Growing In The Grey
On healing, writing, and the quiet courage it takes to keep going when nothing feels certain
I read a great article this morning that made me think. The author pointed out something I hadn’t noticed before: nearly everyone who starts writing on Medium or Substack begins by talking about healing from trauma.
Huh, I thought. That’s oddly familiar because that is exactly what I did, too.
What really got me, though, was when the author used a phrase to describe her early works. She called them self-indulgent diary posts disguised as essays.
Ouch!
That cut straight to my core.
For a moment, I felt panic.
Oh god. I’m not unique at all.
And just like that, I lost my ability to write.
I have been writing on Substack for a meager but solid three months, and I have been publishing a minimum of once a week. For nearly three weeks straight, I posted once a day during an extensive trip to Asia with my 13-year-old daughter.
The themes of my writing have all revolved around healing from trauma and the associated challenges that come with that—learning to accept the past, learning to love oneself, the growing pains that accompany becoming a more authentic version of yourself, etc. I thought my perspective was fresh—maybe even valuable—but after reading this article, it suddenly started to feel generic. What I believed might be my unique contribution to readers was suddenly just… something everyone does.
So for the past few weeks, I have sat with this fear that I am unoriginal and have nothing of value to offer. During that time, I have grown restless, irritable, and discontent. I have also felt increasingly confused and lost. Life has continued happening around me, but without writing about it, my vision seems blurred—like trying to see underwater.
I once read that Stephen King said, I write to find out what I think.
That’s exactly how it feels for me.
I don’t think before I write—I think through writing. It’s the only way I can make sense of the tangle inside my head. Without writing, my thoughts are like fog on glass: scattered, shifting, hard to grasp.
But when I sit down to put words on the page, something begins to take shape. It’s not always neat or polished, but it’s real. Writing is how I separate what I’ve absorbed from what I actually believe. It’s how I sift through noise until I can hear my own voice.
It’s how I find myself.
Before I ever published a word, I spent two years reading Substack essays in silence. The pieces I found during that time were like oxygen. I must’ve read one essay at least twenty times during a particularly painful month—not because it offered solutions, but because it described an experience I recognized in my own life. The way that writer told their story gave me a picture of how to survive mine. It showed me what was possible, and I came back to that essay again and again because it gave me hope that I could make it through my ordeal.
The more I read other people’s essays, the more I practiced. The more I practiced, the more I grew.
Eventually, I realized it was my turn to write—not because I had answers, but because it felt like the natural next step in my journey. I had learned how powerful it can be to simply tell the truth about what it means to begin again, and I had grown enough to believe that my own experience could help others in the same way that other people’s experiences had helped me.
So maybe it doesn’t matter so much that me writing about healing from trauma isn’t unique. The comfort I found in others’ words didn’t come from how different their stories were, but from how deeply familiar they felt. So I may not be saying something new. But I am saying something true. I’ve come to believe that resonance matters more than originality. So if my truth resonates with someone else and helps them feel a little less alone, then maybe that’s the real value proposition.
So here’s where I am right now.
Growing Through the Grey
The spear-shaped leaves of a hickory tree wave gently in the breeze of an early-summer storm outside my living room window on a lonely Sunday afternoon. Mist falls steadily, barely visible, creating a haze across the wall of green of forest behind my house. Skies are muted grey—the color of dirty aluminum, featureless and foreboding. The world feels paused, suspended between the heat of summer and the violence of storm. And I, too, feel like that. Like the skies above me, I am grey—neither clear nor dark, not yet storm, not quite calm. This is where I live lately: in the uncertain middle. The waiting. The not-yet.
I am in the grey.
The past is already written. The future has not yet revealed itself. And the only place I can live is here—in the middle.
My 13-year old daughter is reading The Hobbit for the first time. Although she is an avid reader, she struggled with the first third of the book. Tolkien’s dense, slow, descriptive storytelling is a far cry from the young adult fiction she devours on a daily basis. I encouraged her by telling her the middle is the best part of the book. The Shire is behind you, and the treasure is far ahead—but the journey is where the real magic happens. The battles, the revelations, the companionship, the transformation. It’s all in the middle.
What I didn’t tell her is that in real life, the middle isn’t quite so magical.
It’s like being homeless. No, it’s more like being homeless in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language or understand the laws or culture. It is a lot of wandering around, looking for guidance in maps you don’t fully understand, bumping into people and stumbling into crosswalks despite your best efforts.
Even that analogy doesn’t quite capture how I feel some days.
Maybe it’s more like clinging to the outside of a speeding train, barely hanging on. No matter how much I wave my hands and shout, I have no real power over the train. I try to understand the landscape as it blurs by at incredible speeds, but nothing really makes sense. I have no idea where the train is going. I just have to hope that its destination is better than when I got on.
And I guess that is called faith.
I always hated feeling powerless. I have vivid memories of feeling powerless as a child, and it was terrible. Twenty years of serving in the Navy often felt powerless, too. Where I lived, when I deployed, what I did for my job—all of those things were subject to the government’s needs, not mine or my family’s. I grew to crave and protect power wherever I could.
