Life Update

Some disjointed thoughts on my life and lessons from 2025.

This year started with an epic shove of a dream and ended in separation. It’s been a ride. But also a very good story.

“Meru” - 63’ Vic Carpenter 1992

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I’ve been sitting with the question of whether forever is actually the right measure for a good marriage. Whether duration defines success. This might be my own bias but forever feels like a lazy metric.

I have no time for optics if its in opposition to aliveness no matter how hard it is to do the hard thing. Because I do believe that some relationships end because they failed. But more times than not, they end because they completed what they came here to do.

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I came across a quote in Medium Raw by Anthony Bourdain while in Sardinia.

He wrote something about realizing how much of his time was spent complaining about a life most people would dream to have. I’m not exactly the melancholic character Tony was, but I resonate with that sentiment now in ways I wouldn’t have a year ago.

I have had a great life. But pain is pain which is why I enjoy sharing through the podcast and through mediums like Substack in the case that there are other people out there who judge their own sorrow like I do sometimes.

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Jeff and I gave our marriage more than a college try. After 10 years together, we lived a thousand lifetimes. We fucking went for it. We did it all. And if this year revealed anything, it’s not that we didn’t try hard enough, it’s that we tried relentlessly. Maybe too hard. There’s a lesson in excess vs devotion in here somewhere but I haven’t earned that wisdom just yet.

It’s on the list.

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Here’s a recap for anyone who wants to know some of what went down this year. Please enjoy the overshare. It’s more efficient than a hundred conversations with friends and maybe helpful context for any curious onlookers.

We’d gone through a year and a half separation a few years back. I spent that time in Austin and loved the groundedness and aloneness I found there. I’d argue it’s one of the best cities in the world to be alone in. But something kept pulling me back to Canada. The hindsight still hasn’t fully landed, but I think one of the biggest reasons we came back together was because we had unfinished business.

For two people who love and live as deeply as we do, the romance was mythological. And the ending we’d written back then didn’t feel proportionate to what we’d lived. It’s like we needed a final gong.

So we rewrote the ending in 2025 and my head has just stopped ringing.

We started the year with a month in the Yucatán, coming straight off a month in Croatia. Then the Dominican Republic, followed by Martinique and Sardinia. That was about 5 months of travel.

If that sounds logistically nonsensical, it felt like it. But we needed to find our boat.

I’ve talked about this at nauseam in prior articles. The short version is we were chasing a shared dream of buying a liveaboard sailboat with the idea of circumnavigation. And if there’s one thing true about the formula of Jeff and Jessica, it’s that we don’t fantasize. We meet our dreams honestly and do what we can do make them happen.

By the end of all of that globetrotting we’d found a hundred yachts we didn’t want to buy.

By mid May, we were in the remote Canadian wilderness with our friends, cadre, and candidates facilitating the final iteration of The Process, the Special Forces Experience. After 8 years, it was the right moment to give her back to the earth before she overstayed her welcome. It was a beautiful closing ritual of our rite of passage in the woods.

We moved back into our log house on Manitoulin Island for a while to regroup. My GOD. I could have laid face down in the grass for days. I was exhausted in a way that went deeper than physical fatigue. I shed a few happy tears as I finally unpacked my suitcase. And then had the urge to burn it in the firepit. I was so grateful to be somewhere that felt like home.

But we weren’t done.

We finally found our yacht and continued on to Tiverton, Rhode Island. We named her Meru.

Video taken by Matt McCartney (Meru Crew #3). Check out his Substack videos Meru Part 1 and Meru Part 2.

Meru became more than a boat. She was the container that held us while the ending of our marriage was taking shape in the background.

There were moments on that boat where I genuinely wanted to jump overboard and swim for shore, anything to escape the weight of our relationship in that state. There were times we were emotionally neglectful toward each other. We cared about each other. But we were depleted, scared, and still trying to hold something that was already changing.

Those versions of us make me sad. We deserved more tenderness than we sometimes gave.

And still, this matters, we were never just talk.

We didn’t sit around theorizing about love or growth or alignment. We didn’t ignore or avoid our challenges. We fucked around and found out. We tested the dream. We lived inside the questions. We put our bodies, money, time, careers, and nervous systems on the line. We chose experience over safety, even when it cost us.

And, well lots of hindsight here, it did cost us. And that’s ok too.

One of the beautiful aspects of this that was apparent to both of us during our difficult times was how the boat held all of it. The fights, silence, secrets, the grief. The moments of making up, the awe of living on a fucking yacht. Yes, it was still amazing.

Meru was her own main character in this.

She is and will likely always be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever owned. The days and nights we navigated our relational issues were held by a cocoon of curved mahogany and though it was perhaps the most challenging time of our lives, the boat was another character that brought a sense that everything is all ok. This is a storm, and it yep it feels insane, and yes you’ll be different on the other side of it, but you’ll definitely be ok. In fact, this is exactly where you need to be experiencing everything you need to experience.

“Meru” 63’ Vic Carpenter 1992

I can’t say enough about this boat. I mean, to the point where I fear I border on annoying because I’m not sure it’s so relatable. I wouldn’t understand it if I didn’t experience her for myself.

Since I left in September, a few friends have joined what’s now called the Meru Crew. Matthew McCartney, Ryan Knight, and Adam McMaster came aboard to help Jeff sail her down the coast, leaving late in the season and fighting terrifying seas. Every one of them has said the same thing in their own way. They somehow knew they were physically and spiritually protected by this boat.

Does that sound crazy?

Yes, we do be an existential bunch. But this was a new flavor, like ancient sailor wisdom vibrating off the hull itself. I’ll say it again, Meru really is her own main character.

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Next week I’ll be meeting Jeff and Meru in Charleston, SC. We’ll tie up loose ends, get our affairs in order, and give each other a proper, respectful honoring of everything we lived through together. We’ll celebrate what we created. And we’ll say goodbye to what needs to be left behind.

There’s a cultural script that says if a marriage ends, something must have gone wrong. That’s partially true. The part of the script I’d like to champion is that love can have been done right even when it ends.

We lived our marriage fully. We sure did make some mistakes, but I think even those deserve reverence, not shame.

Now on this side of things, I’ve learned a lot of what not to do. That’s the benefit of having been married. I don’t know how else to say this but previously married people are broken in, in a lot of good ways. There’s an art to domestic life without domesticating your spirit.

I think if you can work with that material in a meaningful way, if anything, your spirit is left more wild and undomesticated than ever. Cheers to 2026.