He had coached his kids' baseball team for years. Through bad calls, losing streaks, kids crying in the dugout. He never raised his voice. Mike was the steady one — in his family, in his neighborhood, in every room he walked into. That was just who he was.
So when he found himself sneaking away from his sister's birthday party to sit on the edge of the tub in her bathroom — just breathing, waiting for something nameless to pass — he didn't know what to make of it.
His wife Janet was changing too. She'd stopped hosting her book club. Stopped watching the movies they used to love. She'd look out the window at her garden and feel nothing. The same garden she'd tended for fifteen years. The one that used to get her outside on a Saturday morning before she'd even had coffee.
One evening they sat across from each other at the kitchen table and Mike said the quiet part out loud: "Are we losing our minds?"
No. They weren't losing their minds. But something real was happening to them — and it didn't have a name they recognized, which made it worse.
In Staying Strong in Unsteady Times, I spend a lot of time with people like Mike and Janet — functional, capable, deeply decent people who've started to feel like they're failing at something they used to do effortlessly: just being okay.
The researcher Aaron Antonovsky spent his career studying what keeps people healthy under extreme stress. Not what makes them sick — but what protects them. He found that people who stayed grounded had a strong Sense of Coherence: the world made enough sense to them, they had enough resources to cope, and enough meaning to keep going.
What's happening to a lot of us right now is that all three of those are under pressure simultaneously. The news cycle doesn't make sense. We feel powerless to change anything. And it's hard to hold onto why it matters.
Mike, hiding in his sister's bathroom, wasn't weak. It was his nervous system doing its job — trying to find fifteen minutes of quiet because it had been carrying months of sustained alarm with no clear resolution.
The first thing I want Mike and Janet to hear — and maybe you, if you're somewhere in that story — is this: You're not broken. The situation is.
There's a difference. And once you see it, you can actually start to work with what's real.
If you're in the middle of that kind of exhaustion right now, this book was written for you. Not to fix you. To meet you where you are and help you find your footing again.
Get Staying Strong in Unsteady Times on Amazon:
📖 Get it on Amazon → amazon.com/dp/B0GY49XSVZ