ENDGAME

How can I help? How can I be of service?

Who talks like that?

In the modern world, depending on your mood, that phrase makes you feel like a target. It is the language of people who know how to play and break the rules. When you see the players getting gamed, everyone seems ridiculously annoying. Like the ones who are trained to and live to value the time and lives of bosses and shareholders more than the blood in their own veins. The words arrive with rehearsed voices and smiles.

But there is another version of those words. It belongs to a father.

A father knows lives are being held together by the love, knowledge, wisdom, and honesty he chooses to share, or chooses to withhold. Words are not filler. They decide futures. They decide damage. For him, service is a life-and-death responsibility. It shows up in how he pauses before answering, how he chooses silence instead of convenient conflict.

The new year arrived not with celebration, but with a rupture. One of the worst days in a family’s life. There was no explosion, except internally, as he was let go from a place in the trenches of human suffering that had long ago burned his spirit to a crisp. No misconduct. The door was left open, with the suggestion that he would be welcomed back if he improved how he played the game. Polite words to dull the pain of dismissal.

The timing mattered. A daughter was home from college for the break. This was supposed to be a season of joy, not the burden of familial and financial collapse. He tried to gather himself, to find a way to reveal the loss without poisoning the holiday. This wasn’t denial. This was restraint.

When the truth finally surfaced, sympathy did not arrive with it. Instead, rumors of unethical behavior spread the way smoke does, the way STDs do.

In the world of addiction counseling, the pattern is familiar. Truth is measured by what remains. Damage is hidden just long enough to finish the day. Protect the mood. Move on as if nothing happened. That’s how things survive longer than they should.

And fucking addicts run the world like drugs themselves. Their makers and suppliers withhold truth to hide true effects, and ruin the high.

But sometimes the high ends.

Sometimes being cut loose exposes the thinking that kept a man stuck. The loops of justification and quiet bargains made with exhaustion and identity. The same patterns taught to addicts who confuse endurance with strength and familiarity with purpose.

The firing didn’t destroy him.
It interrupted him.

It forced a reckoning with a way of living that no longer worked, a way of serving that had started to look like self-erasure. In the break, the spark returned.

This is how the game ends. And how the fun begins.