What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years” — and what got you through it?

The Hard Years

People always ask about the hard years, as if suffering arrives with a clean beginning and a polite ending. Like some miserable season you can circle on a calendar.

I envy those people.

I can’t point to one chapter. I have an entire shelf.

I could start with my parents’ divorce. Watching the foundation crack beneath my feet before I was old enough to understand why adults destroy the things they claim to love. I learned early that home isn’t always a place. Sometimes it’s just wherever the shouting isn’t.

Or maybe high school deserves the title. A carnival of questionable decisions fueled by equal parts teenage arrogance and absolute certainty that I knew everything worth knowing. Looking back now, it’s amazing any of us survived ourselves. Every choice was either building a bridge or digging a grave, and most of us couldn’t tell the difference until years later.

Then came first love.

Nobody warns you that heartbreak is less like getting shot and more like slow poison. It settles into your bones and quietly rewrites your understanding of trust. You eventually recover, but you’re never quite the same idiot who walked into it believing forever was a guarantee.

Then there were the wandering years.

Being kicked out. Sleeping in different houses. Carrying everything that mattered in the back seat of a car. Wondering where “home” had wandered off to this time. Eventually I made my way back to California with my father, carrying more baggage than clothes and pretending experience automatically meant wisdom.

It didn’t.

Then came the day the universe decided to remove my father from it.

That wasn’t just a death.

It was an earthquake.

The years after that became their own campaign against gravity. A failed second marriage. Friendships that collapsed under their own weight. Losing jobs. Fighting for my children. Learning that courts don’t measure love the way fathers do. Every victory came with paperwork. Every loss came with another piece of myself I had to leave behind.

And now…

This year.

The year I discovered that grief doesn’t always come from funerals.

Sometimes it comes from people who are still breathing.

Losing two men I once called my best friends has been one of the strangest kinds of mourning I’ve ever experienced. One slowly surrendered himself to paranoia, addiction, and a reality that none of us could reach anymore. The other… the other detonated his own life with choices so monstrous they poisoned every memory that came before them. The man I thought I knew disappeared in an instant, replaced by someone I refuse to recognize.

It’s a strange thing to mourn someone who is still alive.

You’re not burying a body.

You’re burying the person you believed existed.

That kind of funeral doesn’t have a cemetery.

It happens inside your own head.

So which chapter would I call The Hard Years?

All of them.

Because life doesn’t hand out hardship in neat little volumes. It leaks into every chapter. Sometimes it’s loud enough to shake your teeth loose. Sometimes it whispers so quietly you don’t realize you’ve been carrying it for years.

But if I’ve learned anything wandering through this beautiful catastrophe, it’s this:

The hard years aren’t what define you.

The good years do.

The mornings around a campfire. My kids laughing. My wife believing in me when I couldn’t. A camera hanging from my neck somewhere deep in Oregon. The smell of pine after rain. A river carrying me downstream. The old gods waiting patiently in the mountains. Friends like Robert, still showing up when the road gets rough.

Those moments become your provisions.

You store them away without realizing it.

Then one day life punches you square in the mouth, and suddenly you’re living off memories you didn’t know you were saving.

Character isn’t built during the easy years.

It’s revealed during the hard ones.

And if I’m still standing after everything that’s tried to knock me flat, it isn’t because I’m stronger than anyone else.

It’s because somewhere along the way, between the mountains, the cameras, my family, and all the miles traveled, I unknowingly built a foundation sturdy enough to survive the storms.

Not untouched.

Not unbroken.

But still standing.

And sometimes…

Still standing is the bravest thing a man can do.