Growing Forward · Letter No. 1 · July 2026← All letters

I thought I was doing life right. I wasn't.

If you've read my story on the site, you know the outline. This is the fuller version — the part that didn't fit on a homepage.

What happened

It was Covid when things really started to crack for me. Nobody knew what the future held. Daily routines fell apart. The kids were home from school, I was working from home, and I didn't handle it well.

My anger started coming out sideways. The strange part was, my anger never matched what was actually happening. My wife and kids got the brunt of it. Small things — at home, at work — would set me off.

There were days I'd walk outside just to cry. Alone. Isolated. I didn't want anyone to see it.

What came up for me

Here's what made that so strange to me: for most of my adult life, I wasn't a "feelings person." I remember being 18, crying out of frustration at one of my first jobs, and getting yelled at by my boss for showing emotion at work. That was normal back then. Suck it up. Man up. Men don't cry. I wanted to fit in, so I learned to hide what I felt.

I got good at it. I compartmentalized. I solved problems with logic instead of feeling them. I took it to an extreme. I couldn't remember the last time I'd actually let myself feel something all the way through.

And underneath all of that, here's the harder truth: I wasn't showing up as the husband my wife needed. Not because of one big moment. Because of who I'd quietly become — self-centered, defensive, driven by fear more than love. I was hard to be close to. I was hard to really know.

So standing outside my own house, crying because the anger had nowhere else to go, told me something was wrong. A man who hasn't cried in years doesn't end up crying alone at night for no reason.

How the work began

I tried talking to my wife first. It didn't go well. I was too self-centered and emotionally immature to see how much I'd hurt her. You can't repair something with someone you've hurt if you're not willing to hold space for their pain first.

Then I tried therapy. That didn't go well either. Then my wife and I tried couples therapy — and if I'm honest, it made things worse for a while too. I got defensive in that room, because I hadn't done any of my own work yet.

Slowly, I started to see — even though it wasn't fully clear yet — that I was the problem. Not my wife. Not Covid. Me. I was the thing that needed to change.

It was in that process — even the parts that didn't work, even the defensiveness — that I finally understood something: the way I'd been showing up used to serve me. It didn't anymore. And it was hurting the person I loved most.

That's where the real work began.

Looking back, here's how I'd reframe it

I'd achieved everything I ever wanted. And I was failing at the one thing that actually mattered — being a good husband. I could have blamed other things. That wouldn't have changed a thing.

The only way to a different outcome was to take a hard look in the mirror and wrestle with myself. Seek help. Admit I was hurting. Own my mistakes. Not as a project to complete, but as a man learning, slowly, how to actually love someone well.

There's a phrase I picked up somewhere: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. That's the best way I can describe the whole process. The last six years have been slow, by design. And because I slowed down, I've grown more than I ever expected. It feels far away now.

But I don't want anyone else to go through what I did — at least not alone. I'm writing this to offer some hope to anyone walking through something similar.

If you know a man who might need these words today, would you consider sharing this letter with him? Sometimes the right message arrives at exactly the right time.

— Jonathan Worrall