I was sitting on a bathroom floor in the dark. Alone. Somewhere in the middle of a plant medicine experience that had stripped away every story I’d ever told myself about who I was, and one thing wouldn’t let go of me.
I wasn’t afraid of failing. I’d already proven I could win at the highest level there was. I wasn’t afraid of dying, either, not in that moment. What I found underneath all of it, the thing I’d built an entire life trying to outrun, was that I was terrified of being alone.
I fought it. I struggled against it the way you’d fight someone trying to hold your head under water. I genuinely could not understand why love wasn’t enough, because I’d spent my whole life believing it was the answer. Find the right person, get enough of it, prove you deserve it, and the fear goes away. Except I’d found people. I’d had love handed to me in more forms than most men get in a lifetime, and the fear was still sitting right there on that bathroom floor with me.
People talk about these experiences like a switch flips and you’re fixed. Mine didn’t go that way. I didn’t lose an addiction or a fear that night. I found one I didn’t know I had, an addiction to love itself, or more honestly, to the idea that love had to come from somewhere outside me or it didn’t count.
love had to come from somewhere outside of self…
otherwise it didn’t count
What I was actually afraid of
Underneath the achievement, underneath the businesses and the awards and the stage in Dallas, there was a much simpler fear running the whole show. Not failure. Not being seen as weak. Just being left alone with myself and finding nothing there worth staying for.
I’d spent years pleasing people to make sure that never happened. My mother first. Then my first wife, where houses and cars and holidays were really just an elaborate way of saying don’t leave, don’t let me be by myself. I never said that out loud, not even to myself, until I was on that floor with nothing left to perform for and nowhere left to hide from it.
Letting go
The shift didn’t come from finding the answer. It came from finally letting go of needing one.
I’d been holding onto this concept of love so tightly, certain that if I just found the right amount of it from the right person, the fear would finally stop. The moment I actually let that go, stopped white-knuckling it, was the moment something in me settled for what felt like the first time in my entire life. Not because I’d solved anything. Because I’d stopped fighting something that was never going to be won by fighting.
It felt a bit like coming out the other side of something, the way you’d imagine waking up after being under for a very long time. Disorientating. Quiet. Real in a way nothing had felt real before.
What changed after that
The realisation, once it landed, was almost embarrassingly simple. Love had to come from within first, or it was never going to land no matter how much of it I collected from outside. I wasn’t missing love. I was built from it, and I’d spent decades looking for it everywhere except the one place it had been the entire time.
That doesn’t mean I figured out how to love myself in one night on a bathroom floor and never struggled with it again. It means I finally understood what I was actually looking for, which changed where I started looking. I had to learn to love myself before I had any real capacity to love the people around me without using them to plug the gap. That’s a different thing entirely to what I’d been doing for years, and it’s still something I practise rather than something I’ve finished.
The pattern I can see now
Looking back, it’s all connected. The empty chair at that award ceremony, the years spent pleasing people who were never going to be pleased, the nights I went looking for connection in bars and bottles and deals that didn’t need to happen. All of it was the same fear wearing different clothes. I was never actually short on love. I was short on believing I was allowed to give it to myself first.
I don’t know many men who’ve sat with that question directly. Most of us are too busy proving we don’t need to.
I write about this because I’m still working through what it actually means day to day, not because I came off that bathroom floor a finished man with the answer. If any part of this is familiar, the fear underneath the achievement, the love that never quite lands no matter how much of it shows up, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.
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