I've lived some life.
I'm Jay.
And I think if you're considering talking to me about things you may not talk about with many other people, you deserve to know a little about the person on the other side of that conversation.
I'm 57. I'm a father. I've been married and divorced. I've built businesses and watched them fail. I've had money and I've worried about how I was going to pay the bills. I've succeeded and I've fucked things up. I've loved people, hurt people and been hurt. I've started over more than once.
A portrait of Jay belongs here
Natural light · direct · human
And for a significant part of my life, I’ve survived.
Not the inspirational-poster version of survival. The kind where survival becomes how you experience the world.
My own story includes childhood trauma and more than two decades spent trying to understand what those experiences did to the person I became. That has meant taking a pretty hard look at my choices, relationships, sexuality, fears, shame, anger, body, successes and failures—and the countless ways my past continued showing up in my present.
I'm still doing that work.
I don't tell you any of this because I think my story is more difficult or important than yours. And I definitely don't believe surviving some things somehow qualified me to tell other people how to live. It didn't.
What it did was make me deeply curious about people, including myself.
For years, I thought about survival mostly in terms of what it had cost me. Eventually, I started recognizing what it had taught me too. I learned how to read a room, how to listen to what's being said and sometimes what's not being said, how to adapt when the plan falls apart, how to sit with uncertainty and how to keep moving when I have absolutely no idea where things are going.
I also learned just how complicated a human being can be.
We can love someone and resent them at the same time. We can be grateful for our life and still want something different. We can be successful and miserable, confident and terrified. We can know something needs to change and be scared to death of changing it. Two seemingly contradictory things can be true at exactly the same time.
I've learned not to be particularly frightened by that complexity.
And that's a big part of what I bring into a conversation with someone else.
You probably aren't going to shock me.
There are things we don't say because we're afraid of what happens once we say them out loud. Things about relationships, sex, money, trauma, parenthood, work, our bodies, getting older or being lonely. Things we've done and things that have been done to us. Things we want. Things we don't want anymore. Things we're ashamed of thinking at all.
And sometimes there isn't even a thing. There's just this persistent feeling that something isn't right.
You don't have to make any of it sound reasonable before you bring it to me. You can just tell me.
I'm not promising I'll understand everything immediately. I'm not promising I'll agree with everything you say. And I'm certainly not promising I'll know what you should do about it.
What I can promise is that I'm going to listen and get curious. I'll ask questions. Sometimes I'll challenge you. Sometimes I'll share something from my own experience. Sometimes I may tell you something you don't particularly want to hear. And sometimes I'll tell you I don't know.
That's okay, because I don't believe I'm supposed to know your answer.
I don't know whether you should stay married or get divorced. I don't know whether you should quit your job. I don't know what your sexuality means to you. I don't know whether the thing you've spent twenty years chasing is still something you want. I don't know what your relationship with your past should look like.
And I'm not going to pretend I do.
What I am pretty good at is creating a space where we can talk about those things without judgment and without requiring either of us to know the answer before we begin. We can figure out what deserves our attention, try to understand what's really happening and talk about what you actually want—not necessarily what you've been told you're supposed to want.
Then we can start figuring out what forward might look like.
Maybe that's what you need right now.
I'm a certified professional life coach, but that's probably one of the least interesting things about me.
I've lived some life. I've survived some things. I've done—and continue to do—a tremendous amount of work trying to understand myself and the life I'm living.
And somewhere along the way, I've discovered that I'm pretty damn good at sitting across from another human being, creating a space where they can be completely honest and helping them figure out what deserves their attention.
Maybe that's what you need right now. Maybe it isn't. We don't have to know before we talk.