Don't Turn Into Your Dad

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I want to tell you what actually went through my head when I stepped off that scale.

Not the version that sounds like a turning point. The real one.

It wasn’t clarity. It wasn’t resolve. It was questions. A whole pile of them, none of them kind.

Who are you right now? How did you let this happen? You used to be an athlete. How does an athlete end up here?

That’s what shame sounds like when it finally gets a turn to speak. Not statements. Questions. The kind that don’t have good answers. The kind you’ve been avoiding by wearing large shirts and never stepping on a scale and not looking too closely at anything.

I didn’t have answers. I just stood there and took it.

Here’s what was actually going on during that time that I haven’t talked about yet.

The drinking wasn’t casual. It wasn’t a couple of beers on a Friday. It was habitual. It was every night. Different friends coming through all the time — and when you’re the one whose place everyone comes to, everyone drinks occasionally and you drink constantly. You’re the constant. They rotate in and out. The bottle stays.

I didn’t see it as a problem because it was social. Because there were always people around. Because nobody was pulling me aside and saying anything. And because the food and the Mario Kart and the restaurant leftovers and the drinking had all blended together into just — how evenings went. The new normal that I’d never actually agreed to.

But standing on that scale I felt something I hadn’t let myself feel in a long time.

Fear.

My dad drank. A lot. He was the kind of man who left — left my mother, left the family — and the drinking was woven through all of it. The way I understood him as a kid was through the absence he left and the bottle that seemed to explain it. He was the cautionary tale I’d grown up inside of without ever naming it that way.

And here I was. Heaviest I’d ever been. Drinking every night. Asking myself how I’d let this happen.

Underneath all those loud shame questions there was one small quiet one that was different from the rest.

Are you turning into your dad?

That question didn’t feel like motivation. It felt like a warning. Tiny. Almost a whisper. The kind of thing you could easily have talked yourself out of or filed away as dramatic.

I didn’t file it away.

I don’t know exactly why. Maybe because I’d spent my whole life quietly terrified of that specific outcome and never admitted it. Maybe because the fear of becoming him was older and deeper than anything the scale could show me. Maybe because some part of me knew that the weight was just the visible part — the thing I could point to — and the drinking was the thing underneath it that actually scared me.

The weight I could fix with a gym membership and free parking.

The drinking was a different kind of problem.

I didn’t fix it overnight. I want to be honest about that. It didn’t stop the moment I signed up for the gym. But something shifted in how I was watching myself. I started noticing the pattern in a way I hadn’t before — who was drinking and who wasn’t, when I was reaching for a drink because I wanted one versus because it was just what you did when you were sitting there. The question had cracked something open that the shame questions couldn’t.

Because the shame questions were about the past. How did you let this happen? Nothing you can do with that except feel bad.

The fear question was about the future. Is this where you’re headed? That one you can actually do something with.

I’ve coached a lot of people over the years who were stuck in the shame loop. Asking themselves the backward questions. How did I let this happen. Why can’t I just do this. What’s wrong with me. Shame doesn’t point anywhere. It just follows you — a heavy dark rain cloud that moves when you move, stops when you stop. It’s not trying to get you somewhere. It’s trying to keep you exactly where you are.

Fear is different. Fear has a direction. Fear says — that thing over there, don’t go there. Which means it’s already pointing you somewhere else. That’s what makes it useful in a way shame never is.

What moves people is almost never the shame. It’s the specific fear of a specific future they don’t want.

A father who recognizes his own father’s anger in himself. A woman who watches her mother lose her health and realizes she’s on the same path. Someone who looks at a person ten years ahead of them on the same road and thinks — that is not where I’m going.

That’s the question worth sitting with. Not how did I get here. But — if I keep going exactly like this, where does this end? And is that somewhere I’m willing to go?

For me the answer was no. I didn’t have a clear picture of my dad — I barely had a memory of him at all. What I had was a ghost. Bad stories from my mom and sisters. Secondhand information about a man who left and never came back. No real memories to attach to any of it. Just the shape of someone I’d been warned about my whole life without ever really knowing.

That ghost was enough. Maybe more than enough — because a ghost you’ve only heard stories about can become whatever you’re most afraid of. And what I was most afraid of, standing there on that scale, was that I was already becoming him without knowing it. The same way I’d gained seventy-two pounds without knowing it.

The tiny voice asking the question was the most useful thing that happened in that whole moment — more useful than the number on the scale, more useful than the shame spiral, more useful than anything.

It was small. It was afraid. And it was pointed in a different direction. Not the right direction — I didn’t know what the right direction was yet. Just away from the one I was already on.

Sometimes that’s enough to start.

Find the question that points forward.

The shame questions are loud and they feel important but they don’t move you. How did I let this happen. Why can’t I get this together. What’s wrong with me. Those are backward questions. They explain the hole. They don’t point to the ladder. The question that actually starts the climb is always forward-facing and usually quiet. It’s the one you almost talked yourself out of taking seriously. The one attached to a specific fear of a specific future you don’t want. Find that question. Write it down. It doesn’t have to be noble. Mine was basically: am I turning into the man I’ve spent my whole life not wanting to be? Small. Afraid. Specific. Pointed in a different direction. That’s the question worth running from.

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION

What’s the backward question you’ve been stuck in — the shame loop, the how-did-I-get-here? And underneath all of that, what’s the quiet forward-facing fear that you’ve been almost too afraid to say out loud?

The gym fixed the weight. That part was almost straightforward once I showed up consistently enough.

The drinking took longer. It took paying attention in a way I hadn’t been willing to before. It took being honest about what was casual and what was habitual and what was something else entirely.

But it started with a tiny voice asking a question I almost dismissed.

Don’t dismiss yours.

See you next week.

— The guy who heard the small voice and decided to listen

Know someone who could use a real reason to start? Forward this to them.