I used to think power meant control—over myself, over others, over outcomes. But a few decades’ worth of adulthood have taught me definitively that control is an illusion. What’s real is the willingness to stay present when every cell in your body wants to grab hold of the wheel and force things to happen. That is the kind of control I try to exercise today—not the kind that persists in trying to make the world look the way I think it should, but the kind that accepts that life is unfolding into something beautiful, even here, in the uncomfortable middle.
Even in the grey.
I’ve been here before
When I came back from my last deployment with the USMC, I was angry, lost, and scared. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew I wanted something different than what I had been doing for the past eight years. I had no plan. I just knew I needed to keep busy, and that more education would mean more opportunities and open doors somewhere in the future. So I enrolled in a graduate program for experimental psychology. This is the beginning of the story.
Six months after graduation, a miracle happened. I earned an unprecedented direct commission from E5 to O2e. I was commissioned into a community that required a PhD when I only had a master’s degree. The job required me to go to flight school, which I successfully completed 16 months later. A few years after that, I applied for and was awarded a fellowship to get my PhD at Indiana University—the US Navy paid for me to go to school full-time while continuing to pay my salary. That’s the end of the story (or the beginning of another story, if you want to think of it that way).
The middle of the story was not so pretty. It was one of the most exhausting times of my life. I would wake at 5 a.m., walk or bike to my job, put in 10 hours of emotionally exhausting work as a counselor. I would come home and play with the toddlers on the floor for a few minutes, where I would fall completely asleep while my wife cooked dinner and the kids continued to play all around me. My wife would gently kick my foot to wake me up, and I would sit up to find everyone seated at the table eating dinner. After dinner I would kiss the kiddos goodnight, then head out to Starbucks or the library for 3–4 hours of studying and writing. I’d get home and fall asleep between 10–11 p.m. And the cycle continued like that—for two solid years—until I graduated.
When I was in the middle of that season, I was consumed with doubt. I was spending precious money on school with no idea what I would do with that education. My only free time was spent reading or writing something for school. I watched everyone around me go off and have fun—pool parties, bowling, kid playdates—while I sat hunched over my laptop, my sweaty fingers pounding away at the keyboard, doing everything I could to finish a goal that I couldn’t even explain to myself, let alone anyone else.
I felt alone. I felt afraid. I felt lost.
But it was during that time that I learned an absolutely vital lesson: the only real power I have is to change the way I think.
It was during this time that I was introduced to the work of Viktor Frankl, who survived a Nazi death camp after losing his entire family by mastering this one truth about humanity—that suffering ceases to be suffering when it is given meaning.
Viktor was able to find meaning in his experience at Auschwitz even amidst untold horrors and tragedies. He served as the camp doctor. When he was processed into Auschwitz, a manuscript he had been writing for years was confiscated and destroyed. He recreated the entire thing from memory, one page at a time, over the next four years. He remained committed to being a growing and loving person, even when treated lower than an animal. In this remarkable demonstration of choosing how one perceives their circumstances, he emerged from his experiences not only whole, but whole enough to continue his thriving career as a psychiatrist and inspire entire generations through his writings.
Today, I am in a grey, in-between season again. My old life is unraveling. My new life has not yet taken shape. I have made my decisions. I have named the hard truths. But life doesn’t happen on my timetable, and once again I wrestle with the illusion of control. Once again I feel like a homeless wanderer in a strange land, unsure of where I am going. It’s lonely and exhausting.
And once again, I am turning to the one truth that has never failed me: no matter how miserable my circumstances, that misery is largely shaped by how I perceive those circumstances. If I can find meaning in this experience—if I can understand that I’m growing in a certain area, or learning a certain lesson—then the discomfort becomes a necessary part of the process.
I think about this often when I run marathons or train for triathlons. There is certainly discomfort involved in that training, but not only do I accept the pain—I often revel in it. Because that discomfort signals that I’m pushing toward something. It foreshadows the finish line, where I know I’ll feel a sense of release and accomplishment. I see the pain as a necessary part of the process, and so it is given meaning. And with meaning comes value.
So today, as I sit and stare out the window at the featureless grey sky and allow myself to feel all the feelings this grayness is bringing to me right now, I am looking for ways I can find meaning in the in-between.
I am exercising (emotional) muscles I’ll need for future (life) races.
I am developing a sustainable pace I will need in whatever comes next.
I am building a network of friends whose support is something I once took for granted.
I am learning how to recognize my emotions rather than running from them or numbing them.
I am reminding myself that somewhere in this stillness, even though I can’t see it or feel it, there is growth.
Somewhere in this discomfort, there is clarity.
And when I finally step out of this middle place, I want to do so with my eyes open and my soul intact.
I gently remind myself to think of this discomfort as a prelude to the finish line—a necessary part of the journey that will conclude with something better than when the story began.
Growing through the grey is hard.
But it’s the only way I know how to be free.
About the Author
Hi. My name is Eric. I am a writer, father, and recovering overachiever learning to live with more honesty and less urgency. After years of chasing credentials, clarity, and control, I’m learning to find meaning in the messy middle. I write to understand myself—and maybe to help someone else feel less alone while they’re figuring it out, too.
You can find more of my work here on Substack, where I share essays about healing, growth, authenticity, and what it means to begin again.