Saved From the Fire

Make it stand out

Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

I think this is probably the hardest chapter for me to write because I know exactly where it came from, but I also know there are parts of that moment I will probably never be able to properly explain. Not because I don't remember them, but because my head wasn't a place where anything was neat enough to put into words. It was fear and exhaustion and sadness and anger all happening at the same time, with this horrible feeling that something I had spent most of my adult life building and protecting might actually be falling apart, and that perhaps I was going to be the person who had to make that decision.

I don't want to write the details of it here because they aren't mine alone to tell, but it was enough to knock something loose in me that had probably been under pressure for much longer than I realised. I had reached a point where I was exhausted from trying to hold everything together and suddenly I was having to face the possibility that the life I wanted, the family I had worked so hard to protect, my marriage, everything, might not be something I could save.

That thought was devastating.

I didn't want to leave. That is probably the simplest and most important truth in all of this. I didn't want to walk away from any of it, but there was a point where I genuinely wondered whether staying was possible. I don't know if I had ever understood before how frightening it could be to feel trapped between two things you both desperately don't want. Leaving felt unbearable. Staying felt unbearable. And somewhere in the middle of that I was trying to work out how much more I could actually carry.

What made it worse was knowing that leaving wouldn't just mean leaving. There were consequences attached to it that I couldn't ignore. I knew what walking away could mean for my wife, my daughters. I knew what it could mean for the family, and I knew this was not something I was honestly capable of doing. At the same time, I was reaching a point where I wasn't sure I had anything left in me to keep carrying the weight of it.

That frightened me more than I can really explain.

I had always thought of myself as someone who protects. Someone who keeps going. Someone who absorbs the difficult stuff so that other people don't have to. I think a lot of my identity had become wrapped up in being able to hold things together, at least in a way I felt was supportive. Suddenly I was looking at my own life and wondering whether I had failed at the one thing I thought I was supposed to be good at.

There were moments when my thoughts became very dark. I don't mean that in some dramatic or romantic sense. I mean that the idea of simply ending the pain started to feel like an option, and that is a terrifying thing to admit even now. When you are exhausted enough and frightened enough, the mind can start presenting escape as though it is a solution even when you conciously know its not..

It doesn't necessarily arrive as some grand decision. Sometimes it is just the thought that you would quite like everything to stop because you cannot see how you are supposed to keep carrying it.

I was on a knife edge.

And the horrible thing was that life around me was still happening.

I was still a husband and a father. I was still working. I was still answering messages (trying to anyway) and doing ordinary things. I could sit with my children and be present-ish with them while internally feeling like my entire life had fallen apart.

There was no obvious external crisis that gave me permission to stop. Dinner still needed making. Calls still needed answering. People still needed me. The day still had to happen.

So I kept moving.

I think that is one of the strangest things about being in a place like that. You can be doing completely ordinary things while having thoughts that feel anything but ordinary. Nobody necessarily knows. Sometimes you don't even know how to explain it to yourself.

I had spent so much of my life pushing difficult things away that I had become almost frightened of what would happen if I finally let them in. I could swallow things, bury them, tell myself I would deal with them later. Usually there was always something else to do. This time there wasn't anywhere left to put it.

Loss of trust, uncertainty, exhaustion, fear, anger, and of course sadness. The feeling that I had somehow failed. All of it was there at once.

I couldn't think my way out of it anymore.

That was when I went to music.

I didn't go there because I wanted to make a mix. I went there because I didn't know where else to go. I didn't want to talk to anybody in that moment. Talking meant finding words for something that didn't have words. It meant looking someone in the eye and admitting that I was struggling, that I was frightened, that I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do next. I wasn't ready for that.

Music didn't ask me to explain anything.

I could put my headphones on, sit in the dark and search through sounds until I found something that felt close enough to what was happening inside me. I didn't need to make a case for why I was hurting. I didn't need to pretend I was stronger than I was.

I could just be there.

And I think that is why this chapter became what it did.

The music wasn't an escape from what was happening. It was the only place I felt able to actually face it.

I was pulling the plaster off and looking at the wound properly, even though I didn't really want to see it. I had spent so long trying not to look that I had started confusing the fear of the pain with the pain itself.

