Not a Furnace, But a Forge

I worked all weekend.

Came home tired, made dinner, played a game while finishing my audiobook of There is No Antimemetics Division (best, most innovative science fiction I’ve read in forever!), then moved on to a podcast even though it was late, because I typically take Mondays off. I took some magnesium glycinate, hoping it would knock me out before the podcast was over.

But for some reason I just couldn't sleep.

The last time I looked at the clock it was 5:01AM. I left some light on because the cockroach population in this apartment complex has suddenly exploded, and I've run into them multiple times at night in the past few days, including one that crawled on me in bed so I could have nightmares from here on out. The night birds in the tree outside my window wouldn't shut their noisy wormholes. I put on ambient binaural beats to drown them out, but that just meant more noise. I kept waking up about every hour or so. Finally, at about 10:40AM today, I just gave up. Not even 6 hours of bad sleep.

My eyeballs feel gritty. There's a black hole forming where my consciousness should be.

I am about to begin administering coffee intravenously.

There’s no telling how coherent the rest of what I write today will be. Zombies can’t be held accountable for such things.

Mondays, as I said, are usually my day off, and I typically try not to use them for writing, but I had some things I needed to get off my chest. The reason I take off on Mondays is because the gig delivery business is busiest on the weekends, so I try to get in as many hours as I can stand. This weekend I couldn’t drum up the internal resilience to go re-enter my old life and home to see the kids, and I feel terrible about it, but I had just about the most stable week, emotionally speaking, that I’ve had since being forced to leave. And I wanted to hold onto that scrap of peace for just a little while longer.

Contrast is key, here. Last weekend was pretty much the exact opposite. In the middle of my Saturday deliveries, I was just suddenly overcome with grief bordering on despair. I felt trapped in a life I couldn’t stand. Everywhere I went and all over the radio, there were ads for Father’s Day, and I have no idea what that even means for me anymore. I saw a bunch of young dads out with their kids. My baby boy was turning five on June 1st, and I was going to have to put my game face on and go celebrate his birthday without showing the hurt. I’ve been missing out on so much of his life when he’s little, and it’s the most precious time. The big hugs, the little funny comments, the unexpected moments of growth, the silly battles over brushing his teeth and putting him to bed, the times when I was able to help calm him down when his big scary feelings got to be too much for him, because our brains and nervous systems are wired the same way.

I kept having to wipe the tears from my eyes and blow my nose every time I had to leave my car to go into a store or meet a customer. I was struck, with a certain detached alarm, by just how convincing I am at hiding behind a mask that smiles and laughs to conceal the jagged edges that lie beneath that facade. It felt like I was dissociating when I went from biblical lamentation to a cheerful request to a bakery worker to help me find the chocolate chunk cookies for my order.

But then, I suppose I’ve been masking pain and difference my whole life. I’m just not typically so acutely aware of it.

But the tension between trying to be the dad my kids need in the little bit of time they get to see me and the emptiness of the life I live the other 99% of the time has, as most of you already know, been breaking me apart. I was so stressed by the time I got home last Saturday, I started to become physically ill. I spent that whole night tossing and turning in a cold sweat, chills racking my body as I went in and out of disturbing fever dreams, only to wake up after barely any sleep, feeling nauseous and weak and sweating through my clothes, so I could put the mask back on and go bowling with my tiniest guy to celebrate his big day.

We’ve been playing catch the last few times I’ve gone over there, so I got him a mini Nerf football, because his little hands can’t handle a real one. I also know that for whatever reason, he loves Darth Vader. (Probably because he used to always steal the Darth Vader figurine off my shelf of nostalgic toys.) So I got him his own Vader mask and lightsaber.

I was there almost the entire day, and he clung to me for most of it. We went bowling, and I somehow got my best score in over 20 years despite feeling like tepid garbage. We played catch with the new football out back. I sat there with him halfway on my lap as we watched his silly shows and videos. I started feeling a low grade fever coming on, but I was determined not to leave until we sang to him and he ate his cake, because he believes that it is in the eating of the birthday cake that one magically progresses from one year of age to the next.

And as I sat there with him, my mind autonomously kept working the problem.

As anyone who has gone through it knows, when pain gets bad enough — emotional or physical — death begins to feel like the only release. Thoughts turn morbid, and the mind begins to suggest escape routes like unwanted popup ads.

The darkness of these past 8 months, to say nothing of the year or so before that when I realized what was coming, has been so all-consuming that I almost feel guilty about trying to write anything here at times. It bleeds through everything I have to say in a way that feels self-indulgent. I am an experiential, confessional writer, but I don’t want everything to be about my internal state.

Even so, what are you supposed to do when an all-consuming sense of loss occupies every undistracted moment? What’s the alternative when you can’t imagine a future worth living in? Do you just keep pretending? Do you keep on that happy-face mask and lie and say you’re fine?

