I originally recorded this because of This Is Us Season 6 Episode 9, “The Hill.” Mary and I watched Kate and Toby struggle to understand how two people who still loved each other could become trapped inside different versions of the life they thought they were building together, and I saw far too much of myself in it.
What follows is not really an episode recap. It is the story behind a difficult stretch of my life: losing the identity I had built around my career, confronting a complicated relationship with my father, experiencing panic attacks and a mental health crisis, starting over professionally, putting too much of myself into proving that I could succeed again and eventually realizing that I was hurting the very relationships I thought all that work was supposed to protect.
There are pieces of this story I still cannot discuss publicly, and there are other parts that belong to people besides me. What I can talk about is what happened inside me, what it did to my marriage and family, and why I eventually had to decide that being successful could not keep meaning sacrificing the people I was trying to be successful for.
Content note: This conversation includes discussion of grief, panic attacks, hospitalization, family conflict, emotional trauma and a period of significant mental-health struggle. It reflects my personal experience and perspective.
Hear Blake Tell The Full Story
I recorded this without notes because I did not want to turn it into a presentation. I wanted to explain, as plainly as I could, what had been happening behind the scenes and why Mary & Blake Media had sometimes slowed down, changed plans or disappeared from things we had promised to do.
Listen Right Here
Why “The Hill” Hit So Close To Home
Our conversation about Kate and Toby became the catalyst for this episode because their fight was not really about whether one person loved the other enough. It was about work, identity, sacrifice, changing priorities and what happens when the life you are building starts pulling you away from the people you say you are building it for.
For Years, My Job Was Part Of My Identity
I spent most of my adult life working inside my family’s business. I started near the bottom, doing whatever needed to be done, and eventually worked my way into a position of real responsibility. I was proud of that. More importantly, I had built an entire picture of my future around it.
My father had been enormously important to me growing up. I admired his drive, his success and the life he had created, and for a very long time I thought becoming successful meant becoming some version of him. Work, family, identity and approval became tangled together in ways I did not really understand until years of therapy forced me to look at them separately.
When the professional and family relationships underneath that future eventually broke down, I did not simply feel like I had lost a job. It felt like somebody had removed the foundation underneath the person I thought I was supposed to become.
Losing My Mother Changed My Family
My mother died suddenly when I was 18. I happened to speak to her on Valentine’s Day in 2002, told her I loved her and expected there would simply be another conversation. A few hours later, she died from a brain aneurysm. I have always been grateful that an ordinary phone call became the last thing we shared.
Her death changed all of us, including my father. I can only describe that part from my perspective, but the relationship I had with him afterward became increasingly complicated. By the time I was an adult, working for him and building my own family, I had developed a level of codependency that took me years to recognize.
That history matters because when our relationship eventually fractured, I was not experiencing it as one adult disagreeing with another. My brain was processing it through decades of identity, grief, approval, fear and the belief that succeeding professionally was inseparable from being worthy personally.
Eventually, My Brain Simply Couldn’t Keep Doing It
In 2021, after a work situation I still cannot fully discuss publicly, I reached a point where I was barely functioning. I experienced panic attacks, could not sleep normally, struggled to eat and found myself unable to process ordinary parts of life the way I once had.
I stopped working for a period and entered an intensive treatment program. At the same time, much of Mary & Blake Media slowed down. Podcasts were delayed. I could not reliably go live. Projects such as Blake’s Book Club stopped. Social interaction became harder because there were days when simply putting myself in front of people felt impossible.
Mary carried an enormous amount during that period. She took care of our family, helped take care of me and kept pieces of our life moving while I tried to relearn something that sounds simple until you lose it: that my value as a husband, father and human being was not determined by whether I was succeeding at a job.
Then I Had To Figure Out Who I Was Without The Old Life
Eventually I left the company and had to build a professional identity somewhere else. That was terrifying because I had spent most of my life preparing for one future. Suddenly I was entering a completely different field and asking myself whether any of the confidence I once had belonged to me or had simply come from the system around me.
When I got the new job, I loved it. I was learning something new, working hard and discovering that I could be good at something outside the world I had known. After spending so much time believing I was not good enough, that success felt like proof that I could build a life from scratch.
The problem was that I wanted that proof too badly.
I Left The Old Job, But I Brought Some Of The Old Rules With Me
I threw myself into succeeding. I had trouble saying no. Constructive criticism felt more personal than it should have because I had spent years learning to connect professional performance with personal worth. I wanted to prove that I deserved the opportunity, that I could handle everything and that nobody had been right to doubt me.
From the outside, this probably looked admirable. I was working. I was rebuilding. I was providing for my family. Inside my house, however, the cost started becoming obvious. Meetings with Mary disappeared. Podcasts became harder to schedule. I was physically present but not always emotionally available, and my family began feeling the difference.
That was the contradiction I had not understood yet: I had escaped one system in which everything eventually bowed to work, only to begin recreating the same rule inside my own life.
