You're one of the best writers I know. Write a novel. A real project. Build something big and long-term.
Or maybe a full-blown memoir, which integrates your broken religion insights (a phenomenal essay), and moves towards a richer philosophy of being. There just might be a publisher for that sort of thing.
Iain McGilchrist, David Bentley Hart, Annie Dillard and Thich Nhat Hahn are my current lodestars. Just by way of recommendation.
I've managed to begin building a sufficiently profitable consulting practice that's taking up a lot of my energy. The existential anxiety, etc. are still extreme. But having something to build has at least kept me moving forward. It's not enough, but it's something.
I sound like I have things figured out. I don't. But I'm managing. And have moments of insight.
Second, I’m trying to get there. I’ve been working on a novel re-write brainstorming process, but I’m struggling. I’m actually working on a piece of short fiction this morning. I’m determined I’m going to figure this out. Writing a novel is my personal Mount Everest, and the stakes are high, and I’ve had multiple failed attempts, but if I can harness this thing I’m going through instead of letting it kick the shit out of me every day, I might just pull it off.
I also think I may put together some essay collections.
Right now, it’s a lot just to stay functional. And my income is shit, so I’m always chasing the next gig. But one thing I have is time, if I can use it wisely.
When I've hit massive writers' blocks because of my perfectionism, sometimes I've had some success by turning off the Internet, using a focused mode on Word (or my non-internet connected Remarkable tablet), and just spewing. Perhaps 1 hour of that per day? Incredible how some of the best novelists just did 500 words a day. Or even less.
I'm preaching as much to myself as you here. I allow perfectionism to shut me up all the time. Especially when writing fiction.
But, if there is a way out, it's probably by having an alarm that goes off every day, that you can't ignore, and which requires you to sit at your desk and work on the big project, regardless of whether you write 10 or 1000 words.
Just trying to encourage. You really are a phenomenally intuitive writer. You use analogies and metaphors all the time, especially when I can tell you worked and polished, that are full-on creative. Fresh. Original. That leap off the page.
YOu definitely manage it more often than I've ever managed to do it. And so, you have my legitimate respect there. It's hard steering clear of cliche, and you do manage it.
I do like to imagine that if I were out of the house, in my own place, without the constant stream of demands of 8 other human beings, I would use the opportunity to create something legit.
Of course, it would not be like that, especially when depression rears its ugly head.
But, you DO have an opportunity here. All that pent up creativity.
Yeah. Biggest thing when you’re in a house with 8 other human beings is that they’re your anchor, your normalcy. You need a break from them to get stuff done, but you want to come back to them at the end of the day.
When they’re just taken away, and there’s no going back, it breaks something in you. They’re the reason the work even matters in the first place. You go fight your dragons and you come home to your clan.
I thought a lot of things about what I might do if I was on my own until I was. Turns out, it takes so much joy out of everything — at least when it happens like this — that I often end up just trying to distract myself from the solitude. Using it productively has proven a lot more challenging than I anticipated.
The ideal world is to have the people you love, get the time you need to work in solitude, and do the balancing act between the two. I never had the balance when I was there, and I don’t have it now. It’s kind of like day without night or food without water. It just doesn’t work in isolation.
But then I think of someone like Graham Greene (I read his biography last year): bipolar his whole life, couldn't rest in a relationship, his family life a complete cock-up, and yet who, in his own personal hell, just...created. Because he had too.
I've always wanted to find that resilience and creative drive in myself. Occasionally I have.
I think the Internet is bad for that. We can so easily distract ourselves, where a Graham Greene might have had to create, basically as the most potent distraction he had. No smarthpone to check a thousand times a day, or Youtube videos that have just enough gloss of respectability to keep us clicking.
Anyway, I'm done replying now. But, I do want to encourage you, if I can.
I honestly believe you have it in you. Some of your long-form essays prove it. Those aren't things tossed off in a moment of inspiration.
You worked on those. And the work showed. And it was worth it. You have that level of creative labor inside you. I know how much those types of things cost. How much hidden work is in them. What it takes.
There’s something in this. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I think it’s a willingness to enter into the wound and stay there, somehow, focusing it into art. It’s not an obvious thing, but it can be intuited.
