I first met my retinal specialist, Dr. Geeta Lalwani, on August 5, 2013. It was a day I thought would define the rest of my life.

In the thirteen years since, my annual eye exams have come to feel more like visits with an old friend. They usually follow a familiar script.

“Nice to see you, Chris.”

A warm smile. A careful examination. A few quiet minutes as she studies the scans her technician has taken of my eyes. Then the familiar conversation about another promising treatment that might one day slow or prevent vision loss for someone else, but not for me.

For me, those conversations have changed over the years. We spend very little time talking about preventing further vision loss. As the saying goes, that ship has sailed.

Some of those promising therapies are now a reality. They’re just too late for me.

At my most recent appointment, Dr. Lalwani greeted me with the same caring smile. We talked for a few minutes before she turned to her computer.

As she clicked through my records, I said, “Too bad I wasn’t first seeing you now. You’d have something to help me.”

I expected her to smile and say, “I know. I wish I did, Chris.”

She didn’t.

Instead, she said quietly, “I might have something for you.”

Six words I had come to believe I would never hear from her.

I sat quietly, unsure what to say, as she reviewed my medical records, including the results of genetic testing I had undergone four years earlier.

From that first day in her office in 2013, Dr. Lalwani had suspected that my condition wasn’t the more common age-related form of macular degeneration. I was diagnosed unusually young, and my brother had experienced similar vision loss, pointing instead to a hereditary cause.

The genetic testing confirmed what she had long believed. My vision loss was linked to mutations in a gene called ABCA4, a hereditary retinal disease. At the time, the diagnosis provided answers, but not much reason for optimism. There were no treatments that could change the course of the disease, and I assumed there never would be.

After finishing her review of my records, she turned to face me and began describing a clinical trial that I might be eligible for. The treatment showed promise not only for slowing further vision loss, but potentially for restoring some of what had already been lost.

The possibility of regaining even a small part of my vision stopped me cold.

That had never been an option.

And suddenly, there it was. Far from a sure thing, and still at least a year away.

“But how is that even possible?” I asked. “Those cells are dead, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “But we would transplant new RPE cells under the retina.”

It would be reasonable to expect that I would be excited by the prospect. Instead, I simply nodded and agreed to come back in January to explore it further.

Now, several days later, there is an uneasy feeling somewhere deep inside me that has me questioning whether this is the right path.

Certainly, the thought of surgery on my retina doesn’t excite me. It’s easy to make a list of everything that could go wrong, from pain and discomfort to losing what little central vision I have left, or even damaging my peripheral vision. The last thing I need is to end up worse than I am today.

But that isn’t it.

Then I think back to those early years after my diagnosis. The retinal injections. The endless doctor visits. The uncertainty. The drama of the whole experience. It was frightening and more than a little exhausting. I can’t say I’m eager to step back into that world, knowing that, in the end, I might be no better off than I am today.

Maybe even worse.

But that isn’t it either.

How many times over the last thirteen years have I thought about stopping my vision loss, let alone restoring what I’d already lost? But that was never an option. It wasn’t that long ago that Dr. Lalwani had written a letter on my behalf describing my vision loss as permanent. Now, she was asking me to consider the possibility that it might not be.

The truth is, I no longer even know what good vision looks like. In many ways, I live in a different world than I did thirteen years ago. Along the way, my limitations have taught me a great deal about myself and about the world I inhabit.

Somewhere along the way, vision loss stopped being simply something that happened to me.

It became part of the story I tell myself about who I am.

The funny thing about stories is that we rarely realize we’re living inside one until we finally step outside it.

Last summer, I attended a silent retreat at the Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Center in Ward, Colorado. Most of those five days were spent alone, on the land, sleeping in my backpacking tent and sitting beside a mountain stream, doing very little except listening to the water and trying to follow the retreat’s simple instruction: “just be.”

On one of my last days there, I picked up a smooth, rust-colored stone that had rested at the bottom of that stream beside my campsite. Over countless years, the water had worn away its rough edges and reshaped it into something altogether different. As I held it in my hand, I couldn’t help but see a reflection of my own life.

Vision loss had done much the same to me. It had changed me in ways I never would have chosen, softening some edges, exposing others, teaching lessons I could not have learned any other way.

In my earlier essay, “The Stone in the Stream,” I wrote about that stone:

“Strong. Worn. Weathered and shaped by time. It didn’t resist the current. It didn’t cling to what it used to be. It simply allowed itself to be changed. And in that change, there was beauty. There was resilience.”

At the time, I thought the lesson of that stone was about accepting the changes vision loss had brought into my life.

But maybe the bigger lesson was not to cling to any version of myself.

