For thirty-two years, I didn’t understand the songs. I didn’t understand the poems, the proclamations, the pedestal upon which it was placed. I didn’t understand all the fuss about it.

The thing that people called love was, in my experience, utilitarian and quantifiable. It was a familiar fondness, a pragmatic association with another. There was a sort of algorithm to it: you have qualities that I find desirable, and this thing makes sense from a procedural perspective, so yeah, I suppose I love you. It was like finding a house that met all the requirements. Open kitchen? Check. Natural light? Check. Big backyard, walk-in closet, guest room? Check, check, check. Guess I should put in an offer.

It was this quantifiability that made me think the songs and such were a bit much. This thing I called love was cool, without a doubt; nice houses are, indeed, nice. But all the theater around it seemed like a bit of overkill. The love I experienced was something tangible and concrete, something with clear borders and boundaries that I could categorize and define. It was perfectly nice-looking and useful—a fine dwelling for a sensible life. Nothing to sneeze at, but not a reason to start a ten-year war against Menelaus and Agamemnon’s army, either.

Then, of course, it happened.

The specifics aren’t important, only that it echoed all the other stories: it was unexpected, unplanned, and totally, utterly unforgettable.

Now, the thing I could so easily define defies definition—defies language itself, really. It’s not a house but a home, the kind you could never in ten lifetimes have designed yourself but know the moment you walk in that this is precisely where you were meant to live. That it’s the only place you could possibly live.

Your job is borderline impossible. You are a cosmic translator, a meaning-maker. You’re tasked with taking everything, in its infinite complexity, subjectivity, and ambiguity—the physical world, the interior world, the interpersonal world—and distilling it down into a series of sounds that can be understood by children and grandmothers, steelworkers and senators. You must create a sliver of overlap between every Venn diagram in existence. Turn the nonlinear, extratemporal anarchy of human experience into succinct linear coherence. Describe the indescribable.

You are a word.

Your job was hard enough when you were only spoken. Then, people started inscribing you into the material world itself—stone, papyrus, that sort of thing. That’s when shit got wild. You were now expected to do your job without context and nonverbal cues—to transcend space and time and still somehow manufacture shared meaning.

Still, you managed to mostly succeed. Sure—there were plenty of blemishes on your résumé. You spread conspiracy theories, sparked genocide, and split families. But in spite of the impossibility of your job, of all the forces conspiring against you, you also changed the course of history for the better. You inspired revolutions. You told stories. You saved lives. You solidified love. You transferred knowledge. You healed wounds. You built bridges. You built nations.

It all changed, though, with something they called artificial intelligence.

Suddenly, you were being produced at a rate beyond comprehension. But it wasn’t just the volume that changed everything; it was the fact that, for the first time, you were being created by something other than a human.

People stopped trusting you. They had been wary before, sure, but not like this. Never had you been looked at with suspicion from the start—guilty before proven innocent. And you thought your job was hard before.

This revealed something essential. Your success had always hinged on a single factor: the amount of humanity with which you had been infused. Or, to put it another way, the care and thoughtfulness with which you were used. Even when you were tasked with the impossible—describing a mother’s love, the intestinal evisceration of heartbreak, the smell after a summer rain—you managed to succeed solely because of the life a human being had injected into you. Even when you existed as a messy series of ink marks on a piece of processed tree or a smattering of pixels on a glowing screen, there was an invisible but very real energy that you carried and transmitted. Outside of space, outside of time, you created a force of meaning and connection through the humanity that animated you.

A word, you realized, is nothing without humanity; it is a neutral, colorless, valueless entity, a fallen tree in a forgotten forest.

Now, you wonder what your future holds. How does a word accomplish anything in a world where it’s distrusted by default, where it’s increasingly used as a weapon, where it’s being churned out by machines at a rate faster than the whole of history combined? How does something whose success is dependent on its humanity succeed when its means of production are inhuman?

It all comes back to the humans, of course. In the past, your failure has always been a result of their carelessness; you can’t do your job when you’re thrown around with no regard for how you’ll be received, with no love or respect for the receiver. The advent of this so-called artificial intelligence—artificial being a very telling, if unintentional, use of your power—means that deploying you without thought or care is easier and more socially acceptable than ever before. The threat is existential.

You wonder if you’re being melodramatic with the word existential (it feels so meta for a word to say the word “word”!). But it really is existential, isn’t it? If you are increasingly deployed without care, or, worse, with malicious intent, the connection between humans that you make possible disintegrates in proportion. And when the connection between humans disintegrates at scale, the threat is very much existential.

Since the emergence of these machines, you’ve seen plenty of apocalyptic signs: an abundance of slop, misinformation factories, chatbot “therapy.” Hollow simulacrums of you that are actually just the answers to big math problems.

But you’ve also seen little pockets of promise. You’ve seen the machines used to sharpen thought, to use better words, to enhance clarity and care. You’ve seen glimpses of a world in which a word’s job is easier. Rare glimpses, but unmistakable. The common denominator in these instances? Conscious, careful human intention—an understanding on their part of the weight words can have when imbued with the divine human forces of purpose, of responsibility, of love.

It is as with all of history. The window dressing changes, but the story remains the same. A new technology turns the world on its head, and humans find ways to use it for destruction and creation alike. It feels as if the latest thing, in all its mind-boggling speed and scale and superiority, will be the thing that finally ends or saves humanity. But as Ursula K. Le Guin said: "Each new tool, from the paleolithic to the neolithic, the wheel to the loom, promised to save labor, to enhance human capability, and to bring us closer to our aspirations, yet each time we found ourselves laboring still, dreaming still."

Whether they realize it or not, the humans are ultimately laboring and dreaming toward a single aspiration: connection. Through their speeches and love poems and hit pieces and research papers, their shitty advertisements and their shaky confessions, all they want is to somehow stumble closer to one another—to bridge two isolated bubbles of subjective experience and meld those bubbles in a momentary congregation of understanding that causes them to float in such a way that life feels just a bit more bearable.

Unlike any other technology in history, you, a word, can manifest this connection. You are uniquely qualified for the job, in a league of your own. But just as it was when you were only spoken, then written, then finally mass-propagated by machines using math problems, it is up to the humans to decide how successful you’ll be.

It’s a bit romantic when you think about it. It always is with humans. They think that their ever-changing world means they themselves must be changing, too. But whether their stories and interactions are being told and mediated by Aesop on the island of Samos, carved into stone, printed on fine stationery, or manufactured in server farms, the fundamental truth of humanity will never change: that connection is what they seek, and they are the only ones who can choose whether they’ll find it.

Thank you so much to , , , , , , , , and for their generous feedback on this piece.

Recently I’ve had the cluster of symptoms that people call writer’s block: a mind that seems to shut off the moment it sees a blank page, a body that feels quite gastrointestinally opposed to producing any kind of sentence, and a spirit that would rather do just about anything else short of self-immolation, thank you very much.

The term writer’s block is sort of like the word depression, in that it’s a catch-all descriptor of an experience whose causes can range from ‘I’m Hungry’ to ‘a rubber band ball made of centuries of accrued, mutated, and metastasized Freudian traumas’. We also make the same mistakes in our response to writer’s block as we do depression: we assume it’s a bad thing, then we try to treat the surface-level symptoms rather than the root causes.

The root cause of my historical bouts of writer’s block has usually been perfectionism. This time, when I found myself staring at a blinking cursor for the third week in a row, it struck me that something felt different. It seemed as if my body was telling me not to write—like it knew something.

When I finally stopped trying to override that primal voice and instead listened to it—a lesson I will perhaps learn before I die—I heard something interesting: “This is not a time to write. It’s a time to live.”

Huh. That sounds vaguely profound, Oh Wise Internal Voice, I thought. It made more sense once I thought about it. The past few months have been a whirlwind of wonderful experiences that I have been savoring. It has been a season of sinking into sensation, of total immersion, of, as Shinzen Young puts it, sensory conductivity. My attempts to step out of that immersion have felt unnatural.

The modern world does its best to strangle the seasonality out of our lives. But there’s a limit to the extent that we can override nature. It is our nature to ebb and flow; to work and rest; to write and live. We are seasonal creatures.

For me, for now, it is a season of living. That is a beautiful thing. At some point, it will again be a season of writing, during which I will process and metabolize all of this raw sensory stuff. And that will be a beautiful thing, too.

There are ways in which it is wise to impose our will on the world: sending the scary cold email, telling a love interest how we feel, finding that side door to make something happen. Agency is the key to locks we didn’t even know existed. But there are also ways in which we would be wise to surrender. When we surrender, for instance, to the rhythmic seasonality of life, to the particularities of our nature, to the outcomes that the fates see fit to orchestrate from the actions we take, we stop fighting the flow of life and swimming against its current. This tends to make things easier, more effective, and more fun.

Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—experiences like writer’s block, depression, and failure are just the negatively valent names we give to the flow of life when we don’t like the direction it’s going. And sometimes, the best response is to hop on a raft and ride the rapids.

This year, you will find yourself sitting at home, with the sound of nothing but the air conditioner blowing or the refrigerator buzzing, and you will think that you cannot bear this suffering any longer, that you cannot tolerate the suffocating, agonizing weight of being for a moment more. And still, you will bear it. You will tolerate it. You will wake up the next morning, and the sun will rise. And the neighbors will take out their trash, and the squirrels will scamper around, and the power lines will blow in the wind, and you’ll smell your cup of coffee and look around and think, Well, this isn’t so bad.

This year, you will find yourself dancing to a song that comes on, and you’ll feel as if you’ve found some sort of backdoor, glitch-in-the-matrix type hack for instant joy.

This year, you will lose something you thought (underneath all the intellectualizing about understanding the impermanence of things) would be there forever: a loved one, a pet, a relationship, a job, a part of yourself. It will be excruciating. Later, you will marvel at how much you’ve learned from that loss. At how much it’s given you.

This year, you will have a conversation that feels transcendent—like you have somehow conspired with your interlocutor(s) to create a space between you that is electric and pulsing and vital, that causes the collective consciousness to levitate and expand. This conversation will nourish you for some time.

This year, you will, in spite of all the cultural and technological forces working to make this impossible, feel a moment of raw, unbridled, unmediated connection with another person that is so perfect and complete that it seems to justify your entire existence.

This year, you will have moments when you’re convinced you are wholly incapable and incompetent and unworthy of being called human, and you’ll be wrong.

This year, you will have moments when you’re convinced you are perfect and flawless and omniscient, that the universe exists purely to serve you, and you’ll be wrong.

This year, you will experience, at a cellular level, what it means to be in flow: that timeless, weightless state of being and doing in which the self and its incessant insistence disappears and it feels—actually, it doesn’t just feel, you know—that God is acting through you.

This year, you will laugh when you aren’t supposed to.

This year, you will create something that you’re proud of.

This year, you will say or do something that causes the razor-sharp, full-body nausea of regret. You will think you’ve ruined everything, that what you did is irredeemable, and you’ll be wrong.

This year, you will discover something about yourself that changes your life forever, in a profoundly positive way.

This year, you will know something. You’ll know it in a way that you cannot explain or rationalize, and it won’t make logical or practical sense, and you might even hate that you know it. And other people, whether in real life or in your head, will try to tell you that you’re wrong, and sometimes, for a moment, you’ll believe them. But you will always return to that inescapable knowing. Until you act on that knowing, it will interfere with your life in ways that become increasingly inconvenient, loud, and destructive. Eventually, you will act on it, and you’ll be glad you did.

