Hey everyone, welcome to Grace Over Guilt. I'm Dan Kaufman, and this is where I share my story of becoming undone to become whole. If you're going through something hard right now, a divorce, a business failure, legal trouble, or just feeling like your whole life is falling apart, I want you to know you're not alone. I've been there. I'm still working my way through it. And that's exactly what this is about.

Today is the first part of a series I'm calling "The Story." Every Monday, I'm going to walk you through my journey, chronologically, from who I was before everything happened, through the arrests, the jail time, the divorce, and where I am now. It's not a pretty story. But it's real. And real is what most of us need right now.

So let's start at the beginning. Let's talk about who I was before the fall.

THE LIFE I BUILT

If you had asked me in 2019 how my life was going, I would have told you it was great. Better than great. I had built everything I thought I was supposed to build.

I had a wife. We'd been married for years, and we had two beautiful daughters together. The kind of family you put on a Christmas card, you know? We took vacations a couple of times a year. We had plans. Big plans. The kind of conversations where you're mapping out the next twenty years of your life like it's a guarantee.

My business was going really well. I was running my own marketing agency,  working with clients, building something amazing. The work where you feel like you're actually making a difference while also providing for your family. It felt good. It felt right. I was proud of what I'd built.

And here's the thing, I thought I had it all figured out. I really did. I thought I was the guy who had done the work, made the sacrifices, and was now reaping the rewards. I was the guy who got up early, hustled all day, came home to his family, and then did it all over again. I thought that was the recipe. I thought that was the formula.

What I didn't realize was that I was building my life on foundations I didn't fully understand. And when those foundations started to crack, I had no idea how to deal with it.

THE IDENTITY I HAD

Looking back, I can see now that so much of my identity was wrapped up in being a provider. Being successful. Being the guy who had his life together.

I was Dan, the entrepreneur. Dan, the family man. Dan, the guy who always found a way to make things work. And I wore those identities like armor. They protected me from having to ask harder questions about who I really was underneath all of it.

Because here's the truth, and this is something I didn't fully understand until I had years to think about it in a jail cell, I had built my entire sense of self on what I did, not who I was. My value came from my output. My worth came from my productivity. And as long as I was producing, as long as I was achieving, I felt okay.

But that kind of identity is fragile. It only works when everything is working. The moment something goes wrong, the moment the business struggles, the moment the marriage hits a rough patch, the moment the legal system comes knocking, that identity starts to crack. And when it cracks, you realize you have no idea who you are without it.

I didn't know that yet, though. In 2019, I was still riding high. I was still the guy with the plan.

THE FIRST CRACKS

The first sign that something was wrong came in 2020. And I'm not talking about COVID, although that certainly didn't help. I'm talking about a phone call that changed everything.

I had a client. Someone I trusted. Someone I had worked with for quite a while. And this client had overnighted me a check to deposit into my business account for all of the work we did. Seemed routine. Seemed normal. Except it wasn't.

Turns out, that check wasn't his to give. It belonged to someone else. He had stolen it, put my company's name on it, and used me. And when the authorities figured out what had happened, they didn't go after him. They came after me. Me.

I still remember that day. The arrest. The confusion. There was absolute disbelief that this was happening. I was in jail for about three or four hours before I got bailed out. And in my mind, I thought, "Okay, this is going to get sorted out. I didn't do anything wrong. The truth will come out."

My attorney told me it would be fine. He said we'd fight it, and everything would work out. And I believed him. I trusted him. I mean, why wouldn't I? He was the expert. He was supposed to know how these things worked.

So I went home. I went back to my life. And I tried to pretend that everything was normal. But nothing was normal anymore. The cracks had started. I just didn't know how deep they would go.

THE WAITING

What I didn't expect was the waiting. The legal system moves slowly, and when you're caught up in it, time becomes this weird, stretched-out thing where you're constantly living in limbo.

Months went by. Then a year. Then more. And through all of it, my attorney kept telling me the same thing: "It's going to be fine. You're not going to serve any time. Just trust the process."

And I wanted to believe that. I needed to believe that. Because the alternative was too scary to consider.

Meanwhile, I kept living my life. Or trying to, anyway. I kept working. Kept being a dad. Kept being a husband. But there was this weight on me that I couldn't shake. There was this constant background noise of anxiety and uncertainty.

And here's where I made a mistake that I still regret. I wasn't fully honest with my wife about how serious things were. And there were other things I wasn’t honest with her about previously.  So small on the outside, but small as they may be, it continued to build cracks in that foundation.  I kept telling her what my attorney told me: that it would be fine, that I wouldn't do any time. I wanted to protect her from the worry. I wanted to protect our family from the uncertainty.

But what I was really doing was building a wall between us. A wall of half-truths and optimistic spin. And walls like that don't hold. They crumble. Usually at the worst possible time.

So that's where we are at the end of today. I've set the stage. You've met the version of me that existed before everything fell apart, the entrepreneur, the family man, the guy who thought he had it figured out from the outside.

Next Monday, I'm going to tell you about the arrest that changed everything. The one that didn't end in a few hours. The one that started a chain of events that would cost me my marriage, my home, and my sense of who I was.

If you're listening or reading this and something resonates, if you're in that waiting period right now, if you're holding onto hope that things will work out, if you're not being fully honest with the people you love because you're scared, I see you. I've been there.

The path forward isn't always the one we expect. Sometimes we have to be undone before we can become whole.

Grace over guilt.

I'll see you next time, I promise.