Say What Only You Can Say

 

Photo by Mihai Surdu on Unsplash

Originally published on Medium.com here.

“I’m glad you remember the date.”

There was sarcasm in his voice. It stung just a little. He was dodging the weight of what I’d said.

I sat upright in my chair. “I remember May 18, 2021, because that was the day I realized the effort and compensation in this company would never line up.”

The company we built together.

The one started in 2018 with no clear vision how we were going to accomplish what we believed in. And accomplish something, we did. We grew it into a $20 million business. We hired more than two dozen people. We brought in a few big clients. Our business grew to have opportunities from Washington state to Nebraska.

We started early and stayed late so many times. We carried stress home on our backs and in our travels. We toiled as we watched our company become a real thing.

And still — I couldn’t say what needed to be said.

Not for four years.

I’m not proud of that. I’m not trying to cast myself as the noble one. I had opportunities. Days where I could’ve named what wasn’t working. Instead, I swallowed it. Smiled through it. Focused on the parts I could control. That’s what we do when we’re scared of the cost of honesty — we convince ourselves that silence is strategic.

But I have to be honest. Silence, most of the time, isn’t strategy. It’s fear. And maybe loyalty. And a weird sense of guilt I couldn’t quite shake.

I was the extreme minority owner in the business. That was never a secret. He reminded me of it once or twice — “You could’ve had more if you’d made different decisions.” He wasn’t wrong. But that’s not the kind of sentence you say to someone who’s been bleeding effort into your company for years.

At some point, I stopped believing we were building the same thing.

“We all worked roughly the same number of hours,” I said that day. “But when it came time to getting paid, you literally made sixteen times more than I did.”

He didn’t flinch.

“I risked everything I had to start this company,” he replied.

He wasn’t lying. He did take the entire up-front financial risk. But the part he couldn’t see, and the part I couldn’t keep pretending about, was the toll it took on the rest of us to hold that risk up.

Long days in extreme weather. Sales targets that never relented. Fixing the broken deals. Bolstering my own morale. Carrying the pressure. Bringing in tens of millions in revenue to the company myself. Not theoretically. Literally.

And still being the lowest paid employee per hour in the company.

I don’t want to turn this into a takedown. I’m not writing this to say I deserved more money. I’m writing this because I waited four years to say what only I could say. Not to blow something up. But to put it down.

Because silence is heavy.

And bitterness is even heavier when you pretend you don’t feel it.

I would vent to my wife almost daily. I thought I was being mature or taking the high road by not speaking up. I thought I was playing “the long game.” But that long game never came. I kept holding out for the future payoff. The equity adjustment. The recognition.

And it didn’t come.

What came instead was May 18, 2021. The day I knew I couldn’t pretend my way into a fairer version of reality.

I carried that silence for too long.

That’s the part I own. The part I’m learning to surrender.

And that’s got nothing to do with a job or the role.

I’m learning to surrender the belief that things only count if they end peacefully — that the work should speak for itself, or that someone else’s comfort matters more than my voice.

There’s a cost to not saying the things you’re the only one qualified to say.

It’s possible for you to stay silent long enough that you begin to believe that permission to write your story belongs to someone else.

There’s a kind of grief in that.

Eventually, I had to say it. I knew it wouldn’t change anything. It was actually about ending something as cleanly as I could. Honestly. Without editing myself or letting someone else write my story even one more time.

Like I said, that conversation wasn’t meant to change anything. I had already walked away from the company I built.

But I walked out of that meeting lighter than I’d been in years.

And that was enough.

Some Things Aren't Mine to Carry

 

Photo by Jamie Pilgrim on Unsplash

Originally published on Medium.com here.

It’s been years since that conversation, but I still remember how heavy I felt afterward.

She was in her mid-twenties. I was serving as the leader of our church congregation. It was a responsibility I had for about five years. Those kinds of conversations are a lot like therapy. In that role, people talk to you when they’re lost, when they’re broken, when the weight of their past is too heavy for them to ignore anymore. Most of the time, they weren’t looking for answers — just someone to sit with them for a while.

