What I Actually Find Abhorrent: A Journey from Fear to Values

Last week, I published my biography—a story of legacy, place, and the forces that shaped my path. Then someone on a dating site asked me what I found abhorrent. I thought it would be an easy answer.

I was wrong.

My first instinct was pure intellectual autopilot—professional frustrations about people who fake expertise, coaches who exploit young athletes, the "good enough" mentality. Standard responses from someone who's spent 35 years analyzing human behavior under pressure.

I almost sent that response. Clean, professional, appropriately revealing without being too vulnerable.

Then something unexpected happened. That simple question wouldn't leave me alone.

The Rabbit Hole I Didn't See Coming

For three days, it kept bouncing around my head during workouts, in the car, even when I was trying to sleep. I told myself I was overthinking a casual exchange.

But the question had hooks in me.

So I did what I always do when something won't leave me alone—I started writing. What I expected was maybe a page of organized thoughts to help me craft a better response.

What emerged was the most honest self-examination I'd done in years.

I wasn't writing about pet peeves or professional irritations. I was creating what I now call my Values Charter—a complete moral framework I didn't even know I had.

And here's the part that stopped me cold: I'd been approaching the entire question backwards.

The woman hadn't really asked what I find abhorrent. She'd accidentally asked me to define who I actually am.

My Values Charter started where I expected—authenticity and integrity, say what you mean, value substance over appearances. That felt familiar, like putting on a well-worn coat. Then came legacy and community, honoring the people who came before us, standing on the shoulders of elders and mentors.

But as I kept writing, something shifted.

The values that felt most urgent weren't the sharp-edged, intellectual ones I'd built my reputation on. They were softer, more vulnerable. Compassion and humanity. Partnership with families and kids. Leading with empathy, especially when others are vulnerable.

This caught me completely off guard. When had I become someone who prioritizes protecting the fragile over challenging the complacent?

The answer sent me somewhere I didn't expect to go.

The Stories That Built Me (And I Never Knew It)

I assumed my values came from decades of professional experience. Thirty-five years of working with competitive athletes, watching what works and what destroys potential. All that expertise had to add up to some kind of wisdom about human nature, right?

Wrong.

Every meaningful value in my charter traced back to two animals from my childhood—and the completely opposite lessons they taught me about love and loss.

When my sister Stephanie and I were kids, we each had a kitten. Hers was a tabby named Puff, calm and content. Mine was a striped kitten I called Tiger, full of energy and mischief.

I loved that cat with the fierce, uncomplicated love that only children can manage—the kind where you carry your pet everywhere and talk to them like they understand every word.

Tiger was hit by a car and killed.

Just like that—here one day, gone the next, no warning, no chance to prepare or say goodbye.

I remember the confusion more than the grief. How could something so alive just stop existing? How could love just disappear without explanation?

Around the same time, we had a family dog named Jib—short for Jib Stay. She was a massive Newfoundland who slobbered everywhere and scared visitors with her size, but she was the gentlest soul you could imagine.

Where Tiger had been small and vulnerable, Jib was steady and protective. She became my constant companion, my shadow, my security blanket with fur.

When I'd "run away" from home at seven or eight years old—which meant walking to the end of our street and sitting there dramatically, waiting for someone to notice my distress—Jib would follow me. Neighbors would call my parents: "Duey's at the end of the street and there's this giant black dog near him."

My parents would just say, "That's Jib. He'll be fine."

Jib lived to be old for a Newfoundland—thirteen years of steady, loyal presence. We found her by the pond across from our house one morning.

Newfoundlands love water, and apparently she'd decided to take one final swim.

Even in death, she'd chosen something that honored her nature.

I thought these experiences had taught me about the difference between tragic loss and peaceful completion. I thought they'd made me wise about love and mortality.

I was completely wrong about what I'd learned.

The Lesson I Actually Absorbed (And Spent Decades Denying)

Here's what I actually learned from Tiger and Jib, though I didn't recognize it for forty years: if small, vulnerable things can be taken away suddenly, then maybe the solution is to avoid getting too attached to small, vulnerable things.

The Tiger experience didn't teach me about love and loss.

It taught me that love was dangerous.

This defense mechanism showed up most clearly with my cousin Carole. She was about a year younger than me and lived with sickle cell disease. From as early as I can remember, the adults in our family spoke about her in hushed, careful tones.

"Carole probably won't live to see twenty," they'd say. "She's having another crisis"—that's what they called her hospitalizations, as if her pain was a temporary storm that would pass.

Carole was brilliant, funny, and kind. She should have been easy to love.

But every time I started to feel close to her, I'd remember the predictions about her short life and pull back. I was convinced that getting attached to her would end the same way it had with Tiger—sudden loss, inexplicable absence, the sharp confusion of love interrupted.

So I kept her at arm's length. Polite but distant. Present but not invested.

I told myself I was protecting her from my expectations.

Here's the brutal truth I didn't see until decades later: while I was busy protecting myself from the pain of potentially losing Carole, I was guaranteeing that I'd miss the joy of actually knowing her.

