Some have asked: Why did you abandon this blog?

I didn’t want to. Promise.

Here’s the problem: Unrelenting unreasonable standards. My own. My superego wants the id well hid. If I share my voice, then nothing that could embarrass me can see daylight. One sentence, one word that I might disagree with six months later—intolerable. Unforgivable.

It worked, in its way. Years later, I don’t disagree with my posts. Cringy tone at times. Missed the point of some stories. Nothing reckless. One of my favorite singers Josh Ritter, once sang “There are things I will not sing for the sting of sour notes.”

Except one problem…I regret what was unwritten. Unshared.

I’ve lost access to many people dear to me—and parts of myself. A lot has happened: Unplanned emigration, starting from nothing in a new country, marriage, child, all amidst a pandemic that left most of us bruised in ways still hard to name—an ocean of untold grief.

Somewhere in there, I became a therapist. I’ve spent thousands of hours present with people sharing the most vulnerable aspects of their lives, unmentionable memories and beliefs. While there are no universals, most of the time I encourage people to take more risks, honestly share their experience with others. Even in a county where the unofficial coat of arms might read: “Say Nothing. And Keep Saying it.”

At my college graduation, one of my favorite journalists, David Halberstam, told us, “Go out and fail.” He told the story of getting fired from Mississippi’s smallest daily paper out of college. His words guided me.

So I did. I went for it—and got fired from my first real job after college in spectacular fashion—lost housing, income, and dignity in a day. The big failure I’d shaped my life to avoid up to that point.

After that, I lost some of my nerve. When I told people I worked at National Geographic, I know they didn’t picture the desk in an office building where I worked. I was a glorified assistant for eight years. From that post, I wrote articles for the website, successfully pitched millions of dollar’s worth of documentary films. I was offered promotions to associate producer and other positions commensurate with that success, and I turned them down. Not entirely out of fear. I’d lost that first job partly because of substance issues, and after that I vowed to keep sobriety first, above everything.

If I’d taken that associate producer job, the sobriety would be gone, keeping track of a hundreds of things in dozens of unknown places around the world in a media culture brimming with alcohol et al. No chance. I’d have had to do something to numb or dull the incessant voice screaming: You’ll fuck this up, others will suffer for your failure. You’ll never be forgiven. Remember your place. You’re nothing.

I grew up between clashing drives: my mother’s conviction that I was destined for greatness, and my father’s sabotaging criticisms at the most vulnerable moments. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj has a famous quote, “My heart tells me I’m everything, my mind tells me I’m nothing. Between the two my life flows.” My version was My mother tells me I’m everything, my father tells me I’m nothing, between the two my life is stifled.

My father is much gentler now. Reading old things I’d written and encouraging me to keep writing. My body, still braced for defense from years of fambushes, freezes when I hear the encouragement I’d longed for and long since given up on. That man I once dreaded no longer seems to exist.

That, I think is what this return to writing is about. Walking the walk—taking the risks I’m encouraging others to take. To stop hiding behind the old idea of “perfect,” and try instead the revision bell hooks wrote about in in All About Love:

For some time I thought of this word [perfect] only in relation to being without fault or defect…That is, until I looked for a deeper, more complex understanding of the word “perfect” and found a definition emphasizing the will “to refine.

So that’s what I’m doing here—trying to refine. To write something I might one day disagree with. To stumble, to fail, and maybe, let myself be seen.