I Realized I Had Become Toby
Watching Toby constantly working in San Francisco while explaining that he was doing it because the family needed a future hit me immediately. I understood his logic because I had been using almost exactly the same logic. Work mattered because work provided stability. Stability protected my family. Therefore, giving more of myself to work felt like an act of love.
But an intention does not erase an impact. Mary had been telling me that we were not connecting, that she felt more like my friend than my wife and that the things I was trying to build were increasingly consuming the time and attention our relationship actually needed.
That is why “The Hill” wrecked me. I was not crying only because Kate and Toby were struggling. I was watching an exaggerated reflection of something happening in my own house and realizing that being able to explain why I was doing something did not automatically make what I was doing sustainable.
She Had Given Me Everything She Had
During one of our conversations, Mary described the previous year with an image that stayed with me. She said it was as though we were standing outside in the cold and she had given me every warm piece of clothing she had so I could go close the door, but I still had not closed it.
That hurt because I knew exactly what she meant. She had spent months helping me rebuild myself, and when I finally began feeling capable again, I poured much of that renewed energy into proving myself somewhere else. Even worse, there were times when Mary offered me advice that I interpreted as criticism while I happily used similar ideas professionally.
It was not because I did not love her. The problem was almost the opposite: I had convinced myself that working harder was one of the ways I was loving her, and I was not listening closely enough when she told me that what she actually needed from me was something different.
Yes, I Actually Quit Mary & Blake Media
During one particularly difficult argument, I told Mary I would give up Mary & Blake Media if that was what our marriage required. I meant the underlying sentiment completely: there is no podcast, website or business that matters to me more than my relationship with her.
The way I chose to demonstrate that was terrible. I got emotional, made an impulsive decision and announced that I was done. I quit the thing I almost never wanted to quit because I was trying to prove a point instead of actually solving the problem.
It did not last very long. What mattered about that moment was not whether Mary & Blake Media survived my brief retirement. It was realizing how badly I needed to stop treating every conflict as something that required an enormous act of proof.
We Could Not Keep Doing Everything
Eventually Mary and I sat down and looked at our time, our health and everything we had committed ourselves to doing. The answer was obvious once we stopped pretending otherwise: there were not enough hours to do all of it well.
That meant certain podcasts might be late. Some projects might disappear for a while. Things we genuinely wanted to create might have to wait because wanting to do something is not the same thing as having the capacity to do it without sacrificing something more important.
For somebody who had spent most of his life treating work as a measure of character, saying no felt like failure. I am learning that sometimes saying no is actually how you protect the life that lets you keep saying yes to the right things.
Why Succession Became So Personal For Me
During this period, writing about Succession became unexpectedly cathartic. Kendall Roy’s need for approval, the gravitational pull of Logan and the way business, family and love become impossible to separate gave me a fictional language for feelings I was still trying to understand in my own life.
Some of those essays were written while I was still in the middle of what was happening, which means they capture a version of my thinking that is much closer to the moment than anything I can reconstruct now.
The Best Media Strategy Is Not Always The Best Life Strategy
Near the end of the original recording, I finally arrived at the rule I had been trying to learn for years. If we are supposed to record something and my family needs me instead, sometimes the recording has to wait. If a project needs to pause because we do not have the emotional or physical capacity to do it properly, then it pauses.
That may not always be the best media strategy. Algorithms do not care that somebody needs their dad. Release schedules do not care that a marriage needs attention. The internet is extremely good at convincing creators that every missed opportunity is permanent.
But I would rather build a slightly less efficient media company around a life I actually want than build a perfectly efficient one at the expense of the people who make that life worth having.
More This Is Us Coverage
This Is Us 6.09: “The Hill”
Our full review of Kate and Toby’s San Francisco weekend and why two people can both grow while growing further apart.
This Is Us Season 6
Follow Kate, Toby, Rebecca, Miguel, Kevin, Randall and the entire final season of the Pearson story.
Explore This Is Us Too
Six seasons of recaps, conversations and the personal stories that made this particular podcast different for us.
This Is The Part Behind The Podcasts
One of the reasons Mary & Blake has always mattered to me is that the conversation does not have to stop at whether we liked an episode of television. Stories give us a language for talking about work, family, marriage, grief, fear, failure and everything else happening when the microphones are turned off.
I’m Still Rebuilding. That’s Okay.
When I recorded this, I was not claiming that everything had magically been fixed. I was trying to explain that I had spent months rebuilding an identity I thought had disappeared and was finally beginning to recognize which parts of the old one I did not want to carry into whatever came next.
I still wanted to be good at my job. I still wanted Mary & Blake Media to succeed. I still wanted to create things that mattered to people. I just no longer wanted proving those things to become more important than being present for the people whose lives I was supposedly doing all of it for.
That was my hill. Not walking away from work, ambition or the things I love, but learning that I could climb toward a different version of success. One where my family does not have to lose me in order for me to provide for them.
