For me, one of those questions was my biological mother.

I was adopted as an infant, but adoption was never treated as a secret in our family. My sister and I were both adopted, and neither of us could remember the moment when our parents first explained it to us. The knowledge had simply always been there. Two children’s books about adoption remained on our family bookshelf for years, and although I do not remember reading them myself, I was told they were read to us when we were young. Their presence made adoption feel less like a revelation and more like an ordinary part of how some families were created.

My parents never made me feel unwanted or incomplete. They loved me, provided for me, and gave me a stable home. They had waited years to become parents, and when they finally received the opportunity to adopt, they embraced it fully. I did not grow up believing I had been abandoned. I grew up believing I had been chosen.

Still, gratitude and curiosity can exist together.

As I grew old enough to understand what adoption meant, I began wondering about the people who came before my parents. I can remember thinking about my biological mother around the age of seven or eight. My birthday seemed to be the one day each year when I felt connected to her. I did not know her name, where she lived, or what her life had become, but I assumed she remembered July 13. I imagined that perhaps, somewhere, she was thinking about me at the same time I was thinking about her.

Those thoughts continued through childhood and followed me into adulthood. They were never overwhelming. I did not spend every day searching faces in crowds or imagining dramatic reunions. The questions simply returned from time to time. Who was she? What did she look like? What was she doing? Was she happy? Did she ever wonder what kind of person I had become?

My father always told my sister and me that he would support us if we ever decided to search for our biological parents. At the time of our adoptions, the names of the biological parents appeared on some of the paperwork. My father had specifically asked that those names be covered before he signed the documents. He believed it was unfair for adoptive parents to know the identity of the biological parents when the biological parents were not permitted to know where the child had gone. Once my sister and I were brought home, our parents accepted that the past belonged to someone else. We became a family and moved forward together.

That did not prevent other people from having opinions about whether I should look backward.

Whenever I mentioned an interest in finding my biological mother, someone seemed ready with a warning. What if she did not want to know me? What if I had been a secret she had never revealed? What if she had married and started another family? What if finding her ruined her life? What if she had died? What if she was in prison? What if she struggled with addiction? What if I discovered something that emotionally destroyed me? Why would I even want to find her when I already had a family?

At the time, those questions sounded like concern. Looking back, I recognize them as another form of staying in line. They were reminders that curiosity could be dangerous and that the safer choice was to accept the story I had been given. I should appreciate what I had, leave the unknown alone, and avoid the risk of disturbing anyone’s life, including my own.

But there was also the tug.

It was not loud enough to overpower every warning. It was not strong enough to send me running toward an answer regardless of the consequences. It was simply present. I could ignore it, but I could not make it disappear.

When I was twenty-five, I finally called the adoption agency from my office at the family business. A caseworker explained that I could request copies of my original case records. The documents would not include names, but they could contain genealogical information, medical histories, social histories, physical descriptions, and any information added after the adoption. There would be paperwork to complete and a fee of $150.

A few days later, the packet arrived.

I reviewed the forms, considered the cost, and placed everything in my desk drawer.

At twenty-five, $150 seemed like a considerable amount of money to spend on information that might not tell me anything meaningful. I later learned that most adoption files are never updated after their original creation. I assumed mine would probably contain a few pages of generic descriptions recorded in 1976, information that might be interesting but would not bring me any closer to finding the person I wanted to know.

There was also a part of me that had absorbed all the warnings. Perhaps searching was selfish. Perhaps I would disrupt a life that was never meant to include me. Perhaps the questions were safer than the answers.

So the paperwork remained in the drawer until I eventually discarded it.

For years, I treated that decision as insignificant. It was simply a packet I had not completed and a fee I decided not to pay. Only later did I understand that the drawer had become a physical representation of a part of myself I was not prepared to explore. The answers were not being withheld from me. I had placed them out of sight.

Life continued, as it always does. I became engaged and married. My career grew. I pursued more education, took on greater responsibilities, and filled my days with work. Birthdays continued to arrive, and thoughts of my biological mother continued to visit briefly before retreating into the background.

Then I became a father.

Natalie was born when I was thirty-four. Watching her enter the world and witnessing the immediate bond between a mother and child changed something inside me. Growing up, I had understood adoption from the perspective of the child who had been placed with another family. Becoming a parent forced me to consider the story from the perspective of the person who had done the placing.

As I looked at my daughter, I tried to imagine holding a child and then allowing someone else to carry that child away. I could not do it. I could not make the idea fit inside my mind. Before becoming a father, I respected the decision my biological mother had made. After becoming a father, I began to understand the depth of it.

Within a few months of Natalie’s birth, my wife became pregnant again. Thirteen months after becoming parents for the first time, we welcomed Annabelle. She was born in the early morning hours of May 1, May Day. When I left the hospital with my second daughter, I knew I could no longer keep postponing the search.

I now had two little girls whose existence connected the future to a past none of us knew. Somewhere in the world, if she was still alive, was the woman who had given birth to me. She was not only my biological mother. She was also their biological grandmother. Natalie and Annabelle had made the unanswered questions larger than my own curiosity.

Our home was filled with the beautiful chaos of two babies born thirteen months apart. There were bottles, diapers, blankets, highchairs, toys, sleepless nights, and constant responsibilities. It would have been easy to postpone the search again. In fact, I did postpone it for several months. It was another reminder that even the decisions we know we need to make can remain trapped beneath the urgency of ordinary life.

In July 2011, shortly after my thirty-fifth birthday, I called the adoption agency again. Almost ten years had passed since my first call. The process was explained to me once more, and another packet was sent to my office. This time, when the paperwork arrived, I completed it and sent the check.

I was ready.

A few weeks later, on a Saturday, I was working alone at the office. As I prepared to leave and lock the building, I noticed a large manila envelope among the mail. I knew immediately what it was.

I carried it outside to my truck.

I could have taken it home. I could have waited until I was sitting somewhere more comfortable. I could have opened it with my family nearby. Instead, I sat in the driver’s seat in the summer heat, opened the envelope, and began reading.

For approximately twenty minutes, the rest of the world disappeared.

The first pages contained the kind of information I expected. There were descriptions of my biological parents, their ages, physical characteristics, interests, education, family structures, and medical histories. There were references to their siblings and to the grandparents I had never known. There were pieces of social history and observations recorded by a caseworker before I was born.

To another person, the pages might have looked clinical. They were forms, typed paragraphs, dates, and descriptions preserved in an institutional file. To me, they were the first map I had ever received of the place from which I came.

I read about physical traits and wondered which ones had passed into me. I read about interests and personalities and recognized possibilities that had never made sense in the context of my adopted family. I read about people whose names were not provided but whose lives had contributed to mine. They were strangers, yet they were not entirely separate from me.

That was when I first saw the thread.

In Chapter 2, I described the internal tug I had felt throughout my life, the sense that parts of me were trying to lead somewhere I could not identify. Sitting in my truck with those papers spread across my lap, the tug became visible. For the first time, I could trace parts of myself backward.

I had origins.

Most people grow up surrounded by evidence of where they came from. They see their eyes in a parent’s face, their hands in a grandparent’s hands, or their mannerisms in an aunt or uncle. Family stories explain why they laugh a certain way, why they are drawn to certain interests, or why they respond to the world as they do. Even when they reject their family history, they have something tangible to reject.

I had been loved and raised by a family with a strong history, but it was not a history written into my body. Their stories explained my childhood, my values, and much of the person I had learned to become. They did not explain the parts of me that seemed to arrive from somewhere else.

Until that afternoon, I had never possessed a biological before.

Of course, I knew I came from someone. Biology was not an abstract concept. But knowing something intellectually and feeling it are not the same. The papers gave substance to a history that had always felt invisible. I was reading evidence that the qualities I carried did not begin with me. There were people before me who had their own personalities, passions, struggles, talents, and ways of seeing the world.

I cried in the truck.

The tears were not about sadness, and they were not an expression of dissatisfaction with the family who raised me. I was not replacing one family with another. I was recognizing that my life had more than one beginning.

For the first time, I felt that I belonged to something I had never been able to see.

That feeling did not diminish the love I had for my parents. If anything, it allowed me to appreciate more clearly what adoption had given me and what it had left unanswered. I was the result of biology and upbringing, of inheritance and environment, of people who gave me life and people who helped me build one. The paperwork did not choose between those truths. It allowed both to exist.

I continued reading until I reached an addendum at the end of the original documents. The first pages had been created in 1976. These pages were more recent.

On my eighteenth birthday, Helen had contacted the adoption agency.

I stopped and read the entry again.