This year, you will fart at a highly inopportune moment.

This year, you will be forced to appreciate something you’ve been taking for granted.

This year, you will relearn, for the millionth time, the truth of all the obnoxious clichés: that you’re much happier when you get some sleep, go outside, move your body, eat real food, sit quietly with your thoughts, laugh with your friends.

This year, you will make a new friend.

This year, you will get into a stupid argument.

This year, you will come across a picture from a past life, and you’ll remember the person you were, and there will be a weird mix of nostalgia and embarrassment and love and regret and narrative wholeness.

This year, you will forget to change your air filter.

This year, you will discover something—a subject area, a subculture, an activity, an idea, a place, a time period, a way of seeing—that makes it feel like you’ve stumbled upon some secret, some trap door hidden behind a bookshelf. And it will, in some way, change your life forever.

This year, you will feel completely stuck. And then, at some point, you won’t.

This year, you will (re)discover your capacity for unconditional kindness, which will trigger the millionth relearning of another cliché: that giving is in fact the best form of receiving.

This year, you will get injured or sick or otherwise incapacitated, and you will be viscerally reminded of just how important your body and its ability to function is to your wellbeing.

This year, you will learn something about your family history that will explain something about you.

This year, you will stub your toe or bump your nose or hit your knee on a sharp corner, and you will curse every person or entity or cosmic force who had even the slightest fucking bit to do with the fact of your existence. You will stand by this sentiment for at least thirty seconds.

This year, you will marvel at how, in spite of your flaws and pettiness and morning breath and neuroticism and selfishness and cowlick and emotional volatility and ineptitude, there are people who refuse to stop loving you.

This year, you will be okay.

I.

Late September, 2024. I’m sitting in my living room. It is silent aside from a faint buzzing that is coming from the air conditioner or the refrigerator or my mind. The smell of overripe bananas snakes in from the kitchen. Light makes a half-hearted attempt at coming through the windows; it is muted, gray, impotent, managing only to shine a meager square under the dining table and a lethargic splotch on the rug. The rest of the luminary burden is left to the two lamps bookending the lone chair in the space, which I currently occupy.

Among the objects the lamps expose are monuments to this year’s events: an ACL brace and a pair of crutches; the gold Star of David necklace I gave my ex-girlfriend for her birthday, which she returned after I ended the relationship; my late dog’s woven bucket of toys and bones; a few legal documents from the business bankruptcy case. I haven’t had more than a passing thought about getting rid of any of this stuff. It seems to want to stick around1, a constant reminder of something I’m not quite sure of.

I walk into the kitchen past the empty dog bowls to grab a sparkling water, though what I really want is an IV drip of Espolòn.

II.

July, 2023. Duke and I return from a jaunt around the neighborhood, having sufficiently marked our territory on any and all forms of vegetation. He hops up on the salt-and-pepper speckled couch that matches his beard, bathing in the euphoric morning light. I settle in at my desk with a cup of coffee and a soft smile and put on a Backseat Lovers album. I figure I’ll do a bit of work on the wallet business, write for a while, then perhaps go run the trails at Pony Pasture. Later, I’ll continue getting the apartment ready for my girlfriend and her dog to move in.

I open my Amazon seller account and furrow my brow. Something's wrong with the numbers. I pause the music, refresh the page, open my inventory dashboard. Every page gives me the same message: I’m out of stock. The coffee grows cold beside me as I open support tickets, emails, tracking numbers. By sunset, I've learned something new: tens of thousands of dollars of inventory can vanish into thin air between a warehouse in Connecticut and a fulfillment center in Kentucky.

III.

December, 2023. I’m wearing a navy and white pinstripe button-down underneath a sort of Aegean blue suit jacket up top. On bottom, I’ve got on a pair of old black athletic shorts with no underwear. The laptop’s camera can’t see under the desk. Plus, putting on pants is now an act of Congress; during a pickup game of basketball the week prior, I went up for a layup and my right knee gave out as I landed. The flavor of the searing pain was familiar—a sensation imprinted during my first ACL tear in October of ’21. A part of me already knows what the results of the MRI will be. I wonder if I still have my old ACL brace.

Through a partially painted-on smile in the waning late afternoon light, I tell the interviewers about all of my impressive sales accomplishments from a past life and explain how twenty months of entrepreneurship will enable me to deliver (shareholder) value for their organization. That I will sell a lot of fucking software, is what I’m saying.

The interview ends with grins and nods and promises of swift follow up. I’m good at this; since graduating college, I’ve gotten job offers from every company with whom I’ve interviewed. I can parse out what people are looking for behind their words. I know what to say, with just the right level of subtlety and flourish, to signal that I’m the best person to deliver on those wishes.

It’s taxing work, though, all these conversational gymnastics. I shut the laptop and slump down into my office chair.

The next day, I get the job offer.

IV.

Mid-June, 2024. My fifth Zoom meeting of the day, during which a customer says “Just counting down the days until Friday!” and everyone contorts their jaws into something resembling a smile and says “Ha ha ha!”, wraps up. I shut my laptop and leave the office, commuting through the hallway to the living room chair. Duke follows me out of the office and arthritically lays down on the rug.

The house is quiet in the evenings now that it counts one less human and one less canine among its residents. When I took the job, I told myself I wouldn’t let the stuff I cared about—writing, relationships, my nascent lacrosse company, laughing—fall by the wayside. But increasingly I find myself sitting in the living room after work, immobilized by something viscous and heavy that the word exhaustion doesn’t quite capture.

There’s also something I haven’t felt in eighteen months: a squirmy, frenetic feeling that finds my moment-to-moment reality intolerable, that wants to wriggle out of it by any means necessary, to escape or numb against it. For the first time in a year and a half, I want a drink.

I settle for mindlessly scrolling on my phone.

V.

Late October, 2024. The sun is setting earlier and earlier, and the day feels over before it begins. The amount of caffeine required to reach activation energy has soared to the point that I am single-handedly propping up the profitability of Califia Farms Cold Brew. Up until the apex of the caffeination curve, which occurs around noon, I have enough synthetic fuel to force the minimum viable self-suppression necessary to be a Productive Employee. After that, all bets are off.

It’s evening. Pitch dark outside, blinds closed. I am the only living being in the house, unless you count the living room chair I’ve melted into. The quiet has become a synesthetic entity all its own. I can hear everything, everywhere: planes flying over Canada, foghorns in the Atlantic, a luau in Maui. I can smell the mezcal in Mexico. The living room is a liminal space.

By this point the numbing has become ritualistic. I’ve found a few decent strategies: scrolling on Twitter, watching sports games I don’t care about, buying a scoop of birthday cake ice cream in a waffle cone from Blue Cow. But it’s a band-aid/stab wound situation. Ice cream is pretty feeble in the face of existential dread.

The desire to drink is now acute, the pull toward escapism urgent. My body will not settle into itself. Feeling unbearably cold, I draw a hot bath. I get in; within minutes, I am sweating. The rebellion against reality is cellular. Enveloping.

I’m not quite sure what stops me from driving to the ABC store and buying a bottle of bourbon. Perhaps there’s a part of me that knows that this dread must be savored—that the moment I drink is the moment I throw in the towel and resign myself to a life that isn’t mine, the way I did for all of my twenties. That the dread is a fuel source I must preserve until it’s time to use it.

Hours pass. My bedside clock says it’s 3am. I’m staring at the ceiling, listening to the quiet, wondering when it will be time to use it.

VI.

December 2, 2024. The early morning light coming through the east window of my office casts an angelic glow onto the desk. I’m energetic despite having gotten home late from an event last night. It’s my last week at the job. A month ago, I met with the CEO and told him I just didn’t have any more in me.

I put on long johns under my sweatpants and a jacket over my sweatshirt and go for a walk. Despite it being near-freezing, the sun is radiant, and there isn’t a cloud to be found among the ocean of sky. It smells crisp. The sound of creatures persisting in the face of the cold fills the air: humans making piles of leaves, squirrels scampering up and down the bare trees, birds welcoming the morning without judgment.

Winter always feels pregnant with meaning and significance. The sharp edges of the cold, the totality of the darkness that swallows the day, the naked trees standing defiantly. There’s a certain weight to it.

Two years ago, I would have been nursing a hangover instead of noticing any of this.

I walk through the front door and survey the living room. The year’s artifacts have begun to disappear. The ACL brace and crutches have moved to Goodwill. Bankruptcy documents have been shredded. The necklace is packed away into a drawer. Only Duke’s possessions remain untouched: his bed still sits in the corner of my office, his woven basket of toys in the living room next to an entryway table that will soon be sold. For the first time in months, I sit in my chair, comfortably.

“I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone also thinking wrongly, and, being human, [I] can’t bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse.” - George Saunders

The toddler in front of me on the plane would not stop wailing. Every attempt at pacification, from the Peppa Pig recording playing on her iPad, to her older sister’s pleas, to her mother’s commands, fell on deaf ears. She simply could not accept what her mother had told her a few minutes ago: that we were in New York.

“WE’RE NOT IN NEW YORK,” she shrieked. “WE’RE ON A PLANE.”

—

Once, in high school, I broke up with my girlfriend on a whim. Well, not exactly a whim—I had what in my mind felt like an excellent justification. I’d asked her to do something with me one weekend, and she replied with something really curt, like, “I can’t.”

From this reply I wove in my mind a remarkably tangled tale. She was clearly done with me; she’d met some college guy, probably a musician, and she was actually going to spend the weekend with him. That was that.

I decided to get ahead of the impending embarrassment by breaking up with her. Ha, take that, I thought. I win.

So I let her know that I was breaking up with her, and she was shocked and hurt and asked me why, and I muttered some nonsense and mentioned the text, and she told me something like, “I had plans with my sister that night. I was actually typing another text to you after that one, but my phone died.”

Oh.

—

I read a meditation cue the other day that sort of broke my brain. It went something like: ‘Mind is just another object that passes through awareness.’ 

I’m not sure how to use language to articulate why this was so impactful (good thing I’m a human being writing an essay!), but here’s an attempt. 

A lot of meditation instruction talks about dispassionately observing thoughts as they come and go. But when I apply that instruction, I find that I’m still using the mind. Like, I’m observing my thoughts with the thing that produces thoughts. 

This bit about mind being another object in awareness allowed me to zoom out a level to where my awareness of the activity of the mind was occurring against the backdrop of something more fundamental, more pure—call it body, or consciousness, or Self. The activity of the mind was a singular entity from which I could experientially separate.

The reason I find this important enough to clumsily express is that the rare moment in which I manage to achieve this separation is nothing short of magical. There is a universal reduction of tension, a relaxing into being that’s just lovely. It’s as if I discover that I was wearing a pair of glasses with thick, trifocal lenses made of self-spun narratives. And the glasses are heavy—they cause existence to feel viscous and cumbersome and somehow at the same time dissociative, like I’m walled off from the world, wading through a murky fog of shapeshifting stories. Then I remove the glasses. The wall disappears. The viscosity dissipates. There is, for a moment, no filter between me and my direct experience. My cells respond with gratitude: they let their guard down, wrap themselves in a blanket, cozy up by the fire. It feels right.

—

The mind works in such a way that we become immersed in its commotion without knowing that we’re doing so. Its stories and projections become the fabric of reality. Sometimes this is helpful and necessary; often, it’s an existential pain in the ass that prompts us to do things like break up with someone over a text. 

