The thread
I pulled.
I grew up in the church. The pursuit of something true led me into the role of a Baptist minister. I took the role of spiritual leader seriously enough to start asking big questions about it. From the inside, I began to see the institutional patterns underneath the spiritual ones. I pulled the thread. What followed was harder than I knew how to name at the time. Belief systems came apart. So did a seventeen-year marriage. Depression sat on me for a long stretch. There was no clean version of any of it.
I rebuilt slowly. What came back wasn't the religion I started with — it was a quieter, more grounded set of practices. A spirituality that was expansive.
That rebuilding also ushered in the culmination of twenty years of digital creative agency work, building brands, telling stories, and chasing the question of what meaningful output actually looks like when the brief is bigger than a campaign. Through my work with Awake, I have found myself drawn repeatedly to the same room: men trying to figure out who they were becoming. Leaders mid-transition. Founders between versions of themselves. I started exploring spaces for that work – communities, conversations, containers for growth – and discovered that the search for legacy and positive change was the most compelling brief I'd ever been handed.
That's where Curious? began. In the accumulated weight of a career spent watching what happens when people are finally given permission to ask the real questions.
I don't share this for the drama of it. I share it because most of the people I work with now are somewhere on the same map – between the version of themselves that got them here, and the one that comes next.
The thread I pulled was a simple one, in retrospect: what does it actually mean to be a spiritual leader? From the inside of the institution, the answer kept coming back smaller than the question deserved. The more honestly I asked it, the less the role I was in could hold.
What followed was years of unlearning. I had to take apart the belief systems I had built my identity around. There was nothing graceful about it. I lost the marriage I had been in for seventeen years. I lost the certainty I had used as a compass. For a stretch, I lost myself — a depression that didn't lift on schedule and didn't respond to the things that were supposed to fix it.
The way back wasn't a crisis-to-clarity arc. It was slower than that, and less cinematic. I started doing small things again. Walking. Writing. Paying attention to what my body was telling me. I rebuilt a relationship with something larger than myself that didn't require me to defend it to anyone. I met Tess. We built a family. I started a new kind of work.
What I have now is not the spirituality I left, and it's not its opposite either. It's something more honest, more embodied, less interested in being right. It's the ground I stand on when I work with other men on the same terrain — and there are more of us than the culture lets on.
If you're somewhere in the middle of your own version of that: it does pass. What's on the other side is yours.
