The origin story

The Line

By Matt Gilhooly, host of The Life Shift Podcast

I was eight years old when my mother died. That's the line. Everything after it is what I built on the other side.

1989 doesn't feel like history to me. It feels like the hinge my whole life swings on. For a long time I didn't look at it directly. I built a life instead: school, work, more school, a career I was good at and didn't love enough. I moved a lot. I told myself that was ambition. It took me a long time to see it as something else.

The Life Shift Podcast started as a grad school project at the University of Florida in 2022. I told myself it was about other people's stories. It was, mostly. But somewhere around the hundredth interview, I noticed I kept asking the same question in different words: when did your life change, and how did you survive the turn. I was asking because I still hadn't answered it for myself.

Still Here came out of five seasons of listening to people find their own line in the sand, then finally sitting down to find mine. The SHIFTS framework, the one that runs through the book and through this site, isn't theory I found somewhere. It's the shape of what actually happened to me. Stop, hide, identify, face, transform, share. In that order, slower than I wanted, every time.

There are two dogs in this story, not one. Mikey, who isn't here anymore, and Molly, who is, older now, still with me. I think about them both more than makes sense to say out loud.

Proof that love doesn't ask you to move fast.
Only to keep showing up.

This site exists because a page like this shouldn't only belong to me. If you have a line in the sand, a moment before which you were one way and after which you weren't, I'd like to see it on the wall. Not because it needs an audience. Because naming it out loud is usually the first shift.

Matt

If you have a line in the sand, before and after, this is the place for it.