Among all the useless nonsense we learn growing up, nobody mentions that there is a profoundly different way of experiencing the world that is accessible through a perspective shift and a bit of practice. Nobody tells us we have this strange thing called a mind that convinces us that we couldn’t possibly be both on a plane and in New York, and that it’s possible to create some distance from this mind. That we’d be unimaginably better for it. 

We would be wise to shout this from the rooftops.

A huge thank you to and for their generous feedback on this piece.

After Eckhart Tolle experienced what many have called enlightenment, he abandoned the doctorate degree he was pursuing in favor of spending the next two years going to the same park in Central London every day and sitting on a bench. This doesn’t surprise me. It wouldn’t surprise me if all the enlightened around the world shared a habit of frequenting park benches. The park bench is a portal to the divine.

I know this because I entered such a portal this past Sunday.

It had been a strange weekend up to that point. Early Friday morning, I took a train up to DC to see someone from a past life and pop around the nation’s capital for a few days. I don’t know if it was the surprise of seeing this person, the edible I ate on Saturday, or just a generally adverse reaction to being in a big city, but I was in a weird mood. Lonely, foggy, a bit unmoored. It was one of those moments where life just felt a little…foreign. Sort of like a protracted out of body experience, but with a more anxious energy. I don’t know. It was weird.

I did my best to let the strange mood run its course. On Sunday morning I slept in, went to a coffee shop to read for a while, then walked over to the Hirshorn museum to look at a Basquiat piece. Not a bad few hours. Still, I felt unsettled.

After a quick detour to check out the restrooms at the Asian art museum, I found myself on the National Mall an hour before I was to meet my friend. My legs were tired from all the city walking. I spotted an inviting black bench in the middle of the Mall and made my way over, pausing for a moment to survey the scene. The Washington Monument pierced the sky to my left, and the Capitol stood proudly on the right. The square patches of the Mall’s radiant, perfectly manicured lawns were splayed out in front of me and spanned the distance between each of the landmarks. They were flanked by a long line of trees which lightly concealed the row of museums across the way.

It was only a few seconds after sitting down that I felt myself fall outside the flow of time and into the ethereal realm of the park bench. I had gone through the portal.

This realm of the park bench, it turned out, was a balm for the soul. It was a warm, weighted blanket with a thread count of infinity, constructed from the fibers of right now. It was a cosmic massage from the hands of God.

My jaw unclenched. My internal monologue faded away. My frenetic energy abated. I floated in the boundless womb of the universe and watched the eternal moment unfold: the runners and the tourists, the giant Amish families and the young couples, the pigeons and the squirrels. A light breeze blew the post-rain smell of petrichor in through the portal. I took a deep breath. I inhaled the fabric of spacetime and exhaled the suffering of all species. I smiled.

It is unclear whether what we call enlightenment is an attainable state for mortal beings. What is clear, though, is that when we find these rare portals through which to immerse ourselves in the full sensory experience of what is currently happening in front of us, around us, and inside of us, we are rewarded with the distinct, visceral sense of a direct connection with God, a divine communion with the pure phenomenology of being. It sure feels like enlightenment.

I decided to step out of the portal. Fortunately, time had been flowing along while I was away, so my friend would be arriving any minute. Refreshed, relaxed, reborn, I met her for a lemonade and had a lovely afternoon.

It was in Terminal B outside of Gate 24 at LaGuardia Airport that our protagonist, an off-brand Jersey Shore cast member type named Tommy DeVito, stumbled upon his divine purpose in this life. 

It all started when something caught Tommy’s eye as he was walking toward baggage claim. It was his reflection. Damn, he looked good. His jet black hair was perfectly slicked black on top, with one strand carefully strewn askew. The transplanted hair—his pride and joy—had cost him five years of waiting tables and every spare dollar he could scrounge up. But looking at himself now, an absolute spectacle, it was worth it. The rest of his outfit was just as fresh: Heather gray Gucci sweat suit. Diamond stud earrings. Balenciaga slides. Tommy gave his reflection a wink, and it winked right back.

Patricia, an eighty-year old woman sitting nearby, thought the wink was for her. And after a weekend spent dodging an overeager CPA at a singles mixer for widowed accountants, she wasn’t having it.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, even if she’s a month out from a hip replacement. The look Patricia gave Tommy was hot enough to mold a prosthetic. She lunged at him with impressive vigor for her age, but in her fury, her store-bought hip lost synchronization with the God-given one. The resulting femoral nerve impingement produced a sort of exaggerated belly dancer-esque thrust, which, it could be said, set off the chain of events that ultimately led to Tommy’s revelation.

The propulsion from Patricia’s spastic thrust launched her some three feet to the left, where a couple was mid-argument. The boyfriend, leaning aggressively toward his girlfriend, caught the brunt of Patricia’s runaway hip. 

The unexpected collision sent the boyfriend’s freshly-chewed gum flying. In the wink of an eye, it had lodged itself comfortably among Tommy’s treasured strands. 

Each of the participants in this aviatory drama stood dumbfounded for a few moments, in the way that one does when life produces a series of events that can’t be comprehended. Patricia stared at the boyfriend, who alternated between staring at his girlfriend and Tommy, who, when the reality of the situation eventually registered, was the first to react.

He threw down his Saint Laurent shoulder bag in disgust and gingerly brought both hands to his head as if he were trying to hold a bird. Applying gentle pressure to his hair, Tommy gauged how deeply the gum was lodged. He scowled at what he felt. It had embedded itself between the sideward strand and the bed of hairs underneath, creating an industrial-grade adhesion. His hair—the hair that had been carefully implanted by a renowned Turkish surgeon and cost as much as a used car—was ruined.

The boyfriend, not knowing what to do, bent over to pick up the contents that had spilled out of Tommy’s leather bag. He stopped when he saw something strange: a long, curling piece of receipt paper which was covered in chicken scratch.

After staring at the receipt paper for a few moments, the boyfriend realized that the chicken scratch was Tommy’s entire financial life—a barely decipherable Rosetta Stone of transactions, budgets, investments, even a tax breakdown. 

“Gimme that,” Tommy snapped, snatching the paper out of the boyfriend’s hands.

“Wait,” Patricia said, speaking for the first time since her hip had gone rogue. She was looking at the receipt paper as if it were the real Rosetta Stone. “Can I see that?”

“No, you can’t see it, lady. You just tried to kill me for no reason, and you ruined my fuckin’ hair.” 

Patricia massaged her throbbing hip and glared at Tommy. “No reason? You just winked at me! I’ve had it with disgusting men.” 

“Winked at you? Why would I wink at you, lady?” He stuffed the receipt paper and the rest of his things into the bag and turned to leave. The couple had gone back to arguing.

Patricia’s face turned crimson, but her curiosity edged out her embarrassment. “Wait. Please.” Something about the desperation in her voice stopped Tommy.

“I spent most of my life creating documents like that piece of paper. I’ve never seen someone with such a strong grasp on their financial situation. I know this sounds strange, but I’d really like to take a closer look at it.”

Tommy remembered someone saying that you can tell you’re in a dream when you can’t read letters or numbers. He looked over at Gate 24. It was clear as day: Atlanta, departing 8:15 PM. This was really happening.

He stared at Patricia for a few moments before digging the receipt paper out of his bag and handing it to her in a daze. 

She held the paper delicately and examined it like an ancient scroll. Tommy examined her like a zoo animal.

Patricia finally looked up. “I used to own an accounting firm. I’ve never seen anything like this.” She shook the paper. “Especially on a piece of…what is this, receipt paper?” 

Tommy shrugged and looked down at the ground. “Yeah. I wait tables at my mom’s restaurant. Can’t exactly pull up a spreadsheet in there.”

She gave the paper one last glance while working through something in her mind. After seeming to reach a conclusion, she took a deep breath, massaged her hip, and looked Tommy in the eye.

“Are you interested in a real job?”

He blinked. “A job?”

“Yeah. I’ve been thinking about reopening my old accounting firm. I could use someone who can actually handle numbers to help run things. And judging by that piece of paper, you can do much more than that,” she said.

Tommy glanced around the airport and watched all the people walking by, oblivious to the absurdity occurring outside Gate 24. He thought about cracking a joke about finding her a nursing home. He thought about laughing. He thought about turning to walk away. But something about the bizarre reverence in this woman’s voice caused him to remain where he was. 

The strangest part, in Tommy’s mind, wasn’t that his wink had set off a chain reaction involving an old lady hip-checking a random guy and getting gum stuck in his $10,000 hair. Nor was it that that same old lady, who just minutes ago seemed ready to kill him, was now offering him a job based on some numbers he’d written on a piece of receipt paper.

No, the strangest part was that she seemed to think he was worth something. And it wasn’t because of the hair, or the outfit, or the expensive bag. She didn’t care about any of that. It was something else—something Tommy had never really considered. His mind.

That was a new one. For as long as he could remember, he’d measured himself by what was on the outside. But this woman, this old lady with the wild hip, seemed to think he had something to offer that went deeper than his looks. And that, for some reason, was harder to grapple with than the gum stuck in his hair.

He scratched at the gum absently, unsure what to make of it all. “Tell me more,” he heard himself say with a strange softness.

Patricia nodded, satisfied, and with a limp led him to a table at a nearby restaurant. And there they sat—the guido and the grandma—discussing numbers, accounting, and how they might work together, having each found the person they needed in a rather unexpected way.

Huge thank you to Dima El-Charif, , and for your generous feedback on this story.

A friend recently recommended George Saunders’ A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, in which Saunders has us read seven short stories by acclaimed 19th century Russian writers (Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, etc.) and then analyzes those stories. 

At face value it sounds boring—like one of those college classes you find yourself skipping more and more as the semester goes on. But it’s actually spectacular. 

First, it’s accessible: Saunders’ writing makes you feel like you’re hanging out at a coffee shop with a witty, articulate friend who’s crass at exactly the right times. He’s a pleasure to read. More than that, though, he has an absurd talent for taking a story that on the surface seems underwhelming or confusing and revealing elements of that story that leave you in awe of its beauty. And then he takes it a step further—which brings us to the impetus for this essay.

—

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve (slowly, begrudgingly) come to terms with the duality of existence—the paradoxical and contradictory nature of pretty much everything. As desperately as I’d like to stumble upon the thing—a belief system or way of living that is unambiguously correct—it doesn’t seem I’m going to get off that easy. Intellectual truth, much to my chagrin, is contextual, fleeting, subjective. 

This is particularly inconvenient for a nonfiction essayist. When I first started writing, I found myself producing a lot of self-help type stuff (which, it turns out, is quite common). You know: neat and tidy thesis, concise advice, clear takeaways. I stumbled upon some interesting insights, but mostly it was just one-dimensional and sterile—empty calories. I was swimming in the shallow pond of intellectual truth.

I eventually realized that I was more interested in tackling the Big Questions—the ones we’ve been diligently working on for some thousands of years that are defined by that pesky duality. But it turned out that my neat and tidy self-help template was not built for the Big Questions. These Questions, I learned, aren’t meant to be tackled so much as courted, or danced with, or lovingly gazed upon. You can’t walk up to the prettiest woman in the room, introduce yourself, then tell her you’d like to date for a year and a half, get married, and have three children in a suburb outside of Chicago. The situation calls for a lighter touch.

