Have you lost your passion and fire?

I began shifting in my chair, unable to get comfortable. I tried with one leg curled on the chair. Then with both feet on the floor. No good. Suddenly, I realized it wasn’t the chair that was the problem.

It was my skin.

I felt twitchy. Tense. Constricted.

Claustrophobic.

I wanted to jump, leap, and run out of my body.

I closed my eyes. Took a deep breath and tried to re-focus. My hands started to fly over the keys on the keyboard. Time passed, but nothing was getting done.

I felt this shooting pain in my gut that bent me forward. My head on the desk. The stinging turned to nausea. I got up, walked into the laundry room to change the load. Then the kitchen to pick up. And finally, back to my desk.

My mind—blank. Until a voice spoke up: Face it, you’re done. Failure. Your fire is gone. You have nothing left to give. So, now what? My inner critic, claiming to protect me. Though I’d argue that convincing me my work is meaningless isn’t protection but forcing a future state in the present.

But, then again, it has become increasingly hard to argue back; after all, my motivation has waned. My fire to embers. Hot, but not stoked and starved for fuel.

I find myself stuck in the past, remembering my youth. The intensity I had back in my days as an engineer. Studying for years on end. My kids still babies. Working until all hours of the night. Doing everything I could to provide for my family. To hold my wife in her life with cancer.

Endless mornings and nights in hospitals. Eyes burning. Love in one hand and my laptop in the other.

I was unstoppable, even if the critic was still telling me I was absolute shit.

But as much as I might romanticize my past, it is far from what I want now. I couldn’t. I am not that person anymore. He left the moment Ariana took her last breath. His purpose was complete.

Now, I’m something entirely new.

First and foremost, I am a father. I have three kids who need me—daily. After Ariana died, I committed to making them my priority, even over my work and mission. My time with them was and is short. I refuse to let anything get in the way of that.

But honestly, it hasn’t been easy. Like, it suffocates me sometimes.

It has created a tremendous amount of self-doubt and trepidation. It’s created a war inside between being a present dad and a successful entrepreneur. And between the two, I am thankful to say, I (mostly) have been a present dad—a far better dad than I am an entrepreneur.

And if I had to choose between the two, I’m glad it’s the former.

Yet, there is a day coming soon when my children will all be out living their lives on their own. And I will be left here—alone—left behind in an empty home with pictures of a past life and the deafening silence of my failed mission. My failed work.

So I walk around with this weight of shame and disappointment. This mountain I am attempting to summit feels manageable, until it doesn’t.

The reality is, I have no idea what the future holds. I stopped pretending I did after Ariana’s diagnosis.

I have ideas.

Tentative plans.

Wishes and dreams.

But, at the end of the day, my way to peace is to keep going—though I want to give up sometimes—and hold loosely any thoughts of where I am in life and where I ought to be.

Today, my fire is embers. Tomorrow, there could come a moment that stokes and fuels those embers to ignite the fire once again.

Have you lost your passion? Do you feel your identity has been lost in your grief?

With empathy and understanding,

-CJ