The stone wasn’t beautiful because it had found its final form. It was beautiful because it allowed itself to be shaped by the current. Maybe people aren’t so different. Maybe there is no final version of ourselves to protect. Maybe there is only the life in front of us, asking us to change once again.

Now my doctor was telling me that my future might be different from the one I had learned to accept. Even expect.

And it felt uncomfortable. Foreign.

It’s an odd thing to admit, considering I spent more than half a century with what I once thought of as normal vision.

Maybe the real lesson of that stone is that change was never up to the stone.

That was always the work of the current.

Maybe that’s the real lesson of life.

I was maybe fourteen when my cousin Tom and a friend rode their motorcycles from their home in New Jersey to Florida. They spent the night with us at our house in Yorktown, Virginia. I can still picture the bikes. Choppers. Front wheels stretched way out on long forks. Ape hanger handlebars. They were the coolest motorcycles I had ever seen in real life. And my cousin was riding one of them on what felt like an endless road trip.

Decades later, after owning several motorcycles myself, I realized what an incredible feat that really was. Riding a hardtail motorcycle more than a thousand miles feels like something only a young man with an enormous appetite for life would even attempt.

I was in my sixties before I really got to know my cousin and hear him tell that story himself. It only made me admire him more. The older I got, the more I realized what kind of spirit it took to move through life that way.

Tom died yesterday. He had just turned seventy-seven, and his love of life seemed to stay with him until the very end.

What I will remember most about Tom, besides his love of life, is what a great storyteller he was.

Every time I saw him, Tom told stories about my father, his Uncle Jerry. Stories I had never heard before. Stories about my brother Mike too. Small moments. Funny moments. Parts of their lives that might have disappeared if nobody had carried them forward.

Just sitting with Tom brought back so many memories of my parents and my brother. I could feel them with me again in a way I hadn’t in years. To him, they were probably just good memories and funny stories. To me, they were everything.

Somewhere along the way, without me fully realizing it, my cousin had become a living connection to my own family.

My parents had two sons, Mike and me. My father had one brother, who was killed in World War II at nineteen. My mother came from a much larger family, but for reasons I still struggle to fully explain, I spent much of my adult life disconnected from many of them.

At the time, I don’t think I fully understood what that distance meant. I think I simply assumed there would always be more time. But after the loss of my parents, and eventually my brother, I began to understand the loneliness hidden inside that isolation. So much family history suddenly felt gone. So many stories, memories, and connections I had never taken the time to know.

Or at least I thought they were.

It wasn’t until after the loss of my parents that I really found my way to my cousins Patti, Judy, Jackie, and Tom, along with the large extended family that came with them. And through all of them, I found the presence of my parents again in a way I never expected.

To see someone through the eyes of another is to see something you may never have seen otherwise.

What began as reconnecting with a cousin slowly became something much deeper. Sitting with Tom, listening to him laugh and tell stories about my father and my brother, often felt less like visiting extended family and more like finding my way back to a part of myself I thought was gone.

People do that for each other.

Without ever announcing it, they carry parts of us into their own lives. Stories. Memories. Fragments of laughter and personality that somehow survive long after a life ends. Memories we thought were gone until someone unexpectedly brings them back to life across a dinner table or a phone call.

Tom carried my father and brother forward for me in a way I’m not sure he ever fully understood. It meant everything to me. I don’t think he could have given me a greater gift. I wish I had taken the time to tell him just how much that meant to me.

Thank you, Tom. For the stories. For the laughter. For helping me find parts of the people I loved that I thought were gone.

Now, like so many others who loved you, I find myself carrying you into my future. I only hope I can honor you as well as you honored the people I loved so dearly.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been writing a novel with the working title Begin Again.

But recently, I’ve started questioning what I call it.

In What If the Truth Was Never the Point?, I wrote about how the novel itself seemed to be changing as I moved deeper into the second draft. Or perhaps more accurately, my understanding of it was changing.

That’s the strange thing about stories. We tend to think we are shaping them, when often they are shaping us.

A title frames meaning before we ever experience the thing itself. A book title. A job title. “Doctor,” “Officer,” or “Writer” immediately shapes the story we begin telling ourselves about a person before they ever say a single word. And of course, there are titles far more culturally and emotionally loaded than those.

Begin Again feels hopeful. Redemptive. Almost certain renewal is possible.

The Path Forward, the title that seems to be calling to me now, feels different. Less certain. More grounded in movement, choice, and uncertainty.

Objectively, they describe much the same novel. Two estranged stepbrothers hiking the Colorado Trail after a family tragedy. Grief. Memory. Regret. Reconciliation.

