The Cracks That Let the Light In
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There is a particular kind of silence that arrives after things fall apart.

Not the peaceful kind. The kind that presses against your chest and asks questions you have been avoiding for years. I have sat in that silence more than once. After my first marriage ended. After my second. After seasons in my professional life when I gave everything I had and felt, somehow, completely unseen. Each time, I told myself the silence was the problem. It took me a long time to understand that the silence was actually the answer, the first honest answer I had been given in years, if only I was willing to listen.

I want to tell you what I found when I finally did.

In my relationships, I had always been drawn to people I believed in deeply. I would speak about them to family and friends with genuine warmth, highlighting everything that was good in them, holding the doubts quietly to myself. At the time I believed I was being loving. I was being something else: I was building a version of the relationship in my own mind that neither of us could actually live inside. I chose my partners not entirely for who they were, but for who I hoped they might become, and I carried that gap in silence, convinced that admitting it would mean admitting weakness. The silence created distance. The distance created the very thing I had been trying to prevent.

Behind closed doors I kept my struggles entirely to myself. I believed, with a conviction I never stopped to question, that I could manage everything alone. What I did not understand then, and had to learn the hard way, is that transparency is not vulnerability. It is the foundation of any connection that intends to last. Hiding my struggles did not protect anyone. It only ensured that the people closest to me were navigating a version of me that was not entirely real.

The pattern in my professional life was not very different.

I gave more than was asked of me, consistently and without reservation. I believed that dedication and excellence would speak for themselves, that the quality of the work would be its own argument. And in some environments it was. But I also worked in environments where the language of advancement was not substance but visibility, and I had never learned to speak that language. I kept my head down and worked harder, while others moved forward through means I did not understand and was not willing to imitate. The harder I worked, the more invisible I felt.

I also gave generously to the people around me. Mentoring colleagues, supporting others' growth, sharing what I knew without keeping score. There was genuine joy in that, and I do not regret it. But I did it, for many years, at the expense of my own development. I was so focused on helping others move forward that I had not noticed I was standing still.

Each of these failures, personal and professional, chipped away at something. I began to ask the question that is both the most honest and the most frightening question a person can ask: am I the problem?

The answer was not comfortable. But it was clarifying.

The turning point did not come in a single dramatic moment. It came in a series of small, quiet recognitions that accumulated over time. The clearest of them arrived after my last unsuccessful relationship, when I found myself sitting alone, looking at my reflection, and asking the question I had spent years avoiding: why do I keep ending up here? Not as an accusation. As a genuine inquiry. And for the first time, instead of looking outward for the answer, I looked inward.

What I found there was a pattern. The way I had consistently ignored signals that deserved attention. The way I had silenced my own needs in the belief that doing so was generous rather than self-destructive. The way I had overcompensated, in both love and work, pouring everything out while taking nothing in, and then wondering why I felt empty. Seeing the pattern clearly, without flinching and without excuse, was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

It was also the beginning of everything that changed.

I started small, the way real change almost always starts. A notebook in which I began writing down the thoughts I had been carrying without examining. Books that offered new frameworks for understanding myself and my choices, among them works by Steve Harvey, Robin Sharma, Norman Vincent Peale, and John C. Maxwell, each one offering something that landed at exactly the moment I needed it. I sought support from people I trusted. I began the slow and unglamorous work of peeling back the habits and fears and beliefs that had been running my life without my full awareness.

I learned to speak my truth, even when it felt uncomfortable. I stopped pursuing perfection and started acknowledging progress, however small. I set boundaries, not only with others but with myself, reminding myself that you cannot give from a place of depletion and call it generosity. I reconnected with the things that made me feel genuinely alive, and one of those things, unexpectedly and completely, was writing.

Writing became the practice through which everything else came into focus. It gave me a way to process what I was learning, to share it honestly, and to contribute something to others who might be navigating similar terrain. I began writing articles. I wrote books. I wrote for a magazine in my country, bringing awareness to the stories of people whose lives had something important to say: figures like Abraham Lincoln, Princess Diana, Jimmy Carter, Soichiro Honda, Steve Jobs, and Mo Salah, each of whom had shown, in their different ways, that greatness is not about the absence of failure. It is about what you build in response to it.

These were not simply professional decisions. They were acts of becoming.

I want to say something honest about where all of this has led, because I think it matters.

I have not arrived at happiness. I do not believe happiness is a destination that one arrives at and then inhabits permanently. It is a state that visits, sometimes briefly and sometimes for long and sustaining stretches, and it is cultivated through the daily choices we make about how to live, what to give, what to protect, and what to let go. I am still on that road. I expect I always will be. And I have made my peace with that, because the road itself, walked with honesty and intention, is where the meaning actually lives.

A quote has stayed with me through much of this journey, attributed to Paul Brown, the legendary American football coach: when you win, say nothing. When you lose, say less. I have returned to those words many times, in moments of both success and setback, and what I find in them is not a counsel of silence but a counsel of grace. How we carry our victories and our losses says more about who we are than either the victories or the losses themselves.

What I know now, that I did not know when I was sitting in that pressing silence after everything had fallen apart, is that failure was never my enemy. It was the most honest teacher I ever had. It showed me the cracks I had been ignoring, not to break me, but to show me where the light needed to get in. It taught me the kind of resilience that is not about never falling but about developing a relationship with falling that does not frighten you into stillness. It taught me humility, and self-awareness, and the particular courage required to face yourself without looking away.

I no longer see my failures as things to regret. I see them as the stones I walked across to get here.

And if you are reading this carrying the weight of your own missteps, I want to say this to you as plainly as I know how.

Your failures are not the final word on who you are. They are part of the sentence that is still being written. Sit with them long enough to hear what they are actually telling you, and you will find that even in the darkest and most disorienting moments, there is something in you that knows the way forward.

It has always known. You simply needed the silence to hear it.