For years, I had imagined my birthday as the one day when we might be thinking about each other. Now, sitting in my truck, I learned that on one of the most significant birthdays of my life, she had done more than think about me. She had called.

Helen had asked about me, but the agency could not release information. She was allowed to update the family medical and social history, which she did. The caseworker also told her about a Nebraska law passed after my birth. Under that law, I might someday request my original birth certificate if Helen gave the state notarized permission to release it.

A few years later, Helen updated the records again.

The file that I assumed would probably contain nothing beyond its original creation had been visited more than once. While I had been living my life, Helen had been leaving evidence that she had not forgotten me.

The realization brought relief, but it also brought guilt. I thought about the paperwork I had placed in a drawer at twenty-five. Helen had already been waiting seven years at that point. By the time I finally opened the file, seventeen years had passed since she called on my eighteenth birthday.

I had spent much of my life wondering whether she wanted to know me. The answer had been sitting inside an adoption agency, waiting for me to pay the fee and ask.

Still, I do not believe the delay was entirely a mistake. At twenty-five, I might not have understood what I was reading. I had not become a father. I had not held Natalie and Annabelle. I had not developed the gratitude or maturity necessary to approach Helen without expectations. The ten-year delay caused regret, but it may have also prepared me to find her for the right reasons.

I was no longer searching for someone to complete me. I had a family, a career, a home, and a life. I wanted to find Helen because I was finally ready to tell her that her decision had led to something good.

The Monday after receiving the records, I contacted the Nebraska office responsible for birth certificates. When I was adopted, the state created a second birth certificate listing my adoptive parents and the name they gave me. My first birth certificate, containing Helen’s identity, had been sealed.

The person I spoke with could not tell me whether Helen had submitted the required notarized authorization. I knew only that she had contacted the agency, updated the records, and been informed about the process. That was enough for me to believe she had completed the release.

I downloaded the request form, wrote a check for fourteen dollars, and mailed it to the state.

Then I waited.

I have never been especially patient. My career in technology had trained me to expect information quickly. If an answer existed, I wanted to find it. This search required paperwork, mailed checks, government offices, and silence. After waiting thirty-five years, even a few weeks felt excessive.

On a Friday afternoon in October, shortly after lunch, another envelope arrived at my office. This one came from the State of Nebraska.

I opened it at my desk.

Inside was a single document.

My original birth certificate.

For the first time in my life, I knew her name.

Helen.

I also knew where she had been born and could estimate her age. It was not much information, but it was more than I had ever possessed. The invisible woman who had lived in my imagination for thirty-five years was no longer entirely invisible.

She had a name.

In 2011, a name was enough to begin.

I opened Google and searched for Helen. I expected a dead end. Women often marry and change their names. People move, records become outdated, and decades create distance. I assumed I was beginning a long process that might involve investigators, public records, letters, and more waiting.

Instead, within minutes, I found a doctoral student at the University of Idaho whose work involved environmental sciences. This Helen was also an environmental activist. Only weeks earlier, she had been arrested during a protest connected to her opposition to enormous industrial shipments traveling through Idaho on their way to the Canadian tar sands.

I stared at the screen and thought there was no possible way this woman could be my biological mother.

Over the years, I had imagined many versions of her. I probably pictured someone living a fairly conventional life, although I had no reason for that assumption. Perhaps she was a teacher, a nurse, a homemaker, or a business professional. Nothing in my imagination included environmental protests, civil disobedience, graduate research, or an arrest in Idaho.

Yet the details began to align. Her approximate age was correct. Places she had lived matched information in the adoption records. Her academic history and public biography led back through locations supported by what little I knew.

The more I searched, the more the impossible possibility became possible.

One of my clients owned a background investigation company and worked as a private investigator. I emailed him a copy of the birth certificate and asked for help.

Approximately thirty minutes later, he called me.

He began by preparing me for difficulty. Women frequently marry and change their names. People relocate. Records become fragmented. A name from 1976 might not lead anywhere.

As the phone was ringing, however, Helen’s name appeared in his system.

His tone changed as he began reading addresses and locations. The information lined up with the curriculum vitae I had found on the university website. Previous places she lived connected with the history contained in my records. The environmental activist and doctoral student in Idaho was not simply someone who shared the same name.

I was nearly certain it was her.

Finding Helen turned out to be easier than deciding how to contact her.

How do you introduce yourself to someone who has known about you for thirty-five years but has never heard your voice? How do you tell a person that you may be the child she last saw as an infant? How do you acknowledge the enormity of that possibility without frightening her?

A telephone call felt too intrusive. A mailed letter would require more patience than I possessed. An email offered distance and immediacy at the same time. She could read it privately, decide how she wanted to respond, and take whatever time she needed.

I chose a subject line that revealed almost nothing while quietly containing everything:

Interest in Nebraska.

The original message was cautious. I apologized in case I had contacted the wrong person. I explained that I was looking for a Helen who had lived in Omaha during the mid-1970s and who might have a particular interest in July 13, 1976. I provided my contact information and invited her to respond if I had reached the right person.

Then I pressed send.

It was Friday afternoon. I had sent one of the most consequential messages of my life just as the weekend began.

The message was intentionally short. I did not tell Helen the story of my search or try to explain everything I had carried for thirty-five years. I did not tell her about the adoption records, the birth certificate, my daughters, or the thoughts that had returned every July 13. I simply offered enough information for her to understand who I might be, while leaving her room to decide whether she wanted to open the door.

Then I waited.

Friday evening passed without a reply. Saturday came and went. Then Sunday. Each time I checked my email, I was aware of how much meaning I had placed inside a message that said so little. I had spent decades imagining the possibility of finding Helen, but I had never spent much time imagining the silence after I did.

The silence allowed every old warning to return. Perhaps I had found the wrong person. Perhaps I had found the right person and she did not want to be found. Perhaps my message had arrived in the middle of a life where there was no place for me. I reminded myself that Helen owed me nothing, including an immediate response, but patience is much easier to admire than to practice.

I had chosen email because it gave her distance. Over that weekend, I learned that distance belonged to both of us.

I did not hear from Helen until Monday morning.

When her response finally appeared, the first word was enough.

Welcome.

She told me that she had been waiting decades to hear from me. Her delay had not been rejection. She needed to make sure I was who I said I was. Before fully engaging with me, she had contacted the adoption agency and asked them to verify my identity. She invited me to contact the caseworker so the agency could formally release my information to her.

Her caution made sense. I knew who she was because I had received a birth certificate with her name on it, read decades of adoption records, searched public information, and asked a private investigator to confirm what I had found. Helen had none of that. From her perspective, a stranger had appeared in her inbox with a carefully worded claim about the most private part of her life.

She was deeply private and distrustful of government institutions. Only weeks earlier, her environmental activism had led to an arrest during a protest. During the booking process, she had been asked to identify scars on her body, including the Cesarean scar from my birth. Then, not long afterward, an unknown man contacted her and suggested that he was the child she had placed for adoption thirty-five years earlier.

I had worried all weekend that Helen might reject me. Helen had spent that same time determining whether I was real.

Her response was warm, but it was also careful. She wanted the people involved to be safe, comfortable, and protected, just as she had when she made the original decision to place me for adoption. Even before we knew one another, I could see something familiar in the way she approached the moment. Emotion mattered, but so did caution. Connection mattered, but so did responsibility.

Once I understood that she had welcomed the contact, I wrote again. This time, I did not hold back nearly as much.

I told her that I had struggled with how to introduce myself. A telephone call had seemed too startling. A letter would have required more patience than I possessed. Email had felt like the best way to give both of us space while still reaching across the distance between us.

More importantly, I told her the three things I had wanted her to know for most of my life.

I had thought about her.

I thanked her for her sacrifice.

And I told her that I was happy.

I explained that birthdays, marriage, the births of my daughters, and the other meaningful moments of my life had often brought thoughts of her with them. I had imagined that she might be thinking about me on July 13, just as I was thinking about her. When I learned that she had called the adoption agency on my eighteenth birthday, that lifelong feeling was no longer only something I had imagined.

I thanked her for what I described as an act of kindness and sacrifice. After becoming a father, I understood her decision differently. I could not fully know what it had required of her, but I could recognize that the life I had been given began with an enormous loss in hers. I wanted gratitude, not accusation, to be the first truth I placed between us.

Finally, I wanted her to know that I was doing well. I told her about my wife, my parents, my career, and my two baby daughters, Natalie and Annabelle. I wanted her to understand that the decision she had made at nineteen had not destroyed me. It had led to a life I valued, a family I loved, and happiness I hoped might bring her some peace.

I did not contact Helen because I needed her to explain herself. I was not searching for someone to blame, and I was not asking her to repair something broken inside me. If that longer message became the last contact we ever had, I wanted it to leave her with three simple truths.

