On a month of depletion, a line that landed while driving, and what it means to lead when you don’t know where the ground is.
I was driving when I heard it.
Listening to a book called Soul Care through my speakers, somewhere between wherever I was coming from and wherever I was going, when this line landed: “You can’t lead out of a place you haven’t seen victory.”
I couldn’t write it down. Couldn’t stop and underline it. Just me and the road and that sentence sitting in the cab of the truck, asking something I didn’t have an answer to.
I’ve been depleted for about a month. Not depressed; that’s an important distinction for me, because I know what that feels like, and this isn’t it. This is something closer to wading through molasses. Fatigue that doesn’t lift. The absence of the sharpness I’m used to operating with. Every day feeling one day away from being past it, and then waking up and realizing I’m not past it yet.
I looked back through four weeks of my weekly journal recaps and found the same complaints repeating. Fatigue. Low energy. Feeling behind. I went through everything: my supplement stack, my diet, the sleep data on my watch. I noticed my sleep deteriorates badly around 1 AM every night. Made some adjustments. Still waiting to see if they hold.
What I think is closest to the truth is that I’ve been fighting something off. No fever, no sore throat, none of the obvious markers. Just my body quietly burning resources I didn’t know I was spending.
Here’s what I noticed in the middle of it though: I was still holding up a lot. Family. Business. Clients. A challenging teen baseball team. Relationships that need tending. All of it kept moving. And somewhere in that month of molasses, I realized that the investments I’d been making in myself: the workouts, the routines, the disciplines, had been quietly absorbing the impact of everything I was carrying. When those investments depleted, I felt the full weight of what had been sitting on top of them.
My workout routine isn’t just fitness. I’ve known this intellectually for a while but the past month confirmed it. It’s my primary emotional regulation tool. When it goes missing for a week I feel it. When it goes missing for a month, everything downstream suffers: patience, clarity, capacity, the ability to absorb hard things without flinching.
Which brought me back to that line in the truck.
You can’t lead out of a place you haven’t seen victory.
I know the theological answer here. Victory through Christ is real. It’s not something I’m earning or working toward; it’s already won. Forgiven, secure, empowered to obey by faith even in hard circumstances. I believe that.
But there’s a gap between knowing that and feeling it operative in the specific hard places. The depletion. The teen who pushes back. The business that isn’t producing what I hoped. The month of molasses. Knowing I have victory and being able to lead from it are two different things. And I’m not sure I’ve figured out how to close that gap in every room of my life.
What I do know is that without the journal and the weekly recap, I might have spent that entire month underwater without ever understanding why. The self-awareness infrastructure I’ve built, slowly, imperfectly, over years, gave me enough distance from myself to see the pattern. That’s not nothing. That might actually be what victory looks like right now. Not a feeling of triumph. Just enough clarity to keep showing up in the hard places while you wait for the ground to feel more solid.
I’m still waiting. But at least I know what I’m waiting for.
Is there a place in your life right now where you’re leading but haven’t seen victory yet? I’m not asking for a resolution, just whether you recognize the feeling.
Reply and tell me. One sentence is enough.
