Trying Again, Again
Before reading this, it may help to read “Trying Again…”, an essay I published in 2023 about restarting Open Doors.
The ellipsis now seems almost prophetic.
I wrote that I was trying again, laid out what I hoped the site might become, and promised to return to essays and fiction. Then, for the most part, I didn’t.
Apparently, I was trying to try again.
There were still ideas. There were unfinished drafts and outlines. I kept reading, listening, noticing, and thinking. But, Open Doors once again fell mostly quiet.
What makes the actual return strange is that it happened at a point when writing should have become less likely.
I now have three young children. My disability has progressed considerably. I have less energy, less physical independence, and more friction between a thought occurring and that thought becoming something another person can read.
And, somehow, I am writing more than I have in years.
Open Doors now includes essays about Cormac McCarthy, MS fatigue, nonduality, marriage, fatherhood, work, AI, and why I say please to it. I have written about “The Sound of my Son”, followed McCarthy in his shadow, tried to explain being “Too Tired to Explain Tired,” and looked directly at “The Same Life in a Darker Key.”
There are also mugs, medical absurdities, petty linguistic grievances, childhood writing, Suno songs generated from essays, and whatever else refuses to leave me alone.
And, since I first drafted this follow-up, I have kept going. That feels worth saying because the continuation is really the point. I have now published quite a lot of fiction too, enough that returning to it is no longer something I need to describe in the future tense.
The difference was not that I finally became disciplined enough. I did not suddenly discover more time or energy. I found a process that could survive the life I actually have.
AI has helped enormously. It did not give me the memories, experiences, questions, or voice. It helped reduce the distance between them and the page. It could hold a thread when my body or attention dropped it. It made revision, organization, and basic site work possible on days when each extra step might otherwise have ended the attempt.
In 2023, I thought trying again meant deciding harder.
This time, it meant adapting.
The earlier attempt still matters. I meant every word when I wrote it. But, intention alone was not enough, and the quiet years afterward are now part of the record too.
The work is continuing. There are still more McCarthy essays ahead, more reflections on disability and family, more fiction, more strange little moments that will probably insist on becoming posts, and more subjects I have not yet realized I am going to write about.
Maybe there will even be a few short poetry collections. There is already something like a poem sitting at the bottom of nearly every essay, after all.
Open Doors is finally becoming what I hoped it might be: not a finished statement or a polished identity, but a place where I can follow the ideas, people, books, illnesses, stories, jokes, and ordinary moments that keep shaping me.
And, this time, I know it is going to continue.
Not because I have conquered the circumstances that interrupted it.
Because I have finally learned how to write from inside them.
It’s happening now
I tried this before, and yet
This time it’s working
