“The ones I’m writing for are the ones who are complicated and scarred and managing to be functional, who carry darkness they’ve learned to live with rather than eliminate, who are capable of genuine devotion to something outside themselves despite — or because of — everything their formation produced. The ones who’ve never quite fit the available frameworks, who’ve taken useful things from many places and constructed something that works for them without anyone ever handing them a map.”
The Body and the Mind Do Not Always Travel Together
A technique I learned at fourteen, sewing my own tongue with no anesthesia, that has carried me through every hard night since.
Crumbling Is Just a Luxury I Never Had
Why I almost never cry — and why that doesn't mean I feel less than people who do.
The True Name
My father had aliases. So do I. The difference is everything — and it took the worst place I've ever been to find mine.
Why Animals Are the Only Ones Who’ve Never Asked Me to Be Different
Why a man with a complicated history and an even more complicated psychology has spent his life devoted, completely, to animals.
Hell, Except for One Thing
I've made peace with going to hell. Except for one promise I made to the animals I've lost — and I'm not sure I can keep it.
No One Can Take What I’ve Lived From Me
Everything you've lived — good and bad — is yours, permanently, and no one can take it from you. Here's the accounting.
The Year Lisbon and I Were Together
The only twelve months I ever lived entirely for myself — walking Lisbon alone, before everything that came after.
Personal essays and testimony from the author of the Good Bad Person and Plan X series — on survival, darkness, and the philosophy of doing good without being good.
This is not a content calendar. It's a memoir, written as it's lived, in the order things surface rather than the order they happened — by a life that has beaten the odds more times than it should have, and isn't done yet.
Michael Bothrops
Born of Asper. Built by Fire.