There’s something about water.
Maybe it’s the way it slows you down, or the way it reflects things back at you that you weren’t planning to see. A week ago, I found myself sitting by a pool in Cabo San Lucas, recording a podcast episode that wasn’t supposed to happen.
There was no expert, no bestselling author, no carefully planned outline—just a guy named Mike.
We started talking the way strangers usually do..light, casual, mostly forgettable. But it didn’t stay that way for long. Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, Mike told me he had an idea for a podcast.
He’d call it This Sucks.
The premise was simple: create a space where people could talk honestly about pain. Not polished pain or the kind that’s already been resolved, but the kind that still lingers.
The kind that doesn’t tie itself up neatly.
I told him it sounded like something people desperately need. Then he paused. And that pause told me everything.
About ten years ago, Mike’s son William was stillborn. There’s no clean way to write that sentence, and there’s certainly no clean way to live it. After that came miscarriages, and more recently, a car accident that forced him to reconsider his career and the direction of his life. If you’ve lived long enough, you recognize the pattern:
Pain rarely arrives once. It tends to echo.
And yet, despite all of this—despite having both the idea and the lived experience to create something meaningful—Mike hasn’t started the podcast.
Not because he doesn’t care, and not because he doesn’t believe in it, but because he doesn’t feel ready. Or maybe more honestly, he doesn’t feel allowed.
I offered him something I’ve wrestled with myself. What if it’s not fear of failure that’s holding you back, but something quieter and harder to name? What if it’s guilt? The kind that whispers that moving forward—building something, finding meaning, even helping others—might somehow diminish what was lost. As if healing could feel like forgetting, or worse, like leaving someone behind.
We don’t talk about this enough.
There can be a strange safety in pain. When something devastating happens, it becomes part of your identity, sometimes the center of it. And moving beyond it, even in a healthy way, can feel like betrayal. Mike understood that immediately. He also pointed out how difficult it is to even have these conversations, especially as a man. There’s this quiet expectation to endure, to keep going, to “rub some dirt on it” and carry the weight silently.
But he said something else too. He told me that humor, laughter, even in the middle of it, is sometimes the only way through. And I think there’s a lot of truth in that.
At some point, as these conversations tend to do, we turned toward my own story. Losing my father at seven shaped more of my life than I realized for a very long time. I carried guilt I didn’t understand and built an identity around trying to make up for something that was never mine to fix. Becoming a physician felt like part of that equation. It took years for me to see it differently and to understand that maybe my story wasn’t something to compensate for, but something to interpret.
So I asked Mike a question I’ve asked myself many times: Do you see your life as a victim story or a hero story?
He didn’t hesitate. “Hero.”
Of course he did. He’s a comic book fan. He started talking about Wolverine and Peter Parker…how the characters he admires are all shaped by loss and adversity. That’s what defines them. That’s what gives them depth and strength. It’s not the absence of suffering that makes them heroic; it’s what they choose to do with it.
That’s when something shifted in the conversation. Maybe courage isn’t just about facing the future. Maybe it’s also about how we choose to understand the past. It’s the willingness to look back at the hardest moments of our lives and decide that they don’t only define our pain, they also inform our purpose.
Before we wrapped up, I asked Mike to imagine his life ten years from now if things go right. He didn’t mention wealth or status. He talked about being happily married, playing basketball with his son, helping his daughter through college, and feeling proud that he found a way to help other people. There was something simple and deeply honest about that vision. It wasn’t about escaping pain, it was about using it.
We all have our own version of this sucks. Moments we didn’t ask for and stories we wouldn’t have chosen. The question isn’t whether they happen; it’s what we do with them. Do we keep them hidden, quietly shaping us from the inside, or do we bring them into the light and allow them to connect us to others?
Mike hasn’t launched his podcast…at least not yet. But something tells me that conversation by the pool was a beginning. Because sometimes courage isn’t a big, visible act. Sometimes it’s just telling the truth out loud for the first time.
If you’ve ever wondered whether your pain is something to hide or something that might eventually help someone else, I think you’ll find this conversation meaningful. Give the episode a listen.
I've noticed a pattern in cases where I've tried to hide pain, it works for a while before it actually feels worse. For me, there's no escaping the process of properly dealing with stuff that sucks, and the sooner I can deal with it, the better.
And guilt can manifest itself in so many ways. It's stealthy too, meaning it can show up unexpectedly at the worst times.
I hope Mike launches his podcast.