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In the ‘Keep’ column, I write:
The way she looks at me
The way I feel when I look at her
That sound she makes when something feels or tastes good
How she relaxes when I read to her
The sex
Ithink about our last day together and list every detail from how comfortable it is to hold hands when we walk to the way she talks to birds in the park as if they understand her to how she randomly drops coins while she walks, believing that finding a quarter can make a person’s day.
I look at the empty ‘Change’ column and tap my pen on my lip. There’s only one thing to write, but it’s a possibly impossible change:
Ask Mags to tear up her plan and create a new one with me.
Happy with my back-of-napkin thinking, I take my seat in the seminar and have several epiphanies in under six hours, almost all based on evaluating the notes I’ve scribbled in answer to the question Will Power keeps repeating:
What story about yourself do you need to let go of?
He frames it as the core question to figuring out how to find happiness, how to identify the perfect job pivot, how to achieve next-level success. Everything comes back to this one question. And my answers start to form a pretty clear picture of the stories I need to say goodbye to so I can start to write the next chapter of my life.
All signs point to one core story:
I can’t ask for what I want because I was raised with privilege and asking for more would make me a selfish asshole.
By the end of the day, I’m wrung out. Exhausted. Magdalena had been right: the last thing I want to do is have to make dinner or even engage in conversation. I’m happy to head back to my apartment with a bottle of wine and the makings of a charcuterie platter—some fine cheese, nuts and cold cuts.
Will Power suggested we spend time rewriting our stories before the second day of the seminar so we’d see options previously hidden by the limits of our old thinking. I write several pages of scribbles. I write until my hand aches. I write until I’ve cleared a path out from a lifetime of beliefs about who and what a man named Stirling Cox has to be and do in the world.
I had to be an indistinguishable reflection of my father, the original Stirling Cox.
I had to be the personification of the upscale, notable and exemplary experience diners have in the restaurant called Stirling Cox.
I had to become the backbone of the family who relied on the original Stirling Cox after he died too young.
As I pour my second glass of pinot, I have another epiphany in the form of even more questions.
Who would I be and what could I become if my name was anything other than Stirling Cox?
What could I create and have if I decided to leave Stirling behind and used my middle name, became Joseph Cox?
And most importantly, without Stirling’s baggage, what would a guy like Joe Cox want?
Several illegible pages of notes later, I have clarity and no more wine. Stirling wants to share what I came up with with Magdalena, but Joe knows it would be best to sleep on these new ideas and share them when I’m stone cold sober.
Sleep comes quickly and easily. And my morning alarm comes too soon. I roll over, disappointed not to find the woman who’s filled my dreams lying beside me.
I grab my phone to call her and realize it’s been on airplane mode since yesterday morning. It pings half-a-dozen times, a text and five voice messages.
Before I call her, I listen to Magdalena’s messages.
“Hey. So, you should be home by now. Call me when you get this.”
“It’s been three hours since the seminar ended. Are you okay? Call me.”
“Um … so, I get it if you’re tired of taking care of me. I mean, I thought you were getting something out of what we had together, but OK. Yeah, maybe I was getting more from it than you were. But seriously, Stirling, you’re just going to ghost me?”