She asked to meet. Said she didn’t know why, only that she felt like I was the person she needed to talk to. What she shared happened nearly a decade earlier, something from her teenage years. I don’t need to explain what it was. Only that it haunted her. She had lived an admirable life since, but that thing she carried had never been given a place to rest.

So she handed it to me.

Not intentionally. Not selfishly. She was unburdening. And I did what I thought was right — I took it. I tucked it into the already-crowded corners of my heart and walked around with it like it was mine. For days afterward, I couldn’t think about anything else. Her story consumed my thoughts.

And not in a noble way. In a helpless way. As if obsessing over it could somehow undo what had been done. As if taking it on would make me more compassionate, more Christlike, more responsible.

It did do some of those things, but mostly it just felt heavy.

What I learned from that experience has shaped me more than almost any sermon I’ve ever preached.

She needed to speak it. To name it. To release it into the air where it could lose some or all of its power.

But she didn’t need me to carry it anywhere.

In fact, part of the gift I could give her, really the only grace of that moment, was letting it land between us and just stay there. Not because I didn’t care. But because there was no point in anyone picking it up again. And if I did — if I tried to carry her sorrow — would that make her wonder if it was still hers to bear?

Some burdens — maybe most — are meant to be witnessed, not adopted.

I wish I could say I learned that lesson and applied it everywhere. I didn’t.

In my work life, especially, I’ve developed an almost pathological need to take on burdens that were never mine. I do this thing where I make myself the fixer, the rescuer, the emotional buffer between reality and someone else’s reaction.

I say yes to way more than I should.
I reread emails ten times trying to anticipate how someone else might misunderstand or disapprove.
I over-explain. I over-apologize. I over-function.

And it’s not because I’m noble, but because I’m afraid of what happens if I don’t carry the weight.

Somewhere along the way, I decided that being a good leader, or a good business owner, or a good friend meant absorbing everyone else’s discomfort and still performing like it doesn’t affect me.

But I’ve been wrong about that.

“Leave no trace” is an important principle when camping in the real world. You want to leave the beauties of nature in the same condition that you found them. In the metaphorical canyon of our lives, though, the trail should be littered.

Not with recklessness. Not with denial. But with the discarded burdens we’ve finally decided not to carry anymore.

That young woman had carried her weight long enough. What she needed wasn’t someone to take it from her, but someone to hear it and then let it fall to the trail. To let it be over.

It was never mine to carry. And neither are so many other things I try to shoulder.

I’m learning, slowly, that I can be present without absorbing. I can love without losing myself. I can witness pain without adopting it.

Some burdens are sacred to hear. But not to hold.

Some guilt isn’t mine to scrub clean. Some outcomes aren’t mine to fix. Some pain isn’t mine to own, even if I love the person who carries it.

This lesson keeps circling back into my life. Sometimes in a church pew. Sometimes in a Teams thread. Sometimes in a late-night kitchen conversation.

And every time I remember it, I walk just a little lighter.

I’m not finished learning. But I’m closer than I was.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along on Medium.com here. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.

When You Let Your Past Hold Your Future Hostage

 

Photo by Hadija on Unsplash

My Hamlet paper didn’t land in my hands. It landed on the floor.

My professor flung it back across the desk at me like it had personally insulted him. The disgust on his face was real. “If that’s what you’re going with,” he said, “I’m going to fail you. You can do better than that.”

I picked it up, part mad and part in full agreement. He wasn’t wrong. The paper was garbage. It was scribbled together with the creative effort of Brian Regan’s “Cup of Dirt” science project. (“Here’s a cup of dirt. I call it… Cup of Dirt. Please just give me an F and move on.”)

