Forty, Frozen, and Still Fighting

I’ve been struggling lately. My Uber Eats deliveries have basically come to an end — it’s just too cold to keep doing that on an electric bike. I know some people somehow push through the snow and road salt, but I can’t do it. The cold is brutal, and the salt destroys my equipment. It’s not sustainable.

So for now, I’ve ended up at a part-time job at Wendy’s. I’ve also applied for Better Jobs Ontario to hopefully get funding to go back to school. I should hear back in the next couple of weeks. I never thought, at 40 years old, that I’d be working at a Wendy’s.

What makes it sting a bit more is that I didn’t even land the job on my own. A friend of mine, who works there as a manager, vouched for me and convinced his boss — the actual store manager — to hire me. She didn’t want to at first. She told him I was too honest when I said upfront that the job would be temporary and that I would give proper notice when the time came. Apparently that made me “not committed enough.” And honestly… who is truly committed to a job like Wendy’s? It’s the definition of a temporary job. I was just being real.

My birthday happened recently.  I didn't have any money to really celebrate, but I took my kids to the agriculture museum for the day.  I didn't even have a birthday cake.  Turning 40 has made everything hit a bit harder. I thought I’d be in a different place by now. My oldest daughter still won’t talk to me because of things my ex-wife told her. I’ve refuted them completely, but she’s chosen to stand with her mother. I don’t wish anything bad on my ex — she’s still the mother of my children — but it’s been incredibly hard to cope with the fallout.

One of the things she did that still affects me today is the electricity account. It was in my name, and she ran up the bill, had it cut off, and then opened a new account under her own name. Now I get hounded almost daily by a collections agency over a bill I didn’t even create. It’s just one more reminder of how tangled the past can still be, even when you’re trying to move forward.  It's like she threw a grenade over her shoulder as she walked away and it's still exploding inside my life months later.

Every day feels like a reminder of past mistakes, past wounds, past versions of myself I’m trying to outgrow. And look, I know I’m not innocent. As Sam Dawson says in I Am Sam: “I made huge mistakes. Huge mistakes. Mistakes that are huge.” I know exactly where I went wrong, and I’m trying to build a support system one slow brick at a time.

Some days it feels like everything hits at once — the job, the cold, the money, the family stuff, the weight of being 40 and still trying to figure out who you’re becoming.

That’s when I find myself turning back to scripture.  I need the reminder that “we all have sinned and continually fall short of the Glory of God, and are being justified as a gift… by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23–24, MSG). I need the reminder that I’m going to keep messing up, because everyone does. Ecclesiastes 7:20 spells it out plainly: “Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who always does good and never sins.”

And honestly? It’s wearing me down. Not because I’m fragile. Not because I’m lazy. But because when you’re already trying to rebuild from the ground up, every extra blow feels like it lands twice as hard.

But I remind myself of the same thing I’ve told other guys coming out of jail, rehab, homelessness — any of the trenches I’ve personally crawled through:

You don’t stop because it’s unfair. You push because stopping isn’t an option.

So yeah, I’m tired.

Yeah, sometimes it feels like the ground keeps shifting beneath my feet.
And yeah, I’m dealing with the fallout of choices that weren’t even mine.

But I’m also still here. Still showing up. Still working. Still rebuilding.
Even when it hurts.
Especially when it hurts.

Because being “down” is part of the story — but staying down? That’s not how my story ends.

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