But emotionally, they feel like entirely different books.

In that earlier essay, I wrote about how the novel itself seemed to be telling me where it wanted to go. Writers talk about that sort of thing all the time. Characters taking on lives of their own. Fiction resisting outlines. Refusing to stay inside the neat boundaries we originally planned for it.

What I hadn’t fully realized was how much the title itself was shaping the meaning of the story, both for the reader and for me.

At first, I simply liked the sound of Begin Again.

Now I’m no longer sure that’s the story I’m telling.

Over the last two years, I’ve occasionally questioned the title, but I always returned to the same resolve not to change it. I have to laugh a little at my own unwillingness to Begin Again.

Then I realized something more interesting.

I may not be changing the novel at all.

The novel may be telling me its real name.

Stories do that.

Not just for writers.

That realization sent me down a strange rabbit hole about memory, identity, neuroscience, and the narratives human beings live inside of without even realizing it.

It made me think about something I’ve read repeatedly in neuroscience: memory is far less like replaying a recording and far more like reconstructing a narrative.

Stop reading for a moment and notice everything around you.

The sounds in the room.

The pressure of your body against the chair.

The objects nearby you hadn’t noticed until now.

A moment ago, most of that information barely existed in your awareness at all. Your mind filtered it away so you could focus on the words unfolding in front of you.

But what’s stranger is this: when you remember this moment later, your brain will not retrieve an exact replica of what happened. It will reconstruct the experience from fragments, emotion, meaning, and interpretation. According to neuroscientists like Anil Seth in Being You, perception and memory are far less like replaying reality and far more like actively reconstructing experience.

In other words, memory is not playback.

It is interpretation. A revision.

It’s storytelling.

More interesting still is the fact that the reconstruction process itself changes the memory. The simple act of remembering alters what is remembered.

Said another way, we remember stories. And like all stories, they tend to grow in the retelling.

“And the fish was this big.”

More unsettling is the realization that we often shape those stories around emotion first, then gather facts that support the emotional reality we already feel. I was reminded of Robert Wright’s book Why Buddhism Is True, where he describes the mind less as a single rational actor and more as competing modules, constantly nudging perception and behavior in ways we barely notice. We tell ourselves we are reasoning our way through life. More often, we may be narrating our emotions after the fact.

Then I thought about Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History episode “Free Brian Williams,” and the story of how Williams’ memories from Iraq slowly morphed over time. Experiences and stories he had heard from others eventually became tangled with his own memories until the line between recollection and narrative began to blur.

Gladwell also discussed a long-running study of 9/11 memories that found people’s recollections changed dramatically over time, even while they remained deeply confident those memories were accurate.

The unsettling part of all this is not that memory is imperfect. We’ve known that for a long time.

It’s realizing how much of our lives are shaped by stories we never recognize as stories at all.

Stories about ourselves.

Stories about other people.

Stories about what someone’s behavior means. What their silence means. What their expression means. What their disappointment, criticism, or distance says about them, and about us.

Stories about whether we are lovable, successful, abandoned, worthy, strong, weak, or broken.

And maybe that’s why this question about the title of my novel has lingered in my mind more than it probably should.

Because names matter.

Stories matter.

Because of my visual impairment, I cannot read a menu in a restaurant. My wife is incredibly mindful of this and, because she knows me so well, she quietly helps me figure out what I want to order. But she isn’t always with me.

More times than I care to admit, I’ve found myself staring at a menu I have little chance of reading, stumbling through an order for something I assume is on it, then fumbling through the inevitable follow-up questions.

“Did you mean—”

“The one with—”

When Marilyn hears these stories, she rightfully tells me I should simply let people know I am visually impaired. But that was hard for me for a long time, because of the story I felt it told about who I was.

Weak.

Incapable.

That wasn’t me.

Or was it?

I am a VMI graduate. A former Marine. Not the guy who couldn’t even order an egg roll.

That was the story that played in my mind for years.

Over the years, I’ve gotten better at recognizing the cognitive dissonance between the labels I place on my visual challenges and the objective reality of them. I’ve learned to see those labels for what they are: stories I tell myself.

Where this becomes far harder for me to recognize is in the stories I tell about other people. Those feel like objective truth.

And once I believe those stories deeply enough, they quietly begin shaping the way I experience everything about them. I believe I know who they are. I think I see them clearly.

But all I really see is the story.

The one I created.

The labels we place on ourselves and others quietly shape the way we experience reality. Over time, they stop feeling like stories.

They become our truth.

“He was wrong.”

“They were right.”

“I am right.”

Begin Again.

The Path Forward.

