I walked into Indochino to buy my first tuxedo and knew within a minute I was in the wrong room. Some of that was the shop. Most of it was me. I didn't know the first thing about the world of suits, and I'd walked in expecting the appointment to feel like something. A rite. The moment a man buys the thing he'll marry his wife in. Instead I got a person who barely looked up, a few flat questions, and a slow-dawning sense that whatever I'd been picturing wasn't going to happen here. So I left. Twenty-nine years old, alone in a chapter that was supposed to mean something, disappointed on an ordinary afternoon.
I don't write one of these every year. I wrote one last year, and here and there over the years I've left notes, because I've always been the kind of person who has to put the philosophy of a thing into words every so often, to let the soul get some air. Last year's was about what I'd survived. This year I mostly went quiet. Not because there was nothing to say. Because there was too much, none of it fit in a caption, and some of it I had to live all the way through before I could turn it into anything worth reading.
So consider this a reintroduction. Not the highlight reel. The real one.
The suit I built, and never learned to wear
There's a particular loneliness in outgrowing your own life. You spend your twenties sewing something ambitious: companies, a name, a reputation in a small town that watches everything. Then one morning you look down and the thing fits like a suit cut for a stranger. Broad in places you haven't grown into. Tight in others you didn't know you'd outgrown.
I built that suit. Picked the fabric, paid for the tailoring, stood for every fitting. What nobody tells you is that wearing it is a separate skill from making it, and there's no one who can teach you the second part. My father would have been the man standing off my shoulder in the shop, telling me what looked right. He's been gone since I was six. So the day I went looking for my tuxedo, I went the way I've gone at most things that matter: alone, guessing at what a man is supposed to look like and slowly becoming the guess.
After I walked out of the first shop, I didn't drive home. I got a haircut instead. Sat in a barber's chair and fell into one of those long, wandering conversations about life and the roads that get us where we're going, the kind you can't schedule and can't fake. Then I wandered into Suitsupply, and the whole day changed key. A man met me at the door and offered me a beer. I'm not much of a drinker, but it felt required for the plot, so I took it. Turned out to be a very expensive beer. A woman walked me through the entire thing, pinned it to my body, made me feel like the moment was actually mine. My best man, Sam, showed up partway through, took one look, and told me the tuxedo was the way to go, never mind that he hadn't laid eyes on a single other option. He had a very expensive beer too. His was free.
We closed the day out over happy-hour tacos, reminiscing on the strange layers of a life that had put us both in that room. And somewhere between the bad appointment and the good tacos, the thing I'd wanted at the start quietly happened anyway. Nobody handed me the rite of passage. I had to walk out of the wrong room to find it, and when I did, it was made of ordinary stuff: a haircut, a stranger's welcome, a friend showing up, a beer I didn't need. That's the part about becoming a man nobody warns you about. It doesn't arrive as a ceremony. It assembles itself out of the day, if you keep moving.
The rifle with a blank space
At eighteen, at my high school graduation party, my mother handed me a rifle she had been holding for me my entire life. A Winchester Model 1894 — the lever-action John Browning drew up in the year of its name, the long gun that stayed behind to watch over the West after the six-shooters were done taming it. The rifle in the back window of every ranch truck between here and the Montana line. It was heavy in a way that had nothing to do with steel.
My uncle, my dad's best friend, put a Leatherman in my hand and told me to take the cap off the buttstock. Inside was a matchbook. Inside the matchbook was a note, in my father's handwriting, written for a day he knew he would not be standing in. My father died by suicide when I was six years old. He wrote the note, carved the stock, and arranged for a rifle to reach me on a birthday he had already decided to miss.
Carved into the wood were three names. My grandfather. My father. Me. And beneath mine, a fourth line left blank, space for a child I haven't had yet, in a marriage that's a month away. Four generations of men in a single piece of walnut, and one of them reaching across the one gap that can't be closed to make sure I knew I belonged to the line.
What the note said stays between him and me. I'll tell you only that it was sincere, that it shook something loose in me that has never fully set again, and that I've made a hard peace with the fact that the same hand which left me a blessing also left me the wound. Both are true.
Grief doesn't resolve. It just changes clothes.