I thought about you.

Thank you.

I am happy.

For thirty-five years, I had wondered whether Helen remembered me. Her first reply answered that question. She had called on my eighteenth birthday. She had updated the records. She had provided a path for me to obtain my original birth certificate. She had waited, trusting that if and when I was ready, I might find her.

The thread I first saw in the paperwork had reached the other end.

It began with children’s books on a shelf, birthday thoughts, covered names, unanswered questions, and a packet placed in a drawer. It continued through the births of my daughters, a Saturday afternoon in my truck, a manila envelope, a fourteen-dollar check, a Google search, a private investigator, a short email sent on a Friday afternoon, a long weekend of silence, and a single word on Monday morning.

Welcome.

I believed I had reached the end of the search. I had found the name, the woman, and the answer I had been seeking since childhood.

What I had actually found was a beginning.

Lists help me organize what needs to be done, remember what might otherwise be forgotten, and turn ideas into something tangible. I keep lists for work, travel, projects, writing, household responsibilities, and almost every other part of my life. If something matters, there is a good chance I have written it down somewhere.

For years, almost everything on those lists represented an obligation. There were customers to contact, projects to complete, appointments to schedule, bills to pay, problems to solve, and commitments to remember. Crossing something off brought a small sense of satisfaction, but the list was never truly completed. As soon as one responsibility disappeared, another took its place.

That is the nature of a to-do list.

It tells us what requires our attention.

At some point, I began to wonder whether I needed another kind of list. I did not need more reminders of what other people expected from me or what had to be completed before the end of the day. I needed a reminder of the things I wanted to remain present in my life.

I needed to know what brought me joy.

The question seemed simple, but when I first began thinking about it, I realized how rarely I had asked it. I knew how to identify what was urgent, practical, or responsible. I knew how to measure progress and complete projects. I was much less practiced at noticing which experiences left me feeling energized, connected, curious, or completely alive.

So I began paying attention.

I noticed that some activities could leave me physically exhausted and still somehow restore me. I could finish a long bicycle ride, a difficult hike, or an early-morning swim with tired muscles but a clearer mind. Teaching a cycling class required energy, but I usually left with more energy than I had brought into the room. Exploring a museum could occupy hours without feeling like time had passed at all.

Other experiences created a quieter kind of joy. Reading something that changed how I understood the world. Taking a photograph that captured a detail most people might have walked past. Organizing a space until it felt peaceful. Solving a difficult problem for someone. Helping another person move forward in a part of life where that person had been stuck.

I started writing these things down.

What Belongs on the List

The Joy List did not emerge fully formed. It began with whatever came to mind, then expanded as I learned to recognize joy in more places.

Travel was there immediately, along with hiking, cycling, backpacking, swimming, photography, museums, and exploring unfamiliar cities. Writing eventually appeared, along with poetry, creative projects, improv comedy, research, reading, listening to podcasts, mentoring, volunteering, learning about history, cooking, and investing.

Teaching belonged on the list. So did helping someone with a fitness journey, sharing what I had learned, and solving technical problems that seemed impossible when they first arrived. Spending time in nature belonged there, especially among cacti, dense forests, mushrooms, alpine lakes, mountain peaks, or on a trail where the view changed with every turn.

Meaningful conversations belonged on the list. So did friendships, time with Paula, and experiences with my daughters.

Not everything on the list was exciting. Not everything required travel, exceptional talent, or a large investment of money. Some entries were ordinary activities that became meaningful because of the attention I brought to them.

That was an important discovery.

Joy did not require spectacle.

It could be found in movement, service, conversation, learning, creativity, challenge, beauty, or simply becoming absorbed in something that mattered to me. Sometimes joy arrived in the middle of an adventure. Other times it appeared during an ordinary day when I stopped moving long enough to notice it.

The list gave those moments names.

Once they had names, they became easier to recognize.

Living From the List

The Joy List is not something I created once and then stored away. I return to it. I revise it as I learn more about myself. I add new activities, reconsider old ones, and occasionally recognize that something which once brought me joy no longer does.

More importantly, I try to live from it.

At the beginning of a day, I do not expect every hour to be joyful. Life still contains responsibilities, interruptions, maintenance, and work that simply needs to be done. I am not trying to avoid those realities. I am trying to prevent them from becoming the only realities.

I want at least part of each day to connect to something on the list.

That might mean teaching a class, taking a photograph, reading, writing, swimming, riding a bike, spending time with someone I care about, or planning an adventure. It might mean researching an unfamiliar topic or helping another person solve a problem. It might be something as simple as choosing a route that allows me to see a part of the city I have never noticed before.

The duration matters less than the intention.

Some days offer hours. Other days offer minutes. The purpose is not to complete the entire list or manufacture constant happiness. The purpose is to avoid reaching the end of a day, a month, or a year and realizing I gave all my attention to things that demanded it and none to the things that gave something back.

A to-do list helps me manage my life.

The Joy List helps me experience it.

The Shape of Persistence

One holiday season, Natalie, Annabelle, and I traveled to southern Utah. Instead of filling the holiday with material gifts, I wanted to give the girls another experience, something we could live together and perhaps remember long after the objects from that year had disappeared.

We stayed in a tiny house and used it as our base camp while exploring the landscapes around us. It gave us a place to rest, warm up, talk about the day, and prepare for the next adventure. The tiny house was part of the experience, but it was never the destination.

Each morning, we climbed into the vehicle and headed toward another place to explore. Winter gave southern Utah a different appearance from the images most people see. Snow and ice appeared among the red and orange rock formations, transforming the desert into something quieter, colder, and less predictable.

At Zion National Park, we decided to hike to Scout Lookout.

The trail climbs more than a thousand feet above the canyon floor through a demanding series of switchbacks. It is a hike many adults struggle to complete, and the girls were young. They were capable, but capability does not prevent a person from complaining when a mountain refuses to become any shorter.

They complained a lot.

They wanted to know how much farther we had to go, whether we were almost there, when we could stop again, and why we had decided to do this in the first place. Their questions were reasonable. The trail was steep, their legs were tired, and every switchback seemed to reveal another stretch of climbing.

I could have turned us around. There would have been no shame in doing so. We had already spent time outdoors, experienced part of the trail, and seen beautiful views.

But I also knew the girls were capable of more than they believed in that moment.

I did not want to drag them up the mountain simply to reach an overlook. I wanted them to experience the process of moving through something difficult without immediately surrendering to the discomfort. That meant listening when they needed to complain, stopping when they needed to rest, and encouraging them when the next section of trail seemed impossible.

Then we would move again.

We continued slowly, putting one foot in front of the other and allowing the mountain to teach the lesson at its own pace. There was no dramatic burst of strength that carried us to the top. We made it the way most difficult journeys are completed: through patience, persistence, frequent pauses, and the decision to take one more step.

Eventually, the switchbacks ended. The trail leveled, and the canyon opened beneath us. The landscape stretched outward in every direction, immense enough to make the effort feel both significant and small.

The girls were still tired when we arrived. Reaching the overlook did not erase the difficulty of the climb. What changed was their understanding of it. They could look back at where they had started and recognize what they had done.

They had reached Scout Lookout.

More importantly, they had discovered that the voice saying, “I cannot do this,” did not always know the truth.

The Joy Beyond Comfort

I have thought about that hike many times because it helped me understand an important truth about joy.

Joy is not the same as comfort.

For much of my life, I had been surrounded by the opposite message. Comfort was presented as the reward for doing everything correctly. Work hard enough, earn enough, accumulate enough, and eventually life would become easier. The American Dream seemed to promise a protected existence with a large house, reliable cars, financial security, convenient surroundings, and as few disruptions as possible.

Comfort was presented as the destination.

I began to see it differently.

Comfort can become a poison.

It does not usually arrive looking dangerous. It arrives disguised as success. It tells us we have earned the right to stop reaching, questioning, risking, and changing. It encourages us to arrange our lives so carefully that nothing unexpected can enter. Over time, comfort can narrow the world around us until we mistake familiarity for happiness and predictability for fulfillment.

I do not want a life built entirely around avoiding difficulty.

I do not want comfort to decide where I go, what I attempt, which questions I ask, or who I am willing to become. I do not want to spend my life protecting myself from the very experiences that might help me feel most alive.

When I looked closely at my Joy List, I noticed something surprising. Many of its entries were difficult, uncomfortable, or even intimidating. Long-distance swimming can be exhausting. Cycling can be painful. Backpacking is rarely comfortable. Travel involves delays, changing plans, unfamiliar surroundings, and occasionally discovering that the lodging looks nothing like the photographs.