I was speaking with a friend recently about family dynamics, and specifically about relationships between men. During the conversation, I shared the story of the last meaningful moment I spent with my father before he died. I captured it in my memoir like this:

I would only see him a couple more times before he died after falling and hitting his head on his 82nd birthday. I flew to Texas one last time to see my father after his fall. He was in a nursing home, and it was hard not to think back to my mother’s last days. It was a different facility 2,000 miles away, but it was just too familiar. This time, I wasn’t fooling myself like I did with Mom. I knew there would be no recovery. This was the end of the road for my father.

On the last day I spent with him, I sat by his bed alone with my thoughts and watched him lay there staring off into some unknown place. I thought back on all that we had gone through over the last two years since my mother’s stroke. For all my life, I had loved him, and at times feared him. I had spent half a century trying to live up to his expectations and always feeling as if I came just a bit short. Now through the distance of time, I realize that it was my own expectations of myself that I had failed to meet. He was always far prouder of me then I ever was of myself. I tried so hard to be the man he was and lost sight of the man I was in the process.

Just before I was about to fly home to Oregon, I leaned forward and quietly said something I have no memory of ever saying to him previously: “I love you Dad.”

Can that really be the only time I told him that?

Recently, Marilyn pointed out the difference in the way I say goodbye to my two adult children. When I hang up with my daughter, I almost always say, “I love you, sweetie.” When I end a call with my son, it is usually something more like, “Take care, man. Talk to you later.”

The strange thing is that I do not love him less. If anything, Jonathan and I are probably closer right now than Jennifer and I are. We talk more often. We see each other more often, if only because he lives near me in Colorado while my daughter lives in Los Angeles. My son’s career is also not all that different from the one I once had. My daughter works in the beauty industry in LA, a world I appreciate but cannot personally relate to, as anyone who has seen my photo can probably attest.

And yet, Marilyn was right.

Somehow, the language changes.

It certainly is not a difference in the depth of my love for one over the other. If anything, I suspect it is more a reflection of the emotional language I inherited from my father.

The only clear memory I have of my father openly telling me he loved me happened when I was preparing to graduate from high school.

I had only considered three schools: Virginia Military Institute, my brother’s alma mater, the University of Maryland, and Old Dominion University near where we lived.

At some point, I began questioning whether I really wanted to attend VMI or stay home in Norfolk and go to ODU instead.

My father was thrilled when I applied to and was accepted at VMI. A career military man, I imagine he saw it as the better path toward a more certain future.

We were sitting at our kitchen table. I still remember the little nook it was tucked into. The small round table with its red-checkered vinyl tablecloth. The metal-framed chairs. He sat across from me as I told him I wanted to stay home and attend ODU.

For me, ODU not only offered a mechanical engineering degree that appealed to me, it also meant I could stay close to my friends. I had never known that kind of stability in my life, and the idea of remaining home felt comforting.

Then suddenly, he burst into tears.

I can still see his hard face distorted as he tried to cover it with his hand. He told me how hard he had worked to build a better life for me and my brother than the one he had known himself. How afraid he was that I would never become what he believed I could be. And how much he loved me.

I graduated from VMI four years later.

I cannot say what my life would have been had I gone to ODU. I only know it would have been a different path than the one I ultimately took. While there are certainly regrets in how I arrived where I am today, another path would likely have carried its own regrets as well. Despite all of it, I have nothing but gratitude for where I am now.

I love the life I have today. I love the people in it, my family, my friends. And it amazes me how clearly I now see just how much I admired and loved my father. I think I miss him more with each passing year.

And I cannot think about my father without thoughts of my brother filling my mind. Not only were they closer than my father and I ever were, they were far more alike. For some reason, loving my brother always felt easier than loving my father did. I suspect my mother had something to do with that, though I cannot fully explain why. But it is there.

Mike and Dad somehow existed on the same wavelength.

In some ways, that feels a lot like my relationship with Jonathan.

A few days ago, I received my new passport in the mail. As I swapped it out with my old one, a small folded note slipped out. I had carried it through multiple passports and hundreds of thousands of air miles over the years.

It was from Jennifer when she was in second or third grade. She had written the note on a piece of Jonathan’s stationery. His name was printed across the top, scratched out in pencil and replaced with hers in a child’s handwriting.

As I unfolded it and read it again, my vision blurred, this time from tears rather than my retinal disease.

“Dear Daddy,

I love you soooo much just wanted you to know that! Because you are great! And you are also one of my heros.

I LOVE you!!!!!!!!!!

Love,

Jennifer”

It occurs to me now that there may be some parallel between all of this and the relationship between the two main characters in the novel I am writing. They love each other far more deeply than either knows how to express. One is too uncomfortable with vulnerability to openly admit how much he needs his brother in his life. The other feels much the same, but years of mistrust leave him terrified that if he opens himself emotionally, he will only be hurt again.

