What You Choose to Remember

This afternoon, I opened the “office drawer” in my kitchen looking for tape. I pushed aside this weird metal bracket that’s been in there for as long as I can remember. There’s a tangle of old charging cords that don’t fit anything anymore but haven’t warranted the effort of removing and throwing in the trash that’s five feet away. There’s an old conference badge, faded from the time it sat on the dashboard in my truck before I finally stuffed it in the drawer.

There’s nothing important or sentimental about the drawer’s contents. I mostly use it to hide my gum and mint stash from my kids. (They know where it is.) That drawer represents the everyday mix of a life that moves faster than I can comprehend.

For a minute, I stopped. Stopping and staring have become hallmark traits in my life recently. For the last eight months, I’ve been unpacking a lot mentally and emotionally. I’m re-learning that stillness is a requirement, not a luxury, so I let it take hold whenever the feeling rises.

Staring into that drawer, I thought about the things that once mattered so much in my life; things that happened long before all the more recent hard endings that have tried to rewrite the whole story.

Before the strain. Before the resentment. Before the math stopped adding up.

There were mornings when we sat in my old partner’s office, mapping out the future of a company we both believed in. We’d talk strategy until the ideas started to spark, and then we’d laugh because it felt unbelievable that two people from such different pasts (hydraulic supply and finance) were somehow building something that was working.

There were nights when our wives joined us to celebrate a deal we didn’t expect to land. I can still see the Moochies sandwich shop where we’d end up most often, still hear the way we’d talk about the company he’d sold years earlier with all its missteps and victories. And all the gratitude. That was the space where we stopped being colleagues and became friends. Real friends. The kind who showed up for each other’s joys and disappointments with the same sincerity.

I remember the first time he handed me a bonus check so large I didn’t know what to say. Half of my annual salary, given not out of obligation but appreciation. I remember the look on his face. It was a mixture of pride, gratitude, and certainty that I had helped change the trajectory of something he had once thought might fail.

I remember the nights we worked late simply because we loved building together. The tears we shared when life was so much heavier than business. The fierce loyalty. The trust. The sense that we were shaping something neither of us could have built alone.

Those memories don’t erase the later years. They don’t excuse the imbalance or soften the parts that still hurt. But when I think about the life I’m choosing to build now, it helps to remember that what was broken wasn’t the whole story.

Some parts were good. Some parts were better than good. They were formative, human, and worth holding.

Memory isn’t a perfect archive. It’s a practice. A choosing. A way of deciding which pieces deserve breath and which ones can settle into the background without bitterness.

For years, I defined myself by the worst parts of the end of our story—the disappointment, the imbalance, and the years that stretched me too thin. But today, standing over a messy drawer, I acknowledged the change in myself. I don’t have to forget the hard parts. I just don’t have to make them the headline like I did for years.

I can keep the early mornings. The laughter. The shared belief. The gratitude that once flowed both ways. Those pieces are mine to keep, and keeping them doesn’t betray the truth. It honors it.

Maybe memory is less about accuracy and more about intention. About choosing what still helps you become the person you’re trying to be.

And right now, choosing gentler memories feels like choosing peace.

And that is enough.