The rifle has lived in a safe for eleven years. Partly because life is loud and busy, partly because I never had a home of my own solid enough to keep a thing like that the way it deserves. My mom and her husband held it safe when I couldn't. This year I'm taking it out. I'm going to fire it at my wedding — one round, into open Wyoming air, for the man who won't be in the photographs. Not to mourn him. To put him in the room. To save him the seat.
The woman who taught the world to hold on
My mother spent her career in mental health, much of it inside the VA, teaching people how to ask the hard question of someone they love. How to sit in a room with another person's darkness without flinching. How to help a stranger hold on for one more day. Her whole life was quiet, selfless service to other people's survival.
This year I got the call, and I beat the ambulance to her house, and I won't describe what I found there, because she is alive, thank God, and some doors you close gently behind you. She'd had a severe stroke. The cause has a name most people have never heard: CADASIL, a genetic condition that thickens the small vessels in the brain and sends strokes through a family across generations. There is no cure. The woman who taught half of Wyoming how to hold on was suddenly the one being held.
The months after were a blur of highways. Bad care at first, then better care two hours north in Billings, then rehab, then the slow, unfinished work of getting her home. I drove up every day I could. I sat across from the woman I'm about to marry and told her the plain truth: I don't know when I'll be home, or how often, or what the next few months hold. She didn't blink. She came when she could, gave what she had, and was standing there every time I got back.
My mother is still fighting. Every single day. She is the strongest soul I have ever stood next to, CADASIL is a ruthless and unfair opponent, and both of those things will go on being true for a long time. She is a light in this world. That's not a metaphor. Ask anyone she ever pulled back from an edge.
Becoming my own lab
CADASIL runs on a coin flip. If a parent carries it, each child has a fifty-fifty chance of carrying it too. I sent my DNA to a private lab and waited over a year for it to come back, and even now I don't have a clean medical verdict, just my own reading of my own data, gathered off the standard path, outside the big machine that likes you to wait your turn and trust the process.
So I did the only thing that made sense to a man who'd already learned that no one was coming with the map. I built my own instrument panel. I measure almost everything now: sleep and heart rate and the slow variables underneath them on a WHOOP, body composition, gut microbiome, regular blood panels. The standard book offers CADASIL almost nothing, but it does say one honest thing. With no cure, the single lever you actually hold is your vascular health. Blood pressure. Glucose. Inflammation. The metabolic machinery running beneath the brain's small vessels.
So I pushed that lever harder than any clinic would think to ask for. Last time I checked, my metabolic age came back around twenty-three, six years under the odometer, in the one system I might have a prayer of bending. I can't outrun my genetics. Nobody can. But I can make my body the hardest possible ground for this thing to take root in, I can turn a year of terror into a discipline, and I can build something out of it so the next family standing where mine stood isn't as alone as we were.
That's what the Goodyear Foundation is becoming: a place built out of my family's real experience with mental health and chronic illness, so the hard-won stuff doesn't die inside one household. It's still early. Most real things are, for a long time.
Machines that measure everything, and heal nothing
Here's the part I never saw coming. This year I spent more hours than I'd ever have guessed working alongside robots and AI, chasing the idea that these tools might make some corner of humanity better. And in the middle of all that measuring, the sensors, the models, the endless quantified self, my mother had a stroke no algorithm could stop, the note in the buttstock still said what it said, and not one of the machines could touch the two things that actually mattered.
They can measure everything and heal nothing that counts. A wearable can tell me my heart rate variability to the millisecond and cannot tell me how to sit with my mother while she relearns a word. The most sophisticated model on earth can't drive to Billings for me. It can't stand off my shoulder in a tuxedo shop. The frontier I actually live on isn't technological. It's the old human one: grief, love, showing up, holding on. No upgrade is coming for it. There's a strange relief in that, once you stop fighting it.
A smoke test for the soul
In automotive school they teach you the smoke test. When a system has a leak you can't see, you pump it full of smoke and watch where it escapes. The leak announces itself. You don't argue with it. You find it, you seal it or you cut the line, and you close the hood.
A hard year is a smoke test for your life. When my mother was in that hospital bed and my hands were full and I needed the people I'd counted on to simply show up, the smoke ran through everything, and I watched exactly where it leaked. Some of it came from directions I'd have bet my name on. There were people who studied what I built closely enough to copy it, and studied me closely enough to know precisely when I was down, and chose that moment. I won't name them. Living well in full view is a more honest answer than any callout, and a small town keeps its own ledger.
