I Almost Died Thinking About Moving Boxes
I wrote this as a journal entry for myself after a rough patch earlier this month. Sharing a polished version here in case it resonates.
For the past year, I’ve taken two walks per day. 1.5 miles each. One to start the day, one to close it. A simple ritual. Bookends.
The nightcap walks are done now.
Around 10:30pm on January 3rd, a car pulled up beside me. Someone rolled down the window and held a gun at me.
It lasted maybe five seconds. Maybe ten. I don’t know. Time does something strange when your brain registers that you might not exist in thirty seconds. I had headphones in. I never heard what they wanted. I just stood there, frozen.
They didn’t shoot. They drove off slowly, gun still pointed at me, and eventually disappeared into the dark. I’ve heard people describe their soul leaving their body. I never understood what that meant until that night.
To understand why that moment broke something open in me, you need to know the state I was in when I stepped outside.
The Context
I was two weeks post-op from a neck surgery. Couldn’t turn my head. Couldn’t sleep properly. Couldn’t sit at my desk without pain. I also couldn’t play hockey, which is the thing that usually keeps my mind from eating itself like it did.
I had also just lost my grandmother and spent the holidays alone.
Heavy time, certainly, but these were mostly all results of choices I made. Nothing too far from the ordinary, but the compound effects were gnawing at me.
Everyone has phases of life that are more difficult than others. That’s part of the human experience.
The disturbing thing about my mental state in that moment:
My mind wasn’t on recovery. It wasn’t on grief. It was spiraling over a commitment I had made weeks before my surgery was even scheduled: helping a group of people move the following weekend.
I’ve spent years in therapy working on co-dependency. Years of recognizing this pattern, naming it, understanding where it comes from. And there I was, two weeks post-surgery, barely able to turn my head, and my nervous system was still more concerned with being useful to others than healing myself. It’s almost comical.
The pattern doesn’t care how much you’ve read about it.
I was thinking about optics. I was worried about whether I seemed supportive enough. I was consumed by the need to be perceived as a “good person,” even if it meant putting my body at risk to maintain the image.
Then, in a single second on the side of that road, all of it changed.
When you are staring at a gun, you do not care about moving boxes. You do not care if someone thinks you are "helpful." You realize, with violent clarity, that if you had died on that road, none of it would have mattered. Not the boxes. Not the opinions. Not the performance. Your final days on Earth would have been spent agonizing over a commitment your body was begging you to break.
That moment forced a question I had been avoiding for years.
Why am I working so hard to protect a life that doesn’t actually feel like mine?
The Performance of Self-Betrayal
I was physically incapable of helping. And yet, when that weekend came, I drove myself there anyway. Put on a mask of “feeling fine.” Did the lifting anyway.
I’ve always prided myself on reliability. I’m the guy who shows up. That’s the identity I forged for myself. Acts of service, presence over promises, being the person people can count on. I believed this was a virtue.
Standing there that day, moving things regardless of the discomfort and smiling no matter the circumstance, I realized something. I wasn’t being reliable. I was being afraid. Afraid of looking weak. Afraid of being seen as unhelpful. Afraid that if I stopped performing the role of the “good person,” my relationships would collapse. This was straight up hostage behavior.
Robert Kegan, the Harvard developmental psychologist, describes a stage of adult development where your identity becomes fused with how others perceive you. You don’t have relationships. Your relationships have you. You are authored by your audience.
That was me. And the pattern didn’t start with the move. It started with the surgery itself.
I had a cyst on my neck for nearly 15 years. Never bothered me. No pain. I barely noticed it unless I saw it in pictures. But over the years, people made comments. They made it clear it was unsightly. And because I have a tendency to treat other people’s discomfort as my renovation project, I decided to cut it out.
I underwent a surgery I didn’t need to fix a problem I didn’t have.
Recovery cost me weeks of mobility. Cost me hockey. Cost me Christmas with my family. I traded peace, movement, and the holidays for a scar, 1 for 1. The cyst was harmless and the surgery was the only real thing that caused damage.
Moving boxes I shouldn’t lift. Getting a surgery I didn’t care to have. Same pattern. I was dependable to everyone except myself.
Reliable to every audience except the one in the mirror.
Reliability without boundaries isn’t virtue, it’s slow-motion self-abandonment. The one thing I worked so hard to avoid.
The Trap of Good Enough
So why do we do this? Why do we cut ourselves open for other people? Why do we stare down the barrel of a gun and still worry about being perceived as helpful?
I think it comes down to the seduction of “good enough.”
The situations that have historically drained the most weren’t catastrophes. They weren’t nightmares. They were fine. Stable. Comfortable. Even fun. And that’s exactly what made them dangerous.
When something is terrible, the choice is clear. You can literally just leave because it is so obvious what you need to do. Survival instincts kick in and the exit sign is lit.
But when something is just “good”? Just “okay”? Just “better than the alternative”? You stay and you patch. You convince yourself that if you just work a little harder, endure a little more, change one more thing about yourself, it will become great.
Voltaire said that ‘perfect is the enemy of the good’. He was right. But I’ve learned the inverse is equally true.
Good is the enemy of great.
Good is a comfortable cage. It tricks you into settling. It convinces you to compromise on non-negotiables. It lulls you into thinking that adequate is the same as aligned.
I’ve spent my adult life patchworking it together. Ignoring friction. Overriding the gut instinct that whispered “this isn’t right” because situations weren’t bad enough to justify leaving.
I think we could all benefit from no longer negotiating with just “good enough”.
The Close
Walking away from things that are “good” is brutal. Every instinct screams to hold on. To fix. To endure. Maybe sell something about yourself to fit the confines of whatever “good” is.
Whether we like it or not, a stark reality check is waiting for you at any moment. You don’t know when it will come. You have to stop setting yourself on fire to keep other people warm.
There is power in stepping back from situations that feel like they should be good enough for you. You deserve a life where you don’t have to perform happiness while running on empty. You deserve environments where your health is a requirement, not a bargaining chip.
—
Getting a gun pulled on me was terrifying. It was also clarifying. It stripped away the noise. It showed me that life is too short to spend performing for an audience, no matter who’s watching.
I will always have the scar on my neck. I’m choosing to see it as a reminder. The only person I need to be reliable to, first and foremost, is the one staring back at me.
I’m not out of the woods. Most of us aren’t. But there’s peace in knowing you’re strong enough to recognize when the cup is empty. There’s power in knowing you can make a decision for yourself, even when it hurts.
Some days will be better than others. Other days, the next twenty minutes will feel impossible. But at the end of it all, you only have you. Without you, nothing else exists.
Your Turn
Think about your moving boxes. The commitment you made before you understood what it would cost you. The one your body is begging you to abandon while your reputation management system screams at you to show up anyway. You know exactly which one it is. It surfaced in your mind before you finished this sentence.
Send the text. Not the paragraph-long justification. Not the apology stuffed with excuses. Just: “I can’t do this one. I’m sorry.” Then put the phone down and let their perception of you be their problem.
The next time someone asks how you’re doing, and you’re not doing well, don’t perform for them. Don’t say “getting there” with a brave smile. Try: “Honestly, I’m not there yet.” Then stop talking. Let the silence sit. Let them see you without the mask.
You cannot be loved for who you are if you are always performing as someone easier to deal with.