The Missing Two-Thirds

At the time, I thought this was personality. Reliable. Practical. Calm under pressure. The person who kept moving.

Looking back, I am no longer sure.

In The Face of El Exiliado, I wrote about something I could not clearly see for most of my life. Part of me, the emotional, rooted, intuitive part, became cut off from the outside world. That part became El Exiliado, sealed behind internal walls that were opaque and unbreakable from the inside.

For the purposes of living, he was gone, and life adapted to his absence.

When I look back now, parts of my own life feel strangely quiet. Not false. Not unlived. Just difficult to fully inhabit in memory. Decisions were made. Responsibilities were carried. A life kept moving. But sometimes it feels like I stepped into someone else’s life only to realize it was mine.

This is difficult to explain because care was there. Loyalty was there. Commitment was there. I showed up. I stayed. I carried what needed carrying.

But when I revisit parts of my life, I sometimes find practicality standing where I expected something else to be. Responsibility. Momentum. What made sense. What kept life moving.

And somewhere inside that, a strange question quietly waits: Where was I? Not physically. Not practically. Something quieter than that. Something harder to name.

For a long time, I thought I was missing individual things. Better balance. More rest. More certainty. Maybe even more courage. But the longer I looked, the stranger it became.

I started noticing the ordinary things people quietly seem to rely on while becoming themselves.

• A stable sense of identity
• The feeling of this feels like me
• Emotional certainty
• Rest that restores
• A feeling of enough
• The quiet sense that something matters before you can explain why
• Emotional closeness that feels inhabited instead of managed
• A basic sense of safety in my immediate environment
• Internal feedback
• Continuity between feeling, identity, and action
• A sense of belonging without needing to earn it
• The ability to relax into ordinary conversation
• The mental room to remember the small details that build closeness
• The feeling that people value me, not only what I provide
• The feeling that I can simply be with people instead of carrying them

Ordinary human things. The kind of things people rarely notice because they are quietly there.

And somewhere in the middle of that realization, another thought arrived:

Well… what exactly did you expect him to do without all of this?

Of course friendships felt difficult to hold onto. Friendship takes room. Listening. Remembering. Follow-through. Small things that slowly become closeness. I do not think I lacked care. I think there were long stretches where so much energy went toward keeping life moving that closeness quietly became harder to hold.

I think that may also be why tenderness sometimes felt far away. Not love. Love was there. Loyalty was there. Showing up was there. But softness, ease, emotional room, those things sometimes felt harder to reach.

Growing up, I did not really have a father at home in the way people usually mean it. I had a stepdad who helped provide food, shelter, stability, and structure, and a biological dad I saw every other weekend. But looking back, I do not think I had much opportunity to quietly absorb fatherhood up close.

I think I spent a lot of my life quietly looking for fathers.

If there was a father figure out there, I think I hoped he might show me something. Maybe that is why I kept returning to dads like Cliff Huxtable, Al Bundy, Tim Taylor, and Hank Hill. Men fumbling through family, trying to stay steady, trying to be decent, trying to love people while figuring themselves out at the same time. Looking back, I wonder if I was not only watching them. I wonder if I was studying them.

And rest. That one took me a long time to understand. Everyone worries. Everyone loses sleep sometimes. But looking back, I am not sure there was ever much room for real rest. The world got quieter at night, but I rarely did. Maybe there was never much room for real rest because something in me had been trying not to get lost for a very long time.

For years, I thought ordinary life simply felt hard. Looking back, I wonder if ordinary life quietly cost me more than I understood. Not because life was false. Not because love was false. Not because I was absent. But because there was enough of me for the essentials, and not always much left over.