Dennis Schulz

When people talk about healing, they often paint a peaceful picture: meditation, warm baths, journaling under the sun. And yes, those moments exist. But they’re only one side of the story. What most people don’t talk about is that healing often looks like crying at 2 a.m. for reasons you can’t fully explain. It looks like confronting truths about yourself you spent years running from. It looks like letting go of people you still love. Healing can be brutal before it’s beautiful. For me, healing meant facing a version of myself I didn’t want to meet. I had to unpack habits I thought were just “who I am” and trace them back to pain I never addressed. I had to stop blaming everyone else and start asking harder questions: Why do I react like this? Why do I chase people who treat me like I’m hard to love? Those weren’t easy answers. Sometimes, healing felt more like breaking than rebuilding. There were days I felt like I was going backward, not forward. Days I was exhausted just...

Growing up without a father is something that leaves a quiet, invisible space in your life—one that doesn’t always make itself obvious until you’re older. As a kid, you learn to cope, to normalize it. You watch your friends with their dads at football games or graduation ceremonies, and you pretend it doesn’t sting. You act like you’re fine. But as you get older, you begin to realize that the absence wasn’t just physical—it shaped how you carry your emotions, how you connect with people, how you handle hard days. I’ve been in crowded rooms, at family functions, with friends who genuinely care about me—and still felt alone. That’s the strange thing about loneliness. It doesn’t always mean you’re isolated. Sometimes it just means you don’t feel understood. When you grow up without someone to teach you how to navigate life, especially a father figure, you carry that silence with you. There are things I wish I could’ve asked, guidance I wish I had, but there was no one to turn ...