The mountain.

A few years ago, in a stretch I'd rather not describe in detail, I asked for a picture of what was happening in my life. What I got was a mountain.

I was standing at the bottom of it, and at the top was everything I had ever wanted. I could see it clearly. I was thrilled. I started up fast.

You can guess the middle. The excited steps got heavy. I ran out of water and started tasting iron. My eyes dropped from the summit to my own feet, and I noticed how slowly they were moving, and my mind started doing what minds do when they're exhausted and alone. Then I walked into a cliff. A sheer face, stretching left and right as far as I could see. I tried it a few times. There was nothing left in me to try it with.

Off to the side, under the first tree I'd seen all day, someone was sitting in the shade. He was not impressive to look at: rough, worn, the kind of man you'd cross the street to avoid. He invited me to come sit. I wanted the shade more than I wanted my pride, so I went.

And that was the end of it. I sat down, and the picture stopped.

I was annoyed. Shouldn't a vision end at the top? It took me years to understand that it had ended at the top of the only climb that mattered that day. The success in that picture was never the summit. It was being willing to sit. To rest in the shade of someone who had plainly made the climb himself, and to let him get me back on my feet before I tried the wall again. Not instead of the climb. Before it.

Rest is not quitting. Sometimes it's the only way up. That doesn't hand anyone an excuse to stop working. It just moves the first question from how do I try harder to what do I actually need right now, which turns out to be the question that gets people moving again.

That's what this site is. The shade.

Who's writing this

Those jobs don't look related on paper. What connects them is that every one of them put me in a room with someone on his worst day. The crisis line taught me the most: people almost never call because they've run out of advice. They call because there's no one else awake who knows their name.

I'm a Latter-day Saint. You don't have to be to find something useful here, and I won't pretend it doesn't shape how I see this. I think a faith you chose, standing on your own two feet and knowing what you value, is the only kind that holds. A lot of what I write is about getting men back onto their feet.

What this is, and isn't

It's a place to put what I'm learning while I'm learning it, for men who are doing everything right and still can't breathe. It is not therapy. I'm a counselor-in-training under supervision, not a licensed clinician, and I'm not accepting clients. When that changes, this page will say so plainly.

Until then: take what's useful, leave what isn't, and tell me if something landed. I read everything.