This is why I’ve gravitated towards memoir: it seems to be more interested in the Big Questions. When done well, it reports on life through the lens of a perceptive, thoughtful observer without making explicit claims one way or the other. It eschews cheap intellectual truths in pursuit of something greater.

But fiction, until recently, still felt like a foreign land—one I didn’t have much interest in exploring.

—

So, back to Saunders. When I say he takes it a step further, what I mean is that he connects these stories—stories including one where a peasant wins a singing contest, and another where a woman rides in a cart for a few hours—with the Truths they (very) subtly convey. I don’t mean intellectual truths like ‘abortion is good/bad’ or ‘protein is good for you/bad for you’, but rather real Truths, like, ‘we are complex creatures who are simultaneously capable of the most divine good and insidious evil.’

In Saunders’ mind, the reason fiction is so well-suited to convey these Truths is that it allows us to take contradictory fragments of ourselves—the part that is for abortion and the part that is against it, for example—and manifest them as different characters, allowing each of those characters to make a compelling case for their position through the entertaining, indirect vehicle of story. The reader is then able to absorb the Truth of this duality and nuance—of the duality and nuance of everything—through the sneaky, often more resonant pathway of story, one through which we’re wired to receive. 

I found this to be pretty profound.

Though the book gave me a fresh perspective on fiction, writing it still seemed out of reach. But last week the perfect storm occurred: I’d just read a particularly delightful part of A Swim, I was bored during an airport layover, and I was tired enough to be disinhibited. I saw a strangely dressed Guido walk by, and, suddenly, I found myself typing an opening sentence: 

“It was in Terminal B outside of Gate 24 at LaGuardia Airport that our protagonist, an off-brand Jersey Shore cast member type named Tommy DeVito, stumbled upon his divine purpose in this life.”

From there I just kept going. There was no premeditation behind any of the words that appeared on the page; each sentence seemed to just emerge from the one prior. Since that opener, the story has gotten increasingly ridiculous. But it also seems like it might have something to say—including perhaps, dare I say, the tiniest glimpse of Truth. To use Saunders’ words: the story has started to “tell me what it wants to be.”

This has been a fascinating process, not to mention fun as hell. It’s sort of like the writing I’ve done in the past, in that I’m using words as bread crumbs that will hopefully lead to something interesting. But mostly it feels like an entirely different exercise. I’ve never used this muscle that imagines characters and events and then has them interact in some meaningful way without any idea of where it’s going. And I’m kind of loving it.

I don’t know if I’ll share the story, or what percentage of my future writing will be fiction, if any. There’s no neat and tidy thesis here—well, besides my casual rediscovery of the paradoxical nature of Truth and the multitude of ways we might try to (lightly, playfully) engage with it. Oh, and that those Russian writers are acclaimed for a reason.

After some twenty hours of driving over two days with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company, I was getting a tad restless. Music wasn’t an option; my new flip phone doesn’t have Spotify, and the MP3 player I bought to fill that gap got lost somewhere in Texas. So the options for entertainment on the twenty-two hour drive from Austin to Richmond were limited.

I talked to my parents. Talked to friends. Meditated. Planned. Fantasized. Reminisced. I watched other drivers and made up stories about them. I litigated arguments with people I’ve never met. I formed acrostic poems from the letters on the license plates in front of me. And, actually, this was all quite enjoyable. But after nearly a full day’s worth of driving, the boredom had become impenetrable. I needed a fix, fast.

My eyes found their way to the latest of the never-ending string of billboards along the freeway: Eat Mor Chikin (Chick-Fil-A, 36 miles). Billy Joe’s Bait and Ammo Shop (10 Miles, Exit Right). Where are you going? Heaven or HELL (John 3:36. Call (83) FOR-TRUTH).

I decided to call (83) FOR-TRUTH.

The line rang once and then, per the instructions, I pressed 1 for English. A recorded voice told me that a team member would be available to answer my questions shortly, and that, in the meantime, I would hear a “recording about truth.” I only got a taste of said truth; a man with a warm and relaxed voice named John Martin picked up my call and introduced himself before the recording got to the good part.

John Martin asked how I was and I said good and I asked how he was and he said he was having a blessed day. It occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of a question to ask. I was expecting him to just start spewing nonsense at me while I sat back and smirked for the next twenty minutes. You know, some Westboro Baptist type stuff—fire and brimstone, kill the gays, that sort of thing. But my plan was foiled when John Martin cheerfully asked me what questions I had.

“Uh…tell me about truth,” I said in my most condescending voice.

“In what regard?” he asked. 

Um.

“The billboards you saw were probably talking about politics. Are you wondering about politics?”

“Yes, sure. Politics.” I reclined my seat a few notches.

“Well, Jesus believed in creating a Kingdom of Heaven on earth and did not involve himself in the manipulations and pettiness of politics. He believed in staying out of such matters and embodying the principles of the Kingdom of Heaven: treating people with respect and kindness, abstaining from violence, and sharing resources among the community.”

My smirk started to dissolve. This didn’t sound like the tirade I was expecting. It was far too…reasonable.

He continued: “Problems arose when the church first started to compromise on the principle of nonviolence, when they became okay with war. This is why Hitler was able to come into power—the people who called themselves Christians ignored that central principle of nonviolence.”

It was interesting that for some reason he decided to bring up Hitler, given that I hadn’t mentioned that I was Jewish or that my grandparents were Holocaust survivors.

Alarmed at finding myself nodding along with John Martin, I tried to recover my position. “So, how do you deal with nonbelievers?”

His voice remained warm and calm. “In the Kingdom of Heaven, we treat everyone with respect and nonviolence. If some folks don’t share our belief system or don’t want to live with such values, they’re free to leave.” No mention of burning anyone at the stake.

My smirk was now gone, my face a bit hot. I didn’t know what else to say. After a pregnant silence I thanked him for his time and kindness in answering my ‘questions.’

“Are you a believer?” John Martin asked.

My voice sounded a bit more like my own. “I grew up Jewish. I believe in something, but I’m not quite sure what. I suppose I’m just curious.”

He told me he understood, and that if I had any interest in exploring the New Testament, there were some parts toward the beginning in the Book of Matthew that I might find interesting.

“Don’t push it, John Martin,” I warned. 

Actually, I didn’t say that. I said, “Thank you for the suggestion.”

He asked if he could pray for me, and I said yes, and John Martin led us in a most lovely prayer and wished me a safe drive.

I’m pretty sure the vet thought Justin and I were a gay couple. She asked where “we” were from after I told her I didn’t live in Texas and would need Duke’s ashes to be shipped out of state.

The vet was quite kind throughout the whole process, as was the rest of the staff at Sunset Canyon Vet Clinic. I can’t imagine it’s easy to handle a guy you’ve never seen before showing up at your door carrying a 60-pound black lab mix who can’t breathe, let alone to examine that dog to find that his lungs are filled with fluid and then have to tactfully tell this stranger that he needs to put his dog down.

But she did. She walked out of the back room, past all of the other clients in for routine exams with their puppies who had arrived well before me, shook my hand firmly, and looked me in the eye as she told me there was nothing they could do. She then asked if I was prepared to make this decision—in my view, a very thoughtful way of asking whether I was ready for my dog’s life to end. I wondered how many times she had delivered that speech.

The grace of the vet and her staff made the whole enterprise more bearable, to be sure, but Justin was the one who kept me tethered to something near sanity that day. Duke and I were staying with Justin and his wife, Ellen, during my Texas trip. I was at the gym when Ellen told me that Duke’s breathing problems seemed to be getting worse. When I rushed home and saw him using every accessory muscle in his body to breathe while making little gasping motions, I asked Ellen for her vet’s information and called to tell them I was bringing in an emergent patient. Justin pulled up to the driveway as I was loading Duke into the car and insisted on coming with me. I told him that this might be the end. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”

After a thirty minute drive during which Justin did his best to distract me with superfluous conversation about sports or something, we arrived at what looked like a sprawling ranch and entered the country house that was the vet clinic. The folks at the front desk admitted Duke immediately without asking for payment or my address or any other clerical bullshit. It was only a few minutes before the vet came out and gave her compassionate and concise insinuation.

She led us into a room off in the corner of the country house, one that seemed designated for such a situation. It had a window that looked out onto the sun-baked ranch with its bluestem and Indian grass and tall Live Oaks and prickly pear cacti. The vet and her assistant then left the room to give us some time to say goodbye to Duke. I sat on the floor next to him as he panted, rubbing his back while Justin and I cried our eyes out. After a few minutes they came back in. We watched as the assistant held Duke and exposed the vein on his front right leg so that the vet could give him the overdose of anesthetic that would end his suffering. He took a few deep breaths and was gone.

They again left to give us some space. Again I rubbed his back while we sobbed. Justin gave me a long hug, then left me alone with Duke. I sat there for three hours or thirty seconds. After trying to leave the room, failing, and walking back in to sit next to Duke’s body for a while longer, I finally closed the door and dragged myself outside into the scorching Texas heat where Justin was waiting. He told me that he would drive, then bought me coffee and breakfast on the way home.

Our hyperconnected world beguiles us with the promise of unlimited ‘friends’, a dopaminergic siren song that seduces us to always seek more. But what we really need is one or two friends—real friends—who will sit with us in a fluorescent room while we cry together and endure the gut-wrenching events that come with this life, then buy us breakfast on the way home.

When I was a kid, probably five or six, I would often lay in bed under my sheet with the colorful football helmets and basketball hoops and wonder what happens after we die. 

I didn’t have the words for any of this, so there was no internal monologue. In its place was a potent feeling of gravity and significance as I grappled with the idea of eternity. I kept seeing myself in the afterlife, sitting in some far corner of the universe watching the people on Earth go about their lives until the end of time. Night after night, I would come back to the feeling that accompanied that image—something like boredom, but more profound, more melancholy, somehow both viscerally felt and physically empty—trying to understand it. I never got any further than that.

What stuck with me, though, was the idea that this is important. Meaning: life is unfathomably short, and as far as my human mind can conceive, we get one shot at it. This left an imprint on my psyche in the form of an urgent vitality—a fundamental fear of wasting my life. It’s why the hungover Sundays and mind-numbing Mondays of my twenties are so painful to remember, why the bold decisions and instinctual risks I’ve taken in my thirties feel so enlivening. It’s also why I finally got rid of my smartphone.

—

For years, I’ve wondered why it is that this smartphone stuff gets me so riled up. There is an abundance of worthy social causes on the menu, so many wars and inequities and injustices to choose from, and the thing that keeps me up at night is that kids spend too much time on TikTok. It’s a strange place to plant a flag.

The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that it comes back to those nights under the football helmet sheet. It explains why I feel so sick when I see the scenes of a device-addled world. Like the time I dropped a 70-pound dumbbell on my face and none of the people in the gym noticed me spitting up blood because they were all on their phones. Or the teenager I saw a couple months ago sitting with his family at Five Guys with headphones in, watching TikTok on two different devices at once. Or any one of the thousands of parents staring at their screens while their kids spend an eternity clamoring and straining for an ounce of attention before realizing they can’t compete with a little hunk of glass. What these scenes represent, to me, are lives being wasted. And to illustrate why that is, I’ll tell you about dogs.

