endless amount of content competing for it. What foods to eat. What foods to never eat. What exercise you should be doing. A litany of opinions on how to live your life. I don't want to be another one of those, and I don't think I usually am, but I've gotten overly sensitive about it, and the result is that I haven't written anything.

Then Dolly Parton died.

This post isn't about her. Plenty of people knew her, made music with her, spent real time with her, and they're the ones who should be telling those stories. Go watch those interviews. Go listen to what she actually said. I mean that as an actual recommendation, not a throwaway line.

What her passing did do was send me back through her old interviews, and I was struck all over again by how much of what she said was just... useful. Practical. Not inspirational-poster stuff. Actual instructions for getting through hard things.

"Find out who you are and do it on purpose."

That one has been rattling around in my head all week, because it's exactly what the last two years have been for me and I never had a clean way to describe it until I heard it put like that.

So this is my version. Three things that changed, what they cost, and what I'd tell you if you're in the middle of your own version of it. It's not all grim, I promise.

1. I Read a Book Through a Bumpy Landing

Recently I read a book during a plane landing. It was a little bumpy. I didn't flinch. I also slept through takeoff, which prompted my wife to look at me like she'd witnessed a crime. (There's a decent chance this becomes one of Heather's comics about me. You never know.)

That sounds like nothing. For me it's the whole thing.

Two years ago I couldn't go out. I couldn't get coffee with a friend without either feeling one coming on or actually having a panic attack on the way there. Not at the coffee shop. On the way. If you've never had that, it's genuinely hard to explain. If you have, you already know exactly what I mean.

I haven't beaten anxiety. You don't. It's something you carry. But now when the thought shows up, I go anyway. We're going. It doesn't matter how you feel about it, they're just thoughts, you're going to get there and you're going to have a good time. And I always have a good time. One hundred percent of the time. If you've hung out with me, you know I have a good time. Sometimes too good of a time.

"Storms make trees take deeper roots."

2. I Got My Time Back, and It Was Terrifying

The second thing is that I've been able to live on my own terms for a while now, and I want to be honest that this is a privilege. I have a supportive wife and a supportive family. We've been careful with money and never overextended ourselves, so we don't have many bills. We can run a single-income household right now, and we don't have kids. I don't take a single piece of that for granted.

What it bought me wasn't relaxation. It was the ability to stop performing. I don't put a mask on every morning. I don't manufacture a demeanor for the day. I'm a husband, a family member, a friend, a creative person. That's it, and that turned out to be the most revealing thing that's happened to me in years.

Because when I lost my job, I found out I didn't know who I was anymore. Fifteen years of work had quietly become my identity, and when the work went away there wasn't much underneath it I could name. I think this is what happens to a lot of people when they retire. They give a whole life to something, and then it's over, and there's nobody home.

I'm in my forties now and the math has gotten louder. There is a limited stretch where you're mobile, you have energy, and you have the freedom to choose. That window is not permanent, and it is not as long as it feels.

Once I separated my identity from my job, I started turning up little nuggets of things I'd been interested in ten or fifteen years ago and had just put down. Being an artist. Making pottery. Building websites, which I did constantly in school. Graphic design. Digging into new products. Reading sci-fi again. None of it is impressive on a resume. All of it made me feel like myself.

I don't know how to hand this advice to someone else, honestly. It's very hard to do unless you're independently wealthy or in a situation like ours. For most people it arrives when the kids go to college, or at retirement, or when it gets forced on them.

And it's being forced on a lot of people right now. The layoffs in tech and gaming haven't stopped. People are ten, fifteen, twenty years into a career and can't find work. AI is taking a lot of the air out of the room. It's the topic among my friends and across most of my feed. A lot of folks who want to stay true to their craft are picking a different route: freelancing, going independent, building their own thing. If that's you, the identity part is going to hit before the money part does. Be ready for it.

"Don't get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life."

3. I Picked Heavy Things Up Off the Ground

This is the cliche one and I don't care, because it's the one that made the other two possible.

I've gone to the gym essentially every day for two years. If you know me, you know I'm a fitness freak to a fault. Let me say this clearly: I do more exercise than anybody needs to do, and it's probably borderline unhealthy. Do not use me as the benchmark.

I'm not a scientist and I won't pretend to explain the mechanism, but the short version is that exercise supports neuroplasticity, your brain's ability to rewire itself. My working theory is that all of that training is a big part of why I was able to change who I was. Not just move my body around, but actually shift my identity away from the anxious version of me.

And this wasn't jogging the same loop every day. This was pushing to genuinely painful limits, which, again, I would not recommend if you're just starting out. If you're new, start slow. If you want to be relentless about it, you can be, and there's a confidence waiting on the other side that you didn't know was available to you.

About a year in, running stopped moving the needle. Everyone tells you the same thing once you get older: you have to lift. So I went full bore. I decided I wanted to recomp, to take as much of the fat as I could and turn it into muscle. That's an aggressive goal, and I basically followed a bodybuilding protocol to get there. I didn't diet much at first, but you do have to get your protein up, because you're going to be sore and your body needs the material. (I have an unreasonable amount of data on this. Ask me and I'll happily share it.)

The mechanism is simple once it starts. You lift, you add muscle, muscle costs energy to maintain, so you burn more at rest, and the ratio starts moving. As of today I'm down 17 pounds of fat and up 10 pounds of muscle. I need about seven more, and muscle comes on at roughly a pound a month, so that's another half year of being very strict about it. It's slow. That's the whole deal.

But here's the part that actually matters, and it has nothing to do with the numbers.

When you pull a heavy weight off the ground, or squat it, or press it off your chest, something happens that I haven't found anywhere else. Squat, deadlift, bench. Do those three regularly, add a little weight or a few more reps each time, and you will get stronger. Being able to move weight like that is an incredible feeling. It gave me a kind of confidence I didn't know was on the menu. It made me feel alive and free. It's the thing that lets me walk into rooms I used to avoid.

"If you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."

What Actually Makes Me Shine

So, rest in peace, Dolly. Directly or indirectly, she made me want to be more involved in helping people, do some good in the world, and be honest about the things that actually make me shine.

I'm a humanitarian at heart. I love hosting. I love having people over and putting food in front of them. Which, now that I write it out, is a lot of what she seemed to love doing too.

If you've read this far, here's the only thing I'd ask. Figure out what actually lights you up, the thing that makes you want to get out of bed, and then do it on purpose. Put the phone down, or whatever you're using to pass the time, and replace it with something you genuinely want to be doing.

And go pick something heavy up off the ground a few times. I'm serious. Energy is the resource everything else runs on. Health and mobility are what get you through a workday with enough left over for the things you actually love, and they're also what make you brave enough to do the things you're afraid of.

I know not everyone can step away from a job for two years to sort themselves out. If you can, I'd tell you to do it. If you can't, get yourself in decent shape and find fifteen or twenty minutes here and there, and fill them with something that makes you feel like you.

Don't do it for Dolly. Do it for yourself, because I'm pretty sure that's exactly what she'd tell you. Don't try to be her, either. Look at what she built and find the part of it that's already in you. She was relentlessly motivated and she turned that into an enormous amount of joy for other people. Use the inspiration, then go be you.

That's it. Thanks for reading.