There’s something quietly sacred about the writer who labors in obscurity. Much has been written about this strange devotion.

We know the stories: Kafka dying with his manuscripts unread, Lovecraft’s mythos blooming only after his death. They are not anomalies, but saints in a long procession of invisible scribes.

In my youth, I chased recognition like a famished dog chasing a bone. I passed my articles and stories to friends and family, hoping anyone would name the brilliance I secretly believed was buried in the lines. I wanted confirmation that I was destined for literary immortality.

Perhaps I still do this, here, on this modest corner of the internet. 

But with age has come a strange peace. Obscurity no longer stings; it shelters. There’s a freedom in writing into the void, in composing not for acclaim but because you simply must.

The truth is, I write compulsively, not necessarily for glory but for survival. When I go too long without putting language to the noise inside my mind, it builds like pressure that threatens to burst my head open.

For me, writing has become less a calling and more a compulsion; a sacred affliction. 

I’ve heard it said and believe it now more than ever: being a writer is not always a blessing. It is a curse, a lifelong addiction for which there is only one reliable remedy: to keep scribbling until the hands forget how.

**

Driving home from work the other night, the moon hung impossibly low over the interstate like a bruised yolk: golden, gravid, and pulsing with some unspoken sorrow. 

It hovered just above the horizon, as if the heavens had grown tired of holding it and were about to let it crash to earth.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that the moon wasn’t just watching but judging. Its swollen face was a silent oracle, casting verdicts in light. 

This kind of adolescent metaphysics feels slightly absurd at my age, like trying on a jacket I outgrew decades ago but can’t seem to throw away.

And yet, it clings to me: this old habit of finding cosmic significance in the smallest gestures. I thought I’d grow out of it. 

I haven’t. Maybe I never will.

**

Maybe it’s because I’ve always had a pessimistic streak—something like a default setting—but I’ve never been able to picture a future that isn’t somehow charred and crumbling. 

That dystopian haze doesn’t just hang over the world at large; it also creeps into the corners of my personal life. Hope, when it appears, feels like a thin mist that’s beautiful, but too fragile to hold.

This has been a lifelong struggle, the kind that years of therapy and self-inquiry haven’t quite unraveled. And lately, it’s felt even more acute. 

Like many Americans, I’ve spent the past decade feeling like an exile in my own country, wandering through Trump’s dark circus of cruelty and chaos.

But if I’ve learned anything, it’s that some things don’t need to be fixed to be lived through. Acceptance—true, steady, and unsentimental—has become my quiet shield.

Not resignation, not defeat. Just the recognition that the world may not make sense, and I don’t have to make sense of it to keep going.

So I narrow my focus. I tend to my tiny garden. And when the world grows too loud, I return to the wisdom in 12-step rooms: one day at a time.

Not because it’s easy, but because it’s possible. Because even the bleakest path can be walked if you keep your eyes on your feet.

**

If Alcoholics Anonymous gave me anything—and it gave me many things—it was the invitation to a spirituality that didn’t require me to check my brain at the door. 

I no longer consider myself an AA evangelist, but I’ll always be grateful that the program opened a space where something like faith could live.

In early recovery, I searched everywhere for signs of the divine: street corners, song lyrics, strangers’ eyes.

I clung to the notion that if I followed the script and played the part of the “good” person in recovery, then surely God would reward me with smooth roads and painless progress. 

I treated grace like a transaction. 

I know better now.

My understanding of a higher power has shifted, softened, and dissolved into something more fluid and formless. These days, I rarely ask for anything. I don’t barter with the universe. I’ve mostly let go of the notion of a personal God who orchestrates outcomes like a puppeteer.

If God exists—and most days, I still believe they do—then God is less a figure and more a presence. A vast, ungraspable mystery beneath the surface of things. Something you can rest inside, but never explain.

And resting in that mystery, without answers, without demands, has made it easier to keep going.

I no longer need to figure it all out. I’ve learned to live inside the questions, and that has become its own kind of peace.