Conversations on the Drive Home — Part One
There are songs you’ve heard a hundred times that somehow become completely different when life changes.
I was driving home from work the other day when Reason to Believe by Lionel Richie came on. I’ve probably heard that song dozens of times over the years. Like most songs, it played in the background while life kept moving. But this time, something was different. Maybe it was everything that’s happened over the last year. Maybe it was where I find myself today. Whatever the reason, I stopped hearing a love song and started hearing a question.
What gives us a reason to believe after life has spent so much time giving us reasons not to?
That question followed me the rest of the drive home.
As I listened, I found myself staring at one word: believe. I’ve always had a habit of pulling words apart, looking for meaning that probably wasn’t intended. This one became Be. Lie. Ve. At first, I laughed at myself. Then I realized it wasn’t really about the word at all. It was about how easily we begin believing the lies we collect over a lifetime.
Not the lies other people tell us.
The ones we quietly repeat to ourselves.
“You’re not enough.”
“You’re too broken.”
“You should be farther along by now.”
“Your best years are behind you.”
“This is who you are now.”
The frightening thing about those lies is that they rarely announce themselves as lies. They sound reasonable. They sound familiar. Eventually, they begin to sound like the truth simply because we’ve heard them so many times.
For most of my adult life, I thought I knew exactly who I was.
I enlisted in the Army before I ever walked through the gates of West Point at twenty-one years old. Later, I became an Army officer, led soldiers in Iraq, earned graduate degrees, and eventually found a career helping veterans and job seekers rebuild their own lives. Those weren’t just accomplishments; they became part of my identity. They answered the question, “Who are you?”
Then life started asking a different question.
What happens when some of those things change?
PTSD isn’t something you leave overseas. It has a way of following you home in unexpected ways. My marriage, which I believed would last the rest of my life, is ending in divorce. Plans I spent years building no longer look the way I imagined they would. None of those things happened all at once, but together they slowly forced me to ask a question I had never really considered.
If you strip away the titles… the plans… the expectations… and the picture you’ve always carried of your future… who is left?
I don’t think that question is unique to me.
Some people lose careers.
Some lose marriages.
Some lose their health.
Some lose people they love.
Some wake up one morning and realize they’re living a life they don’t even recognize anymore.
Different stories.
Same question.
Who am I now?
Working as a career coach has given me a front-row seat to that question almost every day. I sit across from veterans, parents returning to work, people who’ve been laid off after twenty years, and individuals trying to rebuild after difficult seasons. Many of them walk into my office convinced they’ve lost their value because they’ve lost a job or a title.
My job is to help them see that their identity was never their résumé.
The irony hasn’t been lost on me that while I’ve been helping other people answer that question, I’ve quietly been wrestling with it myself.
I’ve come to believe that trauma doesn’t just change what happened to us. Trauma tries to rewrite the story we tell ourselves about what happened. There’s an important difference. One describes an event. The other begins to define an identity.
Trauma whispers, “This is who you are now.”
Healing asks, “Are you sure?”
I’ve realized that resilience isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes resilience looks like showing up to work when your heart is heavy. Sometimes it looks like helping someone else find hope while you’re still searching for pieces of your own. Sometimes it looks like getting in your truck at the end of the day, taking a deep breath before you start the engine, and deciding that tomorrow you’ll try again.
Nobody applauds those moments.
Nobody sees them.
But maybe those are the moments that matter most.
One thought has stayed with me ever since that drive home.
Trauma is a terrible author.
It always wants to rewrite the ending in the first chapter.
Healing is taking the pen back.
Maybe that’s what believing really is. Not pretending life hasn’t hurt us. Not ignoring loss. Not acting as though everything happens for a reason.
Maybe believing is simply refusing to let our hardest chapter become our whole story.
So I’ve been thinking about that song ever since.
Not because it answered my questions.
Because it reminded me to ask a better one.
What story am I choosing to believe?
Maybe that’s the real question for all of us.
If you stripped away every title you’ve ever held, every role you’ve ever played, every expectation someone else placed on your life…
Who would still be standing?
I think that’s the person I’ve been trying to meet all along.
Maybe…
You are, too.
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I’m not here to play nice, I’m here to make change.
I work with veterans, teens, career shifters, and anyone who’s ever been told they’re too late, too broken, or too much.
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