Writing can be uncomfortable because honest stories require me to return to parts of my life I might prefer to leave alone. Relationships require effort. Learning requires admitting that I do not already know the answer. Helping others can mean becoming involved in problems with no simple solution.

None of these things promised comfort.

Yet they consistently produced some of my deepest experiences of joy.

Eventually, I understood why.

The joy was not found in the discomfort itself. The joy was waiting on the other side of it.

It came from accomplishment. It came from growth. It came from facing uncertainty and discovering that I could move through it. It came from pushing beyond the limits I had accepted and finding out that some of those limits had never been real.

At Scout Lookout, the girls did not experience joy during every step of the climb. They were tired. Their legs hurt. They questioned whether they wanted to continue. The joy came when they turned around and saw how far they had climbed.

Accomplishment has a way of changing our relationship with discomfort.

The struggle becomes the story.

The effort becomes the pride.

The challenge becomes the memory.

The person who emerges on the other side is not exactly the same person who began.

That lesson did not end at Scout Lookout.

Near St. George, we found ourselves standing at the entrance of a dark lava tube cave.

Into the Darkness

From the outside, the cave looked unremarkable. It was a dark opening in the ground surrounded by rock and sand. The challenge became obvious as soon as we approached the entrance.

Getting inside was not easy. We climbed down through the opening, switched on our headlamps, and stared into the darkness ahead.

The girls were nervous immediately.

The cave was cold, narrow in places, and completely dark beyond the reach of our lights. Each headlamp illuminated only a small section of the cave, leaving everything beyond it hidden. Every shadow seemed larger than it was. Every sound seemed louder. Before long, Natalie and Annabelle became convinced they could hear bats somewhere deeper inside.

They wanted to turn around.

I understood why.

Most fears sound reasonable when we are standing in the middle of them.

We took our time. We moved slowly, stopped frequently, listened, and talked about whether we should continue. Sometimes we would make it a little farther, hear a sound echo through the cave, and the girls would run back in the direction of the entrance.

More than once, they tripped and skinned their hands and knees. That made everything worse. Now the cave was not only dark and frightening. It had also hurt them.

After the tears and frustration settled, we would gather ourselves and begin moving forward again.

A little farther.

Then a little farther still.

That became the pattern of the experience.

Fear.

Pause.

Courage.

Repeat.

I did not need them to stop being afraid. Courage does not require the absence of fear. I only wanted them to understand that fear did not have to make every decision for them.

We continued deeper into the cave.

The headlamps did not show us the entire path. They showed us only enough to take the next few steps. In some ways, that was another lesson. We often believe we need to see the entire path before we are willing to begin, but life rarely offers that kind of certainty. Sometimes we receive only enough light for the next decision.

Eventually, we made our way all the way through the cave.

When we emerged into the sunlight, the girls were relieved, exhausted, scraped, and proud. I do not know if either of them has any desire to crawl through another lava tube cave. They may never do it again.

But that was never the point.

The lesson was not about caves.

The lesson was about discovering that fear does not always get to make the final decision.

As a parent, I have never wanted to remove every obstacle from my daughters’ path. I want them to know they can overcome obstacles themselves. There is a difference.

If I rescue them from every challenge, they never learn what they are capable of. If I prevent every fall, they never learn how to get back up. If I create a childhood without fear, disappointment, uncertainty, or discomfort, I may protect them for a while, but I also risk sending them into adulthood without the evidence that they can survive those things.

My role is not to eliminate every difficult experience.

My role is to stand beside them while they work through it.

In that cave, the girls knew I had their backs. I would not abandon them in the darkness, but I also would not allow fear to make the decision too quickly. We could stop. We could breathe. We could talk about what frightened them. We could move carefully.

Then we could take another step.

I wanted them to begin collecting evidence about themselves.

Evidence that they could keep climbing when their legs were tired.

Evidence that they could move forward while they were afraid.

Evidence that discomfort did not mean they were incapable.

Evidence that they had done hard things before and could do hard things again.

One day, the obstacles in front of them will be far greater than a mountain trail or a dark cave. I will not always be able to walk beside them with a headlamp. When those moments arrive, I hope these experiences remain somewhere inside them.

I hope they remember what they learned about themselves.

The cave offered something that could never have been purchased, packaged, or reproduced at a tourist attraction. Had we spent the afternoon somewhere safer, easier, and more predictable, the girls might have had a pleasant day. It may have looked much like the day thousands of other families experienced during the holiday break.

Instead, they crawled through a lava tube in the Utah desert.

They faced their fears.

They overcame uncertainty.

They collected scrapes, bruises, confidence, and a story.

Years later, they may remember very little about where we stayed, what we ate, or how far we drove. But I suspect they will remember that cave.

I know I do.

That experience added definition to their childhood. It became part of the story they could tell about where they had been, what they had faced, and what they had discovered about themselves.

That is one of the gifts I have always wanted to give my daughters.

Not a life without discomfort.

A life expanded by their willingness to walk through it.

The Other Side

People generally shy away from being uncomfortable. We seek what is familiar, predictable, convenient, and safe. We often organize our lives around minimizing struggle. We remove obstacles, reduce uncertainty, and convince ourselves that the absence of difficulty is the same as the presence of joy.

It is not.

Comfort asks very little from us. If we remain there long enough, it may also reveal very little about us.

Discomfort introduces us to parts of ourselves that comfort never needs to summon. Persistence. Courage. Resourcefulness. Patience. Humility. Confidence. The willingness to try again after falling.

These qualities are not built by imagining what we might do. They are built by doing the thing that frightens or challenges us and discovering that we can survive the experience.

Looking back, I realized the Joy List was not simply a list of things that made me happy. It was not a collection of easy pleasures or pleasant distractions.

It was a list of things that made me feel alive.

Some restored me. Some connected me with people I loved. Some allowed me to create, explore, serve, or learn. Others frightened me, exhausted me, tested me, or forced me to grow.

Often, the same experience did several of those things at once.

The joy was not always present at the beginning. Sometimes it appeared only after the challenge had been accepted, the fear had been faced, or the obstacle had been overcome.

It was the joy on the other side.

Growth rarely happens inside our comfort zone.

Confidence is built when we discover we can do something that initially seemed impossible.

Memories are often created when a story could have gone either way.

Character is formed when we choose to keep moving despite uncertainty.

That is why so many things on my Joy List involve challenge. Not because I enjoy suffering, but because I have learned that being fully alive often requires stepping into situations that make me uncomfortable.

The mountain was steep.

The cave was dark.

The girls were tired and afraid.

And that is exactly why those experiences mattered.

A List, Not a Cage

There is a risk in turning anything important into a list. Lists can become another form of pressure. They can create the feeling that progress must be measured, experiences must be collected, and every day must produce evidence that it was used properly.

That is not what I want.

The Joy List is not another set of boxes I need to check. I do not judge myself for failing to hike, write, swim, travel, read, photograph, teach, and volunteer all on the same day. I do not treat joy as a competition or expect every experience to become a profound memory.

The list is a reminder, not a demand.

It reminds me that I already know many of the things that make my life meaningful. I do not always need to search for a new answer. Sometimes I need to return to an answer I have already found.

When life starts becoming too crowded, I can look at the list and ask whether the things that restore, challenge, and inspire me have quietly disappeared. When I am making a decision about my time, I can consider whether I am creating room for curiosity and connection or filling every available space with another obligation.

I can also ask a more difficult question:

Am I choosing something because it brings me joy, or am I choosing it because it keeps me comfortable?

The answer is not always obvious.

Rest can bring joy. Peace can bring joy. A quiet afternoon can be exactly what I need. The goal is not to reject every form of comfort or turn life into an endless test of endurance. Rest prepares us for what comes next.

The danger begins when comfort becomes the goal rather than a place we occasionally visit.

Comfort should restore us.

It should not imprison us.

The Joy List does not tell me exactly what to do.

It reminds me what deserves my attention.

What Joy Taught Me About Myself

Over time, the list became more revealing than I expected. I thought I was documenting activities, but I was also documenting patterns.

Curiosity appeared everywhere. So did learning, adventure, creativity, service, movement, connection, challenge, and growth. The individual entries were varied, but the person behind them was consistent.

That realization changed the way I understood identity.

For years, I had tried to understand myself by examining where I came from, what I had accomplished, which responsibilities I carried, and which roles I performed. The Joy List gave me another lens. It showed me who I was when I was not trying to satisfy an expectation or prove my value.

I was someone who wanted to learn.

I wanted to explore.

I wanted to create.

I wanted to help.

I wanted to challenge myself and encourage other people to discover what they could do.

I wanted to experience the world rather than simply move through it.

