Why no man is ever beyond hope.
The Question Most Men Never Ask
There are men suffering right now who do not know they are suffering.
There are men who know they are suffering but believe it is simply the nature of things — that this is what life is, that this is what they deserve, that the flatness and the bitterness and the numbness are not symptoms but conclusions.
There are men who are ashamed. Men who have done things they cannot forgive themselves for, who carry that unforgiveness the way you carry something very heavy for so long that you forget you are carrying it at all.
There are men who are bitter — genuinely, deeply bitter — and who have built their entire personalities around that bitterness because at some point bitterness felt better than grief. Bitterness at least has an edge to it. Bitterness feels like power when you have none.
There are men who are lonely in ways they have never told another living person, because to admit that loneliness would require a vulnerability they surrendered years ago and are not certain they can find again.
There are men who are numb. Not depressed, exactly — not in any way they could name or describe — just absent. Present in body. Gone everywhere else.
There are men who are cruel. Men who have built the habit of cruelty and no longer remember why they started. Men who wound the people closest to them and feel, in doing so, something that functions as power but is actually its opposite.
There are men who have simply given up. Not dramatically. Not with fanfare or crisis. They just quietly stopped trying. Stopped reaching. Stopped caring whether their lives amounted to anything. Stopped believing they could.
This chapter is for all of them.
Not to condemn them. Not to analyze them. Not to categorize their pathologies or identify their deficits. But to ask — and to answer — a question most men in these places never think to ask:
How far away from magnificence can a man travel and still find his way back?
This chapter is not about how men become lost. There are enough books about that. This chapter is about whether they can return. Not theoretically. Not as a comfortable spiritual abstraction. But actually, practically, genuinely — in the body and the life of a real man living a real life right now.
What can be done?
Stepping Away From Magnificence
In the previous chapters, I’ve defined a magnificent man as a man who is actively becoming — increasingly alive and increasingly capable of experiencing life deeply.
A magnificent man keeps moving toward life because he has learned, in his bones and not just his intellect, that life frequently rewards the brave with ecstasy. He has tasted it. He has felt it. He has known moments of wonder, of connection, of transcendence, of love so real and so present that the entire machinery of his protective cynicism was temporarily dismantled by the sheer force of aliveness.
And underneath all of it — underneath the courage, the growth, the willingness to feel — is love. Not romantic love, not sentiment, not affection as a passing mood. Love as a deep commitment to the well-being of oneself and others. Love as an orientation. This is what magnificence actually is, at its core: not an achievement, not a state of having arrived, but love expressed as a direction of movement. Responsibility flows from it. Service flows from it. Protection, connection, beauty, meaning — all of it flows from the same source. A magnificent man is, at bottom, a man who loves. And the man stepping away from magnificence is, at bottom, a man who has stopped being able to.
This does not make him perfect. It does not make him fearless. It does not mean he never fails, never wounds others, never retreats, never loses his way. It means he keeps orienting toward life. That orientation — stubborn, imperfect, sometimes barely detectable — is the whole of magnificence.
Men step away from magnificence in different ways.
Some step away through bitterness — a gradual calcification of the heart that begins as a reasonable response to injury and hardens, over years, into a permanent posture toward the world.
Some step away through resentment — the slow poison that feels, in the short term, like justice, but functions, over time, like drinking something toxic every morning and wondering why you are sick.
Some step away through addiction — the substitution of a chemical or behavioral counterfeit for the real aliveness they have stopped believing is available to them.
Some step away through selfishness — a progressive narrowing of their world until other people exist primarily as instruments of their own comfort, and the capacity for genuine care has atrophied from disuse.
Some step away through cruelty — becoming men who have learned to derive some simulation of power from the diminishment of others.
Some step away through cynicism — the intellectual’s form of despair, the posture that says: nothing is worth believing in, nobody is worth trusting, hope is for fools.
Some step away through self-hatred so thorough and so old that it no longer feels like hatred. It feels like truth.
