A friend of mine died four days ago. He was 39. Cardiac arrest.

He was a rugby player. That's how we met. He was the enforcer. the one you wanted on your side and didn't want to face. But he was also sharp. Educated, verbally precise, the kind of person who could dismantle a bully in front of a room without raising his voice. He didn't just play hard. He lived without the filters most people hide behind.

Two days after he died, there was a league match dedicated to him. I expected grief. A heavy room. Teammates who'd played alongside him for years, struggling with the loss.

That's not what I saw.

They weren't down. Some of them seemed almost relieved. Not cruel about it. Not celebrating. But there was a lightness that didn't match what had just happened. A room of men who'd lost someone they'd known for over a decade, and the dominant feeling wasn't sadness. It was something closer to release.

That bothered me for two days. I kept trying to explain it away. Maybe they'd already processed it. Maybe they grieve differently. Maybe I was reading it wrong.

Then I saw it.

Part of them had always been scared of him. Not because he was violent toward them, but because he was honest in a way they couldn't match. He said things they thought but wouldn't say. He did things they wanted to do but had decided were too risky, too loud, too much. He lived without asking permission, and that permission was exactly what they'd spent their lives waiting for.

Part of them were angry at him. Not for anything he did to them. For the fact that he existed as proof that you could live that way and not collapse. His presence was an argument against every compromise they'd made.

And part of them were jealous. Not of his life, but of his willingness. He had the nerve they didn't, and being around him made that visible.

So when he was gone, the mirror left the room. And the room got lighter.

He came back from New Zealand after three years and we started hanging out. He figured out fast that I needed to leave my marriage. He never said it outright. He just kept asking the right questions, leading me toward what I already knew but couldn't say. Not through his example this time. Through conversation. Weeks and months of it.

There's a moment I'll never forget. Him on a swing. Me standing beside it. And me saying, out loud, for the first time: "Fuck it. I need to get divorced." Realization, confession, and decision all at once.

He just looked at me and nodded. Not "told you so." Just do what you think you have to do.

We hung out almost daily for the next four years. I gained confidence, experienced things I never would've had the guts to do alone. It took me three more years to realize I'd been piggyback riding on his courage instead of building my own.

That's what the best people in your life do. They don't give you advice. They don't tell you what's obvious. They walk you to the edge of what you already know and wait for you to say it yourself.

Here's what I keep seeing, in that room and everywhere else. When someone bothers you more than they should, not because they wronged you, but because something about them gets under your skin, the intensity isn't about them. They're standing where you decided you couldn't.

The move is simple. When someone gets under my skin, and I can't point to a concrete reason, I stop looking at them and ask what they're doing that I've told myself I can't. It changes the question from "what's wrong with them" to "what am I not doing?" That one leads somewhere. The other never did.