Grieving the Imagined Man

When I was a kid, I had this idea of the man I’d turn into. Not the details—couldn’t tell you his address, couldn’t tell you what kind of car he drove, but I had the basics down. By forty, he’d have made it. Probably in film. He’d have money, or at least enough that he didn’t have to think about it every goddamn day. He’d be strong. He’d know what to do when shit hit the fan. He’d know how to handle himself. He’d be the guy people turned to when things went sideways.

That last part was everything. I wanted to believe there was some moment where adulthood just clicked. You spend years being a kid, then a teenager, then some idiot pretending to know what he’s doing, and then—what? The fog lifts? Suddenly you’re the guy who steps up when shit goes wrong. You’re still scared, but fear is just another thing to deal with, not something that tells you what to do. You know how to make a call. You know when to fight and when to walk away. You know how to take care of the people who count on you. You know what matters, and you actually do something about it.

I am forty-three now, and that man never arrived.

I’ve got a wife, a dog, a job that pays the bills—barely. I make just enough to keep my head above water, which is its own weird kind of stability. I know it could be worse. I’m grateful, sure. But being grateful isn’t the same as being satisfied, and the two don’t erase each other. Nothing’s so bad that I want to torch my life, but there’s enough missing that I can’t help but wonder if this is it. If this is all there is.

The guy I pictured would have known what to do with this feeling. Me? I sit with it until it turns into something else—anxiety, shame, exhaustion, anger. Then I stay up too late, doomscroll on my phone, wake up tired, drag myself to work, and do it all over again.

When I was younger, getting stronger was about the obvious shit. Vanity. Sports. Girls. Being able to hit back if some other kid took a swing at you. Not wrong, exactly, but it’s too small. Lately, I think strength is about something else. It’s about space.

From the second you show up in the world, there are walls. You don’t see them at first. When you’re a kid, the world feels huge, and the walls are way off in the distance. There’s room to move, room to dream. You can point yourself at some future and actually believe you’ll get there. You think there’s time.

But the walls are moving.

One wall is money. Another is time. Responsibility. Loss. Fear. Failure. Your own body. The people you love, and knowing you can’t keep them alive forever. It doesn’t matter what you call them. Everyone’s walls are different. Everyone feels them closing in on them in their own way. The point is, they move.

And your job—way earlier than anyone warns you—is to get strong enough to keep those walls from crushing you.

Not forever. Nothing keeps them apart forever. But just enough. Just far enough that you can still breathe, still move. Strength gives you leverage. Not just muscles, but money, skill, discipline, friends, boundaries, being able to keep your shit together. Every useful thing you pick up is another place to push back. Every dollar you save, every hard conversation you survive, every time you manage to control your own brain instead of letting it run you—those are all ways to keep the walls from closing in.

That’s what strength buys you.

Space.

I didn’t get any of this when I was a kid. I thought you either had strength or you didn’t. I wasn’t in the military—they wouldn’t take me. Didn’t play sports. Wasn’t good at them, and nobody ever told me that being bad at something was just a starting point, not a life sentence. School was easy for a while, which screwed me up in its own way. I coasted on ability until it ran out, and by then I’d never learned how to actually work.

When I was bullied, I was taught not to fight. Prayer. Passivity. Don’t fight back. Don’t fight. Ever.

So I learned how not to fight.

I learned how to read a room. How to keep the peace. How to make myself easy to be around. How to see someone’s reaction coming before I even opened my mouth. Anger was dangerous. Confrontation was dangerous. The safest thing was to be easy. Manageable.

Then my mother had her accident. There were lawsuits—national news. My brother was killed. My father died. I got through college by the skin of my teeth, then graduate school. My wife and I moved around—a lot.

And somewhere in there, years passed.

When you spend most of your life just trying to make it to bedtime, you get a certain posture. You stop thinking about building anything, because building means believing in the future, and the future starts to feel like a joke. You duck. You cover up. You shrink. You deal with whatever’s right in front of you, because there’s always something, and anything long-term gets shoved aside until things calm down. Spoiler: sometimes they never do.

