I sure seem to have a lot to say about you, don’t I. Who am I to preach anything about being courageous? Fair question. Ahead is an honest answer. Let’s go!
My very first experience in life was being given up for adoption and flown across the country to a family I didn't choose.
Hold up - I’m not going to just run through my life story, chronologically listing the top ten difficulties I’ve had to overcome. I don’t do listicles, and you don’t need to hear me moan about a fortunate, privileged, and glamorous life. I say fortunate because I landed with a family that always made me feel safe and loved. I say privileged because I grew up middle-class in the suburbs of the greatest city in the world. I never had food insecurity, never had to worry about cops harassing me, my parents didn’t get divorced, I got to go to college and even do a semester in London. As for glamorous, well I’ve had a varied career in advertising and entertainment on both coasts and have been able to travel abroad on numerous occasions. That’s more glamour than most folks get to experience.
That said, life hasn’t always been completely easy or a straight and simple line for any of us, right? I’ve been knocked down, repeatedly. These days I’m intrigued by how one still finds the courage to clamor back up on the horse and gallop on.
Unsplash: Live Kaiah
You’ve seen me casually mention therapy and “men's work” in previous issues here. There are good reasons why I needed these resources. Let’s take a moment to look at men’s work, what it is, and how it prepared me for what the universe had in store.
For the last decade I've sat in a circle of men, for a few hours nearly every week, doing the often uncomfortable work of being in personal relationship, especially in an era where we’d all rather cover our faces with our phones. To be clear, this work is not “group therapy”, but it’s also not just a “group of guys” hanging out either. We’re a team: we work together and challenge one another to level up our lives, supporting each other during the losses and celebrating the big wins. Aside from the weekly meetings, I’ve spent hours on the phone with teammates, and have worked at higher levels of leadership within the associated organizations, planning and leading gatherings as large as a hundred men at a time.
Over the years, I've watched men from all walks of life ‘drop their mask’ and share their deepest pains and their hardest truths. Only to discover that they weren’t unique in carrying these burdens or in their habit of fighting through it all alone. Once they’ve felt the support of their teammates, I’ve listened to them unload their childhood traumas, their delusions, their addictions, their crippling self-esteem deficiencies, their self-limiting beliefs, and so much more.
Over time they revise the story about themselves that they had believed for years. They begin to detangle themselves from their destructive patterns, rebuild their marriages, leave their unfulfilling jobs, address their health issues, transform their relationships, build consistent systems around their obligations. With their teammates mentoring them and holding them accountable to these commitments, they can finally become the men they were meant to be.
Solid. Confident. They keep their word: they are trustworthy and reliable. They’re connected to their hearts and comfortable in their skin. They can speak with ease in front of a crowd, and are equally well-practiced in the art of active listening. In their men’s team they have a place to release their negative energy so they stop bringing it home to their families.
Eventually, the hope is that these mature, masculine leaders of their own lives can bring their positive energy out into their communities and lift others up, modeling their integrity for younger men and demonstrating outstanding leadership. And most importantly, I’ve seen many of them move mountains to become the dads their own children need them to be.
I feel lucky to have done this work. It’s been pretty profound to witness the transformation in others as I worked on my own. I wish I had found it sooner, but I would learn it was all just in time.
In 2017, five years after having moved to LA, I made a triumphant return to NYC, to meet my birthfather’s daughter, my sister, for the first time. Her boss was excited about our story, and insisted we both stay at her fancy two-level apartment down by South Street Seaport, rather than at my sister’s place. This apartment felt more like a house, with two full floors, direct elevator access on each side, and a spiral staircase in the middle. The next morning we would fly out to Virginia together to spend time with our father and his wife, and I would meet my brother for the first time as well.
But first, New York had to send me a welcome party. At around 1AM, someone else entered the residence. Thankfully I was still awake when he appeared in the doorway of the bedroom I was in. Once he noticed me, he backed away. Apparently I was a surprise; I wasn’t supposed to be there. Well, neither was he.