I did not want the American Dream if it meant constructing a life so comfortable that nothing could surprise, challenge, or transform me. I did not want to reach the end of my life surrounded by evidence of security but unable to remember the last time I had been truly alive.

I wanted stories.

I wanted scraped knees, tired muscles, changed plans, unexpected discoveries, difficult questions, and experiences that asked something from me.

I wanted the joy that waited on the other side.

The list did not create those qualities.

It revealed them.

That distinction would eventually become important.

Long after I had begun recognizing these patterns in myself, I would encounter another person whose life was filled with learning, exploration, unconventional choices, and an unwillingness to let other people define the only acceptable path.

At first, I did not understand why that connection affected me so deeply.

Then I began to recognize something familiar.

Some of the qualities I had spent years uncovering in myself appeared to have been living somewhere else all along.

Her name was Helen.

And although I had found her years earlier, I was only beginning to understand how watching her live would influence the way I chose to live my own life.

“Why do you have trips planned four years in advance?”

I laughed too.

At the time, they were only seeing a small piece of it.

The spreadsheet already stretched years into the future. It contained destinations, museums, cycling routes, national parks, hiking trails, road trips, historical sites, strange attractions, and adventures I hoped to experience one day. What they could not see was the overflow list. When the spreadsheet became too full, I created a second section for ideas that would not fit.

Today, that spreadsheet contains more than 2,000 lines.

It grows almost constantly.

When I meet someone during my travels and they tell me about their favorite place, it goes into the spreadsheet. When I hear about a hidden museum, a little-known hiking trail, a historic building, an obscure roadside attraction, or an unforgettable restaurant, it goes into the spreadsheet. When I stumble across something online that sparks my curiosity, it goes into the spreadsheet. Occasionally, I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea and add it to the spreadsheet before I forget.

The list keeps growing.

Then, eventually, I schedule it.

To some people, that sounds excessive.

To me, it feels necessary.

Because I learned something many years ago.

“Someday” is not a date.

If I truly want something to become part of my life, I have to create space for it.

The spreadsheet is how I create that space.

The interesting thing is that the spreadsheet did not begin because I loved planning travel.

It began because I wanted a different life.

About nine years ago, I started taking solo trips.

At the time, I did not fully understand why I felt drawn to them. Looking back now, I realize those adventures arrived at exactly the right moment in my life.

For decades, I had been carrying responsibilities.

The business needed things.

Customers needed things.

Employees needed things.

Family needed things.

There was always a problem waiting to be solved, a customer waiting for an answer, or a responsibility waiting to be carried.

Then I started traveling alone.

Something unexpected happened.

The noise disappeared.

There was nobody asking me to solve anything.

Nobody calling with an emergency.

Nobody expecting me to carry the weight of their problems.

For the first time in a long time, I could hear my own thoughts.

I spent long hours hiking trails, driving unfamiliar roads, wandering museums, exploring cities, and sitting quietly in places where nobody knew my name. Sometimes I had a destination. Sometimes I was just following curiosity.

The farther I traveled, the more I realized I was not escaping my life.

I was discovering it.

Many of the most important questions I have ever asked emerged during those trips. They appeared on mountain trails, beside rivers, during bicycle rides, and while driving across vast stretches of highway with nothing but landscape and silence.

Those adventures helped me realize there was a difference between being alive and truly living.

For years, I had been successful at managing life.

I had not spent nearly enough time experiencing it.

Around the same period, I started making different decisions as a father.

When my daughters Natalie and Annabelle were younger, holidays created an interesting dilemma. Like most parents, I wanted to give them things that mattered. The more I thought about it, however, the more I found myself questioning the traditional approach.

Another toy.

Another gadget.

Another item destined to be forgotten.

None of those things felt particularly meaningful.

So I started giving my daughters experiences.

Some holidays included presents.

Many included adventures.

Instead of another object, we might take a trip.

Instead of another purchase, we might explore a place we had never seen before.

Instead of accumulating things, we accumulated stories.

At the time, I did not fully appreciate what was happening.

Looking back now, it seems obvious.

The toys disappeared.

The stories remained.

One winter during the holiday season, the girls and I traveled to Colorado.

By many people’s standards, the trip made very little sense.

We stayed in a yurt high in the mountains.

There was no electricity.

No running water.

No television.

Our light came from lanterns, candles, flashlights, and moonlight reflecting off the snow.

The bathroom was down a snowy trail away from the yurt. During daylight, the walk felt adventurous. At night, bundled against the cold and navigating through the darkness with flashlights, it felt slightly absurd.

The girls alternated between excitement and complaining.

As children should.

Yet despite the discomfort, that trip became one of the most memorable adventures we ever shared.

At night we played card games under candlelight. I honestly cannot remember which game we were playing. What I remember is the laughter.

The kind of laughter that arrives unexpectedly and becomes impossible to stop.

One person says something silly.

Someone else adds to it.

Before long, nobody can breathe.

Tears are rolling down faces.

The game itself becomes irrelevant.

The moment becomes the memory.

Years later, I can still picture us sitting in that yurt laughing so hard that none of us could speak.

Durin the week, we were driving through the mountains when the GPS repeatedly instructed us to turn onto “Dam Road.”

For reasons known only to children, this was endlessly hilarious.

Every time the GPS repeated the phrase, another round of laughter began.

By the end of the drive, I am not sure any of us could hear the words “Dam Road” without cracking up.

Again, it was not an important moment.

It was simply life.

But those moments became part of our family story.

That is the funny thing about memories.

The moments that stay with us are rarely the ones we expect.

The highlight of the trip arrived later in the week.

One morning we bundled ourselves into layers of winter clothing, attached microspikes to our boots, and started hiking toward a glacier lake.

The trail was snow-covered.

The wind was relentless.

The girls were not entirely convinced this had been a good idea.

Truthfully, there were moments when I was not either.

There were complaints.

A few tears.

Negotiations.

Questions about whether we could turn around.

But we kept moving.

Step by step.

The farther we climbed, the more dramatic the landscape became. Towering mountains surrounded us. Snow stretched in every direction. The wind felt determined to push us backward.

Eventually we reached the lake.

Frozen solid.

A sheet of ice surrounded by snow-covered peaks.

Standing there felt like stepping into another world.

Carefully, we walked across the frozen lake.

The wind howled.

The girls grumbled.

The adventure continued.

Years later, none of us talk about the cold.

None of us talk about the discomfort.

We talk about the experience.

We talk about standing in the middle of a frozen mountain lake.

We talk about the beauty.

We talk about the challenge.

We talk about surviving it together.

Every time we do, we smile.

That trip taught me something important.

The best gifts I ever gave my daughters were rarely wrapped.

They were experiences.

As the years passed, my adventures changed again.

Then Paula entered the story.

Many of my early trips were solitary. They were opportunities for reflection, curiosity, and self-discovery. When Paula entered my life, the adventures expanded in ways I never anticipated.

Suddenly there was another person willing to say yes to unusual plans.

Another person willing to explore.

Another person who viewed adventure as an opportunity rather than an inconvenience.

Before long, her boys joined us.

Then her parents joined us.

Trips that once consisted of a single traveler turned into family experiences.

The circle kept growing.

The stories kept growing.

The joy kept growing.

That progression taught me another lesson.

Adventure is wonderful alone.

It becomes even more meaningful when shared.

Somewhere along the way, I started referring to all of this as Joyopoly.

At first it was a tagline.

Then it became a philosophy.

Growing up, Monopoly taught me one set of rules.

Acquire.

Accumulate.

Own.

Grow.

Win.

American culture often teaches similar lessons. We are encouraged to pursue bigger houses, bigger titles, larger bank accounts, greater status, and endless accumulation. Success is frequently measured by what we own.

I understand that mindset.

I lived it.

I worked hard.

Built careers.

Earned degrees.

Accumulated achievements.

The problem was not that success is bad.

The problem was that I eventually realized I was measuring the wrong things.

The experiences that brought me the greatest joy had almost nothing to do with accumulation.

They involved connection.

Learning.

Curiosity.

Adventure.

Nature.

Friendship.

Family.

Stories.

So I changed the scorecard.

Monopoly asks:

“What do you own?”

Joyopoly asks:

“What have you experienced?”

Monopoly rewards accumulation.

Joyopoly rewards participation.

Monopoly rewards ownership.

Joyopoly rewards connection.

Monopoly encourages people to collect things.

Joyopoly encourages people to collect stories.

Most importantly, Monopoly eventually produces one winner.

Joyopoly gets better when shared.

Today my spreadsheet continues growing.

More than 2,000 lines.

More adventures than I will ever complete.

More possibilities than one lifetime will likely contain.