Sometimes they don’t calm down.

You look up after thirty years, and the walls are in your face.

They’re everywhere. Money in your face. Time breathing down your neck. Responsibility on one side, loss on the other. You want to move, but there’s nowhere to go. You want to push back, but you never spent thirty years getting strong enough for that. Or maybe you did, but you don’t give yourself credit because just surviving took everything you had, leaving nothing to build anything else.

That’s where I am now. Forty-three. Looking at my life and wondering what the hell happened to the man I thought I’d be.

For years, I thought the problem was that I just hadn’t found him yet. Like there was some version of me buried under all the crap, a tougher, more disciplined guy who’d just been delayed, not destroyed. If I could get my shit together, he’d show up. I’d wake up early. Work harder. Get stronger. Run more. Read more. Stop wasting time. Fix my money. Fix my brain. Fix my body. Fix my marriage. Write the script. Sell the script. Make the damn movie.

Then, presumably, I would meet him.

The imagined man.

He never skips a workout. He doesn’t lie awake at night, waiting for the next person to die. He doesn’t freak out about his dog dying while the dog is literally right there, alive. He doesn’t lose hours scrolling through a world that’s always on fire because he can’t stand his own thoughts. He doesn’t rehearse arguments in his head and then go mute when it’s time to actually speak. He doesn’t sit around wondering if he’s let everyone down—parents, wife, friends, himself.

He knows how to fight.

That’s one I keep coming back to, and I don’t mean it entirely as a metaphor.

I watched one of those videos about turning yourself into a monster. Stupid word. The usual bullshit: wake up at five, work out for two hours, run fifty miles a week, read thirty pages a day, drink water, take cold showers, optimize your life until it feels like you’re being held hostage by some jacked-up motivational speaker. I watched it and thought, yeah, fuck that.

Nor do I want to.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life proving myself to a stopwatch. I don’t buy that a guy who gets up at five is better than a guy who gets up at seven. Exhaustion isn’t a virtue. You don’t have to be miserable to be disciplined.

But under all that crap, there was something I couldn’t shake. The idea that a man should be able to fight and also hold back. That gentleness should be a choice, not just the only option.

There is something to that.

I was taught not to fight. Nobody ever explained the difference between choosing peace and just being helpless. There’s a difference between restraint and not having any power in the first place. Between knowing you could hurt someone and deciding not to, and just never being able to do it at all.

I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to be violent. But I want to know how to fight. I want to know what it’s like when someone comes at me, and my first move isn’t to freeze or try to make it all go away. I want to get stronger. I want to stand up for myself without thinking that someone else being pissed means I screwed up.

That’s what I mean when I say I want to be more of a man. Not some magic shot of masculinity—pretty sure that’s not real. I want options. I want to be able to protect myself and the people I care about. I want to be able to confront someone without falling apart or blowing up. I want to say what I mean. I want to say no. I want to be able to sit with someone else’s anger without scrambling to make it go away.

I want to be gentle because I choose to be gentle.

Not because I am afraid of being anything else.

But the older I get, the more I see that none of this is going to turn me into the guy I pictured at thirteen, or eighteen, or twenty-five. That guy matters to me now because I’m nothing like him. He’s the filmmaker who made it. The guy with money. The strong one who knows how to fight. The good son who never let anyone down. The friend who always called. The husband who always knew what to do. The man who was never scared.

I’ve spent years competing with him.

That’s a fight I can’t win, because he’s got one huge advantage.

He’s not real.

He was invented by a kid who had no idea what was coming.

That kid didn’t know about death. Didn’t know about trauma. Didn’t know how expensive life is. Didn’t know you could work your ass off and still get nowhere. Didn’t know you could love someone and still be miserable. Didn’t know that sometimes you don’t beat fear—you learn when it shows up and plan your day around it.

He didn’t know any of that, but I’ve spent years acting like I signed a contract with his expectations.

By forty-three, I was supposed to be here. Supposed to have this and supposed to be him.

