Every Wednesday morning now I sit in a cigar lounge with a bunch of Christian men having a smoke and coffee. It’s an hour talking about how to live as Christ did, how to be actual disciples, and not just “Sunday Christians.” Afterwards we get to know new guys, make new friends.
It occurred to me that not one person in that room has met the man I was just 10 years ago.
They’ve never seen him. The man who could recite talk radio grievances by heart, whose marriage was thinning into surface-level politeness while he poured himself into work and called it drive. The people in that room only know the current model, and they treat me accordingly. It’s taken me a while to understand how much that’s doing for me.
The old script
For most of my first half I sat in rooms with people who’d known me a decade at a time. Family rooms, Comic-con conventions, monthly CEO group conference rooms, the same faces year after year. There’s real comfort in being known that long. There’s also a cost nobody names: a room that knows the old you keeps handing you his script.
You try on a new way of being and somebody tilts their head. “Since when do you pray?” “Since when do you turn down a third drink?” It isn’t malice. Their data on you is old, and people trust their data. So you shrink back into the man they remember, because staying consistent is easier than being new in front of witnesses.
And I ran the same play on other people, holding old friends to versions of themselves they’d outgrown, because my old read on them was easier than paying fresh attention. Old rooms do it in both directions.
Four rooms of strangers
Then the divorce at 59 took the decision out of my hands. Four moves in four years, and every room I walked into held people who had no read on me at all:
A friend’s cigar bar in San Juan, where I was just the guy who liked an Old Fashioned at six.
A salsa class in Nashville where nobody knew I’d ever run a company.
A two-bedroom apartment I split with a friend, a Boston transplant who took me exactly as he found me.
And now a cigar lounge full of men who assume I’ve always been this steady, which is funny if they knew the old me.
I want to be careful here, because I tried to use new rooms the wrong way first. I wrote once that there’s no geographic answer to a spiritual problem. Moving to Puerto Rico with the old man still inside me changed nothing but the humidity. A fresh room cannot create a new man. You can show up in a new city and play-act at being a completely different man, but if you haven’t changed internally, that’s what you’re doing: acting. The old rooms pull against who you’re trying to become. Having said that, a fresh room does extend you the grace of no expectations, and grace is a better climate for growth than a room that keeps score.
What Nazareth knew
Jesus ran into this. He went home to Nazareth, taught in the synagogue, and the locals couldn’t get past their preconceptions. This is the carpenter, Mary’s boy. We watched him grow up.
“A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown.”
(Mark 6:4)
Mark adds that he could do almost no miraculous work there. The hometown effect was strong enough to constrain the Son of God in Nazareth. You and I are not exempt from it in the rooms that have known us longest.
Your one room
So here’s where you come in. You’ve been doing work on yourself. Maybe you’re eating like an adult for the first time in a decade, or you’ve finally cracked a Bible. And you keep noticing that around the old crowd, you snap back into the old shape within an hour.
Keep your old rooms if they’re good ones. This is addition, and it costs less than you think. A class. A men’s group. A gym at an hour when nobody knows your name. One room where the only version of you anyone has ever met is the one you’re building. Sit in it every week and let it treat the new man as a plain fact, until he becomes one. You won’t be performing there; you’ll be practicing. The difference is that practice doesn’t need applause, just repetitions. Give it three months before you judge it. The first few visits feel like wearing clothes that don’t fit yet. Keep going. Fit comes from wear.
I built Screen Rant and Game Rant surrounded by people who’d known me for years. I rebuilt myself in rooms full of strangers.
The old rooms vote for the old you. Find one that doesn’t, and keep showing up as the man it thinks you’ve always been.
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By Vic Holtreman
For men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s who lost the life they built and refuse to let that be the end.
Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.
He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com about faith, identity, and the second act.
There is something powerful about being known only by the man you are becoming.
I can't handle cigar smoke, but I envy your room. I keep looking for one. Haven't found the right one yet. I may have to create it.