Is Honesty the Best Policy?

So I’m trying something somewhat new and perhaps ill-advised on a person profile site: embracing honesty.

Being honest is easy when there is good news, and you know your audience. Being 42, divorced, and unemployed is not good news, and even worse its common. According to the CDC I am one of 787-something thousand men in America who are divorced, one of 1.6 million who are unemployed, and 2.8 million who are 42.

So why write about something so common? Precisely because it’s also deeply personal, and seems like a good way to start. I am not what most people would deem successful. I am not sitting on tons of money and thus being unemployed is inconsequential. I do not feel like being divorced is ok. Divorce is a broken promise, to yourself, to your spouse, and to everyone who attended your wedding. Being 42 just means that I am likely past my years of peak physical and mental prime.

My wife informed me that after years of attempting to create a meaningful and satisfying relationship with me she had reached the point of realization that additional effort would not yield different results. She was unhappy and in truth I was as well, but I never would have done anything about it. So after 3 excruciating months of trying to prevent the inevitable I moved out. I still feel terrible about it two and a half years later. It still feels like a paramount failure. It feels unfair to our son. But these feelings would not change our relationship from what it was to something it had never been: fulfilling.

I was laid off for the first time in my life in May of 2019. After 20 years in the workforce, doing everything from teaching English as a foreign language, editing for an environmental watchdog, writing for magazines, marketing and selling software, and managing others, I was all of a sudden without a purpose to serve. Or more specifically, without someone else’s purpose to serve.

These two events bear a lot of similarity — both are the ultimate result of hard work and perseverance without purpose and passion. All of the various careers I have worked were either strong in passion and extremely light on compensation (mainly writing and editing, with a screenplay thrown in) or the reverse. My marriage was similar, it worked, it paid the bills, but ultimately left us both feeling emotionally empty.

Change, especially painful change, should come with a lesson, and to be perfectly honest (after all that is the point of this post) I am still wrestling with exactly what that lesson is. But I have an inkling, and that is that anything I engage in that isn’t a pure passion, a true calling, will eventually collapse under its own weight. So pursue passion at all costs, and one passion I have is getting to answers to essential questions. The essential question here is can you sell yourself while being completely honest about who you are, bad and good. I’m interested to find out.