I don't know if you're into metaphysics, but Hart's "The Experience of God" was a phenomenal antidote towards my temptation towards reductionist materialist nihilism. His metaphysics is solid, and grasp of contemporary philosophy of mind, and the implications of its failures to account for consciousness. It's a bit of a slog. But buoyed me up a bit. And is at least nudging me to accept the vision of a God who is silent, but somehow keeps this whole thing going, and whose act of being is somehow accessible.
I listened to it. Don't know if I would have managed to read it. ALthough I am about 800 pages into Iain McGilChrist's The Matter With Things, which is very much in the same genre as Hart. McGilchrist can't PROVE it, but does a good job of indicating that there are a hell of a lot of signs that, forasmuch as this world is a strange and suffering-consumed place, more is going on than our contemporary existential anxiety and unexamined materialism allows for.
I truly believe he is one of the greatest thinkers of the past 100 years, easily. Even if he's wrong, he's a monumental figure that has to be contended with. I can't think of anyone else who has pursued so ambitious an intellectual project as McGilchrist. He really, truly THINKS. And is one of the last polymaths.
Oh, and while I'm eating up your replies, and since you mentioned an essay collection, perhaps the greatest collection of essays I've ever read is Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It's a hidden gem.
If you're looking for stylistic inspiration, can't recommend it highly enough. Happy to send you a copy as a tip from a grateful read, just need your address. Sned via FB if interested.
You broke the taboo. You said what was real. You did it. And I may not matter, but I noticed.
And now I understand in part your pain. You remind me of my cousin, who was so in love. And then she died of cancer. It ruined him. He never got over his ache.
You're the writer, but I would think that is part of the key. Tell the world how beautiful it all was. Tell them how the love got damaged. Tell them of the incredible ache the loss has brought.
It's like you're in a forge. How can a man be known as a man. Unless he be tested. Seriously.
I come to this post as the child of a broken family. The things that you express could be the things my father was unable to tell me and my siblings. Yet, he persevered through all the pain, agony, and loneliness. 43 years after my parents separated, my siblings and I gathered together one last time with our father while he was still coherent and spent a wonderful weekend with him. We watched our favorite movie, The Quiet Man, one last time.
Stay close to your children. Be patient with them as they work through their own issues of a broken family. If you are patient, understanding, and loving, they will come back to you.
I feel guilty reading something like this knowing how much pain is coming from the other side. I guess the thing that's been on my mind is, how is your relationship with your kids? And, do the older kids have the ability to come by and see you on their own volition? Of course you don't have to answer, I worry about your isolation which seems to be suffocating you. 5-15-26
Let me start with this. You are not unseen, brother. You have more people that see and love you than you know, even if you've never met them or interacted with them in the flesh. I'm one of them. I know others.
As another poster said, circumstances are always different, but my divorce over 20 years ago now was without a doubt the hardest and darkest thing I've ever gone through. I had all the same emotions you do now. All I can say is that it does get better with time, slowly. Having said that, even though I've been remarried for 17 of those 20 years, not a day goes by when i don't think about her and what might have been.
I never poured my heart out in writing like you've done here. But, ironically perhaps, the thing that ultimately help me put closure on it was going through the annulment process in order to become Catholic. It forced me to take a hard look at the marriage and really evaluate myself and her. Maybe doing what you are doing here will have the same effect. I pray so, at least.
As I've said before, you've got a place to stay if you ever want to hit the road and head for South Texas.
I was worried about that line being taken the wrong way by readers here. When I say unseen, what I mean is in my real, in-the-flesh life. Nobody notices the pain. Nobody asks after you. You turn invisible as you move through daily life. I have to light this beacon so people I’ve never met in person can see it from far away.
I appreciate the honesty of folks like you, who tell the truth: it’s a wound that can never really heal, for so many reasons. I’m painfully aware of that, even now, from so close to the actual event, because my mind keeps trying to chart a course to the future that doesn’t feel chained to this.
I write it to keep milking the poison out of it, because if it sits inside me it threatens to consume whatever is left. One of the hardest things is the distinct impression (obvious in what I’ve written here) that I’m alone in grieving it like this. I can’t make sense out of that.
