And down came the scaffolding
Three losses. None of them failures. All of them mine.
Last year the scaffolding came down.
It was a particular kind of loss that didn’t announce itself. It didn’t arrive with a funeral or a diagnosis or a door slamming shut. It arrived dressed as success, or as the natural order of things, or as something I worked toward for years finally reaching its conclusion. And then one day I looked up and three of the most load-bearing parts of who I was were simply gone.
That was 2025 for me in a nutshell.
Last year on this date, May 15 2025, my consulting agency was acquired. On May 16, I was no longer CEO. In August, we moved our youngest to college, and the day after, Heather and I became empty nesters for the first time in 23 years. And in the fall, in the middle of the playoffs, North Carolina FC: the professional soccer club I had photographed for nearly a decade, a team I loved and served with everything I had? Well, it announced it was shutting down.
Three losses. None of them failures. All of them mine.
It took me nearly a quarter century of my career to become a CEO. Not all of it at one company, but nearly a quarter century of accumulation. I spent years learning how organizations work, how people work, how vision becomes action and action becomes culture. And when I finally got there, I understood what the role really was. It wasn’t a title. It was the chance to lead and inspire, to set direction, and to hand people something worth believing in and watch them run with it. I wanted to be the person in the room who says here is where we are going and means it.
I didn’t just hold that role. I poured into it.
Becoming a father happened faster. I didn’t get a quarter century of preparation. We just began. But even though the activities and learnings were different, the depth of investment was the same. For 23 years there were kids in my house moving through the world, and my job, the one I cared about most, was to be present for that. To help steer three remarkable human beings toward adulthood without steering too hard. To show up daily in the small moments that don’t feel significant until years later when you realize they were everything.
My kids are extraordinary. That didn’t happen by accident. And now all three are launched: My oldest into her career, My second finishing his junior year in college, and my youngest finishing his first. This is exactly what was supposed to happen, and my house is quiet in a way I wasn’t prepared for. I don’t want them to move back home. I want them to be out into the world…like they are doing. So why does it feel so empty?
The photography came quicker but it still took nearly a decade. Nearly a decade of showing up at training sessions and matches, of learning the technical language of sport and light, of building trust with players and coaches until I was genuinely part of the fabric of the club. Soccer photography isn’t just pointing a camera at fast-moving things. It’s learning to see the geometry of a moment before it happens and the emotion underneath the action. North Carolina FC gave me a place to go deep on something I loved. When the club closed, I didn’t just lose a credential. I lost a practice. I lost a community. I lost the thing I did on weekends that made me feel like a teammate. And an artist.
These three losses gut me. I say this in the present tense. Some days I let my brain run into the vast world of freedom and opportunities. Other days, they dwell on the profound hole that I don’t know how to refill.
Some of you may be screaming for me to just get over it. It’s been many months that have passed after all. But how can you put a timeline on grief? This is by no means equal to the feeling of losing a love one. But last year I lost 3 parts of my carefully crafted identity that I felt proud of, gave me joy, and that I thought I was good at.
So we get started again. We think less about what we lost and more about what we can gain. And there is some good news, though: the losses came with some real gifts.
I am less stressed than I have been in years. My weekends belong to me again. I travel more, sleep more, think more. I’m painting. I am creating more. I am taking my time on things. I am designing things for the fun of it. I am even turning this Substack into a book! (More on that later) There is a version of this essay that is purely grateful, and that version would not be lying.
But gratitude and grief are not opposites. They can occupy the same room, and pretending otherwise is, i guess, its own kind of dishonesty. Cue the ol’ adage, “Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened” right?
Note: Many people credit that quote to Mr. Seuss. It’s actually a German poet Ludwig Jacobowski that originally wrote those words. And you may already know this but I loathe Mr. Seuss. Anyone can make up words to rhyme. That’s not genius. I don’t recognize his doctorate degree. Also he was racist.
What I have been slow to admit and realize is that what I lost wasn’t just three roles. It was three distinct ways of giving.
As CEO, I gave vision and direction to people (my team, my clients, my partners) who needed it. As a father at home, I gave presence and guidance to the three people my wife and I love most. As a photographer, I gave attention and craft to something beautiful. Each was a form of being in service to something larger than myself. And I’d like to think that I was good at all three. I gave freely and deeply, and it mattered.
The gains I listed… the travel, the napping, the creative launches… are largely for me. And after decades of being oriented outward, toward others, toward teams and kids and clubs, that can feel surprisingly hollow even when it is genuinely good. I have more freedom than I have had in my adult life, and some mornings I don’t quite know what to do with it.
And then finally, there is something else happening underneath all of this, that honestly, I am still figuring out and finding the words for.
The three identities I lost were constructed over decades. Brick by brick. Now that they are gone, there is something older surfacing now that those structures are gone. I think they are things that were always there, just crowded out. I’m approaching my travel photography differently. My creative endeavors are staying pure without the quick drive to monetize them. I’m allowing the paint on canvas to exist before deciding to scrap them and paint over them too quickly. I am comfortable in the now…and trying to squeeze every drip of juice out of every single day. Is this “mid-life” crisis? Or is it “just-in-time” awakening?
I won’t say much about it here as this story deserves its own space and in time, I will tell y’all more details. But, in February 2027 I will be publicly showing my painting series of my grandfather. Putting my art in front of people for the first time, at this point in my life, is an act of profound vulnerability. It is also, I think, an act of defiance. I am not replacing what I lost. I am revealing what was underneath it all along.
Soooo who am I now? What am I about, now? I guess I am still figuring it out.
What do I hang onto? What do I let go? I don’t have clean answers yet, and I have decided to stop pretending I do. What I know is that I spent the better part of a year grieving things that deserved to be grieved, even when they ended well. I know that the capacity I built over those decades didn’t disappear. It’s just looking for new vessels. I know that the questions themselves are worth something, that living inside them honestly is better than resolving them prematurely.
2025 was the year the scaffolding came down.
I’m still standing. Still looking at the structure underneath, trying to understand what it actually is.
That feels like enough for now.
Love the thoughtful insights.
The scaffolding may have come down but soon they will be used again for the new you! :)