The Edge of the Tear

I’ve been writing like this my whole life. Long before I came out. Long before I died three times. Long before I got slammed by a car and had to rebuild myself from the ground up.

Those things didn’t change how I write. They just proved that I was right to write this way all along.

When I was younger, I tried to define what writing even was to me. I didn’t see it as art for the sake of art. I never have. To me, writing was always about capturing something that doesn’t want to be captured. A moment. A feeling. That exact instant when emotion swells so hard inside you that it feels like your body might break under it.

Like a tear… right at the edge. Not falling. Not yet. Just hanging there, suspended between control and release.

That’s the moment. That’s the thing I’ve always chased.

Because it’s not the emotion itself that matters, it’s the surge before it. The pressure. The threat. The point where something inside you is about to give.

That’s where truth lives. And that’s what I try to put on the page.

I didn’t learn that in a classroom. I learned it because I had to.

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to express myself. Not really. I was being raised male in a time and place where that meant something very specific: shut the hell up about how you feel. You spoke when spoken to. You answered carefully. And if there was anger in the room, even a hint of it, you learned real fast that honesty could get you torn apart.

So I stopped speaking. Out loud, anyway.

Inside? That was different.

I read constantly. Books became the place where people actually said things. Real things. Honest things. Things no one around me was willing to say.

And I started writing. Early. Not because I thought I was a writer. But because it was the only place I could breathe.

I wrote down thoughts I couldn’t say. Feelings I wasn’t allowed to have. Observations I didn’t trust the world to receive.

That’s where my voice was forged.

Over time, I got good at it. Not in the “flowery, poetic, impress your professor” kind of way. In the “get to the fucking point” kind of way. I learned that if I wanted to say something clearly, I needed to understand it deeply. So I learned. Constantly. School, books, life, systems, people. It all fed the same engine.

It’s why I was good at what I did professionally. Reactor operator. Technician. Analyst. I don’t miss details. I don’t let things sit unexplained. I take a moment, isolate it, turn it over, and figure out what it actually means.

And then I say it.

Clean.

For a long time, though, that clarity only existed on paper. In real life, I was something else entirely. A persona. A performance. The guy everyone liked. Loud, funny, sharp. A “guy’s guy.” The kind of person who fit exactly where he was expected to fit.

None of it was honest.

I didn’t say what I really thought. I didn’t share what I actually felt. Unless it was anger, because that was allowed.

Everything else? Buried.

But the writing never stopped. That’s where the truth lived.

Then I came out. And everything broke open.

For the first time in my life, I felt things fully. Not filtered. Not suppressed. Not managed to fit someone else’s idea of who I should be.

Just… real.

And yeah, that kind of honesty comes with a cost. You don’t get to hide anymore. You don’t get to control how people see you. So you either learn to stop giving a fuck… or you don’t survive it.

I chose to survive.

Then I died.

Three times.

And if you think that doesn’t change how you look at the world, you’re out of your fucking mind.

And then, because apparently the universe wasn’t done with me yet, I got hit by a car.

And still… My writing didn’t change. Not at its core.

It just got sharper.

What changed wasn’t how I write. It was how clearly I understood why I write.

I don’t build sprawling worlds. Not well, anyway. I’m not the writer who’s going to give you ten characters and three timelines and some intricate plot that unfolds over 400 pages.

That’s not me.

What I do is take a single moment in time and I strip everything else away. I clear the air around it. I shine a light on it. I turn it slowly until you can see it from every angle. And then I lay it gently on the currents of life and let it hit you.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

My memoir is short for a reason.

My short stories are built the same way.

Even this blog. It’s always the same process:

Find the moment.
Find the meaning.
Say it clean.

No wasted space. No bullshit. Just truth, delivered as directly as possible.

These days, my writing has more in it than it used to. There’s humor now. There’s bite. There’s swagger. There’s pieces of me that used to only show up in conversations, not on the page.

It’s all blended together.

The quiet observer.
The suppressed kid.
The analytical mind.
The loud, joking exterior.
The woman who finally stopped hiding.
The one who died and came back and decided to actually live.

All of it. That’s the voice.

My father used to say, over and over: “The shortest distance between A and B is a straight line.” He wasn’t wrong. And as much as I’ve spent a lifetime learning language, expanding vocabulary, experimenting with structure… I’ve come right back to that. The shortest sentence is usually the best sentence. The cleanest path carries the most truth.

So that’s how I write.

I don’t chase beauty for the sake of it. I don’t decorate things to make them sound important.

I find the edge of the tear. And I put it on the page before it falls.

That’s it. That’s all I’ve ever been trying to do.