The Book I Couldn’t Find

I want to be honest about why I’m writing all of this — the books, the blog, the testimony pieces, the philosophy, all of it — because I think the honesty matters, and because this project has tried, from the beginning, to say true things rather than convenient ones.

Part of the reason is practical. I run a sanctuary in the Colombian mountains with more than two hundred animals, and the sanctuary runs primarily on what I earn as a freelancer, and freelance income is not the most reliable foundation for two hundred lives that depend on someone showing up every morning. The books are a publishing plan, executed in the hope of generating income that makes the sanctuary more stable, and possibly — eventually — more capable of helping more animals than it currently can. That’s a real reason, and I’m not going to dress it up as something nobler than it is just because “I need income for my animals” sounds less elevated than “I felt called to share my story.” Both are true. The income part is just more honest.

But it’s not only that. And the “only that” is what I want to spend most of this piece on.

The Map I Didn’t Have

I’ve had to figure out most of what I know about myself entirely on my own. Not through introspection as a hobby — through the specific, expensive, often painful process of making mistakes without a framework for understanding them, of having capacities I couldn’t name, of carrying darkness I couldn’t account for, of navigating other people’s performed goodness and actual harm without any vocabulary for what I was seeing.

I had to understand, without anyone helping me understand it, what the darkness that lives in me actually is and what it’s for and how to point it at something that doesn’t destroy what I’m trying to protect. I had to figure out, through trial and error over decades, how to read people accurately in environments where reading them wrong had real consequences. I had to find direction — a lord, in the language of one of my books — without anyone ever telling me that direction was something I was allowed to need, let alone how to find it.

I looked for books that could help with this. I looked seriously, across many years, across many categories — philosophy, psychology, memoir, spirituality, self-development. I found useful things in many places: fragments, passages, a chapter here, an idea there that partially fit. What I never found was a complete voice. Someone who was, recognizably, the kind of person I am — complicated, scarred, carrying genuine darkness alongside genuine commitment to doing good, skeptical of institutions, devoted to animals, constitutionally unable to perform goodness they don’t feel — and who had worked out a way of living that was honest about all of it simultaneously.

That person wasn’t in any book I could find. I kept looking. Eventually I stopped looking and started writing.

Who I Was Actually Writing For

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, after fifty-six pieces and fourteen books and more time thinking about this than I’d have predicted at the start: the people this project is for are among the most underrepresented in the entire landscape of writing about how to live.

Not the broken ones — there’s plenty written for people who are broken and want to be fixed. Not the strong ones — there’s an entire industry for people who want to be stronger, more productive, more optimized. Not the traumatized ones seeking healing, not the spiritual seekers looking for transcendence, not the ambitious ones looking for frameworks for success.

The ones I’m writing for are the ones who are all of those things simultaneously, partially, in ways that don’t resolve neatly into any single category. 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.

Those people — and I think there are more of them than the publishing world has ever properly estimated — have been largely invisible in the literature. Not because nobody wanted to write for them. Because writing honestly for them requires a writer willing to say: I am also this. Not: here is how I transcended this. Not: here is how you can recover from this. Just: I am this, I’ve worked out some things about it, and here is what I know.

What I’m Actually Handing You

Not a solution. Not a path to becoming someone easier to be. Not a framework that will resolve the contradictions in you — the darkness alongside the devotion, the aggression alongside the care, the full awareness of your own ledger alongside the refusal to stop trying to do good things anyway.

What I’m handing you is the map I built, from the inside, over forty-five years of being exactly this kind of person in exactly this kind of life. It’s not a clean map — there are parts that are still unclear, still being worked out, still arriving as blog posts at irregular intervals because that’s how the working-out actually happens. It doesn’t lead anywhere that looks like resolution, because this kind of life doesn’t resolve. It just continues, morning after morning, with the same essential question: given everything I am and everything I’ve done, what’s the least bad, most good thing available to me today?

That’s not a small question. I’ve spent my entire life on it. And I’ve never found a book that was actually, fully, written for the person asking it.

So I wrote one. Fourteen of them, actually. And a blog that will keep going for as long as there are mornings and something worth saying about them.

If you’ve found yourself here, and something has resonated — the darkness that needs pointing, the fence that needs holding, the animals that need feeding, the wall that needs a finger in it — it’s probably not a coincidence. You’re probably the kind of person I was writing for without knowing your name.

Welcome. The book you couldn’t find is here.

This is the project behind the Good Bad Person Series, the Plan X Series, and La Santa Muerte: The Only One Who Showed Up — all available on Amazon. The blog you’re reading is the live version of the same work, continuing in the order things surface rather than the order they happened.