I’m not.

And maybe that’s what I have to let go of.

Not just my youth. Not just the chances I missed, though there are plenty. I have to grieve him—the guy I made up.

Grief is difficult because it requires admitting that something is gone. You can spend years bargaining with a loss. You can imagine alternate timelines. You can tell yourself that with enough effort, you can somehow go back and make the other choice, recover the years, become the person you would have become if your life had been cleaner and your decisions better and fewer terrible things had happened.

But you can’t.

At some point, the guy I made up has to die.

There is a word for killing a god: deicide.

And there’s something that’s been bugging me, in that way certain thoughts won’t leave you alone: there’s only one letter between decide and deicide.

I.

The words aren’t actually related. This isn’t some etymology lesson. It’s just a weird accident of language. But sometimes accidents tell the truth better than all the explanations.

That’s the work.

Before I can decide what’s next, I have to kill the god I made out of myself.

The imagined man has been a god. He has all the qualities I don’t. He is strong where I am weak. Calm where I am anxious. Certain where I am confused. Successful where I feel stuck. He doesn’t need forgiveness because he never failed. He doesn’t need courage because he was never afraid.

And I have worshipped him accordingly.

I’ve thrown away real accomplishments because they wouldn’t have impressed him. I’ve turned normal failures into proof that I’m not good enough, because he never would have screwed up. I’ve looked at my actual life and decided it wasn’t enough, because it wasn’t the life he was supposed to have.

The problem with gods is that they don’t have to live in the world.

They don’t have to pay rent. Don’t have to drag themselves to work tired. Don’t have to bury anyone. Don’t have to freak out about losing their dog while the dog is still alive. Don’t have to figure out how to talk to the people they love. Don’t have to make choices when there’s no good answer.

They exist outside consequence.

I do.

So the first step is to stop waiting for him to make the next move.

I haven’t been able to decide what’s next because I’ve spent too long waiting for the imaginary guy to take over. I thought I’d wake up one day and feel like him, and then everything would be obvious. I’d have confidence, discipline, clarity, and the strength to push back the walls.

Nobody is coming.

Not him.

Not anyone.

There’s only the guy who’s actually here.

He’s forty-three. He takes meds. He worries too much. Doesn’t sleep enough. Wants to be a filmmaker and still can’t tell if that’s ambition or just a ghost that won’t leave. Loves his dog so much it turns into panic. Has a wife and a marriage he’s not always happy with, and he’s never really known how to talk about it. He works. Pays bills. Writes. Gets tired. Loses nights to his phone. Survived things he never wanted to survive, and still feels cheated that surviving didn’t make him stronger.

But he is here.

Which sucks, because now he’s the one who has to decide what happens next.

Not the imagined man.

Me.

I can still learn to fight. I can get stronger. I can learn to stand up for myself without turning into an asshole. I can get better with money. I can make the things I want to make. I can tell the truth about my marriage. I can learn to sit with discomfort instead of running away into distraction. I can stop waiting for some magic change to save me from having to actually do the work.

I can’t push the walls all the way back. I never could. Some things are always going to close in, because that’s what time does. My body will get older. People I love will die, or I will. I’ll never get back the years I spent just trying to survive.

But the walls are still moving. So am I.

That’s enough to start with. Not turning into a monster, not becoming the guy I made up. Not catching up to the life some kid thought I’d have.

Getting stronger.

In every direction that matters.

Strong enough to make some space. Strong enough to move. Strong enough to put my hands on the walls and push, even if they barely budge.

The guy I made up is gone. There’s no freedom in that yet. Mostly just grief. But at least grief is honest. It means I can stop chasing him. It means I can stop waiting for him to save me from my own life.

That is the decision.

I have to kill the god before I can decide.

There’s still a man here. Not the one I ordered. Not the one I was promised. Not the one I dreamed up. Just the guy who spent thirty years trying to make it to bedtime and finally looked up to see the world closing in.

The one who is still here.

The one who has to decide what happens next.