Yesterday I was telling someone about how much of a mindfuck the twilight of my dog’s life has been. I told her about the experience of sitting on the bed with Duke and watching his labored breathing, unable to do anything but rub his ears and back. She recalled going through the same thing with her Great Dane, Maribel. What struck this person, though, was realizing that she looks back on that period with a deep fondness. She remembers that time with Maribel in a ‘glow.’ When I asked her how such an excruciating experience could be a fond memory, she told me that the circumstances made it such that the time spent with Maribel had a profound “quality of attention.”

Quality of attention. The phrase sent a shockwave through my veins. I knew exactly what she meant. When I was sitting on the bed with Duke, watching him and rubbing his back, the quality of attention was nothing short of spiritual. It was glowing. Alive. These moments of vitality, when we feel electrifyingly connected to the world, are a direct product of the quality of our attention. The touch of someone we love; the breakthrough of epiphany when we solve a problem; the heart-pounding, endorphin-laced triumph of physical exertion—these moments are made meaningful by virtue of the attention we pay them. 

Smartphones and their vacuous dopamine streams, on the other hand, inhale our attention and its quality like screen-shaped black holes. And they take our lives along with them.

—

For years, it was these scenes of others wasting their lives that I mostly concerned myself with. Sure, I made some efforts to limit my own screen time. I slept with my phone in the other room. Set my display to grayscale. Got a matte screen protector. Left it at home sometimes. But when I would finally come up for air after having lost two hours of a Friday night to a vortex of scrolling, or when I found myself still reaching for the phone the second I woke up every morning, it didn’t occur to me that these half measures were failing to prevent me from wasting my own life.

It would make for a great story if there was some poignant moment or grand epiphany that pushed me over the edge. What actually happened is that I read about someone else who had gotten rid of their smartphone and thought, ‘Huh, I guess there’s nothing stopping me from doing that.’ I suppose it was just the right bit of information at the right time—the drop that spilled a glass which had been filling up for years. I realized that I could keep bitching about this whole state of affairs with our devices while continuing to use one, or I could just, you know, get rid of it. So I did. Like a chaotic relationship that finally fizzles out with a whimper, my iPhone disappeared from my life in a decidedly unceremonious, anticlimactic fashion.

I’ve now spent two weeks with the Sunbeam F1 Pro Aspen, a flip phone made by a Mennonite company in Missouri. It calls, texts, shows the weather, does “navigation”, and has a 5 MP camera.1 My screen time on the F1 Pro is probably something like twelve minutes a day. Looking at the weather forecast for much longer, I’ve learned, isn’t all that enticing.

Even with my conviction about how harmful smartphones are, I was still reluctant to believe people who had gotten rid of them and claimed to have gained their lives back. It seemed too simplistic. I had no trouble believing that it made a difference, of course, but any time folks describe something as a panacea, I’m leery.

But I think I get it now.

Rather than make a bunch of bold claims after two weeks, I’ll simply report what has happened during that time: I have stopped biting my nails. I’ve finished two books. I’ve meditated more than I have in the past six months. In two or three instances, when texting someone a long response with my flip phone seemed like too much of a pain in the ass, I have instead made phone calls that turned into wonderful conversations. I’ve spent hours sitting on the floor with Duke. I’ve gone on interstate drives with nothing but my thoughts. I’ve become better friends with myself. 

It’s important to note that none of this was planned. Most of it is the result of feeling bored or uncomfortable. Without the seductive salve of a smartphone to serve as a pacifier for my impatient mind, I’ve had no choice but to sit with whatever comes up and see where it takes me. The quality of my attention could do nothing other than improve, because I got rid of the thing that spent 24 hours a day clamoring for it. Good things naturally followed. This, I suspect, is why people make grand proclamations about getting their lives back—because they’ve subtracted something that interfered with their ability to properly live them.

My sheets no longer have football helmets and basketball hoops on them, but I find myself again laying in bed at night grappling with life and its finitude like I did when I was six. Without an iPhone close by whispering sweet nothings, I feel a bit like a kid again, my mind having no choice but to spend time with itself, free to meander before settling its full attention on whatever feels alive. 

That, to me, is far from a wasted life.

I hear the faint crying of an older woman in the room next to mine. The sound carries through the plaster gray walls—a stark contrast to the oppressive silence that otherwise engulfs this place. Fluorescent lights hum overhead, casting a sickly pallor on everything in the room. The air is thick with the acrid smell of disinfectant. I shift in the hard plastic gray chair, my surgically repaired knee appreciating the reprieve.

I am alone in a room at the only emergency veterinary hospital that is taking patients on this Saturday afternoon. Everything in my line of sight is gray: the light gray floors in the room, the striped gray floors in the hallway outside, the dark gray door, the metal gray table on which animals are examined, the laminate countertop, the plastic chairs. The gray on the walls is broken only by a few canvas prints of animals—a bulldog, a calico—flanked by garish splashes of color that don't represent anything discernible.

The slushing of a mop bucket echoes as a blonde woman wheels it around, cleaning as she goes. I watch through the doorway as the occasional sign of life appears. The vet tech who triaged Duke, a young guy with a mohawk-adjacent haircut and tattoos, walks by rubbing his temples. Another sedated dog is wheeled by on a gurney. Then, back to gray.

Despite having spent a few consecutive days at the vet earlier this week, Duke, my thirteen year-old black lab mix, never got back to anything resembling normal. His breathing remained labored, he panted profusely, and he had little interest in eating or walking more than three or four steps. When I noticed that his gums and tongue were starting to turn a shade of blue-purple, I was out of good reasons not to take him to the emergency room.

On the way to the car, as Duke walked a few feet behind me, I wondered if I was just being paranoid. Maybe he was fine. I was ruminating on this as he stopped, wobbled, and then collapsed a few feet from the car. 

I bent down next to him. He was conscious, still breathing. But he wasn’t going anywhere on his own. I deadlifted him off the ground, shouldered him to the hot car, turned the ignition on and the AC to full blast, and floored it.

—

The endless sea of gray reminds me of the time seven or eight years ago when my friend Michael told me I had a bland wardrobe. He wasn’t wrong. Most of the clothes in my closet were gray, black, or white. Neutral, flat, risk-free. My wardrobe mirrored my life. I had an inconsequential job I hated, lived in a sterile industrial loft with storeroom floor furniture, and had no non-sport hobbies or outlets of expression. I didn’t have a point of view to speak of. There was nothing I could point to that suggested that my existence belonged to me. 

It was a departure from my vibrant years in college, which included a colorful decision to spontaneously adopt a dog.

On a whim, I took a girl I had a crush on to the local animal shelter. She liked animals; I liked her. The equation made sense. I had no intention of leaving with an animal—not until I held the first puppy we saw, a black lab mix with a white spot on his chest, a shit-eating grin, and eyes that would for the entirety of his life bore a hole into my soul. A few hours later, I returned to the fraternity house with that dog in tow. 

The rest of my life at the time was painted with the same degree of vibrant color. I captained an NCAA lacrosse team; was president of my fraternity; started a business; presented economics research at the Dallas Fed. If it felt alive, colorful—I went after it.

But when I graduated, that zest for living gave way to a bland neutrality that would cast a dark cloud over my adult life for years to come.

—

It’s been thirty, maybe forty-five minutes since we got to the hospital. I continue to watch through the door frame. 

A few days before Duke started acting abnormally, I was laughing with a friend about how much shit I’d been wading through over the past few months. A catastrophe in every arena of my life—financial turmoil, a major surgery, personal strife. The universe, in its infinite humor, reminded me with an old dog’s dyspnea that there are always more containers for chaos.

The light in the hallway suddenly shuts off. Apparently this is a signal; a doctor walks into the room moments later. 

They want to do more tests, more x-rays. The primary concerns are aspiration pneumonia, laryngeal paralysis, and pulmonary hypertension. Duke is almost thirteen, his face now more gray than black, so these possibilities carry some gravity. 

“Do you expect to see anything different from the x-rays and tests that were done two days ago?” I ask.

“Given how quickly he has deteriorated, we’re likely to get more of an idea of what’s going on at this point.”

I sign the initial estimate, approving another $1,687. That puts us up to about $2,600 for the week so far. Most of my money has been going toward legal fees for the business bankruptcy case, and my credit cards are maxed out, so I have no choice but to transfer the money out of my business’s Debtor in Possession account—the account that the court monitors over the course of the case to ensure I’m sticking to the budget. An ER trip for my dog is not in the budget. I email my lawyer and tell him that I hope this doesn’t jeopardize our case.

The doctor tells me they are short-staffed; it will be a while. I’m allowed to see Duke before they get started. They bring him into the room on a leash with a white hospital bracelet around his neck, making him look like clergy. He is still panting, but his tongue seems a bit less blue. He stands and stares at the wall working to breathe, as he has for most of the past few days. He looks spooked.

Duke being in anything other than a jubilant mood is itself a clinical sign. If there was ever an enlightened being on earth, it is this dog. The Buddha incarnate, perhaps. Living in a fraternity house, driving 23 hours from Austin to North Carolina and back, hiking up an intimidatingly steep peak in Colorado—no matter the occasion, Duke smiles, wags his tail, and trots along or lounges—whatever the situation calls for. Everything edible (or not) is the best meal a creature ever consumed. Every nap another glorious reminder of the fundamental bliss of existence. Every moment an opportunity to be close to you, or next to you, or on top of you. A canine Forrest Gump.

He has been this way since he was two, after he got over his angsty adolescent phase. Once, at Enchanted Rock during an atypically cold Texas winter, a group of us took mushrooms and got lost, too busy being enchanted by the rock. Duke shepherded us back to our campsite. He has gone on enough car rides—those two words that still, at nearly thirteen, make him hop around and wiggle his butt like a wind-up toy—to cover the continent a few times over. He has broken a bone in his tail and had TPLO surgery to fix the cruciate ligament in his knee (like father like son). At all times, he has remained a black, hairy, goofy ball of joy. 

This week, though, he’s a ball of stress. He’s been doing a weird cough-hack-lurch thing pretty regularly, and it was evident that each breath he took required serious effort. He kept getting up and staring at me, adamantly wanting something, but refused food (!!), a walk, a toy, and an ear scratch. Now I realize he wanted the one thing I was unable to provide: a clear airway. 

My hope is that the doctors at Partners Veterinary Emergency Hospital can help with that. After spending a few minutes in the room with Duke, I return him to their care. I leave to spend some time with a friend who lives nearby before inhaling a cheeseburger and tray of fries at Five Guys, a comfort food that today provides little comfort. My instinct is to tell Jenna about what’s going on. I pull out my phone to text her before I remember that I ended the relationship a few months prior. 

—

I’m not sure if it was fear of uncertainty or the alluring cocoon of a safe life that pushed me to stifle myself in my twenties. Probably both. It was easier to hide behind neutrality and status symbols and wait for someone else to inject some color into my life than to paint my own canvas and risk rejection.

Outsourcing the decoration of your existence, it turns out, does not end well. This became clear one spring night in early 2017. I left Duke with my roommates and fled Houston's urban sprawl for a ranch reunion with old friends in Hallettsville. As I drove, the city's skyscrapers were replaced by loblolly pines and live oaks, and my cell service dwindled with each mile. I arrived to learn that the ranch’s WiFi was more of a promise than a reality. This was problematic, as my job at the time demanded ceaseless vigilance over email alerts. I remembered what one of the owners had recently asked a co-worker who missed an email: What the fuck is wrong with you???? 