So they remain stuck.

Only now am I beginning to realize that I may have spent the last year and a half writing about two fictional men struggling to say things I still struggle to say myself.

Maybe fiction is sometimes where we rehearse truths we do not yet know how to speak aloud.

Maybe that is part of what lies behind what I write.

As I sit with all of this, I realize the question is not whether I love my children equally. Of that, I have no doubt.

The deeper question is whether they fully experience that love in the same way.

Love is not the problem.

To borrow another small piece from my memoir, I remember telling my therapist, Chad, that every time I pulled back the cover on my feelings, all I found was another layer underneath. “How do I get to what is at the core,” I asked him.

“You may never completely unravel that ball of yarn,” he told me, “but maybe, for the first time in your life, you are beginning to see that it exists. You can’t think your way through this. The only way is to feel it, and that is what you need to learn: the language of emotions.”

The problem is fluency. We can inherit emotional languages that are rich in loyalty, sacrifice, humor, responsibility, and presence, yet strangely limited in direct tenderness.

My father loved me deeply. Of that, I no longer have much doubt.

But looking back now, I am not sure either of us fully knew how to let the other feel it.

And maybe that is what I am still learning at this stage of my life.

Not how to love my son.

But how to make sure he never has to wonder.

Because the older I get, the more I realize I spent much of my life chasing something that was there all along.

My father’s love and respect for the man I already was.

And in trying so hard to become the man I thought he wanted me to be, I lost sight of that man myself.

The tragedy is that I now know he was far prouder of that man than I ever was.

A few days into being on Substack, I realized something that should have been obvious.

I’ve spent far too much time thinking about where to publish, and not enough time asking what I actually want from my writing.

My website sits in a quiet corner of the internet. It never drew much attention. But the people who did find it felt like my people. Mostly people I knew, or people adjacent to them.

Substack feels different. Louder. More crowded. Like moving from a small town to New York City. And it raises a simple question.

How do I find more of my people in a place like this?

I could change the message. Broaden it. Try to make it appeal to more people. But that doesn’t appeal to me, and it doesn’t guarantee anything.

At every turn, there’s an endless stream of people trying to stand out. I have no desire to be that guy standing in the middle of a busy street yelling for attention as people rush past.

But on some level, that’s the business of writing. And it is unlikely to change.

I’ve spent most of my career in sales and customer-facing roles. I understand the importance of standing out. And by most objective measures, I was successful at it. At least on paper.

But it never quite felt the way I expected it to.

No matter what I achieved, there was always something just out of reach. Some version of “enough” that I never quite got to.

Which makes this question about Substack feel familiar.

Because it isn’t really about Substack. It’s about what I want my second act to be.

The first was performative. It was filled with the things that needed to be accomplished. Raise a family. Buy a home. Put food on the table. It required a certain way of showing up, and I got good at it.

But it never quite fulfilled me.

And then everything fell apart.

My marriage. My career. My family.

All at once. For one reason.

I lost track of what mattered. What I was actually working for.

I learned from that. Picked up the pieces and told myself I wouldn’t lose sight of it again.

And now, in a quieter way, I find myself facing something similar with my writing.

I’m spending too much time thinking about how to be seen. How to stand out in a crowded space. The same kinds of questions I spent a career learning how to answer.

I understand what it takes. I can see how to do it.

And I know what I’m unwilling to sacrifice in the process.

Writing my memoir, Seeing Clearly, made that clear. It forced me to confront parts of myself I had spent years avoiding. Long before I finished it, I knew that as an unknown author without a large platform, a traditional publisher wasn’t a real option. So I self-published it.

That decision came with a cost, both financial and in readership.

And I’d make that trade every time.

Now I’m working on a novel.

I recently read Is Fiction Publishing Losing its Faith in Storytelling? by Mark Gottlieb. In it, he notes that publishers are increasingly asking not just “Is this good?” but “How will this sell?”, placing more weight on the size of an author’s platform than on the writing itself. More concerning, he points out that this expectation, once reserved for nonfiction, is now making its way into fiction as well.

His piece landed harder than I expected. And yet, it wasn’t a surprise.

Halfway through the second draft of my novel, it’s already something I feel proud of. Something I believe could connect with a lot of people.

And I’m faced with the reality of building a platform a publisher will find attractive, or choosing a different path entirely.

Which brings me back to a simpler question.

Do I actually want to do what it takes to be seen?

And for me, that leads somewhere else entirely. Not to how I publish, but to why I write.