Some step away through simple, quiet hopelessness — not dramatic, not loud, not criminal, not visible from the outside. Just a man who has stopped believing that anything better is possible and has organized his entire life around that belief.
Different roads. Same direction. Away from life.
The Great Lie
The central lie that keeps men in darkness is not the one you might expect. It is not: You are irredeemable. You are evil. You are beyond hope.
Most men in darkness do not actually believe this. Or rather — they believe it sometimes, in certain moods, at certain hours of the night. But they do not believe it constantly, and the belief, when it comes, is suffused with grief rather than certainty. A man who believed with perfect conviction that he was beyond redemption would not be suffering. He would be indifferent. The suffering itself is evidence that something in him still knows better.
No. The central lie is quieter than that. The central lie says:
- This is good enough.
- Stay here.
- Don’t change.
- Don’t try.
- Nothing will ever be different.
This lie is powerful because it is delivered not in the language of condemnation but in the language of comfort. The darkness does not say: You deserve to suffer. The darkness says: You don’t have to do anything. Rest here. Stay here. This is home.
And darkness — genuine, deep darkness — offers real counterfeits. This is important to understand. Men do not remain in darkness because they are stupid or weak or because the darkness has nothing to offer. The darkness offers something that functions, in the short term, as strength. Bitterness feels like clarity. Cynicism feels like wisdom. Isolation feels like safety. Numbness feels like peace. Cruelty feels like power. Despair, once fully surrendered to, feels like relief.
These counterfeits are not nothing. They cost something real to leave behind. But they are counterfeits. They are the nutrition-free simulacrum of things a man actually needs. And a man fed on counterfeits for long enough becomes malnourished in ways he may not recognize because he has forgotten what actual nourishment feels like.
Men stay stuck not because darkness is good. Men stay stuck because it is familiar. Familiarity is one of the most underestimated forces in human psychology. The familiar is predictable. The familiar does not require courage. The familiar does not ask anything of you. And for a man who has already spent tremendous resources simply surviving, predictability can feel like the most precious thing in the world. The lie does not feel like a lie. It feels like realism.
What the Darkness Actually Costs
Let me be very direct with you. The darkness costs everything. Not eventually. Not after some dramatic reckoning. Now. Today. In the life you are already living. The darkness is already collecting its payment.
It costs you joy. Not the performed, surface variety — the performed variety you may still be able to produce on demand. The real kind. The spontaneous, unmanufactured, arrived-from-nowhere-without-permission kind. The kind that surprises you. The kind that makes you feel, for a moment, like a child who has just been given something extraordinary. If you cannot remember the last time you felt that, you have already paid a significant portion of the price.
It costs you love. Not the functional variety — the kind that keeps a household running or maintains a social performance. The kind that sees another person fully and is moved by what it sees. The kind that reaches across the distance between two human beings and closes it. The kind that makes you feel less alone in a way that actually resolves the loneliness rather than temporarily papering over it. The darkness cannot coexist with that kind of love. One of them has to go.
It costs you beauty. This may sound small. It is not small. The capacity to experience beauty — in nature, in art, in music, in the face of someone you care about, in the sheer astonishing fact of being alive on this planet at this moment in history — is one of the primary rewards of aliveness. It is not decorative. It is not optional. It is part of what makes life worth living. Men in deep darkness lose it gradually, the way you lose peripheral vision: slowly enough that you may not notice what is gone until you try to look for it and find nothing there.
It costs you meaning. Purpose. The sense that your life is moving toward something, that what you do matters, that you are not simply using oxygen and taking up space. Men who have been in darkness long enough often describe an experience of radical purposelessness that they may have normalized so thoroughly that they have stopped recognizing it as loss.
It costs you connection. Genuine, soul-level connection with other human beings — the experience of being truly known and truly accepted and still wanted — becomes functionally impossible when a man has sealed himself away from it. The armor that keeps pain out keeps everything else out too.
It costs you wonder. Awe. The capacity to be stopped in your tracks by something so extraordinary that for a moment the noise inside your head goes quiet and you are simply, fully present with what is.
