# Losing Agency Part 3: What Remains *This is Part 3 of a 3-part series. [Read Part 1: The Erasure](#) | [Read Part 2: Living Outside the Snow Globe](#)* --- When everything got stripped away—home, marriage, daily fatherhood, income, location, identity—people kept telling me I still had choices. *You can control your attitude.* *You can choose how you respond.* *You still have agency over your perspective.* And technically? They're not wrong. But here's what they don't understand: **when external circumstances remove your options, the agency that remains isn't enough to rebuild a life.** It's enough to survive. Maybe. But not enough to escape. --- ## The Disco Ball I think about agency like a disco ball. You know the kind—covered in tiny mirrors, each one reflecting light at a specific angle. To see your reflection clearly in any one mirror, you have to be lined up just right. Most of the time, you only see fragments. Distorted pieces. Incomplete images. That's how I think about problems, situations, circumstances. How much of this do I see clearly? How much am I missing? What am I not aware that I don't know? When people say "you still have choices," they're looking at one mirror on the disco ball. Maybe two. They see the piece they can see clearly—attitude, perspective, mindset—and assume that's the whole picture. But they're not seeing what I'm seeing from where I'm standing. They're not accounting for the angles they can't see. The reflections that aren't visible to them. So when they say I still have agency, what they mean is: *"From where I'm standing, I can see options you're not taking."* What they don't realize is that from where I'm standing, those options don't exist. --- ## Agency You Have vs. Agency You Don't Let me be specific. ### **Agency I Had:** - **My attitude** — I could choose to see my situation as temporary (distortion) or permanent (reality). I could frame it as a challenge to overcome or a collapse I'd never recover from. - **My daily routine** — I could go to Starbucks or stay in my car. I could apply for jobs or give up. I could shower at the campground (when I had money) or let hygiene slip. - **My perspective** — I could tell myself "I'm still part of society, just camping" or acknowledge "I'm homeless and the system doesn't want me." - **My voice** — I could speak up, ask for help, reach out to family. Or I could isolate and suffer alone. That's real agency. I controlled those things. They mattered. ### **Agency I Didn't Have:** - **Other people's decisions** — My ex-wife chose to end the marriage. Employers chose not to hire me. Landlords wouldn't rent to someone with no income. Those weren't my choices. - **Economic reality** — 2000+ job applications, under five interviews. 30 months unemployed despite decades of experience. The market didn't care. I couldn't force it to. - **Structural barriers** — No home = no mailing address = harder to get hired. No income = no apartment. No car insurance = risk of losing transportation. Can't shower regularly = harder to interview. It's a trap with no exit. - **Time** — I couldn't undo the past. Couldn't skip ahead to "recovered." I was stuck in the present, day after day, with no clear path forward. - **My nervous system** — Depression, anxiety, hypervigilance, dissociation—I didn't choose those. They were responses to circumstances I didn't control. I could manage them (meditation, therapy when accessible), but I couldn't turn them off. So yes, I had agency over my attitude and daily choices. But I **did not** have agency over the circumstances that trapped me in survival mode. --- ## The Difference Between "Bad Choices" and "Ground Disappearing" People love to say, "You always have a choice." And I get it. That's empowering language. It puts you in the driver's seat. It means you're not a victim—you're an agent. But there's a difference between **"I made bad choices that led here"** and **"the ground disappeared beneath me and I couldn't stop the fall."** ### **Bad choices look like this:** - I chose to quit my job without a backup plan. - I chose to spend money recklessly and ignored my finances. - I chose to ignore red flags in my relationship. - I chose to isolate instead of asking for help. Those are decisions. Those are things I controlled and can own. ### **Ground disappearing looks like this:** - The separation happened over two years, and I moved out in June 2023 at my ex-wife's request. I didn't want the divorce. I wanted couples counseling. I wanted to heal the marriage. That wasn't my choice. - I applied to over 2000 jobs. I'm overqualified, underpriced, and the industry sees me as "too expensive" or "too experienced." I can't force someone to hire me. That's not my choice. - I lived in my car for 16 months not because I wanted to, but because I had no other option. No income = no apartment. That's not a choice—that's circumstance. - I couldn't plan beyond 24-36 hours because I didn't know where I'd sleep, how I'd eat, or if something would go catastrophically wrong. Survival mode doesn't allow for long-term planning. That's not a choice—that's biology. **This is the distinction people miss: when you're in survival mode, the ground isn't under your feet. You're in freefall. And telling someone in freefall to "choose a better attitude" is like telling them to flap their arms and fly.