The music gave me enough space to sit inside it without immediately being consumed by it. I wasn't trying to make myself feel better. I was trying to feel something honestly.

There was a point early in making this chapter where everything seemed to stop. I remember the music playing and there being this strange stillness where I wasn't really thinking about anything anymore. I was just numb.

At the time I don't think I understood what was happening. There wasn't really any capacity left to stand outside myself and observe it. Looking back, I think I had reached the edge of what I could hold.

But the music kept going. I listened.

And gradually it started to create a path through the mess. Not an answer. There wasn't one. Not a solution either. Just somewhere to move.

The beginning feels like the shock of it to me now. The uncertainty. The heaviness. The feeling that everything I knew might be disappearing.

Then the collapse.

Then the numbness.

Then the grief.

Then, almost without me noticing, something starts to move again.

I don't think I planned that. I don't think I even knew I needed it.

The music created an arc before I understood that I needed one.

It let me move between those different states without having to decide what any of them meant. And eventually I found myself somewhere slightly different from where I had started.

Not better. Just not completely trapped inside the same thought.

That mattered.

I was carrying a lot of shame at the time. I felt like I had failed. Failed as a husband. Failed as a father. Failed as the person who was supposed to protect everyone. I felt like if I couldn't keep this together then perhaps I wasn't strong enough, and if I wasn't strong enough then what exactly was I?

I can see now how unfair that was, but I couldn't see it then.

At the time I thought resilience meant never getting to the point where you needed help. I thought being strong meant absorbing everything and continuing as though it wasn't hurting.

I don't think I believe that anymore.

Somewhere in all of this there was still a very small part of me that didn't want to give up. I don't mean that I suddenly became optimistic. I didn't. Hope didn't feel particularly convincing.nBut I couldn't completely let go of it either.

Maybe I didn't need to know whether things would work out. Maybe I just needed enough hope not to make an irreversible decision in one of the worst moments of my life.

That was enough.

Not certainty. Not confidence. Just enough to stay.

And I think that is where the title came from, although I don't remember consciously deciding it at the time. Saved From The Fire wasn't about pretending the fire hadn't happened. It also wasn't about everything coming out untouched.

It was about recognising that there were still things inside it that were worth saving.

My children. My family. My Wife. Myself.

I don't think I understood the importance of that last one properly until afterwards.

I had become so focused on what might be lost that I hadn't really considered what might still be there if I could clear the smoke enough to see it.

I didn't need to save everything. I couldn't.

Some things had already been damaged. Some things would never be exactly as they were before. There was pain that couldn't simply disappear because I had decided to stay either. There was loss of confidence that couldn't be wished away. There were conversations and consequences and a lot of things that would still have to be worked through.

But I didn't need to solve all of that in that moment.

I needed to get through the fire before I started worrying about rebuilding the house.

I think that is what the music gave me. A place to sit with the devastation without letting it become the whole story. It allowed me to feel the pain without becoming the pain.

It allowed me to look at the possibility that everything was over without deciding that it was over or that my life was over.

Somewhere towards the end of the session, something changed.

It wasn't relief, it was quieter than that.

I can’t describe it exactly, but there was a lift. It’s weird, it was like a hug in that space that just lifted me up somwhat. It felt like love.

That sounds almost absurd considering where my head had been, but it did and I did feel something. My daughters were there. My family was there. The life I had built was still there. And despite everything that had happened, I was still there too.

I don't know if that was the moment I decided to stay. Maybe the decision had already been forming. Maybe I just finally had enough space to see it.

But I know that I stayed.

I'm glad I did.

I don't say that because everything suddenly became OK. It didn't. Staying didn't erase what had happened. It didn't make the fear disappear. It didn't make the work of rebuilding any easier either.

It just meant I hadn't walked away from something I still loved while I was at my lowest point.

When I listen to this chapter now, I can hear how much pain is in it. I don't hear a story about overcoming something. I hear the person I was at that moment trying to find a way through something he genuinely believed might destroy everything.

I hear the uncertainty and the exhaustion. I hear how close I was to believing that there was no way forward. And then I hear something else, a shift… there was hope.

And there was still something inside me that wanted to keep trying and keep going. Not to give up. I don't know whether that is what saved me.

I only know that it was still there.

And when I listen to the music now, that's what I hear. Not the fire, but what survived it.