I didn't take it that way. Just wanted to remind you that you weren't alone. But i get it. I holed up in a tiny apartment and damn near drank myself to death after my divorce. But to your point, unless you've been through it, you can't fully understand it. So, in some sense, we are alone with the grief no matter what. I wish you had a close friend or somebody there you could lean on though. If your kids weren't there, I'd tell you to move. But I totally understand you don't want to abandon them like that.
It feels a bit sadistic to 'like' this post. I didn't like it; I related to it.
My circumstances were different; in the immediate sense, I was the one who vacated the relationship. Vacated a number of relationships, actually: with family, co-workers, friends, God. Hard to say exactly when it began, but it reached a tipping point during the pandemic, with the loss of two friends. Why was that a tipping point? I still wonder. Probably because one of those deaths was a vaccine fatality, and it wasn't okay to notice. My story had to be neglected, which triggered memories of other stories about my past that also required neglect. The only way I imagined I could draw attention to the neglect was by absenting myself from all obligations, and possibly ending it all.
I think of “likes” as acknowledgements more than anything.
As for the rest: I don’t think the specifics have to match up. I think anyone who has gone through this kind of rending end to something that deeply mattered can feel echoes of their own pain in different-but-similar stories. I’m trying to give a voice to that. Not just to my own. To everyone who is dealing with something unspeakable. I want to speak it, the best I can.
Steve, I know that pain you write about so well - abandonment, betrayal, mistrust. And yet, there are really no words ever written that can adequately describe it. Yet you come close.
I've never understood men (or women) who just casually walk away from marriages like it's nothing. Perhaps you and I are just wired differently than most other people. I, too, cared deeply about my marriage. I sought the help of relationship books, my parish priest, therapists - and at the end of the day, it seems I put more value in my marriage vows and relationship than all these people combined. I was told time and time again that the "expectation" was that I would form a new relationship and be remarried in 2-3 years. Except that never happened. Perhaps it's me - I never wanted to go through that sort of trauma ever again. Not that I didn't try.
As you know, I used to be an organist and choirmaster. I've played for dozens of weddings over the years. Given the Catholic divorce rate, I have to assume that nearly half of those marriages have ended. I still believe in marriage - at least I want to - but, honestly, there's a reason MGTOW was a thing a few years ago, and lives on with YouTube Channels like Dad Mode in Dark Mode and the Functional Melancholic. It's like all the rules have changed in the past 50 years. Men aren't men, women aren't women, and marriage isn't marriage.
It's often said that during divorce you get to see who people truly are. Perhaps that's the most painful thing of all.
Hi Steve. I've been following along for a little while, but you don't know me. This is good, because that means there's no friendship to destroy if I were to rub you wrong.
God has informed me he would like to answer your prayers. Your investment in drawing out the beauty in the story of your own pain is decreasing your ability to fulfill the task you were actually given: to solve the objective problems that hurt your family.
The complete view of a problem on this scale is practically immune to narration: not even in like, a post-modern way, or post-postmodern way, or by adding as many posts as you want. The problem consists precisely in what has slipped between the cracks of our story-making apparatus. As an example, one might dwell on just how much it would have ruined the real poetry of this essay to include how and why it all fell apart from your wife's point of view as she has described it, with equal weight. Mystery is not your friend here.
The complete view of a problem, with all the tremendous effort required to hold it in view consistently, is the only one that can be meaningfully interacted with and solved. Exactly like a broken engine or piece of equipment -- piece by piece, with sustained attention -- but with patience on a timescale of years.
I've spent more than my fair share of time in these pages accusing myself and absorbing blame.
She's spent time in her own pages blaming me.
What has never happened anywhere is her doing the thing you're asking me to do. Not publicly, not privately.
We both came into the marriage with trauma. Mine was the self-aware, self-reflective sort. The kind that comes with a guilty conscience and a need to please. Hers was the opposite.
This is rough. I've read some of her posts, decided to unfollow the account. My father always tried to be respectful of my mother, even when it was hard. I wish I could say the same for my mother.
You're one of the best writers I know. Write a novel. A real project. Build something big and long-term.
Or maybe a full-blown memoir, which integrates your broken religion insights (a phenomenal essay), and moves towards a richer philosophy of being. There just might be a publisher for that sort of thing.
Iain McGilchrist, David Bentley Hart, Annie Dillard and Thich Nhat Hahn are my current lodestars. Just by way of recommendation.
