Things Change: I Stopped Hiding From Myself

I haven't posted since late February 2025.

That's not an accident. In March, I drove to Las Vegas and spent several days inside a program called Atlas. And when I came home, I didn't know how to write about it yet. I'm not sure I fully do now. But I'm going to try.

Atlas is a transformational training. That phrase doesn't do it justice, but I'll start there. The program works in three parts — Explore, Breakthrough, Redesign. I've completed the first two, and I'm inside the third now. Each part builds on the last. Explore asked me to look inward at things I'd been carrying for years. Breakthrough asked me to face them. Redesign is asking me to build something new on the ground that's been cleared.

What I didn't expect was the way trauma works when you actually look at it. Clearing one opened a door to the next. And the next opened another. It was like pulling a thread and realizing how far it ran. I had no idea how much I'd been holding, or how long I'd been holding it, until I started setting it down.

Here's the thing I've been slow to say out loud: for most of my life, I was scared to be myself. Not just in the ways men are taught to hide — though that was part of it. I mean something deeper. I was embarrassed by who I was. I didn't trust the man underneath the armor. Atlas gave me a way to start looking at him honestly. Not all at once. Not comfortably. But honestly.

I'm not on the other side of that. I want to be clear about what this post is and isn't. This isn't a transformation story with a clean ending. I'm still processing things that surfaced in March. Some lessons are still working their way through me. But I'm different than I was. I see things I couldn't see before. And when I looked at my life through that new lens — including the goals I'd set for this year — some things came into focus that I hadn't let myself look at directly.

Going into 2025, my number one goal was to get off my CPAP machine. I wrote about it here as part of my 50 by 50 journey. My sleep doctor gave me a target: lower my weight, drop my body fat, raise my overnight oxygen. I worked that plan for months. By September, I had hit every marker we'd set. I walked into my retest confident.

My oxygen had dropped instead.

That hit harder than I expected. I had done everything right. The outcome moved in the wrong direction anyway. My doctor had warned me this was possible — that even perfect execution doesn't guarantee the biology cooperates. That warning didn't soften the landing much.

But here's what Atlas gave me that I didn't have before: a way to sit with that without it breaking something. Before, a setback like that would have sent me into a spiral — or into denial, which is its own kind of spiral. This time, I could look at it directly. I could separate what I could control from what I couldn't. I could grieve it a little and then ask what's actually true.

What's true is that CPAP freedom is still a long-term goal. What's also true is that I'm not going to hinge my entire sense of progress on a single biological outcome that I can't fully control. The goal hasn't disappeared. It's just taken its right-sized place in the larger picture.

That same clarity turned toward some of my other goals too.

Photography was on my list. I enjoyed it — genuinely. But when I looked at it honestly, I didn't love the hard days. I didn't push through the friction because the destination called to me. If you don't love the journey, you won't last long enough to reach the destination. I've learned that the expensive way. Photography came off the list.

In its place, something that's lived in me for decades finally got permission to be real.

When I first watched Pumping Iron, I was mesmerized. Arnold. Mike Katz. Lou Ferrigno. Something in me wanted that — not just the physique, but the discipline, the commitment, the years of deliberate work toward something that most people would never attempt. I filed that feeling away as a fantasy. I was too heavy. Too far. Too late.

At my heaviest, I was 288 pounds. Today I'm 230 — down 58 pounds. For the first time, I can look at myself in the mirror and see the possibility of stepping on stage. Not as a fantasy. As a thing I'm actually building toward.

I'm competing in a bodybuilding competition in June 2027. I've said it before on this blog, and I'm saying it again — because Atlas taught me that saying the true thing out loud, even when it scares you, is part of how you make it real.

I added new goals to my 50 by 50 list to support that:

Bench press 315 pounds. Deadlift 405. Squat 365. Reach 12 percent body fat. Add 10 pounds of lean muscle. Build 17-inch arms. Compete in June 2027. Take a posing class. Track and log every workout for a year. Dial in bodybuilding nutrition for 90 days straight. Document and publish the transformation.

That keeps the list at 50. Some goals came off. These went on. That's not failure. That's what it looks like when you stop managing your life from behind armor and start building it from somewhere honest.

Atlas didn't fix me. I'm not fixed. But I'm looking at myself more clearly than I ever have. And it turns out that changes everything.