I have been grasping for the answers so obsessively that I have spent marathon sessions just trying to identify a way forward. Days when I’ve relentlessly attacked the problem for 10-12 hours at a go. Sunny afternoons where I have to stop working so I can weep in my car in a random parking lot. Nights spent awake until 4 or 5AM watching television shows or movies hoping I fall asleep in the process, so I don’t have to face my interior landscape, or the unnatural quiet of a solitary life after decades spent with the ambient noise of a family.

But I have to find a way to accept this new state of affairs.

I can’t just “let it go,” but I also can’t keep a white-knuckle grip on what I cannot change.

I can’t stay anchored in the past while mourning a stolen future that will never come to pass. That is an impossible way to live. It will break me in half. It will bring me to ruin.

I won’t get the past 25 years back no matter what I do. I won’t get a refund on the only vision I ever really had for my life: being married and having a family and growing old with a woman I love, arms around each other as we welcome our children home with their children, building a foundation for future generations of the people who came into existence because of that love we shared.

I also can’t overly romanticize what we had, because if I’m being honest, it was rarely good. Our particular wounds and personalities and the extremely different ways our brains are wired created endless clashes and misunderstandings. To do an honest accounting, there were more unhappy times than happy ones.

But I loved her.

And I think, once upon a time, she loved me.

And I loved what we made together, however imperfect. And I believed that if we just kept fighting FOR each other, if we just kept trying to be better, if we just never surrendered and kept working to be who the other needed, maybe we could get there some day. I realize now that our relationship was hurting both of us, and by extension, the kids. But I also believed that we were more than the sum of our individual parts, and that the struggle was worth it. I would have kept going until my final breath.

And now, despite my having no vote in the matter, that option has been foreclosed upon.

My family has been shattered, but my children are still my children. And with 8 of them, every occasion is a new wound. Every birthday, every holiday, every school play or graduation or marriage that comes, I have to find some way negotiate and navigate the humiliation and hurt over the fact that I am now relegated to being a visitor in their lives.

I was never meant to be their primary caretaker. I’m not even good at taking care of myself. They need their mother. They need schedules managed and doctor’s appointments made and the logistics of family life to be handled by someone with actual executive function and the mindset of an operations officer. My role was always meant to exist in complementarity. I was the historian, the meaning-maker, the guy who answered philosophical questions and who taught them abstract things and would sit and talk with them for hours if they had something on their mind. I was always quick with affection and information, but inept at the details, and very frequently distracted by whatever was going on in my own mind. I always needed a grounded partner in the endeavor.

It’s who I am. I have come to accept that. I have improved in areas that were learned, not innate, but no amount of fighting my nature has ever changed it.

And I know they know how much I love them. And I know they love me.

Somehow, that has to be enough. At least for now.

And so, I have become a father-in-reserve, meted out to my sons and daughters in small, managed doses, never on my own terms. I spend over 99% of my time away from them, and yet I have to stick around for that less-than-1%, because despite what anyone else may think, I know they need me in a way that nobody else can fulfill. I am not some mere accessory or inconvenience. I’m a man who loves them with an intensity that is, ironically, the very source of all this pain.

I am grieving the loss of reality as I understood it, and yet I must go on.

So last weekend, as I sat with my precious boy, my last baby, on the eve of his 5th birthday, as he clung to me for hours like he often did before I was forced to leave him in a way I don’t know if he’ll ever understand, a thought came to me, strong and clear:

I have to inhabit my life, not merely survive it.

In the logic of this particular species of grief, this idea feels like a betrayal. How can I smile, how can I enjoy things, how can I think of the future or hope for happier days when it comes at such a cost? It feels like it comes at their expense. Like I’m supposed to be protecting them from this monstrous thing, but can’t get to them. It’s like the recurring nightmares I would have as a child where I was being chased by some enemy, and whenever it inevitably caught up to me, I was paralyzed and couldn’t fight back.

And yet paradoxically, living the best life I can is arguably the only way I can handle this without hurting them even more than this already has. I have to reclaim myself. I have to become fully who I am, so that I have something to offer them in service of them becoming fully who they are. In a very real sense, they are a part of me. Each of them has so many of my traits and quirks, and I know that navigating life with this particular collection of attributes is often quite difficult.

In a very real sense, I died the night I was made to walk out that door. I just merely happen to still be breathing. Whoever I was on September 23rd, 2025 — the worst day of my entire life — that man is gone.

You can of course spin that a different way. Fr. Joseph Krupp reminded me multiple times before I left his company that I was going home a different man than the one who left. But it’s pretty damned hard to sort out the different meaning when you’re in the middle of it.

The experience of the thing is like I’ve been barely treading water for the past 8 months in the midst of some vast and tumultuous sea, under the suffocating blackness of a starless sky.

But that is a living nightmare. If that’s all I ever do, I will drown. I have to swim towards the light, even if it feels like I’m swimming away from the people I love most.

It’s a Sisyphean task, but I know I have to try.