That was basically the energy I brought to the final term paper of my Intellectual Traditions of the West class. I loved writing. I still do. But I didn’t want to give that class my best, even though a bad grade would mean getting kicked out of the honors program at the University of Utah. But after slogging through books like “Gargantua” all semester and pretending I cared what some 16th-century monk thought about oversized pants and bowel movements, I was just done. “Cs get degrees,” I told myself. I just wanted out of there.

That particular scene took place roughly twenty-three years ago, and it’s stuck with me. It was a bit dramatic, but also familiar. I’d done that move before and have done it a thousand times since: the halfway effort that lets me pre-disqualify myself before someone else can. I should call it the “Cup of Dirt” strategy.

Funny thing though. I’ve never been great at the middle ground. I either show up with the full intensity of a revival preacher, or I ghost the whole thing and blame the lighting.

My running buddies know I don’t do moderation. I repeated it again to them on our last run together. Until about a month ago, it had been almost eighteen months since I’d gone on any runs. So my first week back? Thirty-seven miles. I set a goal to hit 55 this week.

Never mind the fact that I’m thirty pounds heavier than I was the last time I ran seriously. Never mind that every joint in my lower body started filing formal complaints by day three. I had to prove, to no one in particular, that I was still that guy. The one who could pick it back up like nothing had changed.

Spoiler: things have changed.

The real truth is that this isn’t about fitness or mileage or knees that sound like bubble wrap. The real truth is that somewhere inside me, there’s still a version of myself I’m trying to justify. Still an audience I’m performing for — even though I don’t think they were ever really watching.

It reminds me of a quote attributed to David Foster Wallace, “We’d be a lot less worried about what people thought of us if we realized how seldom they do.”

When I think about the work I’m doing now, the clients I’m serving, the way I structure my days — it’s not lost on me that I give the least of myself to the company that believed in me the most. I’ve consulted for them for seven years. They stuck with me when I was figuring things out. They trusted me before the credentials were there.

But now that I’m working with companies that pay more, that challenge different muscles, I don’t bring the same energy to my long-time client. Not because I’m ungrateful. But because my attention is divided. And sometimes I forget to give it my full effort because, in a way, I’ve kind of emotionally left the building.

Nobody explained that to me when I started my own businesses. I ignored what should have been; you carry the ghosts of every past version of yourself into new rooms. And if you’re not careful, they start deciding how you show up.

I used to think the hardest part of change was risk. Or discipline. Or rejection.

Lately, though, I think the hardest part of change is not bringing old habits into new opportunities. Not letting that Hamlet-paper energy seep into projects that actually matter just because I’ve been working on them for so long. Not handing the steering wheel to the part of me that already decided to call it a day.

I’ve wasted so much energy performing for people who were never watching. Trying to prove I’m still the smartest guy in the room. Or the fastest. Or the most competent. Or the most useful.

And all the while, I continue to make it harder for the people who are actually watching — my wife, my kids, close friends, even my future self — to see who I really am underneath the performance (or lack thereof).

I don’t want to keep doing that.

If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.
It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of my reflections on identity, meaning, and building a life I don’t want to run away from.

Aaron Pace on Books.by

What if the life you're trying to escape from is the very one you're meant to live? You Don't Have to Escape to Be Free…

books.by

I don’t want to run 45 miles one week and zero the next because I can’t figure out how to be someone in between.

I don’t want to half-write a term paper just so I can beat the professor to the punch and call it trash before he does.

I don’t want to carry the guilt of low effort into every conversation, every invoice, every mirror.

I want to show up for the life I have now, not the one I’ve already walked away from. I want to stop giving my future over to habits I built just to survive my past.

Maybe that means learning how to give enough. Not all. Not nothing. Enough.

That’s a strange kind of growth — to move from all-or-nothing to something solid and steady.

I’m not there yet. But I think I’m closer than I was. Some days, I can feel the weight lift just a little.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along on Medium.com here. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.