And it costs you ecstasy. I want to use that word deliberately, because I think most men have a narrow idea of what it means, and the narrow idea keeps them from understanding what they are actually missing. Ecstasy, as I mean it here, is not primarily sexual. Ecstasy is the experience of being thrilled down to your soul. It is deep peace — not the absence of difficulty, but a stillness beneath the difficulty that holds you. It is the moment when gratitude arrives so suddenly and so completely that you are briefly overwhelmed by the sheer fact that you exist. It is the walk at dusk when the light hits something just right and something in you responds before your mind can catch up. It is the conversation that goes somewhere real. It is the feeling, rare and unmistakable, that you are exactly where you are supposed to be, doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing, with exactly the people who matter. It is the kind of aliveness that makes a man grateful he was born. That experience — real, available, not reserved for the spiritually gifted or the emotionally sophisticated — is what darkness costs you. The darkness costs you your own joy at being alive.
I have sat with men who were, in every external sense, alive — breathing, functioning, going through the motions — and have understood with terrible clarity that I was sitting with someone who had already left his own life. He was still there, technically. But the man who might have existed, the man who might have loved and risked and wondered and grown — that man was so far from the surface that finding him again would require a journey neither of us could fully map.
What is the darkness giving you that is worth this price? I am not asking rhetorically. I am asking because I want you to actually sit with it. To actually name what the darkness is giving you. Because if you cannot name it precisely, you cannot evaluate it honestly. And if you cannot evaluate it honestly, you cannot choose.
What is it giving you that is worth your joy? Worth your love? Worth your beauty? Worth your wonder? Worth your life? And here is something I want you to sit with for a moment, because I think it may be the most practically useful thing in this entire section:
The pain is already there. I am not talking about some future suffering you will incur if you keep going as you are. I am talking about the suffering you are in right now. The loneliness already hurts. The bitterness already hurts. The shame already hurts. The numbness is its own form of pain — a flatness that is felt precisely because something in you knows it should not be this flat. The despair already costs you. Every morning you wake up in the darkness, you pay the price.
The question is not whether pain is on the menu. It is already on the menu. The question is which pain. The pain of staying — the dull, grinding, daily cost of a life moving away from aliveness — or the pain of moving, which is real and sometimes acute but which is aimed at something. The pain of the man who is running toward a finish line hurts differently than the pain of the man who is simply enduring. One of them is going somewhere.
If you are going to hurt either way — and you are — why not choose the hurt that leads somewhere? Why not choose the difficulty that opens rather than the difficulty that closes?
Redemption: The Return to Life
I want to be careful with the word redemption, because it carries freight from contexts that may not be yours, and I do not want the freight to obscure the simple, powerful truth at the center of the concept.
Redemption is not primarily about forgiveness, though forgiveness may be part of it. It is not primarily about being excused or absolved or let off the hook, though a man’s relationship to his own guilt may shift as part of the process.
Redemption is reclamation. Recovery. Return. It is a man coming home — not to a place but to himself. To his own aliveness. To his own capacity for love and meaning and joy and beauty and connection. To the man he might have been, might still be, might yet become.
Redemption does not erase history. A man who has caused harm does not, through redemption, cease to have caused it. The past is the past. But redemption changes a man’s relationship to his history — from one in which the past is the final word to one in which the past is one chapter in a story that is still being written.
I want to say something here that I mean very seriously:
The first step toward redemption is itself an act of magnificence. A man does not need to have completed the journey to have begun it. He does not need to have arrived to be on his way. The moment a man turns — turns, even slightly, even haltingly, even impermanently — toward life, something has changed. He has begun. And beginning is not a small thing.
I think about the men I have worked with who have made this turn. None of them arrived fully formed. None of them transformed overnight. Most of them fell repeatedly. Most of them doubted. Most of them had days — weeks, sometimes — when the darkness felt more real than the light toward which they were groping.
But they were moving. And movement, however slow, however uncertain, however interrupted by falls and reversals and periods of apparent regression — movement toward life is magnificent. Full stop.
