Let's Get Raw & Real For a Hot Second

Some things I need to get off my chest even though I don't want to

The following is a paid subscribers-only post with free preview. If you’d like access to all subscribers-only features and posts, you can sign up for just $8/month or $80 per year, right here:

Writing is how I make my living, so if you like what you see here, please support my work by subscribing!

If you’ve already subscribed but would like to buy me a coffee to help keep me fueled up for writing, you can do that at the button below:

Or alternatively, if you’d like you can drop a tip in my PayPal. Thanks for your support!

---

Hi everyone. Happy New Year. As I sit down to write this, the only thing I can tell you is how much I don’t really want to.

As someone who has made his living for years writing thousands of articles, a guy who believes writing is a craft, not a manifestation of the muses tickling your brain when they happen to feel like it, it bothers me how little content I’ve been able to put out lately. It bothers me more because some of you are paying subscribers, and as one of you complained in the commbox yesterday:

I am disappointed and feel a bit scammed that I subscribed to your substack. I did it when you were in the midst of an existential crisis and just before you left One Peter Five. (Full disclosure: I am not a Trad) What did I subscribe to? You don't even write anything. I follow you on social media but all I see there are angry comments about how much you hate traditional Catholics and lame attempts to appeal to others who have had similarly bad experiences with the Catholic Faith. I hope you can pull yourself together. I don't want my money back, but you might as well have run a GoFundMe; it would have been more honest.

I have no honest defense against this complaint. All I can do is apologize. And promise you that if I can’t get my shit together soon, I will pause all subscriptions and cancel any upon request.

I keep thinking the fog is going to clear. 2021 was a crazy year. Working through healing the things that almost ended my marriage has been an ongoing process. We had a baby — our 8th — in June, in our mid-40s, and it required a complete mindset adjustment. The fallout from the articles I wrote when our “pastor” wouldn’t baptize that baby without making us jump through ridiculous, arbitrary hoops, and the way that was, for me, the last straw in holding together a faith that was already falling apart kind of set my world on fire, what with my entire audience knowing me for being the guy who ran the biggest traditional Catholic website in the world for a while. Then there was the decision to move out of our house in Arizona, which carried a lot of bad memories, the seemingly interminable remodeling projects to get it ready for sale, the trip to New England to see if we wanted to live here (it had been on our bucket list since my 16 year old was a newborn), and ultimately, the move itself, which was complicated by incompetent bank folks, an asshole seller, and a nearly month-long stay with my large family (and dog) in a tiny hotel room as we waited for it to get settled. And then the move itself, and the sea of boxes that has lingered like the dregs of a tsunami for months, and the holidays, alone, in a new place, where we know nobody, and aren’t even certain we belong.

Turmoil. I’m sure many of you can identify with it. I know I’m not unique, and that the last year has been freaking insane for many of you as well. And you just find yourself reeling from it all.

But I finally got my desk set up, and I sat down to write like I always do, and nothing came.

Every day, I think tomorrow is going to be that day. Every tomorrow, I think the same. It’s not that I can’t write — I’m obviously doing it now — it’s that I can’t write anything worth reading.

It all feels too personal, too raw, too repetitive, too self-focused, too much about my own current state of naval-gazing recursive angst. I want to offer things that can help others. That can help you. I don’t want to do all this “me, me, me” BS all the time. But it’s all I can think about, so the other ideas just aren’t coming right now.

And to be honest, I’m pretty sure I’m dealing with an actual case of clinical depression. One of the delights of being in the top percentile of neuroticism and being a massive introvert is that the idea of going out and finding an actual diagnosis for such a thing, and whatever treatment it might entail, is about as appealing as having my fingernails ripped off. But I see the signs. Last night, as I left the grocery store to go home and make dinner for the kiddos (my lovely wife is out of town), I felt a heavy blanket of bone-deep sadness fall over me for no apparent reason.

For most of the evening, I felt myself wanting to just weep, without knowing why. That’s a weird thing for a dad to do in front of his ten-year-old son as he’s just standing there over the air fryer in the middle of a conversation, so I managed not to. But that urge was strong, and it was of no specific origin I could identify.

I’m stuck in that loop where I just keep thinking about the way the universe as I understand it has crumbled.