The Heaviest Talent

For most of my life I felt that I had no innate talent. But, in the solitude of 2025, I came to the realization that my talent is shepherding people across thresholds. A heavy talent indeed, one that has left me used up and broken more times than I care to admit.

I’m beginning 2026 with so much understanding.

I’ve always been an introspective person but at the same time I’ve never listened to myself. Never fully heard myself. Sometimes I’ve been too busy hearing the people who needed me to light their way, and other times I’ve been carrying so much that I couldn’t stop to help myself.

We all come apart in different ways. Some turn to drink or drugs, some to food, some to social media. We all find ways to pretend we’re living while all we’re really doing is allowing time to flow further down the river, as if finding ourselves at a different port will somehow help.

I finally understand what I’ve been doing.

The people I’ve hurt by being the person they needed in their life instead of being who I am. If I’d been myself with them we would have had a completely different relationship and they would have found someone else they needed as well.

Just because I could see who they needed didn’t mean I needed to be that person to them. I’ve shepherded so many people across so many different thresholds and it nearly cost me my life.

If your own foundations are made of sand and you begin shoveling them into the river to build somebody else a bridge, there’ll be that one perfect moment when they can run across the river to the other bank before time washes the sand away. They might be safe but your life will be destroyed, and worse, you’re left on the bad side of the river where you rescued them from with no way back for yourself and no way for them to help you even if they wanted to.

Don’t get me wrong though, I’ve had plenty of help in return. I wouldn’t be alive to type this after shepherding my wife across her final threshold without the help of my friends.

But I feel awful knowing they poured their own sand into the river to shepherd me across. More accurate to say we each poured our sand into the river for the other and ended up on opposite banks, and then the river of time washed all the sand away.

We couldn’t help each other again even if we wanted to.

2026 is the year I build foundations of stone. I’m tired. I’m done with being washed away.