And that is perfectly fine.

The spreadsheet is not really about travel.

It is about intention.

Every line represents curiosity.

Every line is a reminder that there is still more to see, learn, experience, and discover.

For years, I believed success meant accumulating enough.

Enough money.

Enough accomplishment.

Enough recognition.

Enough security.

Today I ask different questions.

Did I learn something?

Did I experience wonder?

Did I spend meaningful time with people I love?

Did I contribute something positive?

Did I create a memory worth keeping?

Did I actually live today?

If the answer is yes, then it was a successful day.

When people ask why I changed my name to Jeffery Joyous Journey, they often assume the answer begins in a courtroom.

It does not.

The answer begins here.

With a spreadsheet.

A joy list.

A bicycle ride.

A mountain trail.

A road trip.

A frozen lake.

A yurt lit by candlelight.

Three people laughing until they cried.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped measuring life by what I accumulated and started measuring it by what I experienced.

I stopped playing Monopoly.

I started playing Joyopoly.

And for the first time in my life, I felt like I was finally playing the right game. 🌈📖

There is nothing unusual about that.

Most of us inherit our names long before we understand their meaning. We inherit family traditions, expectations, values, stories, and identities in much the same way. They are handed to us before we are old enough to question them.

For decades, I rarely thought about it.

I was Jeff Zdan.

That was simply who I was.

At least, that was who I believed I was.

The name carried a history. It connected me to the family who raised me, the business I helped build, the schools I attended, the community where I volunteered, and the life I spent decades constructing. There were many things I appreciated about that life. There were lessons I valued, experiences that shaped me, and relationships that mattered deeply.

But over time, something began to shift.

Not all at once.

Slowly.

Quietly.

Like a river changing course one inch at a time.

The questions began arriving years before the name change ever occurred.

Some appeared during the search for my biological family.

Some appeared during my divorce.

Others emerged as I examined my relationship with work, success, duty, and family.

And some arrived during long walks, long bike rides, and long drives when I finally allowed myself enough silence to hear my own thoughts.

The questions were remarkably simple.

Am I living the life I actually want?

Or am I living the life I inherited?

The older I became, the harder those questions were to ignore.

For much of my adult life, I measured myself by how useful I was.

Useful employees get promoted.

Useful business partners become indispensable.

Useful fathers show up.

Useful volunteers help.

Useful people solve problems.

I became very good at being useful.

If someone needed assistance, I stepped forward.

If there was a challenge, I tried to solve it.

If there was weight to carry, I often volunteered to carry it.

People compliment reliability.

They respect responsibility.

They reward hard work.

And there is absolutely nothing wrong with those qualities.

The difficulty comes when those qualities begin replacing identity.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking what brought me alive.

I simply asked what needed to be done.

The distinction seems small.

It is not.

One question builds a life.

The other maintains one.

When I look back now, I realize I was successful by many traditional measures.

I had built a career.

I earned degrees.

I helped build a thriving company.

I was involved in my community.

I served on a school board.

I taught cycling classes.

I raised two incredible daughters.

I checked many of the boxes society encourages us to pursue.

And yet there was a persistent feeling that something remained unfinished.

Not missing.

Unfinished.

The feeling reminded me of Chapter 2 when I described sensing a disconnect as an adopted child.

Only now the disconnect was different.

It was no longer about where I came from.

It was about where I was going.

I had spent years building a life.

The question had become whether the life I built still belonged to me.

One of the most difficult things a person can do is admit that a life which appears successful from the outside no longer feels right on the inside.

It feels selfish.

Ungrateful.

Confusing.

Especially when nothing is obviously wrong.

Most major transitions are not caused by dramatic disasters.

Sometimes they happen because a quiet voice keeps asking the same question.

“Is this it?”

That question followed me for years.

Not because I hated my life.

I did not.

Not because I was unhappy every day.

I was not.

The problem was that I increasingly felt like I was living according to expectations I had never consciously chosen.

Some came from family.

Some came from culture.

Some came from habit.

Some came from fear.

Together, they formed a version of success that looked impressive but felt incomplete.

When I eventually left the family business, a great deal happened in a short period of time.

There was relief.

There was uncertainty.

There was excitement.

There was grief.

There was conflict.

There were legal letters.

A lawsuit.

Questions.

Doubts.

Second guessing.

Through all of it, I kept returning to a realization that was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

I did not want to spend the rest of my life reacting.

I wanted to begin creating.

I wanted to stop defining myself by what I was responsible for and start defining myself by what mattered to me.

That may sound like a subtle distinction.

For me, it changed everything.

The name Joyous Journey did not appear overnight.

People occasionally ask whether my daughters suggested it.

They did not.

Others ask whether it came from finding my biological family.

That is not quite right either.

The name emerged from years of reflection.

Years of questioning.

Years of asking who I wanted to become.

The word Joyous represented a choice.

Not happiness.

Joy.

There is a difference.

Happiness often depends on circumstances.

Joy can exist alongside difficulty.

Joy can coexist with grief.

Joy can survive uncertainty.

Joy can emerge from curiosity, service, learning, relationships, movement, creativity, adventure, and growth.

I wanted more of that.

Not because life had become easy.

Because life was too short not to pursue it intentionally.

The word Journey represented something else.

For years I treated life as a series of destinations.

Graduate.

Get the job.

Grow the business.

Earn the income.

Reach the goal.

Then move on to the next goal.

The cycle never ended.

Every destination revealed another destination beyond it.

Journey reminded me that life is not simply a collection of accomplishments.

It is an experience.

The value is not found only at the finish line.

The value exists along the path.

In the people you meet.

The lessons you learn.

The mistakes you survive.

The mountains you climb.

The conversations you remember.

The stories you collect.

I wanted a name that reflected that truth.

The day the judge approved my name change, something interesting happened.

Nothing.

The sky did not open.

Music did not play.

My life did not magically transform.

The next morning I still had responsibilities.

I still had challenges.

I still had questions.

But something inside me felt different.

The decision represented ownership.

For the first time in my life, my name reflected a conscious choice rather than an inherited circumstance.

I was no longer waiting for someone else to define who I should become.

I was defining it myself.

People often assume the name change was the transformation.

It was not.

The transformation had already been happening for years.

The name simply made it visible.

In many ways, it was a declaration.

A statement.

A promise.

A reminder.

Not about who I had been.

About who I intended to become.

And that intention eventually led me to another idea.

An idea that would fundamentally change how I approached time, adventure, purpose, and success.

An idea I would eventually call Joyopoly.

And that story comes next. 🌈📖

If someone had told me in 1997 that I would one day stand inside a new workplace while a sheriff served me with a lawsuit connected to the company my parents owned, I would not have believed them. At that point in my life, the possibility would have seemed absurd. My parents were starting a business, I was joining them, and together we were going to build something meaningful.

That was the future I imagined.

For nearly twenty-four years, I devoted a significant part of my life to making that future real. The business became more than where I worked. It became part of my identity, my daily routine, and my understanding of family. I believed we were building something together, and because we were family, I assumed we were bound by more than payroll, ownership, or contracts.

I believed we were bound by loyalty.

That belief would eventually be tested in ways I never anticipated.

The moment most people would identify as the beginning came much later, when a sheriff entered my new workplace and asked for me by name. I had not been there very long, but I had been there long enough to begin feeling hopeful. I knew the organization well because it had been a client since 1998. I respected its nonprofit mission and the people who worked there. After decades inside the family business, I was beginning to imagine what my life might look like somewhere else.

Then the sheriff handed me a stack of legal documents.

The company my parents owned was suing me.

Technically, the lawsuit came from the business. There were corporate names, formal allegations, attorneys, procedural requirements, and legal distinctions. But those technicalities did not change what the moment meant to me. My mother owned the company. My father ran its daily operations. I had spent almost a quarter century helping them build it.

Standing there with those papers in my hands, it felt as though my parents were suing me.

Still, the lawsuit was not where this story began.

It was where I finally understood what the story had become.

Building the Business

In 1997, I joined my parents in their new business venture. I was young, ambitious, technically capable, and eager to help create something successful. There were customers to find, systems to build, technologies to learn, and problems to solve. Like most small businesses, the company required constant attention, especially during its early years.

I enjoyed much of that work. I liked solving difficult problems, helping clients, and figuring out how technology could make organizations more effective. As our customer base grew, I began forming relationships that would last for years. Clients learned they could call me when something went wrong, and they trusted that I would remain involved until the problem was resolved.

Over time, my responsibilities expanded beyond the technical work. I helped grow the customer base, maintained client relationships, led the managed services and technical side of the organization, supported employees, and became involved in nearly every challenge that affected the company’s success. I was not merely completing assignments. I was carrying responsibility for customers, employees, projects, revenue, and the reputation of the business.