I jumped from the bed and stood in the doorframe, barefoot and staring into the eyes of a man who was ready for confrontation. He was shifting back and forth, turning his ballcap backwards and sizing me up. I locked into position and calmly gestured to the elevator behind him.
“Roll out, bro” I heard myself say in my deepest voice. “Roll out.” Firm but calm. Insistent but encouraging. When he didn’t budge I stepped forward and gestured again, fully committed.
“Roll out,” I repeated, this time incredulous that he wouldn’t immediately take my offer.
I reminded myself that I was now both a New Yorker and an Angeleno. I had this.
My unwavering, solid confidence gave me status; it told him he didn’t know my capabilities, and didn’t want to learn them. Plus I was genuinely giving him a way out. I was helping him learn to trust me. Internally, I was surprised to notice I wasn’t panicking, I wasn’t freaking out. Instead of being ruled by my old anxiety, I was feeling quite calm, aware and present, fully in the moment. Problem? What problem. No problem.
This was the man I had been working to become.
Meanwhile it occurred to me the intruder may have met my sister first, whose bedroom was at the end of the long hallway to mine. He finally started backing up, but instead of taking the elevator, he shuffled back down that hallway, away from me and toward her. I assumed he preferred to leave the way he came in. Regardless, I still didn’t really know why he was there, and I needed to look out for my sister’s safety.
I jumped back into my room, threw on sneakers and sped down the hallway after him, pausing in a sparsely appointed kitchen to grab a weapon of some kind to defend us. Drawer after drawer was empty, so I just grabbed a geode off a shelf and shoved it in the pocket of my hoodie.
I rushed toward the staircase, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when she emerged from her bedroom doorway behind it, half-awake and confused. We ran up the stairs to see he had entered and exited through one of the apartment’s sliding glass doors that led out to a large balcony. Thirty minutes later I found myself in the back of a squad car, as two cartoonishly giant NYPD officers drove around waving their giant spotlight and waking unhoused men in the area, asking me repeatedly if any of them was the intruder. Quite an uncomfortable ride-along.
Days later, after he was found and arrested, I would learn more about him. He was a crack addict; he and his buddy had been casing buildings on that very street earlier that week, during which his pal had already been nabbed for brandishing a machete.
I had to reschedule my return flight to LA. The local precinct put me up in a hotel in Brooklyn, not far from where I’d lived before the big move. I had to pick him out of a lineup and testify in front of a grand jury to help put him away. Even though he had threatened my life, it still feels unsettling to help send a person to prison.
This trip to New York would continue to test me in a number of different ways.
Here’s another: while I paid a visit to my adoptive family north of the city, an acquaintance of my wife’s called her in the throes of a suicidal crisis. The event that had triggered his suicidal ideation was one that Jen felt I might be better suited to deal with, given my men’s team experience. I stayed on the phone with him for a few hours the first time, and called him back a few times over the next few days. I'm not a therapist and I didn't have a script. I just stayed present and listened to him in the moment, reflecting back to him and gently helping him reframe how he was viewing his situation. I ended up sending him to the men’s meeting that I’d be missing that week, and throughout our conversations I gave him other resources to look into as well.
We touched base again shortly after that experience and I learned he was rebuilding his life and moving forward on a whole new trajectory. We never did meet in person, but I felt fortunate to be able to be there for someone during a crisis and to help them see it through.
Those who have chosen to try men’s work often find the structure, methods, and tools really helpful. Shared wisdom, honest reflection, accountability and especially the permission to get vulnerable and feel something in front of other men, without being ridiculed or allowed to shrug it off, are all crucial benefits that men typically can’t find elsewhere.
But what really moves anyone to truly change their life is the moment they decide, once and for all, who they're going to be. It’s their identity, their choice, and we hold them accountable to that commitment.
The countless hours I’ve spent doing this work and mentoring others through it has taught me how hard that identity-shifting decision is to make, how much harder it is to keep making it, and how ridiculously difficult it is to do alone.
Just a few years later, Jen would have her own crisis.
