One thing they don’t teach you in school—or in the media world where I learned most of what I know—is how to reconcile the past with the present.
Somehow that question led me to a bar with karaoke that started with Disney songs, moved into the most vulgar and aggressive sermon I’ve ever heard, and ended with a room full of half‑awake strangers singing an a cappella version of “Closing Time.”
Today began very differently. I woke up early, pulling myself out of a dream and into a reality I’m still struggling to accept and understand.
For years, I hated my life. My job. My situations and situationships. My problems and my prospects. I had people around me, but my personal economy of worth was, frankly, wrecked.
I had structure, but I kept missing the mark—at work, in relationships, everywhere. Still, I had people.
Now I’ve lost a lot of that structure. I’ve lost important people. I’ve failed in relationships in ways that can’t be fixed right now, and maybe can’t be fixed ever. And yet, for the first time in a long time, I have things I’m genuinely proud of.
I have a job I love. I have prospects. I’m pushing toward new creative and event‑driven projects. I’m putting myself out there instead of just getting by.
I’m in the most functional relationship I’ve probably ever had. It only took me until forty‑five to figure out how to be that person.
But the failures—jobs, relationships, timing, all the moments where I didn’t figure it out soon enough—don’t disappear. Some can’t be repaired.
I’m visiting family in Arizona with my dad, my brother, and my girlfriend. It’s been great. A genuinely good vacation. And still, my brain can’t stop circling the shadows in the room.
I haven’t always been a good son. I haven’t always treated my dad with respect. I’ve been mean. Even if things are good now, the old stuff hangs there like frozen meat in a cooler I can’t stop punching.
I wasn’t a good brother either. I was so self‑absorbed I didn’t notice anything. My brother never came to me for advice when we were kids. That means either I had nothing to offer or I made him feel like he couldn’t come to me. That sticks.
Even though things are good now—better than they’ve been—we’ve all worked on it, and we’re still working on it, those shadows sit at the edge of my mind and poison every good feeling I have. It’s unfair. It’s human. And it happens anyway.
And then there’s the person I pushed away twenty‑six years ago by ghosting before ghosting even had a name. I was so wrapped up in myself I couldn’t even write a goodbye letter.
Somehow she’s back in my life now, and maybe that’s the thing that makes me believe in God again—but not fully, because we still have a lot of unresolved history. All my relationship failures, most of my own making, all my communication breakdowns, all the selfish impulses I didn’t know I had but definitely indulged—they make me fear that I’m poison.
The overarching problem is the one everyone faces: how do we reconcile the present with the past and still believe in the future.
How do we stop punishing ourselves for the mistakes, the missed chances, the shame that haunts us, without letting it ruin what’s good right now.
These five days with family have been great. But every night when I try to sleep, I think about the people who aren’t here. The failed relationship with my children, now adults. The fact that my mother is gone. The things I don’t get to fix.
I push it away, take a walk, try not to let it ruin the moment—but I also don’t want to forget it, because it’s true. It’s real. And the worst part is that I can’t rationalize a way to fix it. I can’t accept it.
Which, in a ridiculous chutes‑and‑ladders way, brings me back to karaoke.
I walked in and people were screaming—well, singing—“I Hate Myself for Loving You.” Later someone did “Friends in Low Places.” And then there was the woman who had the worst karaoke experience I’ve ever seen, and yet the one I understood the most.
She requested an eight‑minute worship song, and we all got eight minutes of therapy instead. It turned into a sermon, then a grievance, then something like a chaotic musical monologue. At one point she used words I don’t even know how to repeat. She was struggling. And there I was, just trying to decompress, while her trauma milkshake splattered across the entire bar.
It wasn’t enjoyable. Some of the words were indefensible. But I understood it. She was everywhere at once—emotion, memory, pain—pouring it out in a way you don’t usually hear on a karaoke mic.
I’ve been going to karaoke for twenty‑seven years and I’ve never seen a host take the mic to argue with a singer about just singing the song. But in a lot of ways, it felt like my inner brain made visible. Messy. Uncomfortable. Borderline inappropriate. But honest. You could hear her consciousness spilling out.
And it reminded me: life is messy. Life is hard. Life gets worse when people die or when people decide they don’t want to be in your life anymore, even when they have valid reasons.
But sometimes people don’t leave.
Sometimes they come back.
Sometimes they keep trying.
And just like that woman who turned karaoke into her personal pulpit and therapy session, that’s what it means to be human. We don’t get clean endings. We don’t get consistently happy stories. We don’t get what we expect.
Sometimes you find yourself identifying with the person having a psychological breakdown in the middle of a praise song at karaoke, and that’s ok. If a bit awful in the moment.
Like putting a puzzle together when you know you’ve lost some vital pieces.
