My father was a successful man. I grew up watching what that success cost him.

The stress he never named settled into his body until his health broke under it. I was young, and I could do little but watch. In the years that followed I lost more than one person I loved to the same quiet cause: a life driven hard, with no room left to feel it.

There was another thing about growing up in his shadow. Whatever I achieved, someone was ready to explain it away (you're good because of your father). So I learned early not to trust my own wins, and never to ask anyone for help.

For eighteen years I was an aerospace engineer, then a manager. Good at my job, and quietly disappearing inside it.

I could run the meeting, close the account, fly home, and feel almost nothing. I called it discipline. I was doing exactly what I'd watched my father do.

At 43 it came apart: the career, the marriage, the certainty I'd built everything on. For seven months I slept somewhere that wasn't my own home. For the first time in my life there was no project plan, no next milestone, nothing to manage my way out of.