COLLATERAL DAMAGE

The collateral damage of getting older is reading restaurant menus.

I always knew the glasses were coming. Somewhere around your mid-forties, tiny fonts start fighting back. I had accepted that.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the flashlight.

The first time I pulled out my phone to illuminate the menu, I felt something shift. Glasses? Fine. But a flashlight? No.

Every trendy restaurant now seems to believe that darkness is part of the dining experience. Somewhere along the way, they decided that if you can read the menu, the ambiance has failed. I don’t need the room lit up like a Costco. I just need enough light to know whether I ordered the chicken or the sausage.

I don’t even pretend anymore.

Actually... that’s not true.

I absolutely pretend.

Every time I pull out my phone, I try to hide the flashlight from the waiter, whom I’ve known for roughly twelve seconds and will probably never see again. Apparently, his opinion of my eyesight matters deeply to me. So I quickly shove my phone back into my shirt pocket… only to realize thirty seconds later that I forgot to turn the flashlight off.

Now I’m just sitting there glowing, like an idiot.

It got me thinking about collateral damage.

Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind.

The knees that creak when you stand up. The names that take an extra beat to recall. The inability to stay awake for the last twenty minutes of a movie. The confidence to buy... well, any piece of clothing without trying it on first.

I ordered a pair of shorts from one of my favorite stores, Corridor. I’ve bought clothes there for years, so I skipped the fitting room phase of life and ordered them online.

When they arrived, they didn’t fit. Not even the elastic waistband could bail me out. They were on sale, which meant they were non-refundable. So I asked my son if he wanted to try them on. He did.

Yep, they fit him perfectly.

And that’s when it hit me.

Somewhere along the way, I had outgrown the picture I still had of myself.

Somehow… My son had grown into it.

These changes usually don’t announce themselves.

They sneak up on you disguised as shorts.

It also made me wonder if there’s such a thing as collateral gain.

But there are other things I seem to see more clearly than I ever have.

A friend once told me that people show you exactly who they are within the first thirty seconds of meeting them. At the time, I thought that was ridiculous. Thirty seconds?

People are complicated. They have histories, contradictions, and hidden depths. Surely it takes years to really know someone.

Now I’m not so sure.

Experience teaches you to recognize patterns.

One friend showed up twenty minutes late to coffee the first time we met. Carrying a coffee from another coffee shop. Which meant he was somehow late... because he’d stopped for coffee before coming to coffee.

He’s still late.

Experience doesn’t make you psychic. It just makes you a better observer.

Which is strange, because I spend my life writing characters who change.

Every development meeting eventually circles back to the same note, “The character needs a bigger arc.”

Make him more vulnerable.

Make him more dangerous.

Make him more likable.

Make him more masculine.

One executive even told me, “Make him the kind of guy who’d throw me against a wall and fuck me, not a nice guy like my husband.”

This was for network television.

Apparently someone was looking to add a little more dimension to their own life.

Underneath every one of those notes is the same question: Can this person become someone else?

Characters have to change.

But somewhere over the last few years, I’ve started wondering whether that’s actually true about people.

Do we really change?

Or do we simply reveal ourselves over time?

Were we always headed in the same direction, and life just slowly peeled away the parts that were hiding us?

Which leaves me with a more uncomfortable question.

What’s my story arc?

I’ve spent twenty years helping fictional people discover who they’re supposed to become.

But ask me about my own… I wouldn’t know what to say.

When I look back, I still see the same guy. The guy who overthinks everything. The guy who wants people to laugh. The guy who roots for the underdog.

The guy who promises himself he’ll stay calm the next time someone yells that there’s a spider in the house.

Every time someone screams because there’s a spider or a dead creature in the yard that requires “Dad,” I tell myself this is going to be the time I handle it like an adult.

I walk in trying to project confidence.

Thirty seconds later, I’m hyperventilating while negotiating with an animal that is already dead.

Which, if we’re being honest, isn’t negotiating. It’s stalling.

As evidence, here’s my son filming me trying not to puke while disposing of a dead mouse that a hawk dropped in our backyard. Turns out my character arc has some limits.

Maybe that’s my arc.

Not becoming someone else. Becoming easier to recognize.

Maybe that’s the collateral gain.

The menu gets blurrier. The people become clearer.

You stop confusing charisma with character.

You stop mistaking attention for friendship.

Consistency becomes deeply exciting.

You stop looking for people to surprise you and start appreciating the ones who never do.

A few nights ago, I still needed the flashlight to read the dessert menu.

But I didn’t need it to look across the table. My wife. My kids. Arguing over who ate more of the shared fries and whether they’ve earned dessert after all.

Somewhere along the way, while I’d been busy squinting at the menu, life had quietly come into focus.

I was where I was supposed to be.