As the company grew, the boundaries between my work and the rest of my life became increasingly difficult to see. Customer problems came home with me. Technical emergencies interrupted evenings, weekends, and vacations. Even during quieter moments, my mind continued working through unfinished projects and unresolved issues.

I did not initially view any of this as unhealthy. I saw it as dedication. I was helping build a successful company with my family, and I believed the sacrifices were part of that shared undertaking. When the business needed me, I responded. When clients needed me, I found a way to help. When employees needed direction, I stepped in.

There is pride in being dependable. There is satisfaction in knowing people trust you and believe you can solve their problems. But there is also a danger in becoming the person everyone relies upon. The more dependable you become, the more responsibility people place on you. Eventually, carrying that responsibility can begin to feel like the source of your value.

I became very good at carrying things.

What I did not become good at was putting them down.

For years, I rarely stopped to ask whether I was happy or whether the life I was building was sustainable. The company was successful. People depended on me. My family benefited from the work. Those facts seemed sufficient, even when the stress began following me into every part of my life.

I thought this was what commitment looked like.

More importantly, I thought this was what family looked like.

The First Crack

The first crack in that belief did not begin with the business. It began during my divorce and the custody proceedings involving my daughters.

I do not want to retell the details of my marriage or turn this chapter into a disagreement about two parents. That is not the story I am trying to tell. The part that changed me was the decision my parents made to submit affidavits supporting the opposing side during the custody proceedings.

I remember reading the documents and focusing less on the legal language than on the names of the people who had signed them.

My parents.

I read the words more than once, trying to understand what they meant. The difficulty was not that my parents considered me a bad father. I did not believe that was their position. Their own words elsewhere described me as hardworking, deeply involved in my community, committed to my daughters, and a significant contributor to the family business. They had written that I participated in my daughters’ school programs and activities and that they believed I would strive to act in my children’s best interests.

In my own court affidavit, I described my involvement in my daughters’ education, healthcare, routines, activities, and daily lives. I explained my belief that children benefit from meaningful and balanced time with both parents.

What separated my father and me was not love for my daughters. It was a difference in how we understood parenting and family structure. My father held more traditional beliefs. He believed mothers should have the primary role in raising children and that the girls should sleep in the same home and bed every night. I believed my daughters deserved an active and fully involved father, not someone who appeared occasionally around the edges of their lives.

I wanted to share ordinary life with them, not just special occasions. I wanted mornings, dinners, school days, difficult conversations, long drives, unexpected laughter, and all the small moments that form a relationship. I wanted them to experience two engaged homes and to know that the end of a marriage did not require the loss of a parent.

People can disagree about parenting. Families often carry different beliefs across generations. What unsettled me was not simply that my parents saw the situation differently. It was the realization that during one of the most difficult periods of my life, the people for whom I had worked so hard did not appear to be standing beside me.

That realization did not arrive as anger. It arrived as confusion.

For most of my adult life, I had accepted the stress of the family business because I believed our connection transcended the organization. I believed that when life became difficult, family would remain family. Suddenly, I found myself questioning whether the loyalty I had offered for so many years was actually mutual.

I began asking myself questions I had never permitted myself to consider.

What was I doing working so much of my life away for my parents if they did not have my back when I needed them?

What exactly had I been sacrificing for?

If my value came from the customers I retained, the revenue I helped produce, and the technical responsibilities I carried, what would happen if I stopped being useful?

Was I part of a family that owned a business, or was I part of a business that happened to be owned by my family?

Those questions followed me long after the custody proceedings ended.

A Different Life With My Daughters

I eventually received joint custody of my daughters, and I remain deeply grateful for that outcome. It allowed me to build a full life with Natalie and Annabelle, one shaped by presence, curiosity, exploration, and shared experience.

We traveled together. We hiked, explored museums, visited unfamiliar cities, discovered unusual roadside attractions, and took road trips to places that looked interesting on a map. We experienced mountains, trails, neighborhoods, restaurants, parks, and parts of the country that expanded how all three of us saw the world.

Some of those experiences were carefully planned. Others were wonderfully unplanned. Together, they became part of the relationship I had hoped to create with my daughters. I wanted them to understand that there is more than one way to build a meaningful life. I wanted them to remain curious, question expectations, and discover what brought them genuine joy.

I also wanted them to understand that a father could nurture, teach, listen, guide, comfort, and create a home. Fatherhood was not a supporting role in my life. It was one of its central purposes.

As I encouraged my daughters to explore the world, they unknowingly encouraged me to examine my own life. I wanted them to believe they could make intentional choices rather than simply inherit expectations. Eventually, I had to confront the fact that I was asking them to embrace a freedom I had not yet given myself.

I was telling them to live authentically while I remained trapped inside a life built largely around obligation.

That contradiction became harder to ignore.

Wanting to Breathe

By then, the questions about the family business were no longer arriving in isolation. I was becoming profoundly tired, but not in a way that could be corrected by a weekend away or a few nights of better sleep.

This exhaustion had accumulated across years.

I felt responsible for the company’s customers. I felt responsible for its employees. I felt responsible for keeping the technical side moving, maintaining relationships, resolving emergencies, bringing in business, and protecting the organization’s reputation. Even when a problem was not technically mine, it often ended up on my shoulders.

For a long time, I believed this burden was proof of my importance. Eventually, I began to understand that being indispensable can become another form of captivity.

I wanted to breathe.

I wanted mornings that did not begin with an immediate inventory of problems. I wanted evenings when my mind was not still working after my body had left the office. I wanted time with my daughters that was not interrupted by the knowledge that someone, somewhere, needed something from me.

I wanted to discover who I was outside the company.

That desire initially felt selfish. After decades of connecting loyalty with sacrifice, imagining a life built around my own well-being felt almost like betrayal. But slowly, the idea became less frightening. I allowed myself to consider that leaving might not mean abandoning my responsibilities. It might mean finally accepting responsibility for my own life.

The affidavits had not caused me to leave. No single document or disagreement held that much power. They had simply opened a door in my thinking. For the first time, I could imagine that perhaps I did not have to remain where I was merely because I had always been there.

Maybe there was another life available to me.

One with more peace.

More room.

More meaning.

More air.

Looking back, I can see that I started leaving long before I ever walked out the door. The separation happened gradually. Emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, I had already begun stepping away. I continued doing the work and carrying the responsibility, but part of me had started imagining what freedom might feel like.

Five Weeks

In 2021, after nearly twenty-four years in the family business, I decided to leave.

I gave five weeks’ notice. I wanted the departure to be orderly and respectful. I wanted the company to have time to prepare, transfer responsibilities, and begin making plans for a future that did not include me in the same role.

I was not leaving to create a competing business. I was not leaving because I wanted revenge. I was not searching for a way to damage what my parents owned.

I wanted out.

I wanted relief from the stress of feeling as though the success or failure of an entire organization rested on my shoulders. I wanted to work for a mission I respected and build a life that did not require me to sacrifice myself to prove my loyalty.

I accepted a position with a nonprofit organization that had been a client since 1998. I knew the organization and respected its work. For the first time in years, I could imagine waking up without feeling personally responsible for an entire company.

When I left, I felt lighter.

I felt hopeful.

I felt as though I could finally take a full breath.

I believed I was closing one chapter and peacefully beginning another.

I was wrong about the peaceful part.

The Phone Call That Never Came

After I departed, the company struggled with customer and employee retention. I was blamed for some of those difficulties. I understood that my exit would create disruption. I had maintained many of the client relationships and led much of the technical operation. A person cannot occupy that kind of role for decades and leave without creating a gap.

What I did not expect was for the relationship with my parents to move almost immediately into legal territory.

First came a cease and desist letter.

Then came additional legal correspondence.

What hurt was not only the content of those documents. What hurt was that my father never called me to discuss his concerns. He did not ask what had happened. He did not sit down with me and explain what he believed I had done. He did not attempt to resolve the conflict directly.

My father knew my phone number. My father knew where I lived. My father knew where I worked. After decades of working beside me, my father knew exactly how to reach me.

Still, the telephone remained silent.

During that period, I was already questioning my identity and my relationship with the family whose name I carried. The treatment surrounding my departure, followed by the cease and desist letter, moved those questions from abstract reflection into something much more immediate.

Between the cease and desist letter and the lawsuit, I changed my name.

By the time the sheriff arrived, Jeffery Joyous Journey already existed.

That story deserves its own chapter.

The Sheriff

When the sheriff entered my new workplace and handed me the lawsuit, I wondered why I had been served there. I cannot know the intention behind that decision, and I do not want to present my interpretation as fact. I only know what it felt like.