Following a really challenging, uncomfortable and high-risk pregnancy, her doctor encouraged her to follow up with a kidney specialist. Something wasn’t right, but no one knew what it was. Many tests, biopsies and doctor visits later, I was sitting with my 5-month old daughter in my lap when Jen’s doctor delivered the diagnosis.
Multiple myeloma, also known as bone marrow cancer, one in a family of incurable blood cancers. I squeezed our girl tight and was so deeply grateful to hear details about a longterm treatment plan, instead of a discussion about timelines.
Shortly after Jen started chemo, which made her immunocompromised, the Covid pandemic hit. Since many experienced so much hardship and tragedy, anything anyone says about their pandemic frustrations, however real, tends to sound like petty complaints. But the truth for us was that life had suddenly become quite complicated. I was now a brand new dad, a caregiver for my wife, a Clorox-hoarding grocery scrubber, all while working long hours from my desk in our bedroom, managing projects, teams and lengthy video calls with clients.
Internally, I wrestled with existential dread about the overlapping layers of it all and deeply feared for Jens’s life, but externally I worked my hardest and stayed in the fight for my family. Many have told me they don’t know how I navigated all this, but you rise up to what life serves you, and you stretch beyond where you usually think you can. We were also very fortunate that I had consistent income during that period, and that we have a network of family and friends who continue to go out of their way to help us manage this situation.
Jen has spent the years since that diagnosis doing something far harder than anything I’ve experienced.
For a few years, we called it whack-a-mole: a flare-up here, a treatment side effect there, cataract surgeries, more biopsies, more appointments with specialists. Every week brought a new challenge. Even as the pandemic subsided, the most challenging period was when she suddenly needed a double hip replacement - both hips at once, because her bone-strengthening medication had started doing too much work, causing her femurs to become so brittle they were starting to fracture with every step. Terribly painful, as was this procedure. She would spend about two months in a hospital gown, between the surgery recovery and the challenging physical and occupational therapy at the rehab facility. And for the next three years she’s had to relearn how to walk, the way most of us never have to think about, all while enduring her ongoing chemo treatment, a newly discovered foot fracture, and penetrating inquiries from one increasingly precocious child.
Throughout, Jen has taught me so much about grit and resilience and persistence. She’s remained an incredibly present and reliable mother for our girl. She continues to inspire me to raise my own game.
Ok, one more tale, let’s round out the list.
On a rainy December night in 2023, a speeding car ran a light and turned right into me in a crosswalk. I jumped out of its way at the very last moment, but it still clipped my right arm with its mirror and its front wheel crushed my right foot. The car never stopped, disappearing into the darkness.
In agonizing pain, I hobbled in the downpour, collecting my umbrella and broken phone, only to smash the screen again in my blinding fury. A very dramatic scene, but unfortunately no one was around to hand me an Oscar. I used my left foot to drive myself to the nearest urgent care and by the time they removed my shoe, the foot looked as large as a rugby ball.
We rescheduled our flight for a midwest Christmas to leave a day later than planned. We’d already ordered a wheelchair for Jen at the airport, as she was still recovering. So the two of us ended up rolling through the terminal side by side. Our four-year-old proudly marched between us, escorting her very slow VIPs. The universe has a sense of humor. Luckily, so do I. Most days.
I want to be clear: I didn’t write any of this to impress you. I have countless stories to tell. I bet you and your family have plenty of your own, too. I’m sharing from my vantage point now simply because I’ve become intrigued by what it takes to find your way back to standing on your feet and moving forward.
Often, it takes the right attitude, some confidence, and a healthy, clear perspective. And it often requires the right people behind you, who are aligned with your purpose and pushing you to do your best.
And that is the whole case I've been making for The Courageous: a space built so nobody has to carry their burdens alone, while they figure out what's next.
(By the way, my family still gets a good laugh out of the scene of me saying “Roll out, bro". Hope you do too).
Click here and tell me what you're working through these days. I read every single response.
Back on the horse - you’ve got this.
Onward,
Kevin
Founder, THE COURAGEOUS
PS If you’re at all inspired by this newsletter, please help spread the word - think of someone in your life who might get something out of it and urge them to sign up! Thank you!