75th letter from Mihai

Tue 20 Jan, 2026 Colmar, France

I’ve been settling into this new job.
A remote role, working from home. It fits my skills and my priorities.

I’m not out in nature much, and I’m not around people physically as much as I’d like. Those things still matter to me, and I know I’ll want more of them again. For now, though, I feel grateful. I have room to breathe, enough stability, fewer decisions driven by urgency.

That stability has changed something important for me.

It means I don’t feel pressure to turn these letters into persuasion. I’m not trying to convince you of anything or move you toward a sale. I’m writing because I need to understand something for myself, and because maybe you’ll recognize yourself in it too.

Lately I’ve been reading Good Inside by Dr. Becky. I’m not reading it to collect ideas. I’m trying to sit with the parts that explain patterns I already live with, and to learn how to do a better job for my kids.

The one that stayed with me most is her work around repair. Not repair as a parenting technique, but what happens when repair never comes.

Children make sense of the world through experience, not explanations. When something painful happens and it isn’t acknowledged, the child still needs the world to feel safe. So they look for a solution.

Sometimes that solution turns inward. It can show up as blame, or as doubt.

Maybe I’m wrong.
Or maybe I misunderstood something important, and someone else knows better.

Self-doubt can be a way to survive.

If I convince myself my perception isn’t reliable, then the people I depend on can still feel safe. The structure holds, and I absorb the cost.

That landed hard for me.

I grew up in a small village in Romania. We didn’t have much money, and there was a lot of tension around it. There were moments when I saved money for weeks or months, money that mattered to me, and it disappeared. When I asked about it, I was lied to, laughed at, or made to feel naïve for even noticing.

What stayed with me wasn’t the money.

It was what came after.

Accepting that my parents were lying to me, or taking from me, felt too dangerous. That version of reality didn’t feel survivable. So I chose another one.

I told myself I must be mistaken.
That I didn’t understand things properly.
That other people knew better than I did.

That choice worked. It kept the world predictable, and it taught me something I carried forward.

As an adult, that doubt didn’t disappear. It quietly reorganized my life.

I spent ten years in the military.

I don’t say that with resentment. The military gave me structure, clarity, direction. It told me where to be, what to do, how to move through the day. In many ways, it felt like relief.

Looking back, I can see why.

When you don’t fully trust your perception, a system that decides for you feels calming. The rules are clear. Authority lives outside you. You don’t have to listen inward. You follow.

I accepted that structure willingly. It made my world feel contained and manageable. For a long time, it did exactly what I needed it to do.

For me, what once protected me slowly started to limit me.

Self-doubt stopped protecting me when I wanted to express my real, honest self.

When I wanted to choose how to spend my days.
When I wanted to follow curiosity instead of permission.
When I wanted to trust that quiet inner signal that says go there or stay here, even if I can’t justify it yet.

Without repair, you don’t just lose a moment.
​You lose confidence in your own experience.

Repair doesn’t mean fixing the past or assigning blame. Sometimes it’s simply allowing another layer of truth to exist by naming what happened, letting reality be acknowledged instead of overwritten.

I’m still learning how to do that. With others, and with myself.

Some days it’s listening to an instinct and acting on it. Washing the car in the cold. Spending a day in the woods with my daughter instead of doing what seems more reasonable. Letting myself decide, and living with the outcome.

I’m still in it.

One dad figuring it out, same as you.
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P.S. Reader thank you for reading. These letters matter to me, and I’d genuinely love to know what you’re getting out of them. What are you wrestling with these days? If there’s a kind of guidance that would actually help right now, I’m listening.
Your answers would help shape what Rooted Dad becomes next.

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