I was listening to a podcast recently about a woman in her seventies, semi-retired, describing a life built around boards and civic connections and a career that had opened into something expansive in its later years. She sounded settled in a way that felt earned, like she had arrived somewhere she had been moving toward for a long time.
I recognized the path. Not because I’m in my seventies, but because I was on a version of it.
When we moved from Colorado to Philadelphia about a decade ago, I was a senior director at a Fortune 50 company with real scope and responsibility. A few years into that role, I joined a civic leadership program that brought executives from major Philadelphia companies into the city’s nonprofit community. Over the course of a year, you got deep exposure to the city’s history and institutions, built relationships across industries, and came out the other side connected in a particular way. The expectation was that you’d land on a board somewhere, that you’d become someone who contributed to the city in that civic, executive register. The people around me were doing exactly that, and I could see the same future taking shape for me.
Burnout changed the calculation. So did my family needing more of me than that version of my life was leaving room for. I stepped back from the executive track and took an individual contributor role after we moved to the suburbs, trading scope and gravity for time and presence.
What I didn’t fully anticipate was where that would eventually land me. I’m in my early fifties now, a single dad doing his best to hold things together, and the life I’m living looks almost nothing like the one I was building toward in that leadership cohort. The board seat, the Philadelphia connections, the version of myself moving through the city with a sense of purpose and forward momentum — that version didn’t make it here. Not yet, anyway. Maybe not ever.
The woman on the podcast wasn’t describing my life. She was describing what my life looked like from a certain angle, at a certain moment, before it went somewhere else entirely.
I think about that when I think about my son’s future.
I spend a lot of time with the map of what his life might look like — the limitations, the closed doors, the jobs that seem within reach, and the ones that probably aren’t. I carry a picture built from everything I know right now, shaped by twelve years of navigating his condition, watching carefully, and trying to be realistic without being defeatist. It feels like an honest picture.
But five years ago, I would not have predicted this. Not the single part, not the scraping-by part, not the individual contributor part. The version of me in that leadership program had a reasonable picture of the next decade, but it was wrong in almost every respect.
That doesn’t mean his future is full of hidden good news I can’t see yet. I’m not reaching for easy comfort. The limitations are real. The hard parts are real. Uncertainty isn’t the same as hope, and I try not to confuse the two.
But I’m holding his map a little more loosely than I used to. If my own path could shift that completely in five years, I don’t actually know what his looks like in five years either. The shape I think I can see might not be the shape it takes. The road I think he’s on might lead somewhere neither of us expects.
Most days, that doesn’t feel comforting. It just feels true.
Five years ago, I would never have thought I’d be here. And that might be the only honest thing I know about the future.