I've managed to begin building a sufficiently profitable consulting practice that's taking up a lot of my energy. The existential anxiety, etc. are still extreme. But having something to build has at least kept me moving forward. It's not enough, but it's something.
I sound like I have things figured out. I don't. But I'm managing. And have moments of insight.
First of all, thank you.
Second, I’m trying to get there. I’ve been working on a novel re-write brainstorming process, but I’m struggling. I’m actually working on a piece of short fiction this morning. I’m determined I’m going to figure this out. Writing a novel is my personal Mount Everest, and the stakes are high, and I’ve had multiple failed attempts, but if I can harness this thing I’m going through instead of letting it kick the shit out of me every day, I might just pull it off.
I also think I may put together some essay collections.
Right now, it’s a lot just to stay functional. And my income is shit, so I’m always chasing the next gig. But one thing I have is time, if I can use it wisely.
When I've hit massive writers' blocks because of my perfectionism, sometimes I've had some success by turning off the Internet, using a focused mode on Word (or my non-internet connected Remarkable tablet), and just spewing. Perhaps 1 hour of that per day? Incredible how some of the best novelists just did 500 words a day. Or even less.
I'm preaching as much to myself as you here. I allow perfectionism to shut me up all the time. Especially when writing fiction.
But, if there is a way out, it's probably by having an alarm that goes off every day, that you can't ignore, and which requires you to sit at your desk and work on the big project, regardless of whether you write 10 or 1000 words.
Just trying to encourage. You really are a phenomenally intuitive writer. You use analogies and metaphors all the time, especially when I can tell you worked and polished, that are full-on creative. Fresh. Original. That leap off the page.
YOu definitely manage it more often than I've ever managed to do it. And so, you have my legitimate respect there. It's hard steering clear of cliche, and you do manage it.
I do like to imagine that if I were out of the house, in my own place, without the constant stream of demands of 8 other human beings, I would use the opportunity to create something legit.
Of course, it would not be like that, especially when depression rears its ugly head.
But, you DO have an opportunity here. All that pent up creativity.
Yeah. Biggest thing when you’re in a house with 8 other human beings is that they’re your anchor, your normalcy. You need a break from them to get stuff done, but you want to come back to them at the end of the day.
When they’re just taken away, and there’s no going back, it breaks something in you. They’re the reason the work even matters in the first place. You go fight your dragons and you come home to your clan.
I thought a lot of things about what I might do if I was on my own until I was. Turns out, it takes so much joy out of everything — at least when it happens like this — that I often end up just trying to distract myself from the solitude. Using it productively has proven a lot more challenging than I anticipated.
The ideal world is to have the people you love, get the time you need to work in solitude, and do the balancing act between the two. I never had the balance when I was there, and I don’t have it now. It’s kind of like day without night or food without water. It just doesn’t work in isolation.
Yeah, that all makes sense. Totally sympathize.
But then I think of someone like Graham Greene (I read his biography last year): bipolar his whole life, couldn't rest in a relationship, his family life a complete cock-up, and yet who, in his own personal hell, just...created. Because he had too.
I've always wanted to find that resilience and creative drive in myself. Occasionally I have.
I think the Internet is bad for that. We can so easily distract ourselves, where a Graham Greene might have had to create, basically as the most potent distraction he had. No smarthpone to check a thousand times a day, or Youtube videos that have just enough gloss of respectability to keep us clicking.
Anyway, I'm done replying now. But, I do want to encourage you, if I can.
I honestly believe you have it in you. Some of your long-form essays prove it. Those aren't things tossed off in a moment of inspiration.
You worked on those. And the work showed. And it was worth it. You have that level of creative labor inside you. I know how much those types of things cost. How much hidden work is in them. What it takes.
There’s something in this. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I think it’s a willingness to enter into the wound and stay there, somehow, focusing it into art. It’s not an obvious thing, but it can be intuited.
I don't know if you're into metaphysics, but Hart's "The Experience of God" was a phenomenal antidote towards my temptation towards reductionist materialist nihilism. His metaphysics is solid, and grasp of contemporary philosophy of mind, and the implications of its failures to account for consciousness. It's a bit of a slog. But buoyed me up a bit. And is at least nudging me to accept the vision of a God who is silent, but somehow keeps this whole thing going, and whose act of being is somehow accessible.
