I haven’t blogged since the start of June, which was not my plan.
June is Men’s Mental Health Month. I had a calendar, a rhythm, and all the good intentions that come with deciding, yet again, that maybe this time I would follow a content calendar like I ask my clients to do. I had topics lined up. I had momentum. I had the idea that I would spend the month writing honestly about men, healing, recovery, asking for help, and all the things we tend to carry quietly.
Then my body had other ideas.
The CPPS and IBS loop has continued to do what it does, which is to say it has been exhausting, uncomfortable, unpredictable, and more than a little demoralizing. On top of that, new hip and knee pain has been getting worse, and I am now waiting on a CT scan. Physically, I have not been well. Mentally, I have not been well either. And when those two things start feeding each other, it does not take long before discomfort turns into rumination, and rumination turns into a dark little weather system that follows you from room to room.
That is where I have been for much of June. Not gone. Not giving up. Just foggy, sore, scared, irritable, and tired in the way that makes even the things you love feel heavier than they should.
Yesterday seemed to be the point where some of it finally crested. There was the Gatehouse AGM, and then later, week two of a new phase two group. I am still not entirely sure what shifted, or whether it was one clear thing at all. Sometimes the fog lifts because someone says the right thing. Sometimes it lifts because you say something out loud that has been sitting in your chest for too long. Sometimes it lifts because you are reminded, yet again, healing does not happen in isolation, no matter how much the wounded parts of us insist that isolation is safer.
By the end of the day, the mental fog had lifted for the most part. My body was still my body. The CT scan was still ahead of me. The CPPS and IBS loop had not magically resolved itself because I attended an AGM and sat in a room and helped other humans. That is not how any of this works. But something in me felt a little more here.
And then today is Megan’s 30th birthday.
That sentence stops me in my tracks. My baby is 30. I have been her father for three decades. Three decades of loving her, worrying about her, learning from her, failing more times than I’d like to admit, showing up sometimes, and slowly becoming a version of myself I could not have imagined when she first arrived in the world.
I do not want to turn her birthday into a post about my pain. She deserves better than that. But I also know that life rarely hands us clean emotional categories. We do not get to say, “Today I will only feel joy,” or “This week I will only be grateful,” or “This moment will not be complicated by the rest of my humanity.” Sometimes everything arrives together. Pride and fear. Love and exhaustion. Gratitude and uncertainty. A daughter turning 30 and a father trying to find his footing again.
So maybe this is not a birthday post in the traditional sense. Maybe this is a father marking a milestone while admitting he has been struggling. Maybe it is a reminder that love does not require us to be perfectly well before it can be felt. I can be sore and still proud of her. I can be scared and still grateful. I can be foggy and still full of love. I can be struggling and still be her dad.
That last one matters.
Being Megan’s dad has been one of the great privileges of my life. It has changed me, stretched me, humbled me, and kept moving me forward, even when I did not know how to move forward. I have not always done it perfectly, because no parent does, and certainly not this one. But I have loved her from the beginning, and I love the person she has become.
Thirty years. That is no small thing.
So this one is for Megan. Not because she needs to carry any of this, because she does not. This is not her burden. This is simply where I am writing from today, and today happens to be hers.
Her 30th birthday reminded me that even when my body is hurting and my mind has been unkind, there is still beauty here. There is still love here. There are still reasons to stay connected, to tell the truth, to show up, and to write again.
Happy birthday, Megan.
Thank you for being my daughter, and for letting me keep learning what it means to be your dad.