You do not have to be healed to begin. You do not have to be certain to begin. You do not have to be brave to begin. You only have to begin.
David Berkowitz and the Radical Possibility of Hope
I want to tell you about a man who traveled very far from magnificence.
David Berkowitz — known in the late 1970s as the Son of Sam — committed a series of murders in New York City that terrorized a borough and ended lives that had done nothing to deserve ending. He caused grief that has not fully healed decades later. I am not minimizing this. I am not softening it. The harm was real. The losses were irreplaceable. I’m not presenting Berkowitz as a case study in pathology. I am not interested, in this context, in the psychological mechanisms of his crimes or the cultural conditions that surrounded them. I am interested in what happened later.
In prison, Berkowitz underwent what he describes as a profound religious conversion. He began what he says is a sincere engagement with remorse, with faith, with something he experiences as the love of God. He has consistently declined parole, stating that he does not believe release is appropriate given the harm he caused. He has worked with other prisoners. He has, by multiple accounts, become — within the constraints of a prison cell — a man oriented toward life rather than toward death.
I don’t know the final state of David Berkowitz’s soul. I don’t pretend to. Questions of ultimate judgment are above my pay grade and outside my competence. What I know is this: a man who had moved dramatically toward darkness began moving, in some genuine way, toward life. That movement — whatever its ultimate meaning, whatever theological framework you use or do not use to evaluate it — is real.
I offer this not as a statement about Berkowitz specifically, and not as a comfortable narrative about how everything works out. It doesn’t always work out. Some men die without ever turning. Some harm is never repaired. I am not in the business of cheap consolation.
I offer this as evidence of a principle: If the possibility of turning toward life exists there, it exists everywhere. If hope is available in that darkness, it is available in yours.
I do not care how far you have gone. I do not care what you have done or left undone, how long you have been in the dark, how many chances you believe you have squandered. I do not care how thoroughly you have convinced yourself that you are the exception — the man for whom the door is closed and the light is out and the path no longer exists.
You are not the exception. This destroys your excuses. I know. I am doing it on purpose.
God, Intercession, and the Mystery of Transformation
I ‘m going to tell you something personal, and I want to be clear about what I am and am not asking you to do with it. I believe in God. I believe in divine love as an active, present force in the world — not a metaphor, not a cultural construct, not a psychological coping mechanism, but a reality as real as anything I have touched or tasted or known. I believe that this love is capable of reaching into places that human effort alone cannot reach. I believe in the power of intercession — of people praying for other people — with a conviction that is rooted not in ideology but in decades of lived experience.
I believe that some of the transformations I have witnessed in my work and in my personal life cannot be adequately explained by purely psychological mechanisms. I believe something else is sometimes happening. Something I find impossible to describe without using the word grace.
I tell you this because I think it is relevant. I think the Berkowitz story — and stories like it — make more sense when you factor in the possibility that transformation is not purely a human achievement, that the force moving a man back toward life may be larger than the man himself.
But here is what I need you to hear clearly: You do not need to share my beliefs for what I am describing to be available to you. I’m not attempting to convert you. In fact, please don’t change your beliefs on my behalf. I’m not attaching theological requirements to the possibility of magnificence. I’m not saying that redemption is available only to believers, or that the path back to life runs exclusively through a particular tradition or set of doctrines.
Belief in God is not a requirement for magnificence, for love, for joy. Please believe that.
The Man Who Cannot Believe in Himself
I want to widen the circle now, because I am aware that much of what I have said might feel, to some readers, like it is addressed to men who have done terrible things — criminals, addicts, men whose failures are dramatic and externally visible. This chapter is not only for those men.
It is also for the man who has OCD and has spent years believing that the intrusive thoughts he cannot control make him a monster — that the content of his unwanted mental noise is a window into his true character, rather than what it actually is: the symptom of a brain that fires in patterns he did not choose and does not want.
It is for the man who is simply and profoundly lonely — not because he has done anything wrong, not because he is defective, but because somewhere along the way he concluded that he was not worth knowing, and that conclusion has been quietly governing every relationship he has attempted since.