This tiny little rented room, so lacking in natural light that it feels more like a cave than a living space, has often felt far more like a prison cell than a home. I don’t just drive deliveries for cash, or even for writing fodder, though both are true. I do it so I can remember that the world outside these walls still exists, and has beauty in it. Beauty is a salve, and it may be the only medicine that soothes these wounds. I’ve begun to make it a habit of taking orders that include a long drive. They often pay better, but the time they take isn’t exactly optimized for the grind and hustle of the job.

So I’ve decided I don’t care about that.

It’s not like I have someone waiting for me at home. Wherever I am, that’s my home. My home is me. My home is my heart, my mind, my thoughts. It’s not enough, when you’re made for connection like I am, but there’s a freedom in it that I enjoy when I let myself relax into it.

I’m in it for the miles of open road. I’m slowing down. I’m simplifying. I don’t need any more stress, I need to ride the waves. And after pumping $1500 last week into poor Evie, she is finally running as she should be, so we ride together through the gorgeous North Carolina countryside, listening to books, moving at a measured pace, taking it one day at a time. I don’t really enjoy grocery shopping, but Instacart (as opposed to restaurant delivery) keeps me moving. My daily step counts are rising into the thousands. I feel better from the movement, and I don’t have to pay for a gym membership to get on a treadmill to nowhere. My movement has purpose, and I get paid. I also get to interact with more human beings this way, because I’m not just grabbing a bag and going, I’m working the aisles, I’m talking to cashiers, I’m joking with other customers. And the money, while not amazing, is probably at least 30% better than it was doing DoorDash. This past weekend, I think I averaged about $25-30 an hour, before expenses. And I honestly enjoyed my time.

All of this has got me thinking.

I always wrote, from the time I was old enough to form sentences. I loved stories. But I didn’t really know I was meant to be a writer until I spent a semester in Europe, back in 1999, and my travel journal, emailed home, was spread far and wide by my mother. When I returned to the States just before the 20th century handed the baton to the 21st, I received an enormous amount of positive feedback from people I had no idea had been reading my work.

Travel writing brings you out of yourself. Out of your head. You begin to see and experience the world in a different way. New sights, new people, new experiences, all of it allows you to perceive things with different eyes. It keeps your sense of wonder and curiosity alive. I use gig work as fuel for that kind of writing on a local level, in my Notes From the Road series, which I really enjoy writing and have gotten lots of great feedback on.

But my Postcards From Exile series, about the road trip I took when I had to leave home, was even better. It was some of the best work I’ve done in many years, and I felt alive and like myself — despite the circumstances — in a way I haven’t felt since before I got married. In a way, I guess you could say I rediscovered the man I abandoned at the altar. That trip was a means of metabolizing shock and grief, of attaining the love and support of far-flung friends, and I realize that I need to do a more of that.

I think I need to go back to the way I began. I need to travel again. I need to see the world with fresh eyes, not just this dank little roach motel. I need to break bread with real people, not digital abstractions interacted with through the mediation of a screen. I was made to be an explorer, an archeologist of meaning, who brings (metaphorical) treasures back from the far-flung places of the world like Indiana Jones and puts them on display for everyone to see. I do not believe in private collections of precious things. Sharing what delights me is my strongest language of love, and love is the thing I desperately need to experience again, both in the giving and the receiving.

I don’t yet know how to financially afford to make it work, but I am increasingly convinced that I have to find a way. I am in a closed loop, and it shrinks a little further every day. I’m trying to figure out a way for travel writing to fund the travel, and keep the little place here for me when I come back home.

Instead of seeing this part of my life as a furnace where I am being incinerated, I am trying to learn to see it as a forge.

This is my Thermopylae.

This is where I make my stand against oblivion.

The famous actor and wrestler, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, tells the story of how he named his company, Seven Bucks Productions.

“In 1995,” he writes, “I had $7 bucks in my pocket and knew two things: I’m broke as hell and one day I won’t be.”

He built a life of insufficiency and worry into a sprawling empire of output, and a fortune estimated to be approaching $1 billion.

I don’t need all that. I just need enough to take care of my needs and contribute to those of my children, while finding reasons to keep going, as hard as that sometimes is to imagine.

I keep finding myself thinking of my own little place — apartment 104 — as something just as symbolic as Johnson’s 7 bucks.

I keep thinking of it as Forge 104. Like it’s a brand, an umbrella I can use to collect my project work from this part of my life, using those efforts as stepping stones towards a future that might actually feel meaningful again. If I can just keep going, I’m rather fond of the irony of turning my place of exile into my inspiration and reminder of how far I may yet come.

So last week, I did my first creative project in quite some time, under that banner. I made a fake movie trailer for the book I just finished reading. I spent two days obsessively putting it together, using every tool I have access to. Room for improvement, for sure, but I still think it came out pretty neat:

The important thing isn’t the trailer itself, but what it did for me. I was immersed. I was focused. I wasn’t thinking about loss, I was thinking about making something again.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt actually alive.

As of this writing, I’m not sure I can pull this off. I’m afraid to put these words in print before proving I can do it, because I may have to eat my words.

But it matters to plant a flag. And the only way to find out is to start putting one foot in front of the other, and follow the path out of hell.

---

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.