There Are No Problems

I was a child the first time I was handed a job too big for me.

Somewhere along the way, I became responsible for my mother’s happiness. If she was down — a holiday, a birthday, an ordinary Tuesday — I was the one who could bring her back.

Not my father.

Not my sister.

Me.

I didn’t understand at the time that this was happening. Children never do. You just quietly absorb the assignment and go to work.

And that assignment became a lens. I started seeing my whole life through it, without ever knowing I’d put it on.

It made me a people-pleaser with a fierce work ethic — those two always travel together. It made me competitive, always measuring, always needing the outside to look a certain way. I needed the approval of others.

Not just as good as the neighbors — better.

The bigger house.

The nicer vacation.

Whatever it was, I went all in to be the best. Not second best. The best. I’d be up at 4:30 to train for a triathlon, then working, then home to help with the diapers because I wanted a big family and didn’t want it to feel like too much, then out to the home-improvement project because we needed the rental income, then back to work, then coming inside in the dark.

Building the business to hit the right number.

Holding all of it.

Every plate spinning.

I want to name what was actually running underneath all that motion, because you may recognize it. Two lenses. And they were really the same wound wearing two faces.

The first: I have to hold it all. If I don’t manage everything and everyone, it falls apart, and it’s on me.

The second: I’m behind. No matter how much I did, someone was further ahead, and I had to catch them. I wouldn’t earn the respect of others unless i was the best.

If you’re raising a child with special needs, I’d bet at least one of those is running in you right now.

I must hold it all — the appointments, the therapies, the household, everyone’s feelings — because if I set it down, it collapses.

Or

I’m behind — my child should be further along, other families make it look easier, I’m not doing enough, I’m never doing enough.

These lenses feel like the truth. They feel like just seeing clearly. They’re not. They’re a coat you were handed so long ago you forgot you were wearing one.

Here’s what these lenses do: they turn life into a series of problems.

And I want to offer you something that sounds impossible at first, and gets truer the longer you sit with it.

There are no problems. There is only life — and the story the mind tells about it.

A problem is not a fact. A problem is a fact plus a story. The fact is neutral. The story is where the suffering lives.

Let me show you with my own life, because mine got very dark and proved it in a way I couldn’t argue with.

When our 5th child started missing milestones, the realization of having 5 kids within 6 years of age and 2 with special needs was more than my marriage was able to endure. To make a long story short,

I went from a house on the hill with an ocean view in Santa Barbara, California— a couple of businesses, half a million dollars a year, working hard but vacationing when we wanted, with 5 children — to homeless. Living in my car. My marriage, best friend, and partner…….gone! False accusations followed, and the floor just dropped. For a stretch, I was sleeping in my car at a mountain turnout with my son Rocco, who has severe special needs, beside me — him making sounds all through the night, me with no access to money, no house, nothing.

You would think that at the very bottom, the lens would finally switch off. That losing everything would at least free me from the need to compare myself with others.

It didn’t. It got louder. Because even there, homeless, at the turnout — I was still running the same program. I met people and did everything I could for them so I wouldn’t look like the homeless guy. So I wouldn’t be the one who’d fallen the furthest behind. I didn’t want to look like a lousy father.

The circumstances had collapsed completely, and the lens was still whispering the same thing it had whispered my whole life: don’t be behind, hold it all together, keep it looking okay.

That’s the whole teaching, lived. My suffering in that car was real — but it wasn’t only the car. It was the car plus the story. The fact was: I had no home. The story was: I am a failure; I am behind everyone; I must not let anyone see; I have to hold this all up alone. And the story was heavier than the car.

The turn came in the middle of that darkness, following a minor panic attack. If you’ve never had a panic attack, your heart starts racing and often starts palpitating with an irregularity that feels like you’re going to die. Fortunately, this wasn’t my first panic attack; for that one, the ambulance was called. This time, I knew what was happening. I knew I wasn’t going to die, so I did a box breath: inhale for a count of 5, hold for a count of 5, exhale for a count of 7, hold for a count of 5, then repeat.

The palpitations stopped, which informed me, my ego, that I could stop the breathing exercise. I settled deeper into the driver’s seat and reclined a foot or so back to a more comfortable position.

And then it hit me…..

I noticed I wasn’t breathing myself.

My heart had been beating since before I was born, and I had never once told it to. I did nothing to keep it going. I didn’t even understand the mechanics of how the heart worked.

And then it opened up wider:

I didn’t make my children. I don’t know how to make a spleen. I don’t run them. They’re built of trillions of cells doing things I couldn’t begin to direct, and I have no idea how any of it works. For all the bases I was breaking myself to cover, all the outcomes I was trying to force — I wasn’t even in charge of my own next breath.

And here’s the part that changed everything: realizing how little control I had did not feel like despair. It felt like relief. It felt like power — because it was simply true.

I had been carrying a weight that was never mine to carry.

I’d been trying to hold up the house and the kids and the bridge the cars drive across, and the truth is, none of it was ever resting on me. Something far larger was already holding all of it, whether I paid attention to it or not.

And I thought: if some force is already running most of my life — my heartbeat, my kids’ cells, the whole spinning world — and doing it better than I ever could, then maybe it’s not up to me to hold it all together. Maybe it can do a better job of my life than my exhausted, control-gripping ego ever was able to do.

Around that time, I read one line from a teacher whose voice had become one I trusted, and it ran through me like an electric current. Reading it back even now brings tears to my eyes:

The place you’re looking for is the place you’re looking from. - Mooji

It was exactly what I needed to hear at that time. I knew it was true. If I’d heard it before, it didn’t sing out like it did on that day. My life experience had prepped me for this life-changing moment. An awareness that brings me a deep soothing peace.

The peace I’d been chasing my whole life — through the bigger house, the better vacation, the perfect performance, the holding of everything — was never out there at some finish line that didn’t exist.

It was here.

Underneath the story. In the present moment, which is the only place that’s actually real. Everything else — the comparing, the bracing, the fear — was happening in my head. Building false evidence and calling it truth.

You do not have to hold it all up. I know it feels like you do. For most of us, we aren’t even aware that we have a lens. If you have blue lenses on, everything will look blue. If you don’t know you are wearing a lens, then everything is just blue.

With that said…….

The bridge is not resting on you. It never was. And the moment you feel that — even for a breath — the problems vanish and all that’s left is simply life, happening, held by something far greater than you.

Today, I choose the present moment, as often as I can remember to. It hasn’t made my life perfect, but it has made it free.

Today, I am enough, and so are you. There is nothing we need to do, be, or have in order to give and receive love while raising our children.

We are love.

We are light.

We are made of the same elements as stars.

I’ll see you next week.

If this landed, follow along — I write every Monday, for the parent carrying more than anyone sees. If you are ready to make some shifts in your life, we highlight 5 shifts for parents raising special needs children HERE