So I did what the smoke test trains you to do. I found the leaks and I closed the doors, quietly, without a scene, the way you shut a door on a room you're done heating. We're moving, too, out of a neighborhood we outgrew. Not every neighbor is neighborly, and I've come to see that's less a circumstance than a chosen way of moving through the world, one my wife and I simply won't keep company with anymore. You raise your standard, or your standard quietly lowers to meet the room. There's no third option.
The men I chose, and the one who stayed
If a hard year shows you your leaks, it also shows you your load-bearing walls. The men still standing when the smoke cleared are the ones standing up with me next month. I'm giving each of them the same thing: a Ruger Super Wrangler, one of the 250th Anniversary revolvers, roll-marked "Made in the 250th Year of American Liberty" — a rimfire built to be handed down, the kind of small honest object a man keeps and one day gives to his own. A gift made for the next generation, from a circle of men I intend to grow old alongside.
And then there's her. I'm marrying my high school sweetheart in a month. The girl who knew me before the companies and the name, before any of it, who watched this entire brutal year without flinching and never once asked me to be smaller or steadier than I could be. When I told her I didn't know when I'd be home, she didn't negotiate. She came when she could and was there when I got back.
Last year I wrote that real love is patient, primal, and quiet. This year I watched it prove itself under the worst pressure I've ever run it through, and it held. That's the only endorsement that counts — not the wedding, not the vows, but the eleven months before them, when it would have been easy for either of us to let go, and neither of us did.
The room we're building
Not everything this year was something I had to cut. Some of it I got to build. Local Nakamal, the little kava bar I opened back when this town had no idea what kava even was, grew up this year into something with a wider door. The Living Room is a community space in Sheridan, a place made for people to actually sit in a room together in an age that keeps us staring at screens. We've already held some phenomenal nights there. It's where I'm having my wedding reception.
It taught me a lesson the businesses I run alone never could: the balance of time and energy, and the honest limit of my own two hands. I poured effort into it, and then I learned the deeper thing, that a place like this doesn't run on one person's force. It runs on team, on community, on letting the right people find their way to the door. So I loosened my grip and let the universe fall into line, and some of the best of it showed up precisely when I stopped forcing. That's a hard lesson for a man who became his own guide out of necessity: becoming one doesn't mean staying one. The whole point of learning to carry everything alone is earning the wisdom to know when to set some of it down.
The compass for what's next
People ask what I'm building toward, and the honest answer is a kind of freedom — financial, geographic, emotional, the freedom to own my own hours. But this year cut the word down to something truer than a lifestyle. Freedom isn't a beach or a bank balance. It's being solid enough to drive to Billings every day and still run the businesses well. It's a nervous system that doesn't hand the wheel to a stranger's contempt or a hospital hallway. It's the room to grieve your father and still fire his rifle into a clear sky at your own wedding, and mean every part of it.
At twenty-nine, here's what I know. I'll keep it short, because the year already said most of it out loud:
- The map was never coming. You become the map, or you wander.
- Discipline is self-respect with its boots on.
- Grief and gratitude live in the same house and share a coat.
- Cut the leaks. Keep the load-bearing walls. Learn the difference before the storm, if you can.
- The machines will measure everything. The things that matter will still ask for your whole body in the room.
- Softness under pressure is the rarest kind of strength there is.
The blank space is still there, under my name, in the walnut. For the first time it doesn't read as something missing. It reads as something coming — a name I'll carve myself one day, for a kid who'll grow up with a father in the room, which is the one thing I never got and the whole reason I became a man who stays. I went for that tuxedo alone. The day gave me people anyway. I'll wear it like I made it. And somewhere in the crowd, in the crack of the 1894, my dad finally gets his seat.
If you've read this far, you're the kind of person these letters are for. I write at daltongoodyear.com, slowly, honestly, mostly for the ones building something real in a loud world. The Goodyear Foundation is where the harder work is headed. No pitch. Just this: if any of it landed, come walk the next chapter with me.
And if you're closer to an edge than you'd admit to anyone, don't punch the clock early. Say the hard thing out loud to one person. Walk into a room with people in it. In the US you can reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline any time by calling or texting 988. There is more left to live than you can see from where you're standing. I'd know. My father couldn't see it from where he stood. I'm still here, carving names into a future he helped start.
— Dalton
