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Today is May the fourth. Star Wars Day, for the people who are into that kind of thing.
I'm not going to do the joke. But there's one beat from those movies that I've been thinking about more than I'd like to admit, especially this year.
End of Return of the Jedi. Vader is dying. He has spent six movies and a lifetime being the wrong guy. In the last two minutes of his life, he makes one right choice. Not on a stage. Not in front of an audience. In front of his son. He saves his son. And then he dies.
And his son sees it.
That's the redemption arc most of us were sold growing up. Bad guy realizes the truth, makes one right choice at the end, gets the funeral pyre, gets remembered correctly.
Here's the thing I've come to believe about that arc, after living the early chapters of one myself.
It's a beautiful story. And it's not how most of these actually go.
The Story We Were Sold
The clean version of redemption has a tidy shape. Bad guy realizes the truth. Bad guy does the right thing. Bad guy gets the moment of recognition. Bad guy is remembered correctly.
And the bad guy is in control of all of it. He decides when he turns. When he acts. When the moment of recognition happens. The whole arc runs on his clock.
Which is great if you're writing a movie. Terrible model for actual life.
"In real life, the redemption arc isn't yours. It's everybody else's."
You don't decide when you've changed. The people who knew the old you decide. And they decide on their own schedule, by their own metric, and they don't owe you a deadline.
You can change in private for years. Genuinely. Different person on the inside, different choices on the outside, quieter, slower, more honest, the whole package.
And you can still walk into a room and have the people who knew you before see the old version. Because they don't have access to your inside. They have access to their memory of you. And the memory was bad.
That's not unfair. That's reasonable. They're protecting themselves with the information they have. You'd do the same thing. So would I.
But it means the redemption arc isn't a thing you complete. It's a thing other people decide whether to grant. On a timeline you don't control.
The Door
Here's where I am. And I'm going to be honest about it, because if I'm not, this whole show is just performance, and we're not doing that here.
I have two daughters. Right now, the door between us is closed.
Not slammed shut. Not locked from the outside with a sign on it that says never come back. But not open either. Mostly closed. Sometimes a crack. Sometimes a little more than a crack. Sometimes nothing at all.
And I am the guy on the wrong side of that door.
What makes that hard isn't the closed part. I get the closed part. I broke this. I am the reason it's closed. They didn't do anything wrong. I did. They are protecting themselves with information I gave them. By being the version of me that I was.
"I don't get to be impatient about a door I'm the reason is closed."
That's the line I've had to write across the front of my brain. Because the impatience comes anyway. Of course it does. You miss your kids. You miss who you used to be in their lives. You miss the daily little things, the inside jokes, the small rituals, all the boring beautiful stuff that disappears when a relationship gets put on pause.
Impatience says: push. Reach out more. Reach out harder. Make sure they know you're trying.
Impatience is wrong. Because pushing on a door that's closed for a good reason just makes the door stay closed longer.
What Trying Actually Looks Like
If you're in this position, or one like it, here's what I've had to learn about what trying actually looks like when you don't get to control the outcome.
Trying is not pushing. Trying is not reaching out three times in a week and calling it love. Trying is not crafting the perfect message or finding the right time or anything that puts pressure on the other person to engage with you.
Trying, in this kind of situation, is much quieter than that.
Trying is reaching out at the right interval, with no expectation.
Trying is sending a happy birthday message and being completely okay with no reply.
Trying is making sure that if they ever decide to look in your direction, you are the new version. Not because they're watching. Because that's who you actually are now.
"Trying is becoming the person they would want to come back to. Whether or not they ever do."
That's the whole game.
If you only become the new version on the condition that they come back, you didn't become the new version. You ran a marketing campaign. And the people you broke things with can usually tell the difference, even from a distance.
The new version has to be the new version whether anybody is watching or not. That's the only one that can actually rebuild anything. That's the only one that earns the door cracking open.
The Vader Beat, Reconsidered
Back to that beat at the end of Return of the Jedi.
I think it's moving for a reason most people don't articulate. It's moving because Vader doesn't get to come back. He doesn't get reunion. He doesn't get the long conversation. He doesn't get years of repaired relationship.
He gets one moment. One choice. And then he's gone.
And it's enough.
The redemption is moving because it's not a return. It's just one right choice, made at the end, in front of someone who matters. No guarantee anybody else will ever know what happened in that room.
Most of us aren't going to die in our kid's arms after one perfect dramatic act. Real life doesn't have that structure.
But the principle is real. The redemption you can actually offer is one right choice at a time, made on a Tuesday afternoon when nobody's watching, that compounds over years into a different kind of person. Whether or not anyone ever sees it.
"Redemption isn't a destination you arrive at. It's a way of moving, even when nobody's keeping score."
If I'm honest, that's what most of my days look like right now. Making choices my daughters may never see, in a life they may never be part of again. Trying to be the kind of guy that, if the door ever opened, they would not regret walking through.
Some days it feels like enough. Some days it doesn't. But it is what's actually mine to do. And it's enough work to fill a lifetime.
THIS WEEK I'M THINKING ABOUT
You Cannot Outwork an Identity You Don't Believe In.
This week's angle on the same anchor: identity is the only thing you can control when the outcome isn't yours.
If your identity is "the dad who's trying to win them back," your whole life is hooked to whether they come back. They don't come back, you fail. That's a brutal place to live.
If your identity is "the dad who's becoming the kind of person they'd want to come back to," the work is the win. The reunion, if it ever comes, is a bonus. Not the scoreboard.
Same actions, on the outside. Completely different inside. The first version eats you. The second version saves you.
ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
Pick one closed door in your life. Could be a kid. A parent. A friend. An ex. A former colleague. Anybody you broke something with.
Then ask yourself: am I doing the work because I want to be the person they'd want back? Or am I doing the work because I want them back?
Be honest. The answer is rarely the one you'd prefer.
If it's the second one, your work is going to feel like leverage instead of becoming. That's the version that doesn't earn anything. Recalibrate before you do anything else this week.
READER QUESTION
Whose redemption arc are you trying to live right now? Yours, or the version somebody else has to validate? And what would change if you stopped waiting for the validation?
Reply to this email and send it in. I read every one.
Wednesday's episode: The Slow Lane
Dan Kaufman | Grace Over Guilt
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