You Can't Fix What You Can't Name
The half-hour that finds what years of running never did.
By the time I turned 60 in San Juan, I had a regular table and an Old Fashioned waiting at six at my friend Candido’s cigar bar, telling myself I’d figured it out.
I hadn’t. It was the latest in a string of places I’d run to since the divorce, and I already had my eye on the next one.
Puerto Rico was supposed to fix me. I had a Vespa. (Okay, it was a bright yellow Vespa, but a guy’s got to start somewhere.) When that wore thin I went to Nashville. Charles, another friend, a new roommate from Boston. A Honda Rebel 500. Salsa classes on weeknights. I was busy and tan and no closer to whatever I was chasing.
The recognition moment came during a mushroom trip, alone in my apartment. I had Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel playing on YouTube, and I fell apart completely. Everything I’d spent three years “manning up” about and refusing to look at came to the surface, and I let it run right over me.
I let myself feel everything, and it left me utterly exhausted. It was the most cathartic experience I’d ever had, and only the beginning of “the work.”
I wrote later that there’s no geographic answer to a spiritual problem. I kept changing the scenery because I couldn’t name the actual problem. New city, same man. I’d have kept buying motorcycles and plane tickets for another decade if something hadn’t finally made me stop and ask what I was running from.
The wrong target
Here’s what I missed for years: the problem is rarely the thing you think it is.
You think it’s your weight, so you buy the program, eat the same four clean things on rotation, and quit by March. You think it’s your job, so you change it, and eight months later the same Sunday-night dread shows up wearing a different badge. Maybe it’s your house, the city, your marriage, your bank balance. You rearrange the furniture and the room still doesn’t feel right.
Something’s off. You feel it the way you feel a low tire before the warning light comes on. But you can’t name it, and a thing you can’t name wins by default. It charges you interest the whole time you ignore it.
I know this because I did it for years with a passport and a credit card. I was disciplined about the wrong target. I called it a fresh start. But I was a man avoiding one honest hour with himself.
Avoidance is sneaky because it can look like progress. A flight is a decision. A new gym membership is a decision. You get to feel like a man taking action while you sidestep the one decision that matters. I had a whole itinerary of decisions and not one of them touched the center.
The audit before the repair
That honest hour is the whole game. The naming is the work. You can’t fix what you refuse to call by its real name, and we’ve gotten good at not calling it anything. We stay busy. We polish the visible stuff because the visible stuff is easier to measure than the thing eating at us.
There’s a line in Psalm 139. “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts.” David, a man with every reason to act with confidence, asking to be examined instead. Not “fix my circumstances.” Instead, “search me.” He understood the audit comes before the repair.
I won’t pretend one conversation untangles 24 years. It doesn’t. However, naming the thing is the move that makes every other move possible. Once I could identify what I was really running from, San Juan and Nashville stopped being escape routes and went back to being places. The motorcycle became a motorcycle instead of a costume.
What a notebook can’t do
The honest hour gets you to the table. It doesn’t tell you what to ask once you’re sitting there. You can face yourself and still circle the weight, the job, the bank balance, the same surface answers you’ve given for years. The problem beneath the problem doesn’t raise its hand. Naming it on your own, with a notebook and an hour, is harder than it sounds, because you’re the one who buried it.
That’s why I built the tool. It’s an AI that sits with you for about half an hour and asks the questions a good friend would ask if that friend knew how to drill down to the question behind the question. Identity, body, money, relationships, faith, what comes next. It presses when an answer comes too clean and asks the next one, the one you’d never put to yourself.
At the end it names the one belief that’s been driving you the whole time, and hands you a 90-day plan to start taking it back, with periodic check-ins and feedback to keep you on track. A friend who tried it said it found something in thirty minutes that thousands of dollars in counseling never did. I’ll leave it here if you want to look.
So before you book the next flight or start another program you’ll abandon by spring, stop and ask the question you’ve been outrunning. If you want help asking it, the tool is right there. Name what’s wrong. That’s where the second half starts.
Vic built and sold ScreenRant.com and GameRant.com, then rebuilt himself in his sixties.
He writes at TheRedeemedSecondHalf.com for men rebuilding the second half of life.