Toward Empowerment: The Reckoning We Avoid

Notes from the Loft on the courage it takes to face what’s broken.

Reckoning is the step we like to skip, but it’s the most important one if you want to resolve anything and truly move on. Without reckoning, you’re doomed to repetition. You’ll fall off the horse eventually, because you never made the necessary adjustments to keep yourself on course.

Skipping the reckoning is like getting a flat tire and patching it up without fixing what caused the blowout. Bandaids don’t heal relationships. They have their use, but it’s the antibiotic cream beneath that does the work. Reckoning is that—the understanding that heals what’s wounded.

I can’t give you personal examples without exposing people who don’t deserve that. Even changing their names wouldn’t disguise them enough. The acts themselves are recognizable. So I’ll just say this: I know too many people who go through life skipping over the reckoning, as if you can sustain a relationship on patched-up apologies without ever achieving the deeper understanding that prevents the same fracture from happening again.

Parental relationships, friendships, marriages—each one is human, and each one requires reckoning. Uncomfortable, painful reckoning. But if you keep avoiding it, you’re just living in a circle. You’re not moving on; you’re just soothing yourself until the problem returns.

It takes courage to face what’s broken, to be honest with yourself. That’s why so few people do it. But when you finally do—when you reckon—something extraordinary happens. There’s a release. It’s like opening a window in a room that’s been sealed for years. Like putting on glasses and seeing the leaves on trees for the first time, or recognizing what had only been blurs on a chalkboard.

That’s recognition.

That’s understanding.

That’s healing.

That’s freedom.

But freedom isn’t the end of reckoning—it’s the beginning of awareness. Reckoning doesn’t mean the problem won’t return; it means you’ll understand it when it does. You’ll see its shape, its pattern, the reason it keeps appearing. And when you understand why the tendency exists, you’ll know how to meet it differently.

Reckoning gives you more than freedom.

It gives you agency.

It gives you power.

It gives you the one thing hiding never will: the ability to change.