It is for the anxious man who believes his anxiety is evidence of fundamental weakness. The ashamed man who carries shame so old he cannot locate its origin. The man who looked at himself honestly once, many years ago, and did not like what he saw, and has been avoiding honest self-examination ever since because he is afraid of what he will find.
It is for the man who received a diagnosis — of depression, of a personality disorder, of something that comes with a clinical name — and quietly decided that the diagnosis was not a description of a condition he had but a description of who he was. A man who let a medical label become an identity and an identity become a destiny.
It is for the man who failed at something that mattered deeply to him and decided, on the basis of that failure, that he was a failure — not that he had failed, which is a fact about the past, but that he was, essentially and permanently, the kind of man who fails.
To every one of these men I want to ask a single question:
Who told you magnificence was unavailable to you?
Name it. Actually name it. Was it a parent who could not see you? A religion that traded in shame rather than liberation? A bully who found your vulnerability and exploited it? A trauma that convinced you the world was not safe and you were not enough? A failure that you have never allowed yourself to put down? A humiliation you have been reliving for years, keeping fresh through constant rehearsal?
Whatever told you that magnificence was not for you — I want to suggest, with all the clinical and personal and spiritual authority I possess — that it lied.
Magnificence remains available. To you. Specifically. Not as a reward for becoming someone else. But as what becomes possible when you choose to become more alive — more capable of joy, of love, of beauty, of connection, of meaning, of wonder. That capacity is not owned by the undamaged. It is not reserved for the unbroken. It is present in you, right now, regardless of your history, waiting for the direction of your movement to change. Who told you magnificence was unavailable to you? Whatever told you — it lied.
Shame Versus Remorse
There is a distinction I need to make here that I believe is among the most practically important in this entire book. The distinction between shame and remorse.
They can feel similar. They occupy adjacent emotional territory. Many men confuse them, or use the words interchangeably. But they are profoundly different in their function — in what they do to a man and in the direction they move him.
Remorse says: I did something harmful. Something I regret. Something that caused pain I wish had not been caused. I am responsible for this. I want to understand it, make what amends are possible, and move forward in a way that does not repeat it.
Shame says: I am the harm. I am not a man who did a harmful thing — I am a harmful thing. I am the wrong, not merely the doer of wrong. My badness is not what I did but what I am.
Remorse leads toward life. It involves accountability without annihilation. It allows a man to face what he has done squarely, to feel the appropriate weight of it, and then to turn — to use that recognition as fuel for movement rather than as an anchor keeping him in place.
Shame leads toward paralysis. Or toward its cousin, compulsion — the desperate, repetitive reaching for anything that might temporarily silence the verdict. Shame does not motivate change. Research consistently demonstrates this. Shame makes change less likely, not more. A man who is drowning in shame does not have the psychological resources to become better. He is using everything he has just to survive the verdict.
I’m asking you to surrender shame. Not to abandon accountability. Not to deny responsibility. Not to paper over genuine harm with comfortable self-forgiveness that costs nothing and changes nothing. I’m asking you to make a distinction between what you have done and what you are. Between your history and your nature. Between the chapter and the story.
You are not your worst moments. You are not your worst choices. You are not the sum of what you have failed to be. You are a man with the capacity to become more alive. That capacity is not canceled by your history. It is present right now, in you, waiting.
Willingness
Here is the turning point of everything I have been saying.
You do not need certainty.
You do not need faith.
You do not need confidence.
You do not need to understand the process.
You do not need to believe you deserve it.
You do not need to believe it is possible.
You need only willingness.
Willingness to consider: Maybe there is more life available to me than I am currently experiencing. Maybe the version of life I have been living is not the only version possible. Maybe something has been foreclosed that has not actually been foreclosed but only feels that way because I have stopped looking.