I have it. I just haven't gotten to it yet. Maybe it's time.
I listened to it. Don't know if I would have managed to read it. ALthough I am about 800 pages into Iain McGilChrist's The Matter With Things, which is very much in the same genre as Hart. McGilchrist can't PROVE it, but does a good job of indicating that there are a hell of a lot of signs that, forasmuch as this world is a strange and suffering-consumed place, more is going on than our contemporary existential anxiety and unexamined materialism allows for.
McGilchrist is also on my short list. I listened to a couple interviews with him and I was hooked. I think he’s something special.
I truly believe he is one of the greatest thinkers of the past 100 years, easily. Even if he's wrong, he's a monumental figure that has to be contended with. I can't think of anyone else who has pursued so ambitious an intellectual project as McGilchrist. He really, truly THINKS. And is one of the last polymaths.
Oh, and while I'm eating up your replies, and since you mentioned an essay collection, perhaps the greatest collection of essays I've ever read is Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It's a hidden gem.
If you're looking for stylistic inspiration, can't recommend it highly enough. Happy to send you a copy as a tip from a grateful read, just need your address. Sned via FB if interested.
You broke the taboo. You said what was real. You did it. And I may not matter, but I noticed.
And now I understand in part your pain. You remind me of my cousin, who was so in love. And then she died of cancer. It ruined him. He never got over his ache.
You're the writer, but I would think that is part of the key. Tell the world how beautiful it all was. Tell them how the love got damaged. Tell them of the incredible ache the loss has brought.
It's like you're in a forge. How can a man be known as a man. Unless he be tested. Seriously.
The forge analogy is real.
I think about it all the time.
I am using it as a means of anchoring myself, as much as I can.
I read your posts. They matter to me. I would be poorer without them. You're visible to me.
I come to this post as the child of a broken family. The things that you express could be the things my father was unable to tell me and my siblings. Yet, he persevered through all the pain, agony, and loneliness. 43 years after my parents separated, my siblings and I gathered together one last time with our father while he was still coherent and spent a wonderful weekend with him. We watched our favorite movie, The Quiet Man, one last time.
Stay close to your children. Be patient with them as they work through their own issues of a broken family. If you are patient, understanding, and loving, they will come back to you.
I need all the guidance I can get on this front. I just have no idea how to navigate it.
I feel guilty reading something like this knowing how much pain is coming from the other side. I guess the thing that's been on my mind is, how is your relationship with your kids? And, do the older kids have the ability to come by and see you on their own volition? Of course you don't have to answer, I worry about your isolation which seems to be suffocating you. 5-15-26
Let me start with this. You are not unseen, brother. You have more people that see and love you than you know, even if you've never met them or interacted with them in the flesh. I'm one of them. I know others.
As another poster said, circumstances are always different, but my divorce over 20 years ago now was without a doubt the hardest and darkest thing I've ever gone through. I had all the same emotions you do now. All I can say is that it does get better with time, slowly. Having said that, even though I've been remarried for 17 of those 20 years, not a day goes by when i don't think about her and what might have been.
I never poured my heart out in writing like you've done here. But, ironically perhaps, the thing that ultimately help me put closure on it was going through the annulment process in order to become Catholic. It forced me to take a hard look at the marriage and really evaluate myself and her. Maybe doing what you are doing here will have the same effect. I pray so, at least.
As I've said before, you've got a place to stay if you ever want to hit the road and head for South Texas.
Continued love and prayers,
Travis
I was worried about that line being taken the wrong way by readers here. When I say unseen, what I mean is in my real, in-the-flesh life. Nobody notices the pain. Nobody asks after you. You turn invisible as you move through daily life. I have to light this beacon so people I’ve never met in person can see it from far away.
I appreciate the honesty of folks like you, who tell the truth: it’s a wound that can never really heal, for so many reasons. I’m painfully aware of that, even now, from so close to the actual event, because my mind keeps trying to chart a course to the future that doesn’t feel chained to this.
I write it to keep milking the poison out of it, because if it sits inside me it threatens to consume whatever is left. One of the hardest things is the distinct impression (obvious in what I’ve written here) that I’m alone in grieving it like this. I can’t make sense out of that.