I was so focused on avoiding Tiger moments that I was robbing both of us of Jib moments—the steady, daily presence that makes life richer.

Carole did live past twenty. She got married, defying every medical prediction with characteristic stubbornness. She lived until we were around thirty—far longer than anyone had predicted when we were children.

But by then, our patterns were set. We remained cordial strangers, connected by family but separated by my childhood terror.

When she did die, the loss felt exactly like what I'd been trying to avoid all those years.

Except worse.

I wasn't just grieving her death—I was grieving all the years of life we'd both missed because I'd been too afraid to really know her.

Years later, when my youngest daughter was born, I named her after Carole. It was my way of acknowledging something I'd never been able to say directly: despite all my careful distance, despite all my protective strategies, Carole had mattered to me.

She'd always mattered.

I just hadn't been brave enough to let her know it while she was alive.

By protecting myself from pain, I'd ensured I'd miss joy.

And that absence became its own kind of grief.

The lesson I thought I'd learned from Tiger—that love can disappear without warning—was actually incomplete. The real lesson was that I'd rather guarantee emptiness than risk fullness. I'd rather protect myself from potential pain than open myself to actual joy.

And I'd been applying this strategy for forty years without realizing it.

The Professional Mask I Wore (Without Knowing Why)

This fear of attachment didn't stay contained to personal relationships. It showed up everywhere, especially in my professional life, though disguised as something else entirely.

For years, I built my reputation around being the expert who wouldn't sugarcoat feedback, who'd tell you exactly what was wrong with your game or your approach. I called it "giving naked truth," and I was proud of it. I brought systematic solutions to problems others couldn't solve.

Parents and athletes came to me because they knew I wouldn't lie to make them feel better.

I thought this was about integrity and professional excellence. I thought I was serving people by refusing to coddle them.

But here's what I didn't see: underneath that commitment to honesty was the same Tiger-avoidance strategy I'd developed as a child. If I stayed in the role of the expert, if I maintained professional distance, I could help people improve without getting too invested in their outcomes.

I could care about their development without caring too deeply about them as individuals.

This worked brilliantly until I started working with truly elite junior athletes—kids with genuine potential to compete at the highest levels. These weren't casual players looking for weekend improvement. These were young people whose entire futures could hinge on the decisions made during their developmental years.

Suddenly, professional distance wasn't just inadequate—it was harmful.

These kids needed more than technical expertise. They needed adults who would invest in their long-term development over short-term results, who would protect them from exploitative systems, who would see them as complete human beings rather than just athletic projects.

Working with elite juniors forced me to confront the exact choice I'd avoided with Carole: I could maintain safe distance and limit my impact, or I could risk genuine investment and accept the vulnerability that comes with caring deeply about outcomes I couldn't control.

The professional mask I'd worn for decades wasn't about excellence at all.

It was about avoiding another Tiger moment.

The Losses That Stripped Away My Defenses

My carefully constructed emotional distance strategy worked until life made it impossible to maintain.

Over the past decade, I've lost two in-laws, my father, and most recently, my girlfriend. Each loss taught me something different about the relationship between love and mortality, but more importantly, they taught me something devastating about the relationship between fear and connection.

My father's death hit me in ways I didn't expect. Not just the grief—I'd prepared for that.

What blindsided me was the guilt. All the times I could have called but didn't. All the visits I could have made but postponed. All the conversations we could have had if I hadn't been so carefully managing my emotional exposure.

I'd been so busy protecting myself from potential Tiger moments that I'd created them anyway. The loss wasn't sudden and inexplicable like Tiger's death—it was gradual and inevitable. But the absence I felt was the same hollow confusion I'd experienced as a child, with one crucial difference: this time, I could see exactly how I'd contributed to my own emptiness.

My girlfriend's death shattered whatever defenses remained. It was sudden, more like Tiger than Jib—one day she was there, full of plans and opinions and terrible jokes, and then she wasn't.

The randomness of it, the complete lack of preparation or closure, brought back every childhood fear about the fragility of love.

But this time, instead of retreating into protective distance, I discovered something that changed everything: I grieved fully.

I let myself feel the complete weight of the loss without trying to manage or minimize it.

And in doing that, I learned something that rewrote forty years of self-protection: the pain of losing someone you love completely is still infinitely preferable to the emptiness of never having loved them completely at all.

The Integration I Never Saw Coming

This realization forced me to examine something I'd never consciously connected: the relationship between my personal Tiger-avoidance and my professional reputation as a disruptor.

Professionally, I've built my career challenging traditional methods in youth sports development. I call out exploitative practices. I question established systems that don't serve young athletes well.

From the outside, this looks like someone who's comfortable with conflict, willing to take risks for principles.

But here's what I didn't realize until writing my Values Charter: my professional disruption wasn't the opposite of my personal protection strategy.

It was the same strategy applied differently.

When I challenge coaches who provide "daycare masquerading as junior development," I'm not just criticizing poor methods. I'm protecting kids from the kind of adults who exploit vulnerability instead of nurturing it.

When I question parents who prioritize short-term wins over long-term development, I'm not attacking parental involvement. I'm preventing children from becoming casualties of adult anxieties.

