Two strokes shattered me. I realized now that my fractures don’t deserve to be hidden. They could be the most honest, beautiful part of who I am.

I spent over 25 years in a world I never felt I belonged to, playing a part in a movie I never auditioned for. I kept waiting to wake up, to break free from the Groundhog Day of it. There had to be some hidden logic, some sense. Instead, the only thing that broke was me. And I walked away.

The simple, harsh truth is that this isn’t a world made for people like me—people who won’t play along, who can’t contort themselves into profit-making shapes, who create not for fame or applause but because something inside them compels it. The world doesn’t reward that kind of drive. It punishes it.

I’m 51 now. Two strokes at 48 shattered me in unexpected ways and left me scattered. I’ve been trying to piece myself together ever since, groping for understanding. Who is this person I have become? Without permission, he took over. And the strange part is, this new person, this stranger, retained a veil of familiarity. It’s still there. I’ve always sensed it, felt it, the ultra-low-frequency humming undercurrent in my life.

I am a writer.

I write because it’s the only thing I’ve ever been able to do with even a hint of inevitability.

I write because I have no choice.
I write for an audience that may never exist.

There’s no place in this world—not even here, in this vacuous, anonymous corner of the internet—where I feel like anything other than a visitor in my own life. I’m not exploitable. I wasn’t built for the assembly line of modern existence. I’m not an interchangeable resource. 

I thought I would give it time. I blinked, and I had aged out of the game. A game I never wanted to play, a game whose rules were designed to use up people like me.

We aren’t allowed to exist simply for our own sake. We’re required to justify ourselves, to produce, to earn, to work to survive. Every part of the system insists that we serve another’s agenda.

So I’m here, writing this to strangers. Strangers whose opinions I swear don’t matter while wishing, in the quietest, most inconvenient part of myself, that they somehow do. Maybe I’m looking for witness. Perhaps I want proof that this inner life isn’t imaginary.

I don’t know where I fit in this world. I don’t know if I fit at all. I’ve learned that you can push a piece hard enough, long enough, and almost force it into fitting. Or at least get it close enough. Or you can stop trying and wonder whether the puzzle was wrong from the start.

And maybe that’s where the truth lies: in the cracks. In the spaces where the pieces don’t align perfectly, where the jagged edges are proof that you’ve been split open, reshaped, made new.

Like kintsugi—the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery, highlighting each fracture with gold—my breakage and repair are part of my history, not something to hide. Each line, each scar, catches the light. They are not flaws. They are the shape of me, the only shape I’ve ever had.

There’s a chance it’s not about fitting, but about letting the fractures shine, embracing the new art they create. Like my writing, my life, this now life, is built from the broken pieces, and the gold is the story I tell with them.