** It's not helpful. It's insulting. --- ## What Agency Actually Remains So what's left when everything's been stripped away? **Not much. But it's not nothing.** Here's what I had control over, even at the lowest point: ### **1. How I see my situation (perspective)** I could choose to believe this was temporary or permanent. That I'd recover or I wouldn't. That I was still "me" or that I'd lost myself completely. This is real agency. And it mattered. Because the story I told myself shaped whether I kept trying or gave up. But here's the catch: **changing your perspective doesn't change your circumstances.** I could tell myself "I'm still valuable, I'm still competent, I'll get through this" all day long. But that didn't put a roof over my head. It didn't get me a job. It didn't undo the collapse. Perspective is agency. But it's not *enough* agency to rebuild. ### **2. Small daily actions (routine)** I could choose to go to Starbucks or not. Apply for jobs or not. Shower or not. Eat or not. These were choices. Small ones. But they added up. Showing up at Starbucks every day and pretending I was still part of society? That was a distortion. But it was also survival. It kept me from disappearing completely. ### **3. Who I reach out to (connection)** I could isolate or ask for help. I could tell my family what was happening or hide it. I could engage with other homeless people or avoid them. I mostly isolated. Out of shame. Out of fear. Out of exhaustion. But that was still agency. I chose isolation because connection felt too risky, too vulnerable, too much. Was it a good choice? No. But it was mine. --- ## The Trap of "Just Choose Better" Here's what people don't get when they say "you still have choices": **When your options are all bad, choosing between them isn't agency—it's triage.** Do I eat today or charge my car? Do I stay in a place that feels unsafe or drive somewhere else and burn gas I can't afford? Do I apply for another job I won't get or save my energy for something else? Those aren't choices in any meaningful sense. Those are survival calculations. And when every option is a losing option, telling me I "still have agency" feels like gaslighting. Because yes, technically, I'm choosing. But I'm not *steering.* I'm just trying not to drown. --- ## Distortion as Survival vs. Self-Deception Tony Robbins says we're "Distortion-Deletion Creatures." We distort reality to cope. We delete what's too painful to process. I did that constantly. **Distortion as survival:** Going to Starbucks every day and pretending I was still part of society. Telling myself "this is temporary" when I had no evidence it would end. Framing job applications as progress when they led nowhere. That kept me alive. It kept me from completely giving up. It was adaptive. **Distortion as self-deception:** Believing I still had the same agency I had before. Telling myself "I just need to try harder" when the problem wasn't effort—it was circumstance. Blaming myself for things I couldn't control. That hurt me. It reinforced the "not good enough" story. It kept me stuck in shame instead of acknowledging the structural reality: the system doesn't want me, and no amount of effort will change that. The line between survival distortion and harmful self-deception is thin. And I crossed it a lot. --- ## Who Am I Now? In Part 1, I asked: *Who am I when all my roles are gone?* In Part 2, I described what it's like to live outside the snow globe while pretending to be inside it. Now, in Part 3, I'm asking: **What agency do I actually have to rebuild?** And the honest answer is: **Not as much as people think. But more than I thought when I was at my lowest.** I have agency over: - How I see myself (even when the world sees me differently) - How I spend my limited energy (even when all options suck) - Who I connect with (even when connection feels impossible) - The story I tell about what happened (even when the story is painful) I don't have agency over: - Other people's choices - Economic systems that reject me - Time (I can't skip ahead to "recovered") - Circumstances that keep me trapped **And here's what I'm learning: agency isn't binary. It's not "you have it" or "you don't." It's a spectrum. And where you land on that spectrum depends on how many options you actually have—not how many options people think you should have.** When I had a home, a job, a marriage, daily fatherhood—I had a lot of agency. I could steer my life. When I lost all of that? My agency shrunk to: attitude, daily routine, perspective. That's real. That matters. But it's not enough to escape the trap. It's enough to survive it. Maybe. If you're lucky. If you don't give up. --- ## This Is Part 3 of 3 This is what remains when everything's been stripped away. Not nothing. But not enough. Agency over perspective. Agency over small daily choices. Agency over how you frame your story. But not agency over the systems, structures, and circumstances that put you outside the snow globe in the first place. I'm still rebuilding. I'm still figuring out who I am when I'm not Father, Husband, Designer, Coach. I'm still learning what it means to have limited agency and work within those limits without blaming myself for things I can't control. It's slow. It's hard. And some days, I'm not sure I'm making progress at all. But I'm still here. I survived the erasure. I survived living outside the snow globe. And I'm documenting it so you know you can too. --- **Be well.**