Willingness to consider: Maybe joy feels as good as it sounds. Maybe love feels as good as it sounds. Maybe meaning feels as good as it sounds. Maybe connection feels as good as it sounds. Maybe ecstasy — the genuine kind, the soul-deep kind, the kind that makes a man grateful he was born, the deep peace that arrives without warning and the aliveness that makes everything feel lit from within — feels as good as it sounds. Maybe these things are available to me and I am simply not moving in the direction where they exist.
This is not the same as belief. I am not asking you to believe anything. Belief is a conclusion. Willingness is an opening. Belief says: I know this is true. Willingness says: I am not certain it isn’t.
The men I have watched transform — not in my office alone but in the full context of their lives — rarely began with certainty. They rarely began with faith. They often began with something much more modest and much more honest: a crack in the certainty that things could not change. A moment of wondering whether the sentence they had passed on themselves was actually final. A small, quiet, almost imperceptible openness to the possibility that they had been wrong about themselves.
That crack is everything. That crack is where it starts.
If you have any willingness — any at all, even a fraction, even a willingness to be willing, even a curiosity about whether willingness might be possible — that is sufficient. Start there. That is enough to begin.
The Courage to Move Toward Life
Willingness opens the door. Courage walks through it.
I want to be honest with you about what moving toward life actually involves, because I believe you have been lied to enough and I will not add to the pile. This chapter does not promise that your suffering disappears. It does not promise that the path forward is easy or that once you turn toward life everything falls pleasantly into place. Life is not organized around your convenience, and magnificence does not come with a guarantee of comfort.
What I am promising is movement. A better direction. A richer life. A deeper life. A life in which the things that actually matter — love, meaning, connection, beauty, purpose, wonder — are increasingly available rather than increasingly foreclosed.
Moving toward life means moving toward truth. Looking honestly at yourself and your history without either excusing what deserves examination or catastrophizing what deserves compassion.
Moving toward life means moving toward love — toward genuine, costly, risky, non-transactional love for the actual people in your actual life. Not the performed variety. The real kind. And I want to be direct about this: love is not simply one item on the list of things that moving toward life produces. Love is what magnificence actually is. Everything else — the responsibility, the service, the protection, the meaning, the connection — flows from love as its source. The man who begins moving toward life is beginning, whether he knows it yet or not, to love again. That is the whole of it.
Moving toward life means moving toward responsibility. Not as a punishment but as an expression of power — the power to influence, to protect, to nurture, to create. Taking genuine ownership of the life you have been given.
Moving toward life means moving toward service. Finding some context in which your gifts — whatever they are, however untended and overgrown — are offered to something beyond yourself. Service is one of the most reliable antidotes to the particular despair of men who have made themselves the center of a very small universe.
Moving toward life means moving toward beauty. Allowing yourself to be moved. Permitting things to matter. Letting wonder back in. This may sound like the smallest item on the list. In my experience, for men who have been in darkness, it is sometimes the most transformative.
For those who believe: moving toward life may mean moving toward God — toward whatever your experience of the divine is or might be. I will not say more than that here. You know what it means for you.
None of this is comfortable. All of it is worth it.
When You Fall
You will fall. I want to say that plainly, without cushioning it, because I think the expectation that you will not fall — that transformation means smooth, linear, uninterrupted progress from darkness toward light — is one of the primary reasons men stop trying.
You will fall. You will have good weeks and terrible weeks. You will make progress and then lose ground. You will know moments of genuine aliveness and then retreat back into numbness. You will take courageous steps and then take frightened ones. You will turn toward life and then, at some point, turn away again — not forever, but for a while. This is not failure. This is human. The answer is not to transcend the falling. The answer is to get up. To get up again. To get up a hundred times if that’s what it takes. To develop, gradually, the muscle memory of returning — of noticing that you have turned away and choosing, yet again, to turn back. Every time you get up, you are magnificent. Not despite having fallen. In the getting up itself. The falling is not the point. The returning is the point.
And here — in this section, in this moment — I want to speak to you with a particular tenderness, because I think many men reading this have not been spoken to with tenderness in a very long time, and I think that absence has done real damage.
I love you. I mean that in the way that a person who has spent her life loving and serving men means it — without sentimentality, without naivety, with full knowledge of what men are capable of at their worst and at their best.
