Is it hard blaming everyone else for your problems, Mark? Do you show grit by clinging to the lies you’ve built and the stories you’ve spun for an audience that doesn’t even know the truth?

In a way, maybe it does take effort. Maybe there’s a kind of dark discipline in what you’ve done. It takes grit to post multiple times a day, nearly two years straight, polishing your victim script like it’s a résumé for a job you’ll never get. It takes endurance to chase a DARVO doctorate—Denial, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender—turning your manipulations into a degree you can hang on the wall of your echo chamber. And it takes a special kind of stubbornness to carry a victim mentality all the way to the grave.

But let’s not confuse effort with meaning. The real question isn’t whether you’ve shown stamina in your delusion—it’s why you’ve chosen to waste so much sustained energy on looking like a good father, when it would take only slightly more effort to actually be one.

Showing up for your kids requires hard. Following through with court-ordered evaluations requires grit. Building trust brick by brick, after years of tearing it down, requires endurance. That is the kind of work that fathers are measured by. Not hashtags. Not Bible verses out of context. Not pity posts designed to harvest sympathy likes from strangers.

The truth is simple: you’ve embraced the grind of performance, not the grind of parenthood. You’ve chosen the illusion of grit over the reality of responsibility. And that’s why, no matter how many posts you write, the story remains the same—you look like a man working hard, but it’s only on avoiding the work that truly matters.

The tragedy isn’t that you can’t find grit. It’s that you’ve wasted what little you had on the wrong fight.