I know what it isn’t.

It’s not about income. I’m not naive enough to say success wouldn’t be welcome. Of course it would. But that’s not what has me sitting at this keyboard or spending hours each day working on a novel.

I’m fortunate. I had a career that gave me the freedom to spend my time this way. And I do it because I want to.

Which brings me back to the question I keep asking.

Why?

Because there’s a part of me that recognizes that pattern. The part that knows how to perform, how to adapt, how to do what’s required to get the outcome.

But today, the difference is that I can see how much time I spent chasing something I could never catch.

Validation.

I’ve been looking for it in one form or another for most of my life. And as I write that, it sounds ridiculous.

I have plenty of it. From people close to me. From a career that, objectively, was successful. From relationships that matter. There’s no shortage of evidence.

But it always feels just out of reach.

My mind goes straight to comparison. To people who have done more, built more, reached more. And whatever I’ve done starts to feel smaller by comparison.

That’s me measuring the wrong things. But old habits die hard.

I’ve spent a lot of my life measuring things. Outcomes, progress, success. Numbers make it easy. Dollars, titles, growth.

But the things that actually shape a life can’t be measured.

Friendship. Love. Contentment. Peace.

Writing has helped me connect with that truth, and others like it. The act of looking inward, sorting through the noise, and putting it into words is how I make sense of things in my life.

And that’s why I write.

Which leaves me in a strange place.

I can see what it would take to succeed as a writer in this environment.

And at the same time, I can see how quickly I could find myself chasing validation in the one place I’ll never find it.

Clicks. Likes. Sales. Star ratings.

And behind all of it, a novel I hope to one day sell.

Which means the pull toward validation will still be there.

I spent much of the last couple days setting up a Substack.

That may not sound like much, but for a visually impaired guy like me, it was far from trivial.

I have a pretty technical background, but these days even simple technology tasks can test my skills, not to mention my patience. Most interfaces are designed for how things look, not how they’re navigated. That makes sense. The vast majority of people don’t have vision issues. And for most of my life, neither did I. Until I did.

But this story isn’t really about accessibility, or even vision loss.

I worked through it. Page by page. Step by step. I even set up a custom domain, writing.chrismonnette.com, tied back to my website.

When I finished, and everything was working the way it should, I sat back and looked at it. I felt good. Better than I expected.

It’s a good start, I thought.

Later, I told my wife about it. I walked her through everything I’d done, all the small hurdles along the way, how I had navigated them. The pride of the accomplishment was almost certainly not lost on the person who knows me best, and whose opinion matters most.

“That’s great, baby,” she said. “Good job.”

Then she asked, “Why did you do that?”

I laughed. “Well, because—”

And that was as far as I got.

This isn’t really a story about Substack, though I suspect, and hope, it’s a good platform.

I woke up the next morning with her question still sitting there. As I usually do, I fed the dog, then sat down on the cushion to meditate.

I picked up my phone to set a thirty-minute timer. One notification sat on the home screen.

Substack.

Not all of my meditation sessions are as focused as I’d like.

This was one of them.

Afterward, I sat with my coffee, my wife’s question still echoing in my mind.

I already have a website. It’s been there for years. It holds a lot of what I’ve written, some of it I’m proud of, some of it feels like it matters. But I didn’t have a plan for Substack. Just, why not.

That’s not like me. At least not anymore. I try not to jump into things without thinking them through. This time I did, and now I find myself trying to reverse engineer the decision.

The truth is, my website has a lot of content. Far more content than readers. And if I’m being honest, that’s the part that’s pushing me.

But why?

The site was never meant to be a commercial endeavor itself. It started as a way to promote my memoir, Seeing Clearly, but over time it evolved into something I kept returning to, even as I lost any clear sense of what it was for. So I started trying to answer the question.

Why did I do this?

At first, the answers came easily. Substack is a better distribution platform. That’s what it’s built for. It reaches people in a way my website never has. It makes engagement easier, more direct.

All of that is true, but it didn’t feel like the real answer.

Because the truth is, I already have a place for my writing.

So I asked a different question. Am I afraid of losing the content, or am I afraid no one will ever see it?

Or is it something else entirely?

Maybe I want it to be there, out in the world, as proof. Proof that I’ve thought about things. That I’ve written things that matter. That I’ve done something with my time.

That idea is harder to sit with.

But it’s also closer to the truth.

I told myself it was part of the job. That this is what writers do.

Maybe that’s true.

But there’s something underneath that.

Something quieter, and a little less comfortable to admit.

I like the idea that something I write might land with someone. That it might matter.

And if I’m honest, I like being read.

And that’s where it starts to turn into something else.

