Hey Reader,

Last night I stood in foaming ankle-deep water in my laundry room, watching a washing machine I had just "fixed" empty itself onto the floor in what felt like a very personal statement from the universe.

I'd spent the day working on the same family vehicle that had been out of commission since September. This was after finally replacing the dishwasher, which had undergone six rounds of parts replacement before giving up the ghost. And then the washing machine — which I had diagnosed, disassembled, ordered parts for, reassembled, and declared victorious — decided the towel load was the moment to prove me wrong.

I stood there in the water, cleanup beginning, and felt something I wasn't expecting. Not just frustration and discouragement. Something a bit lower than that.

And because I try to eat the same dog food I serve in my community and the men I work with, I sat with the question: what are these hard emotions really about?

Here's what came up.

I grew up being the family MacGyver. The one who could figure it out, fix it, and make something from nothing. And somewhere in early life, as a lanky, clumsy, and insecure kid — quietly, without any real awareness — I built a bit of an identity around it.
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The story assembled itself without my notice: this is how you're useful. This is how you matter. Be the one who fixes things, and you'll have a place and belong.

I'm almost 52. And I'm still finding edges of that story I haven't left.

The thing about building our sense of self on what we can do is that it works... until it doesn't. And the "doesn't" is never really a question of if. It's always a question of when and how hard. A washing machine that defeats you is just inconvenient, unless something more is riding on it. And for most of my life, something more has been riding on it.

I've watched this same pattern run through every domain I ever leaned on for identity: husband, provider, protector, father, the one who has his property in order. Each one, in its own time, has been pressed until it cracked. Not to punish me, but because the things we build identity around were never meant to hold that kind of weight, and life has a way of demonstrating that eventually, whether we cooperate or not.

A friend recently handed me Who Needs Friends by Andrew McCarthy — yes, Blaine from Pretty in Pink — and what stayed with me long after I finished it wasn't the friendship material. It was his conclusion: that American men are, almost without exception, absolutely horrified at the prospect of being seen as weak. That we will contort ourselves into remarkable shapes to avoid it. And reading that, I didn't feel superior or distant from it. I felt seen. Because the flooded laundry room wasn't really about the washing machine. It was about a man who, at nearly 52, still feels the pull to look like he has it handled.

What I keep coming back to is this: the weakest thing a man can do is anchor his sense of self to something that can fail. A skill. A role. An income. A reputation for having it together. Because when those things falter (and they will!), the man built on them falters with them.

Real strength isn't the absence of weakness. It's the willingness to be seen in the places where we're not holding it together, without immediately needing to fix it, explain it, or perform our way back to solid ground.

The cars (did I mention they all have some sort of challenge right now?!) are still in pieces in the garage and out behind the barn. The farmstead looks like a dandelion farm, not a magazine cover. And I am, slowly, learning to care about that less, not because order doesn't matter, but because my worth was never in the order. The sooner I can actually feel that, rather than just know it, the freer I am.

I wanted to share that with you this week, not as a sermon, but as a Friday morning from a guy who is still very much in the middle of the same passage he talks about.

Here's my question for you, and I genuinely want to know (I read every reply):

What's the identity you've built the most of your sense of self around, and has life started pressing on it yet?
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What do you need most in that?

Hit reply and tell me. No wrong answer. Just whatever is honest.

— Sven