Unwritten

There were writers I should not have read

Some years ago I sent essays to a few different artists and asked them to make something inspired by the words. Shawn Kingrey received The Knife, Part One and Two, referenced below, and this was his first study. The final piece was different and truly incredible, a perfect fit with the essay and all that had happened with my old gym project, where the sharp edges were dulled and the hard language softened to accommodate the snowflakes that were dancing around the front porch.

This essay was posted behind the paywall in April 2025, now it is public.

When I think too hard about writing I can't do it. Once upon a time, when I didn't call myself a writer, I could wait, and tease the muse, listen to music or read instead, and then go to sleep because whether I wrote or not didn't matter. I wasn't a writer. These days that sleep is replaced by the anger I aim at my own lack of words, and work. It wears down my molars.

Sometimes though I read a few words someone wrote about my words and they move me strongly toward the creative fountain. A young man I met over the winter recently wrote that he had read The Knife: Part One and then Part Two, and then read them aloud to his mom who was visiting him at college. That alone was enough to provoke an emotional response, a wave of feeling, because I want young men to read my words but I also don't. I've seen the power certain words have when read at a critical time, a right or wrong time. I have felt that power myself. Words shaped me and the direction of my life. Absent authors mentored me. Usually they were men of action first and writers second. Some were still alive. Several of those who weren't either took their own lives or died striving. There were writers I should not have read.

This young man spoke with his mother about the bravery they perceived in me for having written those passages, for being so raw and vulnerable. He found it "incredible and inspiring." I was standing when I read the text and had to sit down; part of me felt seen and understood, and part knew that, even if I stripped away layers other writers had not, I haven't shown everything. When the water is deep light reaches only so far and I think this is true for all of us. We show what we are comfortable sharing; more detail to those closest to us and less as intimacy decreases. I would tell, and have told Blair things I've never shared with anyone else, she has seen me raw, looked into my soul ... and it's still not everything. How do we speak of what we can barely confront in ourselves?

On the other hand, what are we afraid of?

I have written of darkness, death, suicidal ideation, but also hope, potential, and inspiration. I tread gently around my relationship with suicide because I want young men to read my words and I also don't. When I was climbing hard and alone it was my companion, and some suggested, my motivation. If they were correct I was a failed suicide, someone who went right to that edge, danced with it, tempted it, prostrated myself on it, and walked away. And the positive aspects of life I experienced as a result of that failure were hazard, good fortune I would not have been around to enjoy had I ever not held on hard enough.

The most powerful no-future feelings were coincident with youth, adolescence, young adulthood. We are supposed to grow out of it, so says society. I think what they mean is that most people settle on an inevitability, they give up and give in, too tired to push back on the forces that shape and confine. What if it doesn't go away? To be sure, time softens the feeling but it doesn't disappear altogether for anyone who is conscious and sensitive, for those who have truly hard circumstances forced upon them, for anyone who lives or works around danger, in the chaos of man and nature. And we never know what is within, what others around us—perhaps even close to us—are going through, what they have experienced. One's life may appear successful, with abundant rewards and relationships and opportunities but what if that person has lost 70 or 80 friends, climbing partners and students? What if his circle of friends gets smaller every year? How does that man see the future, and does he consider himself to be living the successful life outside observers perceive? Is his path something anyone should aspire to?

When it hit the last time, ten years ago, I wasn't in the mountains but far from them. I had quit climbing long before and was learning to live with and in a new world. Or trying to. When the identity conflict reared up once again, being alone and isolated wasn't good for me. The weight of what I had given up overpowered the substance of what I was doing. It hit while I was far from home and doing one of the most difficult jobs I had yet been assigned. I didn't want to fail, or to let down those who were counting on me but I could barely stand who I was compared to who I had been. I looked ahead and I couldn't see a path that led back to the luminance, the glaring beauty of a rope taut between us as we stood against a brightening sky. The ride I was on led away from clarity, always toward insecurity, and sometimes insincerity. I didn't want that. I hated myself for having been seduced by the bright lights, the silver screen, the social capital, and the congratulations.

There was no satisfaction, only frustration and emptiness, and a dead end ahead of me. I was good at the work but competence wasn't enough. My marriage was fucked and had been for a while. From across an ocean I watched the business I gave blood to build being corrupted and exploited by people who thought they knew what was best, and thought they knew me. I couldn't see a way out, a progression that took me to a better me. I circled the drain.

I still can't write that story with the insight it deserves, with clarity that would serve so I hint and sneak around it, slowly closing in. When I think too hard about it I can't write it but it's coming. I thought I found a soundtrack that would open the flow last night and listened to that song on repeat for two hours, typing, deleting ... hopeful. I'm not mad about it today even though I didn't write what I wanted because I got here instead, on the back of two words: raw, and vulnerable. This morning someone else added a third, honest. And I suppose that's where I was headed after I read my young friend's text and later spoke with him on the phone. I want to write the hard things honestly, without embellishment, and write them loud enough that they cannot be unheard.

That I'm alive to write makes it my duty to do so. That I could step away from the thing that made me and reinvent myself once, twice, and then again means I should write about it because sometimes, what a young man needs to read is that it can get better, that we can and do, and that who we are is not necessarily who we will be, fixed, rigid, and fenced in. Sometimes a young man needs to read that other men have felt just as unanchored, misunderstood, angry, and deeply sad. Some words I read at his age showed me I was not alone and knowing that eased the pain and uncertainty of every upward step. Decades later I understood what Joe Strummer meant when he said, "the future is unwritten," so I say to my young friend, go write it.