It felt public.

It felt intimidating.

It felt as though a conflict that might once have been resolved through a family conversation had been deliberately carried into the new life I was trying to build.

I stood there holding the documents while my past arrived in the middle of my future.

The company had sent legal correspondence. I had been served personally by the sheriff. That distinction stayed with me because it intensified the one question I could not answer.

Why had my father never called?

The lawsuit eventually moved through the court process. According to my recollection, it was dismissed after my father and his attorney did not respond to discovery. I had expected the dismissal to feel like a victory, but it did not.

Mostly, it felt sad.

Winning was never what I wanted. I had wanted freedom, peace, and an opportunity to build a life outside the business. By the time the lawsuit ended, the legal result could not repair what had already been broken.

The court dismissed the lawsuit.

The court could not restore the relationship.

The Question Beneath Everything

For almost five years, I have carried this story privately. I have replayed the events, questioned my choices, considered other perspectives, and wondered whether telling it publicly would serve any worthwhile purpose.

I am not sharing it to ask readers to choose sides. I am not pretending that I handled every moment perfectly, nor am I claiming that my parents experienced these events exactly as I did.

This is the story of what those events revealed to me.

I had spent most of my adult life equating loyalty with sacrifice. I believed that carrying the weight was proof of love and that remaining useful was a form of belonging. The custody affidavits first caused me to examine that belief. My departure from the business tested it. The cease and desist letter damaged it. The lawsuit finally broke it open.

The day my parents sued me was not the day I lost my family.

It was the day I could no longer avoid asking what family meant.

It was also the day I saw how far I had already traveled away from the person I once believed I had to be. I had left the business to breathe and to discover whether another life was possible. Before the lawsuit ever arrived, I had also taken another step toward that new life.

I had chosen a new name.

Not because I wanted to erase everything that came before.

Because I wanted to decide what came next.

And that is where the next chapter begins.

My parents never hid it from me. There was no dramatic revelation and no family secret that surfaced years later. Adoption was simply part of my story from the beginning. It was presented as a fact, no different than where I lived or what school I attended.

At least that is how I understood it at the time.

What I did not understand was that knowing I was adopted and understanding what adoption meant were two very different things.

As a child, I remember sitting through family gatherings and listening to conversations that seemed perfectly ordinary to everyone else.

People would point to a child and say they had their grandmother’s eyes. Someone else would laugh and mention a stubborn streak that had been passed down through generations. Stories about relatives flowed naturally through the room, connecting one person to another in ways that seemed effortless.

No one intended for those conversations to make me feel different.

But they did.

Not because I felt unloved.

Not because I felt excluded.

I simply felt disconnected from a story everyone else seemed to understand.

I watched people trace family traits backward through time, linking themselves to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Their identities seemed connected by invisible threads stretching across generations.

I remember wondering where my thread was.

At the time, I could not have explained any of this. I was a child. I did not think in terms of identity or belonging. I did not sit around contemplating deep questions about family and genetics.

I only knew that whenever those conversations happened, I became curious.

Who did I look like?

Where did I get my traits?

Who shared my smile?

Who shared my laugh?

Those questions would surface for a moment and then disappear back into the background of everyday life.

As I got older, I became very good at pushing those thoughts aside. Like most kids, I had plenty of other things to focus on. School, friends, activities, sports, music, and eventually all the awkwardness that comes with growing up.

Life kept moving.

The questions stayed.

Looking back now, I realize those questions never demanded answers. They simply waited patiently in the background. They were part of the soundtrack of my life, quiet enough to ignore but never completely gone.

When I looked in the mirror, I sometimes wondered who else shared my face.

When I discovered a talent or an interest, I wondered where it came from.

When people talked about traits that “ran in the family,” I wondered which traits might be running through mine.

I did not feel broken.

I did not feel abandoned.

I did not spend my childhood feeling unhappy.

What I felt was curiosity.

And curiosity can be surprisingly powerful.

Years later, that curiosity would lead me to search for my biological family. It would lead me to answers I had wondered about for decades and introduce me to people I had never expected to know.

But those stories come later.

Long before I searched for anyone else, I was searching for myself.

I simply did not realize it.

Today, when I reflect on those early years, I think the experience of adoption taught me something long before I understood the lesson. Most of us spend our lives trying to understand who we are. We inherit stories from our families, our cultures, our experiences, and the people around us. Those stories help shape us, but they do not always answer every question.

Some questions remain.

Some questions follow us.

Some questions quietly wait until we are ready to ask them.

Mine began with adoption.

Yours may begin somewhere else.

But I suspect many of us are searching for the same thing.

An understanding of where we came from.

And perhaps, more importantly, who we are becoming.

As a child, I could not have imagined where those questions would eventually lead.

I only knew they were there.

Waiting patiently.

Following me.

Becoming part of my story long before I understood why.

And one day, I would decide to start looking for answers.

If you had met me twenty years ago, I do not think you would recognize me.

Truthfully, I am not sure I would recognize myself.

Back then, my life looked successful from the outside. I had spent years pursuing an education, building a career, and trying to create the kind of future I thought I was supposed to want. I worked hard. I followed the rules. I checked the boxes.

In many ways, I was doing exactly what I had been taught to do.

Yet there was a question quietly sitting beneath all of it.

A question I did not have the courage to ask out loud.

Was I living my life, or the life I thought everyone expected me to live?

I did not wake up one morning and suddenly decide to reinvent myself.

The change happened slowly.

Over years.

A question here.

A disappointment there.

A lesson that took much longer to learn than it should have.

Like many people, I had become very good at meeting expectations. I could work hard. I could achieve goals. I could solve problems. What I was less skilled at was understanding what I wanted for myself.

Looking back, that should not surprise me.

I was adopted as an infant.

My childhood was not unhappy, but there was always a lingering feeling that some pieces of my story were missing. I did not know it at the time, but I spent much of my life searching for answers to questions I could not fully articulate.

Who am I?

Where do I come from?

Why do I feel different?

Questions like that have a way of following you.

Even when you pretend they are not there.

As the years passed, my search took me down unexpected paths. Some led to adventure. Some led to heartbreak. Some led to growth. Some forced me to confront things about myself that I would rather have ignored.

None of those experiences provided a single answer.

Instead, they gave me something more valuable.

They gave me perspective.

I began to notice a pattern.

Some of the biggest decisions in my life were not made because they were practical. They were made because they felt true.

Not easy.

Not popular.

Not always understood.

Just true.

Over time, those decisions changed the course of my life.

They shaped the way I approached relationships.

The way I raised my daughters.

The way I viewed success.

The way I chose to spend my time.

Eventually, they even shaped the name I carried.

That story will come later.

For now, it is enough to say that the name was never the beginning of the journey.

It was simply one marker along the road.

What changed my life was not a new name.

It was learning to become myself.

The older I get, the more I realize that many people are walking around carrying stories they have never fully examined. We inherit expectations from our families, our communities, our culture, and sometimes from complete strangers. Eventually those expectations become so familiar that we mistake them for our own desires.

At some point, I began asking a different question.

Not “What should I do?”

But:

“What brings me alive?”

That question led me toward learning, travel, service, friendship, adventure, love, community, and a hundred experiences I never could have predicted when I was younger.

It also taught me something important.

Most people spend their lives chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The promotion.

The perfect relationship.

The bigger house.

The next achievement.

The thing that will finally make everything make sense.

What I discovered was different.

The gift was never waiting at the end.

The gift was the rainbow itself.

The colors.

The experiences.

The people.

The lessons.

The journey.

That realization became the inspiration for this publication.

The Color Rainbow is not a guidebook.

It is not self-help.

It is not a list of answers.

It is simply my story.

A story about adoption, identity, family, joy, mistakes, growth, adventure, and the lifelong process of figuring out who we are.

Some stories will be funny.

Some will be painful.

A few will probably make me uncomfortable to share.

But all of them matter.

Because every color belongs in the rainbow.

My hope is not that readers see themselves in me.

My hope is that they begin to see themselves more clearly.

Your story is different than mine.

It should be.

But perhaps some of the questions are the same.

And if they are, maybe we can explore them together.

Welcome to The Color Rainbow.

The journey begins here.

Thank you for reading the first issue of The Color Rainbow.

For many years, I have wanted to tell these stories. Not because I believe my path is the right path, but because I believe each of us benefits from examining our own.

In future issues, I will share stories about adoption, identity, parenthood, relationships, adventure, joy, mistakes, and the lifelong process of becoming who we are.

If any part of this story resonates with you, I would love for you to subscribe and join me on the journey.

Jeffery Joyous Journey