A need.

That’s when the email came.

Long. Personal. Full of details about my background. My writing. My life. It reflected my own words back to me in a way that felt almost too precise. And for a moment, I was hooked.

I felt seen.

Then I looked a little closer.

The details were all surface level. Pulled from things I’ve already put out into the world. Rearranged. Reflected back.

I checked the email address. A made-up name at gmail.com.

And I laughed.

What stayed with me wasn’t the email itself. It was how easily it worked. How quickly it pulled me in.

I don’t think that I am a particularly unique person. Like everyone else, I have wants and needs. Some I am aware of. Others operate at a level just below the surface. Cravings that pull me into things, long before I realize what is happening.

I didn’t take the bait with the email. But I am thankful to the sender, whoever he, she, or it was, because it shined a light on the craving.

So I’m launching on Substack.

Not because I’ve figured it all out. Not because I’ve found some pure reason to write or share. If anything, the opposite. I can see the pull for what it is, the part of me that wants to be read, to be seen, to know it matters.

That’s there. It probably always will be.

But underneath all of that, something simpler remains.

I write because I enjoy it. Because it teaches me something I don’t see until I put the words down. Because every now and then it helps me understand my own mind a little more clearly.

So I’ll keep writing. I’ll share it here, and wherever else makes sense.

Not to chase validation. But not pretending that pull doesn’t exist either.

Just writing, and paying attention to what comes with it.

So if any of this resonated, or if you’re as curious as I am, I’d love to have you follow along.

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After catching up with a dear friend and former colleague this morning, I found myself thinking about the doors we walk through in our lives.

Some are obvious. The big ones we spend hours, days, maybe years turning over before we finally step through. Others feel small at the time. Decisions we make quickly, almost without thinking.

My life is full of them.

Not all of them felt like the right choice. Some were painful. Others barely registered when I made them, only to realize later how much they had changed my life in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

They weren’t doors.

They were turnstiles.

Once you step through, there’s no going back the way you came. The path forward is changed, whether you like it or not.

Not just the big ones. Even the small, forgettable ones.

I used to argue with that. I believed I could undo things. That if I tried hard enough, I could put things back the way they were.

Get the toothpaste back in the tube.

Now, in the back half of my sixties, I see it differently.

The greater harm is in trying to go back.

The very nature of a turnstile is that it forces a choice. And once you move through it, another one is already in front of you.

Stay where you are, or move forward.

There were times I couldn’t get through that next one fast enough.

One of them led me to ask questions I had been avoiding for years.

It led me to my wife, Marilyn.

To therapy.

To writing.

To a life I wouldn’t trade with anyone.

And still, I spent years regretting that first painful turnstile.

The thing about regret is that it can be a teacher, or it can be a master.

Clearly, the harm we cause others isn’t something to ignore or write off. Once we see it, the responsibility is to stop, and then do what we can to repair it.

But we also have to face this: the person we harmed can’t go back any more than we can undo what we did.

I can’t begin to count the number of times a memory from my past has stopped me cold. Sometimes it’s something small. A photo. A song. And suddenly I’m there again. Remembering. Regretting.

There comes a point when there’s only one choice left.

To forgive ourselves.

And that just might be the hardest turnstile of all to step through. But what option do we really have?

As I caught up with my friend this morning, our conversation turned to writing, and I found myself smiling.

She was the one who sent me a link to a class at Lighthouse Writers in Boulder. Introduction to Novels and Memoirs.

I remember laughing.

Yeah, right.

I almost didn’t step through that one.

But I did

.

I wrote this after listening to Lights On. It started as a reflection on my vision, but it pulled me into a much bigger question—what it is we’re actually experiencing in the first place.

Since losing part of my vision, I’ve become strangely more aware of what I can’t see, what’s missing, distorted, or invented by my brain to fill in the gaps. Visual hallucinations are now part of my life. I’ve seen a city skyline, tall buildings stretching across a photograph of the backcountry, where there wasn’t a piece of rebar for miles. A dog lying on the floor, where there was only a rug with an odd geometric pattern. My own dog, Skye, curled beside me on the couch.

Most of the time, it’s entertaining. Sometimes, it’s frustrating, especially when I’m trying to get something done. But every time it happens, it’s enlightening. I find myself asking: What else is my mind lying to me about?

I guess lying is perhaps too strong a word. It suggests intent. My brain isn’t trying to deceive me; it’s just doing its best with the limited visual data that makes it past my ravaged maculas, through my visual cortex, and into awareness. That’s where the inaccuracy takes shape.