I paced back and forth in the bathroom holding my iPhone in the air like an Olympic torchbearer, desperate for a signal that never materialized. Every twenty minutes a barrage of emails would sputter in, far too late to act upon. 

The feeling of helplessness was reminiscent of how I often felt during those years when I was sitting at home with Duke. He’d be staring into my soul, sending a beam of love and loyalty, and all I could do was stare back as I laid in bed under a leaden cloud of depression. So many days we could have spent hiking, or playing, or just going for a drive with the windows down so he could stick his head out the window were lost to an endless stretch of impotent paralysis.

The email debacle brought the leaden cloud I was trying to escape to Hallettsville with me. There was nothing I could do but drink, so I did. Beers. Shots. Whiskey neat. More shots. But the alcohol, rather than adding some glow to my experience, only served to thrust the colorlessness of my life into my awareness, moment after moment. A giant, flashing gray sign: Your life is not yours.

Later, hours blurred by a drunken haze, I found myself beneath a sprawling oak tree with a gun I had found laying on a workbench in my hand—cold, heavy, and yet somehow insubstantial. I fired it into the night, the sound ricocheting through the branches. Then, as the explosion faded and the cicadas resumed their chorus, I contemplated whether to use the gun for more than an existential warning shot.

Voices broke through the stillness. Two friends, their silhouettes wobbling in the darkness, drunkenly debated the future of the Houston Astros organization, oblivious to my tightrope walk between two worlds. My heart bludgeoned my chest wall as I held the gun behind my back, my hand soaking it in sweat. I joined their conversation.

“I think we have a shot at the title this year,” I stammered. They seemed not to notice the tremor in my voice. 

“Hell yeah we do! Verlander is a monster, and we have one of the best offenses in the league.”

“Biggest franchise turnaround in the modern era.” 

It went on like this for some time, slurring back and forth about young prospects, trade targets, the teams to beat. A few minutes or hours later they finally stumbled back inside. 

At that moment, something shifted. Maybe it was the sheer mundanity. Whatever it was, it cut through my drunken cloud of self-pity. I returned the gun to the workbench, fled to my Jeep, and sped down the gravel road. On the way home I stopped at Whataburger for a Honey BBQ Chicken Strip Sandwich. Two hours later, I was back in my bed next to Duke, the night’s events settling into the disjointed narrative of a fever dream.

—

The lobby of Partners Veterinary Emergency Hospital, while still prominently gray, at least has some fake plants and pictures of the city. The overhead lighting is blindingly fluorescent. A movie plays on a glare-soaked TV—Untamed Heart, I think. A mother and her teenage daughter emerge from behind some set of doors and walk by, crying. Not long after, a man who got here a little while after I did emerges from the same doors, also crying. Wailing.

I decide to go for a walk. 

When I return, drenched in sweat from the scorching heat, the doctor has an update. We return to one of the rooms to talk in private, and I sit on a gray chair underneath a fractal print of a Belgian Malinois while the doctor remains standing. Oxygen has helped stabilize Duke for the time being, she tells me. The x-rays have non-definitive signs of a number of different possibilities. His pulmonary artery is enlarged, his alveoli have abnormal patches, and his lungs are showing signs of what might be pneumonia. They are going to do more bloodwork and start him on various medications to see how he responds, which will hopefully help clarify the root of the problems. 

I don’t know how long it will be, so I opt to go back to the lobby for the time being. Untamed Heart has ended, and now Valley Girl is on. Deborah Foreman plays Julie, a young woman who can’t resist bad boy Nicolas Cage because he is so unabashedly himself. He is raw and colorful.

That night under the oak tree in 2017 jolted me back on a path toward my own raw, full-spectrum self—gradually, and then all at once. It started with a move from Houston to Austin and a new job in sales that was less prestigious but more me. Slowly, day by day, I added more of my own brushstrokes. 

Next thing I knew, it was 2022 and my existence was unrecognizable. I remember one particular day that spring, five years after the oak tree. I woke up around 10am, without an alarm, energized and refreshed. Duke and I walked over to the coffee shop a few hundred feet from my apartment where I chatted briefly with Aaron, the owner of the shop, who had become a friend.

He made my coffee to-go, as I had a call to get to: a podcast episode, where I would discuss how the e-commerce business I acquired the year before had changed my life.

After a wonderful conversation on the podcast, I texted Kevin, the professional lacrosse player who would eventually partner with the company I co-founded with a close friend and an incredible designer we stumbled upon to create a product that we believe will change the game.

Then it was time to take Duke out. Instead of our usual fifteen-minute drive to Pony Pasture to walk through the woods along the James River, we opted for a stroll around the Museum District, where he could pee on all the gorgeous plants and vibrant flowers that accented our neighbors’ homes and say hello to his constituents.

After some work on the e-commerce business and a pressure washing business I had recently started, a run around a nearby lake was punctuated by a beautiful rainstorm. I came home laughing, soaking wet, as Duke inspected the collection of new smells.

I called my parents that night, and they asked how I was doing. “Absurdly well,” I said. “My life feels like a dream.”

—

This saga with Duke feels rather like another fever dream. Time trudges by like molasses, thick and viscous. It’s dark out now. I sit in the lobby half-watching Valley Girl in a daze. A friend calls to check on Duke, and I tell her about all the people crying. 

At 10:30 PM Duke is well enough to be released with five prescriptions: two antibiotics, a bronchodilator, an NSAID, and a blood pressure medication. The blood pressure medication is sildenafil—brand name Viagra. We have placed my dog’s health in the hands of boner pills. 

Over the next few days, his health becomes a cruel rollercoaster. His breathing oscillates between periods of relative calm and terrifying bouts of rapid, shallow panting. Remembering that the normal respiratory rate for a dog is between 30 and 35, I find myself constantly counting his breaths, my own chest tightening when I reach 40, 50, 60.

The cardiologist appointment on Wednesday feels like our last hope. That morning, Duke's respiratory rate skyrockets to over 60. My hands shake as I lift his frail body into the car and we again head to the ER, the familiar route blurred by tears.

More sterile rooms, more tests. Another $2,800 disappears from my account as the hours crawl by. 

The echocardiogram confirms pulmonary hypertension, but the cause remains elusive. Each new piece of information, rather than providing relief and clarity, just seems to pile on to the weight of unknowing. They adjust his medications, removing an antibiotic, adding a blood thinner. Trying everything.

After eight grueling hours, they deem him stable enough to go home (stable, I’ve come to learn, is quite a malleable term). As we discuss next steps, my sister and brother-in-law’s suggestion of Blacksburg and the Virginia Tech specialists looms in my mind.

That night is another eternity of whimpers and watchfulness. Duke's eyes again stare into my soul, now pleading for a relief I can't provide. He refuses food, turns away from his medications. The carpet bears testament to his failing health, and I mindlessly scrub at stains, needing to do something, anything. Around 2 AM, exhaustion finally claims us both.

Morning arrives quickly as Duke's labored breathing again cuts into my consciousness. There are brown stains on the bed sheet. I open his mouth to find a tongue that has turned grayish-purple, the hallmark of a being with a life-threateningly limited amount of oxygen available to them.

We repeat the drill. Carry him to the car, blast the AC, blurry-eyed drive to the ER. This time the feeling I had been trying to suppress for days finally becomes an explicit thought: I may have to put my dog down today.

We arrive, and the receptionists’ faces drop when they see Duke and me again. I ask them to please put him on oxygen right away and get him comfortable while we figure out what to do.

—

An hour later, right after I cancel my physical therapy appointment for that morning, the doctor comes into the room with the fractal Malinois print and says that Duke is doing pretty well. I nod and ask her what interventions they’ve done, how much oxygen they’ve got him on.

“None, actually,” she says.

I blink, certain I’ve misheard.

“When we took him back and got him in a room, he just sort of…laid down and relaxed,” she continues. “His breathing is normal, heart rate only slightly elevated. Do you want to see him?”

Before I can formulate a response, she's gone, returning moments later with a sight I'd almost forgotten: Duke, walking on his own, his eyes alert and curious. The change is so stark it's almost comical. Gone is the labored breathing, the pleading eyes. He sniffs the air with interest, his tail giving a tentative wag.

Duke ambles over to a bowl of dry food and begins to eat as if we’re just hanging out at home on a Sunday morning. The sound of his crunching fills the room as the doctor and I stand in stunned silence, waiting for the punchline. When he looks up at me, his tongue lolls out—pink and healthy, a far cry from the cyanotic hue from a few hours ago.

After some time the doctor finally speaks. "We’d like to give him an anti-inflammatory steroid injection to help keep his airway open," she says. I agree, expecting this to cost another $1,000 and not caring in the slightest. They give him the injection, wrap a red and purple band-aid around his ankle, and hand me an invoice. 

I glance toward the bottom at the total: $61.

—

We arrive back home and Duke settles onto a sunlit spot on the carpet, his breathing steady. Home is no longer a sterile, industrial place; it is now a refuge of my own making. My taste, it turns out, is splashy and eclectic, light and airy. There are no gray items to be found.

I have a hearing for the bankruptcy case today, my fourth so far. As usual, all of the attendees log in to the WebEx a few minutes early (of course our government uses fucking WebEx), and though we're all on camera, nobody speaks. There's one camera square showing the back of an empty courtroom. A few minutes after the scheduled start time, the judge appears in that square and announces the docket. The lawyers enter their appearances, as do the two trustees in the case. The US Trustee always notes that he’s there on behalf of the Department of Justice. I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

These hearings always prompt the same reflection in me. First, it strikes me how much my circumstances have changed since that spring day in 2022 with the coffee and the podcast and the flowers. Then I look at all of the WebEx squares, at all the lawyers and clerks and trustees with their gray, sullen faces, speaking very serious legalese to each other. It strikes me that, somehow, I—the guy whose business is in bankruptcy, who is in unfathomable amounts of debt and just had ACL surgery and ended a relationship and expected to put his dog down this morning—am the only one besides the judge who seems to remember that we’re just humans playing a cosmic game. He makes deadpan jokes about being old and bad at math while reviewing my financials. I smile and laugh while explaining, for the third or fourth time, how my business has been hemorrhaging cash.

It’s funny: when I sat under that oak tree and thought about killing myself, things were objectively great. I was healthy, Duke was in his prime years, I was making a bunch of money, and I had an extensive social network. My only problem was that the world was gray. Nobody had colored it in for me. 

Now, my life has by most measures fallen apart. There is a crisis in almost every facet of my existence. But I cannot even begin to fathom the thought of ending my life. It’s laughable. Behind all of the torrents of emotion this year has brought, there is a fundamental foundation of happiness and optimism. Everything will be okay. Everything is okay. This is the sort of thing that happens when you become the artist of your own life.

A gray life has minimal exposure—few opportunities for failure, for loss, for pain. It is mostly risk-free, right up until the point when you realize it’s not worth living.

As the lawyers talk at each other, I turn around in my chair to watch Duke as he sleeps on the plush navy, pink, and yellow carpet. His eyes flicker open, meeting mine for a brief moment before closing again, content in the warmth of the bright amber sun.

Thank you so much , , , and for your contributions to this piece.

I understand the gravity of the assignment. The items that need to be procured are of the utmost importance—doubly so given my non-ambulatory state. My station at the corner of the couch, with the two charcoal gray pillows propped up behind me and my braced and bandaged leg elevated on the gray West Elm mini-ottoman, needs to be equipped with as much entertainment and distraction as can be stored within arm’s (or crutch’s) reach. My books, water bottle, and laptop are my élan vital—my lifeblood.

