I Quit Calling It a Comeback

People keep handing me the word comeback.

I used to take it. It sounded like something I was supposed to want.

I do not use it anymore.

What the word actually means

A comeback means you go back.

Back to the position. Back to the income. Back to the standing. Back to the man you were before the thing happened, like the last few years were a detour and the road rejoins itself somewhere up ahead.

It does not rejoin.

There is no version of this where I walk back into the life I had. That life is gone. Some of it was taken, some of it I gave away, and a piece of it I would not take back if you handed it to me on a plate.

So what exactly am I coming back to?

The trap sitting inside the word

Here is the problem with aiming at a comeback.

It makes the old life the target. And the old life is the one thing you can never hit.

You will spend years trying to push a number back to where it used to be. You will measure a new business against an old one that had different customers, a different market and a different man running it. You will try to rebuild a reputation by arguing with people about a version of you that stopped existing a long time ago.

Every one of those is a race against a ghost.

Ghosts do not get tired. You do.

What I use instead

Build forward.

Two words, and they change every decision you make after them.

Build forward says the question is not what did I lose. The question is what exists now that did not exist last year.

A site with an archive on it that nobody can take down. Work I can do from a laptop in East Texas. A skill set I did not have before, most of it picked up in rooms I did not choose to be in. A son. A book that is written. A shorter list of people and a better one.

None of that is a restoration. You cannot restore something that was never there in the first place.

The part people do not like

Build forward also means accepting that some of the ledger stays red.

There are things on my list that are not coming back, and I have stopped pretending otherwise. Years. Some relationships. A version of my name that existed before the search results did.

A comeback story has to end with the scoreboard even. That is exactly why it is a comfortable story and a dishonest one.

Build forward does not require the scoreboard to get even. It only requires today to be a build.

Why this matters if you are down there right now

Somebody is going to tell you about your comeback.

They mean it kindly. Take it kindly.

Then quietly do not aim at it.

Aim at the next thing you can actually make. A working week. A finished page. A customer who pays. A morning you got up when everything in you said do not.

Those stack. The old life does not.

Genesis 50:20 does not say restore

That is the verse I keep coming back to. What was meant for evil, God meant for good.

Read it close. It does not say He put everything back the way it was.

It says He made something out of it. Something that was not there before and would not have been there if the thing had never happened at all.

That is not a comeback.

That is a build.

I am not going back. I am going forward, and I would appreciate it if nobody tries to sell me a ticket to where I used to live.