I like to write. To capture things. To capture the moment, and that is in that moment, because it won’t be back.
That hits different watching my daughter grow. Every single day she’s a slightly different kid than she was yesterday, and I don’t want to lose the version of her that existed this morning.
Cancer is doing what it does to my dad right now. Slowly. I’m watching that too. And somewhere in the middle of loving the time I’ve got left with him, I keep running into the same regret. I didn’t live my own last ten years much at all.
Here’s where it gets complicated. I didn’t make the Olympic team in 2000. I think I’ve been quietly depressed since. Not diagnosed, not dramatic. Just no target. No pull. The kind of drive I had when I trained went quiet and never fully came back.
I know it’s on me to find that again. What I won’t do is call raising my daughter the whole answer. Is loving her enough? Some days I think it should be. Other days I catch myself wanting something for me too, and then immediately feel like a bad dad for wanting it.
But here’s the thing. My love for her is for her. Full stop. God handed me a job. Protect her, raise her, teach her. I take that seriously, no hesitation. A refocus, absolutely. A reprioritizing, without question.
Still. In the middle of all that joy, some days it feels like I’m quietly dying. Not from her. From the ten years I spent not fully alive while she was becoming herself.
So I capture things. The moment, the thought, the exact feeling. Text, video, whatever’s in my hand. When I’m gone I want her to be able to pull up a memory of us and actually hear my voice in it, not just remember that I existed.
Some of what I capture will be just mine. Some will be hers and mine. Some will be her mom’s and mine, so she can see us the way we actually were, not the polished version parents perform for their kids.
She might never read any of it. She might read all of it. My words might touch her the same way my father’s words have touched me. The same way other people I’ve never met have touched me, taught me, inspired me, warned me, just through what they left behind. Someone who’s never met me might read three sentences of mine and it lands exactly when they needed it, the same way strangers’ words have landed on me at exactly the right moment more than once.
We’re taught to hang on the words of people with credentials. Scholars, historians, whoever wrote the book someone told us mattered. I’ve learned just as much from people who’ll never show up in any of those books. The proverbial nobody. I think what someone says matters based on who’s listening and when they’re listening, not whose name is attached to it.
I don’t know if anything I write is important. I know it’s important to me. Don’t I count too?
I’m not cutting anyone down. Not spreading anything malicious. I’ll probably offend somebody eventually, I’m decent at that by accident, but offending and being cruel on purpose are two completely different animals.
Somebody decided short-form posting isn’t cool anymore. Fine. Since when did uncool mean I don’t get to do it. I spent a long stretch of my life trying to be the guy who fit in, and every single time, something in me sat wrong the whole time I was doing it.
It took me forever to stop fighting that feeling and just admit I’m not that guy. The day I accepted it, I got genuinely happy. That’s also, not by accident, the exact era I was training my own way instead of the way I was told to train. When something didn’t feel right, it wasn’t right. Simple as that.
Somewhere after 2000 I stopped listening to that instinct. I went with the flow instead of fighting for what actually fit me. My purpose went foggy because I wasn’t even looking for it anymore. That’s most of why the next chunk of my life went sideways. Lost, not broken. Just meandering with no map.
Cataloging is the thing that’s always felt natural to me, whether one person ever reads it or nobody does. I write for me first. But I hope, and it’s only a hope, that being honestly myself on the page ends up useful to my daughter someday. Maybe it teaches her something. Maybe it just lets her know who her dad actually was, at 2am, wide awake, working through it in real time.
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