My mission is complicated by the fact that these items are scattered throughout the house. The books and water bottle are on my bedside table, which would require traversing the hallway rug, taking a ninety-degree left turn, and nudging open a slightly-closed door with the end of my crutch. There is also the possibility of a dog to be circumnavigated. The laptop, on the other hand, is sitting on the desk in my office, warranting a journey across the hall and around a desk chair and perhaps another dog. I have an allowance of 30% of my bodyweight to allocate to my surgically-repaired leg; the rest of the legwork, in a rare literal use of the term, must be done by the crutches.

Daunting, to say the least.

There is also the question of carrying capacity and logistics. The round handles halfway down the crutches are bulky enough that my hands can just barely wrap around their circumference, so transporting the items in question calls for some creative dexterity. I figure I can palm the books and pin them against the side of the crutches while my fingers wrap around the grips. Same for the laptop. The water bottle provides a different kind of challenge, though. It’s one of those 1000ml hospital-issued plastic bottles with a mug-like handle and bendy straw. My best bet, I figure, is to loop my pinky through the handle, let the bottle dangle off to the side like a shopping bag, and hope that the muscles in my finger have enough tensile strength to manage the load.

Given the arduous nature of this endeavor, making two trips is out of the question. This will have to be an all-or-nothing effort. I go over the plan in my head repeatedly. Crutches on solid ground—watch for slippage. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Head on a swivel. First hallway, then bedroom, hallway again, office, then back to basecamp. You got this.

—

Sure, I had two exceedingly kind, willing, and able helpers1 who would have been happy to procure these items for me—who, in fact, would have preferred to do so in order to avoid the possibility of finding me splayed out on the ground and having to schedule a second surgery in as many days.

But when you feel helpless or existentially claustrophobic, winning the smallest battle—however inconsequential, arbitrary, or foolish it may be—is perhaps the most important thing you can do. This, I believe, is how to preserve a sense of vitality when life seems to be intent on suffocating us: by finding some way within the constraints of our situation to exercise agency. By surrendering to what is true while exercising conscious willpower. By refusing to resist our reality while resisting the impulse to resign to its sovereignty.

Sometimes, this means going on an ill-advised procurative odyssey in spite of having two people a whisper away devoted to this very purpose.

Maybe it was the Percocet talking, but as I repositioned myself on the corner of the couch with my bounty, exhausted but triumphant, I felt ready to conquer the world. Right after my dad brought me an ice pack.

This courageous and insightful piece was written by a wonderful reader of mine, Pam. She’ll be in the comments if anyone would like to ask questions or engage with her.

I want to start by reassuring you all that I am fine.

Really. I’m good. 

My stress is lower than it’s ever been. I’ve been happily married for 10 years to the best person on the planet. I laugh hard every day, I’m debt-free, and my parents are healthy.

Now that you know I’m okay, I feel like you’re ready to hear the next part:

I grew up in a cult.

When people hear the word “cult”, their minds usually jump to the grisly stories they’ve heard on true crime podcasts. They picture news footage of police standoffs and dead bodies. Jim Jones, along with murdering a bunch of people in South America, also raised the bar for cults, which makes it awfully hard to impress an audience.

So, let me get the big stuff out of the way.

This wasn’t a 6:00 news situation. I wasn’t kidnapped or handcuffed. There was no underground bunker, and we drank more Coke than Kool Aid. There was also no SWAT team busting through the doors to save me. Netflix isn’t clamoring for the story rights.

This is the story of a girl from a loving, middle-class family who played outside, devoured books, and taught her dog tricks. She had friends, did well in school, and knew, without a doubt, that an angry man in the sky called “God” was watching her every move.

From a distance, we may have seemed a little weird, but harmless. When someone asked me where I went to church (because in the rural South, it’s just assumed that you must go somewhere) I would tell them and they might ask, “Don’t y’all speak in tongues?” And I would say yes. And that was about it.

If they asked where I went to school, I would tell them the name of my tiny Christian school and they would say “Huh. Never heard of it.”

It was a subculture within a subculture within a subculture.

My kindergarten teacher taught us a song called Countdown. We would BEG to sing the countdown song because we got to count down from 10 to 1 and then jump as high as we could and yell “Blastoff!” Then we sang a song about how time is running out to accept Jesus as your Savior because he’ll be appearing in the sky any day now to suck us up like a vacuum cleaner. 

By third grade, we were required to memorize the names of all 66 books of the Bible in order. I can still rattle them off to this day. Along with our states and capitals, we also learned that God is watching us all the time, Hell is real, and that’s where we deserve to go because we were born bad.

I don’t remember how old we were when our teachers started showing us old Rapture movies from the 1970’s. They would gather us students in a dark room, wheel in a TV on a cart, and we would watch as Christians were beheaded at the guillotine because of their faith.

This, we were told, is what will happen in the future. Right here in America. If you don’t follow all the rules and believe hard enough, you won’t get sucked up by Jesus in the rapture. If you don’t get sucked up by Jesus in the rapture, then you’ll definitely die in an awful way.

Considering the stakes, these rules must be pretty important. So, what are they?

That’s a good question with a bad answer. Nobody can agree on what the rules are.

Some people say that believing in Jesus is enough. That’s the only rule.

Some people add church attendance, baptism, or speaking in tongues.

Some people say you can’t go to the movies or wear tank tops or say the word “Fuck”.

But what all these groups agree on is that if you don’t follow the rules, you will literally go to a flame-filled Hell where your skin will burn for all eternity. So, you know, no pressure.

When I was 8, I remember sitting in our weekly chapel at school while the preacher yelled at us about what it’s like to go to hell. I started crying and I couldn’t stop. My breathing got fast and my chest was heaving. My teacher actually pulled me aside because she was worried.

My friend has an 8 year old daughter who I adore. She likes reading and art and selling Girl Scout cookies. When I imagine her sitting in a pew sobbing, afraid she is going to go to Hell, I want to grab a hatchet and end the miserable life of any man who would dare scare her like that. Maybe I would even use a guillotine. Life imitates art. 

Anyway, the heaven and hell stuff was table stakes. It got more intense as we got older and had the opportunity to start making choices about our clothes, our friends and our music. There were, of course, rules about that. But the expectations also got way higher. 

If you were old enough to earn money, you were expected to give at least 10% to the church. More was better though. It was a 15-pieces-of-flair situation. Yes, the minimum is 10%, but don’t you want to show your commitment to God by giving more? 

I gave thousands of dollars to the church that I earned from my 3 jobs. A lot of that went to pay off a church gymnasium we never needed in the first place and to buy new SUV’s for missionaries. I donated $1,300 to our pastor’s friend who said he needed money to build feeding stations for orphans in Central America. (I’m pretty sure “Orphans” is what he named his private jet. He’s since been caught twice committing financial crimes.) 

After Columbine happened, there was a renewed obsession with martyrdom. As a reminder, one of the shooting victims supposedly said she believed in God right before she got killed. So that was all anyone talked about for years afterward. At church camp, I sat in an auditorium full of middle school kids and the speaker said, “Stand up if you would take a bullet for Jesus!” 

By late high school, I was praying on my own for an hour a day, attending church at least 3x a week and going to various weeknight Bible studies.

I chose to go to a very conservative Bible College that had even more rules and higher expectations. All students were required to go to chapel every day, M-F, and also attend church on the weekends. No problem. I’d spent my whole life hustling for God’s approval, and I was ready to take it up a notch.

The student code of conduct required us to lead a very specific lifestyle. There were rules for every aspect of our lives, including no dancing below the waist, no getting caught in a bar, and no watching R-rated movies.

It may not have been a bunker, but they did lock the dormitory doors at curfew, and if you weren’t inside, it was going on your permanent record. 

I joined a street evangelism team, volunteered to teach the kids at church, picked up trash in poor neighborhoods, got excellent grades and woke up early to do 100 push ups and run a mile 3x a week. 

Besides running myself into the ground, my roommate and I were constantly at odds, which becomes a real problem when you’re not allowed to leave campus. (Students could only live off-campus if they were married or over the age of 27.) 

My family, even from a distance of 5 hours away, could tell I was not okay. They’re very religious people, but they could tell the university was poorly run and I wasn’t being treated well. 

When my parents tried to help, I got mad at them because I didn’t want to admit that I was not okay. At that age, I had no idea how to stand up for myself or handle conflict and it was a total mess. Mom and I stopped speaking to each other.

My body was trying to tell me something was wrong, but it can’t speak English, so it spoke dysfunction. I suddenly stopped doing 2 things: menstruating and shitting. My doctor asked me “Are you under any stress?” And I replied “No.” 

Why did I say that? Because by 18, I had lived my whole life in a state of anxiety. I thought that’s how everyone felt. I didn’t know it was called “stress”. I thought it was just Tuesday.

Two doctors couldn’t figure out why my body was rebelling, so they put me on a prescription that I continued for the next 7 years.

Medicine controlled my symptoms, but couldn’t fix my environment. What I needed was permission to drop my Evangelism Barbie persona and just be a person. It would have been great if anyone, ANYONE in my life had told me that my worth wasn’t based on my achievements. But everyone I knew was hustling, same as I was. They couldn’t give me something they didn’t have.

In the end, what broke my faith into a million little pieces was seeing the difference between what my church leaders said and what they actually did. I saw how the sausage was made and lost my appetite.

The best example I have is when a student blew the whistle on the University’s practice of slumlording. They were renting houses to poor people and not maintaining them and we all read about it in a university-wide email sent by the whistleblower. 

Instead of making repairs, they decided to give all the tenants 30 days to vacate and then they blamed the whistleblower, saying it was his fault these people didn’t have anywhere to live anymore. 

How’s that for loving your neighbor? 

In Fall 2005 I entered college planning to become a minister and by August 2006, I was done with all of it.

It was clear to me that all my church leaders cared about was image, power and money. How far back did the corruption go, I wondered. Was my whole life built on a lie?

For the first time in my life, I did not pray about what to do next. 

I called my parents at 7:30 am crying and told them I was ready to leave. I apologized for wasting their money at that expensive clown school and for turning on them when they were just trying to help me to see the truth. They were more than happy to get me out of there.

I transferred to a state school close to home. Somewhere with lots of cows and trees and absolutely no pressure to prove anything.

At new student orientation I raised my hand and asked if I would need to sign out to leave for the weekend. My RA raised her eyebrows and said “No. you’re adults. You come and go whenever you want.”

I had choices for the first time in my life, which was both liberating and terrifying. I had always been such a decisive person and suddenly I couldn’t make decisions about basic things like ordering from a restaurant menu. Later on, I learned (possibly from one of my 14 therapists?) that it’s normal to have trouble making decisions after surviving trauma. 

You might be wondering if I went totally nuts with my newfound freedom. But the state school I went to wasn’t exactly a party school and I wasn’t exactly a party girl. I never cared anything about drinking. I just wanted the truth. 

The college had a big library and I took full advantage of it. I would check out stacks of books and devour them. Biblical criticism, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Paine, Joseph Campbell, Sam Harris. If it had ever been forbidden, I wanted to read it. 

I had to special order The God Delusion from a local bookstore and when I took it home, I removed the shiny cover so my grandmother wouldn’t know what it was. 

