Lately, my reading has become something of an accidental conversation, one that keeps asking me… how much of my life is mine to author?

I just finished Sylvester Stallone’s memoir The Steps, and I loved it. I have always had a special place in my heart for the Rocky films, but discovering the person behind the hero, a man considerably more interesting than the celebrity, was even better.

After my dose of Rocky, I came across Raymond Carver’s tiny poem “Late Fragment” one evening over an alfresco dinner and a bottle of Puligny-Montrachet (for non-wine drinkers, a French chardonnay). The poem sparked a conversation with a friend about what it means to be fully alive, knowing, inconveniently, that we will eventually die. Sobering, right? 

From there, I wandered into Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.  Twenty-five pages in, I realized I’d need a pen, some patience, and perhaps a much stiffer drink than French wine.  Becker, in turn, introduced me to Otto Rank, Freud’s once-protégé, who eventually wandered far enough from Freud to begin asking different questions about what makes us human.

And somewhere in this flurry of reading, underlining, thinking and mental sparring, one word kept appearing.

Agency.

Perhaps because I am at an age when the mathematics of life become harder to ignore. There is considerably more road behind me than there once was, and presumably less ahead. Oddly, I don’t find that realization particularly morbid.

I find it clarifying and prefer to be astonishingly alive for whatever remains, and increasingly as the days pass, I wonder how much being fully alive requires examining the person we have spent decades becoming.

Wilhelm Reich called it “character armor” … the defenses we build to navigate the world.

Long before we understand ourselves, we learn to belong to our first little civilization: our family. I was drawn to this idea because we don’t simply hide behind our armor; eventually, we begin presenting it as personality. We become the achiever, the caretaker, the peacemaker, the funny one. Then there is the responsible one, or even the rebel, and the one who needs nothing.  And my personal favorite, the one who proves everyone wrong.

And then we grow up… except sometimes those roles grow up with us.

We carry them into marriages, friendships, careers, and families of our own. What once protected us can become indistinguishable from personality. We say, this is simply who I am, without asking the considerably more interesting question:

But is it?

Stallone unexpectedly brought this home for me. There is the public Sly…the extraordinary will, the body, the movies, the improbable creation of Rocky, the refusals and reinventions. A man whose mythology could practically be reduced to three words: Get back up.

But underneath that story was another one that interested me far more. Again and again, he seemed to return to his mother, wanting something she repeatedly demonstrated she could not provide in the way he needed it. Here was a man who had managed to author almost every aspect of his external life yet remained vulnerable to the one thing he could not author: another person’s capacity to love him.

And suddenly persistence looked different to me. The quality that saves us in one part of life can imprison us in another. Try again. Work harder. Prove them wrong. Marvelous advice for getting a screenplay made. Terrible strategy for making an emotionally unavailable person emotionally available. You cannot outperform someone else’s limitations.

Perhaps that’s where autonomy begins—not in getting what we want, but in recognizing where our authorship ends.

I cannot make you understand me, nor can I make you examine yourself. I cannot make you become emotionally available, nor can I make you love me differently. But I can decide how long I stand outside your door, knocking. 

That realization collided beautifully with Raymond Carver. Near the end of his life, in his extraordinarily brief poem “Late Fragment,” Carver asks whether he got what he wanted from life: “Even so.”

To me, those two words embody an entire philosophy. They don’t deny what happened or insist that everything worked out as it should. They don’t erase disappointment, loss, regret, or mortality. They acknowledge all of it without letting any of it have the final word.

Despite what happened. Despite what didn’t. Despite the people who failed us. Despite the ways we failed ourselves. Despite mortality. Despite all the years spent becoming someone before we understood we had any say in the becoming.

Even so.

Did we live? Did we love? Did we allow ourselves to be loved? The other morning, I showed Hubs Carver’s poem, particularly its final wish: to feel “beloved on the earth.”

“Isn’t that a little narcissistic?” he asked. I laughed, but the question stayed with me, because beloved isn’t the same as admired.

The question isn’t: Did the world think I mattered? It is: Did I matter deeply to someone within it? Was I known? Was I loved? Was I claimed as part of someone else’s life?

Perhaps being astonishingly alive isn’t only about how much of the world we experience or how successfully we author our lives. Perhaps it is also about whether, somewhere along the way, we find our people—and allow ourselves to know we belong to them, too.

I think there is a difference between being loved and knowing yourself as beloved. The first requires another person. The second requires something from within us, too: the willingness to receive it. To believe it. To stop being so preoccupied with the love we couldn’t obtain that we fail to recognize the love already surrounding us.

Maybe that, too, is a form of freedom, and perhaps where Carver and Stallone finally meet.

We can spend years knocking on one particular door because we desperately want the person behind it to open it. But eventually we might turn around and discover an entire life behind us—people who stayed, people who saw us, people who chose us.

The tragedy wouldn’t merely be that one door never opened. It would be spending so long knocking that we failed to notice the ones that did.

And then Becker complicates everything. In The Denial of Death, he considers how much of what we build, achieve, and attach ourselves to is shaped by knowing our lives are finite. Which leaves me with a question I haven’t been able to shake:

What exactly are we all trying to prove, and to whom?

I watch the endless human heroics around me: status, achievement, accumulation, identity, the need and the relentless construction and protection of the person we want the world to believe we are. None of it has ever impressed me much. I have always been far more interested in the person underneath the armor.

Who are you when nobody needs to be impressed?

Who are you without the role your family assigned you?

Who are you when you stop defending the story you’ve always told about yourself?

Who are you when you no longer need someone else to confirm that you’ve become enough?

Otto Rank eventually moved beyond Freud’s emphasis on explaining ourselves primarily through our past and toward questions of will, creativity, and self-creation.  That shift feels increasingly important to me. Understanding what shaped us matters, but eventually another question comes up: “Now what?”

We can spend a lifetime excavating the reasons we became who we are. Let me tell you, I have. But at some point, we need to pick up the pen. Our stories are still being written—and eventually, the pen becomes ours.

What I have learned is relatively simple, though it took me an absurdly long time to learn.  Agency does not mean I no longer need other people.  I do.  Nor does it mean the past stops mattering. It means that, at some point, understanding our history has to become more than explanation. For me, it became authorship.

My challenge, in whatever portion of life remains, isn’t to prove myself to the world.  It’s something quieter: to recognize the armor that once protected me and decide when I no longer need to wear it.

It took me years to stop asking people incapable of emotional understanding to understand me. Years, too, to recognize that persistence is not always courage.  Sometimes persistence is simply resistance to reality.

I can love people without requiring them to become different.  I can leave certain doors unopened as I walk away.  And, most importantly, I can keep becoming.

With sober realism, I don’t know how many years I have left in this human form. None of us do.  But I know more and more how I want to spend mine.

Not proving. Not waiting. Not knocking.

Becoming, loving, and allowing myself to know I am loved. Belonging, and knowing I belong. Even so doesn’t mean everything turned out the way I wanted. It means that despite everything that has happened and everything I cannot control, I still get to decide how I meet the life in front of me…

Astonishingly alive.