Part One of Two
My darling Lizzy,
Papa wrote this one on August 13th, 2026 — right in the middle of our anniversary month, the same month mummy and I stood in front of everyone we loved and made a promise we’re still keeping. I’d been listening to a podcast about how people find “the one,” and it sent me straight back into my own archive, back to a January night in Chicago years before I even knew mummy existed, and forward again to the evening I actually met her.
What I want you to carry from this one, baby girl, is simple: you don’t find a soulmate by chasing. You find one by finally being brave enough to stop wearing a mask.
You find out you not need a mask.
And when you meet the person who doesn’t need you to wear one either — that’s how you’ll know.
I love you my beautiful girl!
Chicago, Illinois — August 13, 2026
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“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” — 1 Corinthians 13:7
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I heard him again the other week. Not literally — the old friend I wrote about years ago, the one with the crooked teeth and the bad back who told me over Macallan 18 that I’d know my soulmate the second our eyes locked, that the incomplete parts of me would suddenly feel whole. I was listening to a podcast this time, Jay Shetty talking about what actually blocks people from meeting the person they’re supposed to be with, and every single thing he said, I’d already lived. I just hadn’t put language to it yet.
Shetty lays it out in pieces, and I kept nodding at every one of them. First: self-acceptance is the entry point. You cannot attract the right person while you’re wearing a mask — you have to know who you are, accept it, before someone else can love it. Second: respecting differences. A soulmate isn’t a mirror; she experiences love and intimacy and communication differently than you do, and the relationship survives on you honoring that instead of fighting it. Third: unlearning and healing your wounds, so you stop falling in love with someone’s potential instead of who they actually are in front of you. Fourth: attracting instead of chasing — building a life so full and curious that love has room to walk into it, instead of you running yourself ragged hunting for it. And fifth, the one that took me longest to learn: none of it is promised on any particular timeline. Probability doesn’t guarantee your soulmate is waiting around the next corner. It only promises that tomorrow isn’t predetermined by yesterday.
I didn’t learn any of it from a podcast. I learned it years earlier, standing in the middle of an intersection.
There’s a scene I go back to often, from the movie Adaptation — a monologue about an orchid and the one insect built specifically to pollinate it, neither of them ever understanding the significance of what they’re doing, just following the design written into them, “how the only barometer you have is your heart.” I’ve carried that image since 12/22/08, the morning I woke up on North/Milwaukee/Damen after getting hit by a car, feeling my toes move in the bitter cold and knowing I’d been given a second chance at something. I didn’t know what yet. I just knew, the way that flower knows its insect: I’m looking for my flower.
I found her on August 3rd, 2018 a little after 7 pm. I was late for our date.
Grace was the most beautiful, most impressive person I had ever met — and I knew it the moment I met her. Not because of a checklist. Not because of what she looked like on paper. I just knew, the way I’d only ever heard other people describe knowing. She knew exactly what she wanted, said so plainly, and didn’t flinch when I did the same. Neither of us wore a mask that day. There was no performance, no version of ourselves we were auditioning. That’s rare. That’s almost unheard of. And I think that’s the part Shetty gets exactly right — the mask is the whole problem. Take it off, and you stop chasing. You just recognize.
I went home that night and deleted every dating app I had. Not eventually — that night. I didn’t need Shetty’s language for “attracting versus chasing” to know what had just happened to me. I knew, the way I’d written about knowing years before I ever met her: two people becoming one, becoming the best versions of themselves, and creating, then raising even better versions. I’d written that sentence about a hypothetical. Grace made it real.
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Where Shetty and I split is in the terrain we’re each mapping. He’s charting the road to the soulmate — the mindset shifts, the unlearning, the healing that has to happen before you’re ready to meet her. I can’t argue with any of it. But my writing has always lived past that point, in what happens after you’ve found her and life decides to test the whole thing at once.
Marriage will test every couple. IVF and ALS have been our tests.
Grace was pregnant with you, Lizzy, carrying you inside her, in the same season papa’s body started failing. She took care of both of us at once. Not one, then the other — both, simultaneously, without complaint, without ever making either of us feel like a burden. In October, in the last month of her pregnancy, we finally hired a caregiver, because even Wonder Woman has limits, and I refused to let her cross hers just to spare my pride. That is not a detail in a story. That is the whole story. That is what soulmate love actually costs, and what it actually gives back.
Shetty talks about releasing the illusion that you can change someone, about loving people for who they actually are instead of who you hoped they’d become. Grace never once tried to change the man I was or whatever man ALS potentially was turning me into. She just kept showing up for him. That’s not a psychological strategy. That’s devotion with no ceiling on it.
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“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” I wrote that once about my village who show up to do for my body what it can no longer do itself. It’s just as true of Grace. Every burden she’s carried for this past year wasn’t a weight. Though it was it sadly and insanely difficult, it was a gift she was choosing, over and over, to give. This is something I have to continually remind myself.
Shetty is right that a soulmate isn’t a rescue — you don’t get to hand someone your brokenness and call it love. But he’s building his case for the front half of the story. I’m living the back half. And the back half is where you find out whether what you built was real. The first one thousand blogposts were about finding Grace. Last few posts are about staying together.
It was real. It is real. Every single day, in sickness and in health, I would choose her again.
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Whether you are currently searching for “the ONE” or holding hands with them right now through a difficult season, remember this: Lost love is still love, searched love is worth the wait, and true love will always choose to stay. And when it’s real, it doesn’t just stay — it chooses you back, every single morning, no matter what the day is about to ask of it.
GO ADVENTURE ◆ GO TRAVEL ◆ GO LIVE
ALWAYS BE EPIC
J Shetty Podcast
https://open.spotify.com/episode/5oxW88DTyNfYhrD6Y7dCGJ?si=nLIQD81ARhCxVX7SIe3_-A&utm_source=copy-link
Secret of My SucCecil 