Living Like the Author, Not the Audience

 

Photo by Mike Hindle on Unsplash

When I left the company I helped build, they hired seven people to replace me.

Seven.

If I ever needed validation for my hero complex, that was is. (Note: I do not need more fuel for the hero-complex fire.) I mean, come on — how many people does it take to screw in the lightbulb that I used to do on my own? Apparently, seven. I fanned the flames of my own ego by sharing that fact with anyone who asked.

Here’s the thing: bragging about that has started to feel hollow. Were I a better person then, the first time I said it would have sounded empty, but I took a lot of pride in it.

For years, I had poured my whole self into the business — going way beyond reason, hours, and even my health. I had played every role in the drama triangle at some point. Some days I was the victim, resenting decisions I didn’t make but had to clean up. Other days, I was the not-so-reluctant hero, staying late, solving the unfixable, sacrificing sleep and time with family for “the greater good.” And, let’s be honest — there were even a few days I was the villain in someone else’s story too.

A lot gets done in the drama triangle. It’s a productive mess. That’s what makes it so hard to leave.

My wife, in her work as a health coach, talks a lot about the drama triangle — how we all crave security, approval, and control. And how, when those needs go unmet, we tend to drift, mostly automatically, into one of the three roles: villain, victim, or hero.

In my professional life, I’ve lived in that triangle more than I’d like to admit. It gave me identity. Motion. Even purpose. But it also trapped me in someone else’s narrative loop of reacting, fixing, resenting, repeating.

At its core, the drama triangle is about authorship. You’re not leading from there. You’re not directing the story. You’re just performing a role in a plot someone else is writing. The pen’s not in your hand.

Rumination is the audience seat of the drama triangle. I’ve spent entire seasons of my life replaying moments, conversations, decisions — scripting the comebacks I never gave, imagining the outcomes that never came, blaming the people who didn’t give me what I never asked for out loud.

And the whole time, I thought I was processing. Healing. Strategizing.

But really, I was waiting for someone else to hand me a better script.

It’s a strange paradox. I chose (maybe unconsciously) not to act — and then I blamed other people for the outcome. I abdicated authorship, then resented the narrative I was living in.

That realization was a bitter pill to swallow. But also a liberating one.

No one else gets to be the author of my life. Not my boss. Not my coworkers. Not even the voice in my head that keeps playing old episodes on repeat, hoping the ending will change.

At one of my old jobs, we had a sales rep who loved to say, “Less is more.”
It was usually his excuse for going to the gym instead of calling on customers, but there’s actually something to that idea.

When you step out of the drama triangle, you give up the need to be seen a certain way. You stop chasing the validation that comes from being the hero or the sympathy that comes from being the victim. You stop trying to win roles in other people’s scripts.

Less drama triangle. More freedom.

Freedom to be who you actually are and want to become.

If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.
It’s called You Don’t Have to Escape to Be Free — a collection of my reflections on identity, meaning, and building a life I don’t want to run away from.

Aaron Pace on Books.by

What if the life you're trying to escape from is the very one you're meant to live? You Don't Have to Escape to Be Free…

books.by

At the time, the only way I knew how to step out of that cycle was to let go of the roles I was good at — roles that made me feel useful, important, indispensable.

In their place, I chose something better: authorship.

Authorship isn’t control. It’s not certainty. Most of life is still outside my hands. But authorship gives me something else: the freedom to choose what matters.

Where to put my energy.

What story I want to live next.

And how to shape the next sentence of my life.

That’s not a clean process. I still get pulled back in. I still want to be the hero. I still draft entire imaginary dialogues in my head that end with someone saying, “You were right all along.”

But more often now, I notice it.

I catch the old pattern and ask a better question: What’s the next right sentence I want to write? Not the next fire to put out. Not the next person to impress. Just the next line in a story I actually want to live in.

I’m still learning how to live like the author instead of the audience.

Still learning how to act without performing, how to care without controlling, and how to show up without needing to be cast as anything other than myself.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.