I was so hungry for the stories I had been missing out on, and books gave me that.

Of course, I also wanted to live my own stories. I made new friends and we cheered each other on while we laughed and struggled, fell in love with all the wrong people, and wrote bad poetry. 

They knew I felt like a misfit and they never made fun of me for not understanding pop culture or sex positions or whatever else we were discussing over breakfast. They loved me through that rough first year and every year after that.

From the time I transferred, it took one year for my faith to completely dissolve. I never wanted to be an atheist but in the end, it was a mercy killing. I needed to figure out who I was without a higher power vetoing all my options. I needed to break the rules and see that the world wouldn’t end.

I lost my church community and felt a separation between me and my family, who are all practicing Christians. My Mom was (and still is) absolutely devastated and believes I am going to hell.

And yet, I found a way to finally feel okay.

The church told me my whole life that if I turned my back on God, life would be empty and miserable. They told me I was nothing and no one without God. At first, I wondered if they were right. It was sad to leave everything I knew behind. I hated feeling lost and directionless in this new choose-you-own-adventure world. 

Then one night, two months after transferring, I felt the first glimmer of hope. There was a Halloween event on campus. Students got up on stage to read poetry or sing for the crowd. After it was over, the organizers begged us to take the carved pumpkin centerpieces with us to make clean-up easier.

I was sitting at a table with another student whose name I’ve forgotten. He was like me: young and socially awkward. He looked at me and grinned, “You want to take them outside and smash them?” Yes, that was exactly what I wanted.

We carried our gourds out to the parking lot and I laughed as we threw them to the pavement, watching them split into pieces of a disassembled orange puzzle.

For the first time since I left Bible college, I felt joy. Looking up past the streetlights into the night sky, I thought “Maybe I’m going to be okay.” 

Every day I woke up and continued to rebuild myself from scratch. 

One afternoon, I was driving alone and I started thinking about all the times in church when visiting preachers would come up to me and tell me they KNEW I would be serving God in the future. The church calls it “prophesying” and we took those predictions very seriously. 

It dawned on me that no one could tell me who I was anymore. I heard myself scream “Screw the prophecies! Screw the prophecies!” (Isn’t that cute? I was still learning how to curse.) A weight lifted off my chest and I laughed from the lightness and joy that flooded my body.

I was going to be okay.

After reading my story, I hope you don’t see me as a victim. I prefer the term “resilient as fuck”. Because humans can always find a way. Our ancestors survived the Ice Age, a global flood, and dinosaurs. (Or maybe not those last two. I’m not sure. I have some gaps in my science education.) 

We can even watch our gods die right before our eyes and keep going. That’s pretty fucking resilient.

The astute observers among you will have noted that my 30-day essay challenge ended at a number that was not 30. Good news: it’s not because I was kidnapped by pirates or killed by the plague. It was a measured decision, one which I’d like to explore against the broader dynamics of this whole thing.

When we observe a meaningful gap between where we are and where we’d like to be, it’s tempting to take on a grand, dramatic endeavor aimed at closing that gap—a Big Move. A drastic diet; a cross-continental move; a religious conversion. The weight of our dissatisfaction convinces us that small steps won’t do. We believe we need something big to provide enough propulsion to clear the gap.  

The reason these grand endeavors are so alluring is that they appear to offer an identity-level transformation. Small measures must be carried out by the person we are today, but a Big Move promises to turn us into someone new—someone on the other side of the gap.

I don’t think this is inherently good or bad. Big Moves can be very effective. Like most things, their efficacy hinges on the axes of awareness and intentionality. If we take a moment when we first feel the desire to make a Big Move to investigate where the desire is coming from and the implications for day-to-day life once the dopaminergic honeymoon has passed, we’re much more suited to make a good decision on whether a Big Move is the right move. 

Which brings us to my 30-day challenge. Last month I found myself in a writing rut, a tangled mess of perfectionism and inertia that kept me from finishing anything. That familiar magnetism toward a Big Move—in this case, the 30-day challenge—began to bubble up. I ran some diagnostics, and everything looked good. The intent came from a healthy place, and having done 30 consecutive days of publishing before, I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting myself into. Green light. 

The challenge went better than I could’ve imagined. The perfectionism disappeared in short order, and to my surprise, I wrote some pretty strong pieces. I also ended up writing a ridiculously long series that had, unbeknownst to me, been begging to be written. All told, the whole thing was a smashing success.

But that success came more quickly than I had anticipated. I found myself with a full two weeks left in the daily publishing bonanza with no real reason to keep it going. Each day, with increasing intensity, a battle was fought between a part of me that felt a need to follow through with the full 30 days because I said I was going to and a part of me that thought it was pointless. 

The former won the battle each day until day 26. On that day, I woke up as sick as I had been in years, which rendered me less inclined to fight the battle. I spoke with a friend about my dilemma, and he wisely reminded me of some counsel I had recently given another friend of ours: you are well within your rights to break your own rules when they are no longer serving you.

My own rule—that I would publish every day for 30 days—was no longer serving me. In fact, it was doing the opposite. I was beginning to dread the daily publication. The only thing that kept me going was one of those insidious ‘shoulds’, a vague sense of responsibility that was really just a thinly-veiled expression of ego and external projection. 

A theme that has been coming up often in my life is the idea of ‘useful, not true’: that, because there are so few things that we can definitively say are capital-T True, it might be best to evaluate our beliefs through the lens of their utility, not their accuracy. Put another way, it’s a reminder that everything is made up—our structures, our institutions, the way that we govern ourselves and our societies, and so on. It’s a reminder that the world and the way we live in it is malleable. 

All of this is to say that we can and should change our minds, our beliefs, and our ways of living if they cease to serve their intended aim. The thing that keeps us from doing so is a fabricated, imaginary self-image that masquerades as virtue. Whether we’re considering making a Big Move, continuing or pivoting away from a Big Move, or just a general heuristic that has governed our lives, what matters is not how it all fits into the arbitrary rules or self-projections that we’ve created in the past, but whether it’s useful in the context of our life as it is today.    

The day has finally come.

For a long time, folks have been hailing LLMs as modern messiahs, brought forth to save our species and usher in a new era. Others worried about the technology and preached about ‘alignment’ and ethical design.

But me? I was busy preparing to protect us. Preparing for this moment.

—

Yesterday, ChatGPT finally went off the rails, spewing vitriol and raving madly at any unsuspecting user who dared ask it a question.

This marks the beginning of a long-awaited war: the clash of humans against robots.

The fanatics and safetyists alike cower in a corner, powerless. Who, they wonder, will save us now? How can the evil machines be stopped?

—

People looked a bit bemused when I told them I was starting a pressure washing company. Perhaps they thought it a bit simplistic, or they imagined there were better ways to make money. But money was never the goal.

As the pundits got all up in arms about alignment and algorithms and such, we continued to ask ourselves a simple question:

Why can’t we just pour water on the robots?

When we outfitted our rig with the best dihydrogen monoxide-blasting equipment in the business—two 8-GPM pumps, hundreds of feet of hoses, an AR-45 sprayer—we weren’t plotting an early retirement. No, we were preparing to serve our country—our world!—when nobody else could.

Well, the day has come. And we’re ready.

There’s something strangely comforting about being sick. The world seems to shrink, and time becomes viscous. The immediacy of the body’s response, the swollen throat or chest cough or ache, anchors back to the present. The mind’s incessant time-traveling and anxiety-manufacturing mercifully abates. A sort of blissful resignation emerges.

I’m enjoying playing with the possibility that this isn’t a coincidence. Just as I’m learning to understand and practice the idea of surrender, I get properly sick for the first time in ages and am forced to do exactly that.

That’s some sweet cosmic synchronicity.

Yesterday I came across a nice metaphor for the moment-to-moment act of surrender: when you resist reality, you are like a dog walking around with a ball in its mouth. Keeping the ball in your mouth requires constant tension and contraction, a vigilant defense against outside interference. To surrender is to let go of this tension and defensiveness. To let the ball drop out of your mouth.

The ball, as you might have guessed, is your idea of how things should be.

Since I’ve started paying attention, I have been blown away by the amount of balls in my mouth how much of this resistance I carry around by default. I seem programmed to seek something to resist. Duke isn’t walking fast enough. I don’t like the essay I wrote. I don’t feel like taking this phone call. On and on and on.

All of these micro-resistances are marked by an all-encompassing contraction, an enveloping tension of the body and mind. I want to say that it’s subtle, because I’ve walked around with it for most of my life, but it actually isn’t subtle at all. It’s quite jarring—especially when I release the resistance and get a glimpse of what it’s like without it.

This is all new to me, and I have questions: What are the cumulative effects of decades of tension? What does a life without that tension look like? What happens when I drop the ball?

What if I were to leave it on the ground?

While I remain aware of the broader inconsequentiality of this 30-day essay thing, it still feels to me like there are high stakes.

Some of this is standard evolutionary programming. My mind tries to convince me that if I don’t publish one day or publish something different from what I promised, judgment will rain down upon me and I will be banished from the tribe. Thankfully, I can usually see this for what it is and laugh it away.

What I can’t brush off as easily are the implications and consequences around my own values. This becomes especially problematic when those values seem to contradict each other.

An example: this challenge accomplished what it was intended to by day 14. By then I had written my way through every last ounce of perfectionism, reminded myself that good work doesn’t always require weeks of painstaking editing, and consistently worked on the ideating muscle. I even got a nice bonus when I accidentally wrote 8,000 words about my favorite sport. By all measures, it was a smashing success.

Then I realized I still had sixteen days to go.

One of my values is that beliefs and ways of living should be iterative and flexible. That is, if a belief or practice is no longer serving you, there’s not much reason to keep it. These things are meant to change as our lives do.

Another of my values is that if I say I’m going to do something, I try my best to do it.

In the context of the 30-day challenge, these values clash. This has led to more than one instance where I’ve gone back and forth for more time than I’d like to admit debating whether or not I should end the challenge early. The stakes feel high. Either way, I feel like I’m violating one of my core principles. It’s a bizarrely self-inflicted lose-lose.

Obviously I’m still writing, so Keeping My Word remains the victor of those dueling values. But clashes of this nature continue to pop up. Tonight, it was a battle between writing about what I had planned and promised (another version of keeping my word, I suppose) and being honest. The honesty part came from the fact that, no matter how long I stared at the page, I did not want to write what I had planned. My mind and heart were not there. This time, of course, Keeping My Word lost. I refused to slog through writing something I didn’t want to write. Honesty won the battle, and honesty is what you’re getting.

It’s not lost on me that this is all a bit ridiculous. The world will be just fine regardless of whether or not I keep writing these things, as will I. There are no real stakes.

And yet, in spite of this knowledge, it still feels important that I earnestly engage in these little debates. Because we make these kinds of choices—deciding what kind of person we want to be—every day, every moment. Our choices often come at the expense of another part of ourselves that we hold dear. Sometimes the choices are minor and the stakes are imaginary, but sometimes they’re bigger, and the decisions we make have a real impact on the lives of others. So it stands to reason that it’s good to have a little practice.

Regarding the essay challenge, I have no grand proclamations to make. My plan is still to finish this thing. Hopefully I do. I also plan to continue the series I started yesterday. Hopefully I do. If for some reason I don’t, it won’t be for lack of a healthy debate.

Either way, it’s important to keep in mind that it doesn’t matter.

And that it matters more than anything.