I didn't take it that way. Just wanted to remind you that you weren't alone. But i get it. I holed up in a tiny apartment and damn near drank myself to death after my divorce. But to your point, unless you've been through it, you can't fully understand it. So, in some sense, we are alone with the grief no matter what. I wish you had a close friend or somebody there you could lean on though. If your kids weren't there, I'd tell you to move. But I totally understand you don't want to abandon them like that.
It is a wound that maybe never heals. 46 years after my parents divorce, the wound still hurts.
Over time, it gets less, but I think that it never completely goes away.
As a scar it becomes a trophy of past trials, but it doesn't disappear.
It feels a bit sadistic to 'like' this post. I didn't like it; I related to it.
My circumstances were different; in the immediate sense, I was the one who vacated the relationship. Vacated a number of relationships, actually: with family, co-workers, friends, God. Hard to say exactly when it began, but it reached a tipping point during the pandemic, with the loss of two friends. Why was that a tipping point? I still wonder. Probably because one of those deaths was a vaccine fatality, and it wasn't okay to notice. My story had to be neglected, which triggered memories of other stories about my past that also required neglect. The only way I imagined I could draw attention to the neglect was by absenting myself from all obligations, and possibly ending it all.
I think of “likes” as acknowledgements more than anything.
As for the rest: I don’t think the specifics have to match up. I think anyone who has gone through this kind of rending end to something that deeply mattered can feel echoes of their own pain in different-but-similar stories. I’m trying to give a voice to that. Not just to my own. To everyone who is dealing with something unspeakable. I want to speak it, the best I can.
Beautiful writing, Steve. Hang in there.
Really good writing, Steve.
Steve, I know that pain you write about so well - abandonment, betrayal, mistrust. And yet, there are really no words ever written that can adequately describe it. Yet you come close.
I've never understood men (or women) who just casually walk away from marriages like it's nothing. Perhaps you and I are just wired differently than most other people. I, too, cared deeply about my marriage. I sought the help of relationship books, my parish priest, therapists - and at the end of the day, it seems I put more value in my marriage vows and relationship than all these people combined. I was told time and time again that the "expectation" was that I would form a new relationship and be remarried in 2-3 years. Except that never happened. Perhaps it's me - I never wanted to go through that sort of trauma ever again. Not that I didn't try.
As you know, I used to be an organist and choirmaster. I've played for dozens of weddings over the years. Given the Catholic divorce rate, I have to assume that nearly half of those marriages have ended. I still believe in marriage - at least I want to - but, honestly, there's a reason MGTOW was a thing a few years ago, and lives on with YouTube Channels like Dad Mode in Dark Mode and the Functional Melancholic. It's like all the rules have changed in the past 50 years. Men aren't men, women aren't women, and marriage isn't marriage.
It's often said that during divorce you get to see who people truly are. Perhaps that's the most painful thing of all.
Hi Steve. I've been following along for a little while, but you don't know me. This is good, because that means there's no friendship to destroy if I were to rub you wrong.
God has informed me he would like to answer your prayers. Your investment in drawing out the beauty in the story of your own pain is decreasing your ability to fulfill the task you were actually given: to solve the objective problems that hurt your family.
The complete view of a problem on this scale is practically immune to narration: not even in like, a post-modern way, or post-postmodern way, or by adding as many posts as you want. The problem consists precisely in what has slipped between the cracks of our story-making apparatus. As an example, one might dwell on just how much it would have ruined the real poetry of this essay to include how and why it all fell apart from your wife's point of view as she has described it, with equal weight. Mystery is not your friend here.
The complete view of a problem, with all the tremendous effort required to hold it in view consistently, is the only one that can be meaningfully interacted with and solved. Exactly like a broken engine or piece of equipment -- piece by piece, with sustained attention -- but with patience on a timescale of years.
Feel free to ignore.
I've spent more than my fair share of time in these pages accusing myself and absorbing blame.
She's spent time in her own pages blaming me.
What has never happened anywhere is her doing the thing you're asking me to do. Not publicly, not privately.
We both came into the marriage with trauma. Mine was the self-aware, self-reflective sort. The kind that comes with a guilty conscience and a need to please. Hers was the opposite.
So I grieve how I grieve.
This is rough. I've read some of her posts, decided to unfollow the account. My father always tried to be respectful of my mother, even when it was hard. I wish I could say the same for my mother.