I see your value. Not the performed version — the version underneath the performance. The man underneath the armor. The man who is still there, still alive, still capable of more than he currently believes.
I cherish you. I cherish what you could become. I cherish the life that is possible for you if you decide — imperfectly, haltingly, with full expectation of falling — to move toward it. The path does not disappear because you stumbled. It is still there. It will be there when you get up. It has been there the whole time.
The Invitation
I want to close this chapter not with an argument but with an invitation. Not an invitation to feel guilty. Not an invitation to feel ashamed. Not an invitation to perform transformation for anyone’s benefit or to fix yourself so that others will finally approve of you. An invitation to yourself. To the life that is actually available to you. To the man you actually have the capacity to become.
Let me say clearly one more time, because this is worth repeating:
No man is disqualified.
No man is beyond redemption.
No man is beyond magnificence.
Not the man who has been bitter for decades. Not the man who has spent years in addiction. Not the man who has been cruel to the people who loved him. Not the man who has failed repeatedly at the same things. Not the man who cannot stop hating himself. Not the man who has given up. Not the man who is reading this with profound skepticism, waiting for the catch, certain that I am describing a country he is not permitted to enter.
There is no catch. There are no preconditions beyond willingness. The door is not locked.
Magnificence is available to the saint and the addict. To the man of great faith and the man of no faith. To the man who has lived beautifully and the man who has made a wreck of everything he touched. To the lonely man. To the ashamed man. To the man whose mind tortures him with thoughts he does not want. To the man who has not cried in twenty years. To the man who cannot stop crying. To the man who does not know who he is anymore. To the man who never knew.
To you. Reading this. Right now.
There is more life available to you than you know.
More love than you have allowed yourself to receive. More joy than you have permitted yourself to feel. More beauty than you have given yourself permission to notice. More meaning than your current life is organized around. More ecstasy — the deep kind, the soul-level kind, the kind that arrives as sudden gratitude for your own existence, as peace so real it surprises you, as aliveness so complete that for a moment nothing is missing — than you probably believe is possible for someone with your history.
More peace. More wonder. More connection. More aliveness. More of what you actually came here for, whatever you believe that is.
More magnificence.
I know you have reasons to doubt this. Good reasons, probably. Reasons with specific names and dates attached. I am not asking you to pretend those reasons do not exist. I am asking you to consider — just consider — whether they are the final word.
And I want to remind you of something: the pain is already there. You are already paying the cost of the darkness. Every day in the bitterness costs you. Every day in the shame costs you. Every day of numbness and loneliness and disconnection from your own life costs you. The question has never been whether you will suffer. The question is whether the suffering will take you somewhere.
You could move toward life and it could be hard. Or you could stay where you are and it could be hard. One of those paths ends somewhere worth arriving. The other simply ends.
Why not find out what is on the other side? I am asking you to become willing. Not certain. Not brave. Not fixed. Not transformed. Not sure of anything. Just willing.
Take one step in the direction of life. Any step. Whatever is in front of you. The honest conversation you have been avoiding. The professional you have been refusing to see. The amend you have been postponing. The prayer you have been too proud to offer. The phone call. The walk. The moment of stillness in which you let yourself feel, for just a moment, the full weight and the full possibility of your own life.
Take one step. Then see what happens. Life, more often than you know, rewards the brave with ecstasy. You are braver than you think.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Chapter Companion Song Recommendation:
— Unwritten, Natasha Bedingfield, 2004
This article is an excerpt from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author, psychotherapist, and leading expert in counseling, communication, and human connection. Her first published study, released in 1993, explored the impact of family dysfunction on intimacy and communication in adult relationships. For more than three decades, she has developed innovative therapeutic models to help individuals and couples create deeper connection, emotional resilience, and extraordinary relationships. Her work explores the intersection of psychology, spirituality, humor, eroticism, and human magnificence, helping people live more fully, love more deeply, and embrace the extraordinary possibilities of a beautiful life.