My professional disruption is actually my personal values fighting back against systems that create Tiger moments for other people.

The revelation wasn't that I needed to choose between being a disruptor or a protector. The revelation was that they were the same thing, directed at different targets.

You can't protect what you're not willing to fight for. You can't advocate for vulnerable people without challenging the systems that exploit them.

My professional willingness to confront harmful systems came from the exact same source as my personal reluctance to risk deep connection: I'd learned too young that vulnerable things get hurt, and I'd spent my life trying to prevent that from happening.

The difference was that professionally, I was trying to prevent it from happening to other people. Personally, I was trying to prevent it from happening to me.

What I Actually Find Abhorrent

So what's my real answer to that dating question that started this entire exploration?

I find abhorrent any behavior that exploits vulnerability for personal gain. Adults who use fear or false promises to extract money from desperate parents. People who treat children as products rather than people. Anyone who uses authority to silence rather than build.

I'm repulsed by cruelty disguised as toughness, by indifference masquerading as professionalism, by laziness hiding behind tradition. I'm disturbed by systems that prioritize short-term extraction over long-term development.

But here's what I didn't expect to discover: what I find most abhorrent is my own former tendency to avoid difficult love because I was afraid of difficult loss.

I'm haunted by the years I spent protecting myself from Tiger moments instead of embracing Jib relationships. I'm troubled by every time I chose safety over connection, distance over investment, professional boundaries over human care.

The woman who asked that question probably expected a lighter answer. Pet peeves, minor irritations, the kind of safe complaints that don't reveal too much.

Instead, she accidentally triggered an examination of my entire moral framework and a recognition of forty years of unconscious patterns.

But here's the twist I didn't see coming: recognizing these patterns didn't make me ashamed of them.

It made me grateful for them.

The Unexpected Gift of Late Recognition

Every defense mechanism I developed, every protective strategy I employed, every way I learned to avoid vulnerability—all of it was in service of the same goal: preserving my capacity to love.

The child who learned to fear attachment after Tiger's death wasn't broken. He was trying to protect something precious.

The adult who maintained professional distance wasn't cold. He was trying to serve effectively without risking devastation.

Even my failure to connect deeply with Carole, while regrettable, came from a place of caring so much that I was terrified of losing her.

The recognition that I'd been running a Tiger-avoidance strategy for decades didn't shame me. It explained me. And more importantly, it showed me that I was finally strong enough to try a different approach.

These days, I'm much more interested in what I'm for than what I'm against. I'm for authenticity over performance, for long-term growth over short-term wins, for protecting vulnerability rather than exploiting it. I'm for the kind of love that stays present even when outcomes are uncertain, that invests fully even when loss is inevitable.

Most of all, I'm for the difficult courage it takes to choose connection despite fragility, to build relationships despite mortality, to love completely despite the absolute certainty of eventual loss.

The kitten named Tiger taught me that love could disappear without warning. The dog named Jib taught me that love could also endure and complete itself gracefully. My cousin Carole taught me that avoiding love to prevent loss creates its own form of tragedy. My recent losses taught me that the fear of grief is often worse than grief itself, and that protecting yourself from pain often means protecting yourself from joy.

It took me forty years to understand that all of these lessons were necessary, and that choosing love despite its fragility might be the most courageous thing we do.

The Question Behind the Question

Looking back, I'm grateful for that unexpected question from a stranger on a dating app. Not because it led to a relationship—it didn't—but because it forced me to articulate values I didn't know I had and to recognize growth I didn't know had happened.

The best questions do that. They don't just ask what you think about something. They reveal who you've become when you weren't paying attention. And sometimes, if you're very lucky, they show you that the person you've become is someone you can respect—someone whose values are worth defending and whose love is worth offering, even when there are no guarantees about how it will be received.

Perhaps you have your own Tiger and Jib stories—experiences that shaped how you approach love and loss without your conscious recognition. Maybe you've developed your own version of Tiger-avoidance, or found your own ways of protecting what matters most. The particulars don't matter. What matters is the willingness to examine the patterns, to understand where they came from, and to choose consciously whether they still serve you.

Maybe the most important question isn't "What do you find abhorrent?" but "What are you still running from?"

What I find abhorrent, it turns out, isn't really about other people's behavior. It's about the ways we all protect ourselves from the very things that make life worth living. It's about choosing safety over truth, distance over connection, extraction over investment.

What I'm for is the opposite of all that. What I'm for is the courage to show up completely, love fully, and trust that whatever happens next is better than the alternative of never having risked anything real at all.

That might be the most important thing I've learned: the willingness to offer your authentic self without controlling the outcome is both the scariest and most essential thing you can do. Everything I find abhorrent is ultimately about people who refuse to take that risk.

Everything I'm for is about people who are brave enough to try.

The woman asked me what I found abhorrent. What I gave her instead—though she'll never know it—was my Values Charter, written in the ink of memory and loss, shaped by a kitten, a dog, a cousin, and decades of learning that love is always worth the risk—just as much a part of my unfurrowed ground as the legacy I was born into.