about

i’ve spent most of my life doing things people would call successful, and most of my inner life noticing what the successes didn’t reach.

there were real wins. there were real failures. there were relationships that healed and ones that are still not healed, and maybe never will be. i learned things in rooms where you’re supposed to be a professional and learned other things in rooms where you’re not supposed to be anything at all. some of what i learned was that i could do more than i thought. some of it was that doing more didn’t touch the part of me that was actually in need of something.

for a long time i thought the gap was a problem, but now i think the gap is the place where anything worth saying comes from. nothing more is needed, and still something in me keeps reaching beyond.

there is a strange loneliness that comes after doing the work in the gap. this surprised me. the work doesn’t get easier; if anything, it gets more specific. more empathetic, and consequently more outward facing.

i can spot the others now. people who’ve done the therapy and can now laugh about it. people who left the container of the religion they were raised in but carried the questions and sacred truths forward. people who’ve had the experience on a mountain, on a dancefloor, at a bedside, or in silence that made the old categories feel too small. we recognize each other on sight.

and still we usually don’t quite reach each other. we lead with the front. the summary. the old default language that conceals the real thing unspoken, out of view, that we keep mostly to ourselves until we are witnessed by someone who can recognize the same pattern.

these shirts are for the reach. one line on front and one on the back; together they hold what a single line can’t. not one or the other. both. the ask and the defense. the forgiveness and the limit. the reckoning and the transformation. worn on one body because that’s where these things actually live.

when someone sees the front and turns to catch the back, something small happens. a recognition of sorts that sometimes leads to a conversation, and sometimes just a look that says: i know.

this isn’t really about clothes.

if a few of us wear the questions we’re actually carrying, we start recognizing each other faster. that helps the person just starting. it also helps the person nearly through. the conversation gets bigger than any single wearer. ideas that used to circulate in retreat centers and long phone calls with old friends start moving in public.

that’s a small contribution to something i think matters. a culture that can hold paradox is a culture that can talk to itself. a culture that can talk to itself can find its way through.