I picture a scene from Inside Out, with a new character—Illusion—who keeps hijacking the projector, making me “see” things that aren’t really there, while Joy, Fear, and Disgust shout from the control panel, “Stop! That’s all wrong!”

Recently, I listened to Annaka Harris’ audiobook Lights On. It’s a deep dive into consciousness. I wouldn’t call it a casual listen, at least not for me. It’s probably easier if you have a background in neuroscience or philosophy. Both would help. That said, she does a remarkable job of summarizing difficult ideas in a very accessible way.

The central question she explores is whether consciousness is fundamental to the universe or simply an emergent property of complex biological systems.

It took me a minute to make sense of that question the first time I heard it, so let me add a bit more context.

Most of science treats consciousness as emergent: something that arises when a system becomes complex enough, like a human brain.

For me, it helps to think about it like this. If consciousness is emergent, it only materializes when an organism reaches a certain level of development, then the lights come on. Think of a human versus a rock. Both are made from the same limited set of atoms: just 118 known elements on the periodic table. But something about the way those atoms are arranged in a human brain gives rise to awareness, while a rock remains unaware.

If consciousness is emergent, it’s the arrangement that matters. But if it’s fundamental, then there’s a measure of consciousness in all matter. Think, for example, of the difference between a human and a worm. The worm may only be aware of pressure as it slides across the ground. It doesn’t worry about money or whether its kids can go to college. Take that down several more steps to a rock, and maybe there’s a tiny spark of consciousness there too. Maybe not something we can relate to, but something nonetheless.

It’s a bold idea, for sure. But it does beg the question: If consciousness is emergent, where do the lights come on? Just with humans? It’s clear to me that my dog Skye feels joy, sadness, and pain. What about a hamster? A butterfly? An ant? A rock?

Where, exactly, is the line where the lights come on and we say there is a level of consciousness?

That’s the question Lights On is exploring. Harris leans toward the idea that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. In my mind, I think of it like the electrical charge of an electron, something basic and built-in, not constructed.

If that’s true, then consciousness isn’t something the brain produces, it’s something the brain taps into. It’s a striking idea, but no stranger than the notion that time itself bends and stretches, as Einstein’s theory of relativity explained, and science has since confirmed.

Okay, so that’s a lot to absorb. I hope you’ve stuck with me this far, because here’s where it gets interesting.

Harris’ final words in her audiobook made me do a double take. I played them back two or three times to make sure I understood what she was saying. I even took a moment to capture them in my journal.

Not because I was certain she was right, or because it wasn’t a logical conclusion to the argument she made, but because of the implications and the questions it opened in my mind.

“Imagine,” she said, “we live in a world where there is no matter. All there is, is consciousness. The world that is constructed in that consciousness, the physical world we all see and feel every day, is just an awareness within that consciousness. It’s not real.”

Imagine the ocean. Each of us is like a single wave: distinct in shape, direction, and energy, yet still part of the same vast body of water. We rise, we crest, we fall. And while we appear separate for a moment, we are never anything but ocean. Each wave is shaped by the others. A wave cannot exist outside the water, and it is always changing, always evolving. Eventually, the wave disappears into stillness, but the water that made the wave remains.

What if Harris is right?

What if there is no physical world at all, only a boundless awareness, like an ocean, and we are nothing more than waves rising and falling within it? What if everything we see, touch, and believe to be real is simply experience, unfolding inside that vast and silent field of consciousness?

Could it be that the presence we’ve called God for thousands of years is not separate from us at all, but this very awareness, ever-present, formless, and indivisible?

Could consciousness itself be the fundamental nature of everything, the hidden thread science has been chasing, the essence beneath all matter and mind?

Or is it something more mysterious still?

Two truths converging.

God and science, not rivals but reflections.

A single explanation, hiding in plain sight.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: No, I’m not under the influence of any mind-altering drug. At least not as I write this.

And no, I’m not claiming this as some ultimate truth.

To be clear, I’m not so arrogant as to say I know the truth of the universe.

But I am someone who believes deeply in asking questions, even the ones that might not have answers.

Let me return to where I started. I know my brain plays tricks on me. Not only is that well supported by neuroscience, I see it in my life every day.

So if that’s true, what’s wrong with asking questions that strike directly at the heart of everything I’ve always believed?

What if the most honest way to live isn’t to be certain, but to stay curious?

That doesn’t mean abandoning science or faith. It means refusing to settle for either as a complete explanation. A universal consciousness might sound like heresy to a scientist and like vagueness to a theologian. But to someone like me, living between vision and imagination, reason and mystery, it feels like a door that begs to be opened.

I’ve come to believe that to live fully is to ask questions, especially the unanswerable ones.

Because if we don’t, how do we know we’re not living a lie?