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 Each day feels new, and my memory of the one before is faint. I’m learning to adapt. |
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In September 2019, a seizure revealed a lime-sized meningioma pressed against my hippocampus—the part of the brain that governs memory and language. The doctors said it was benign, but benign didn’t mean harmless. Surgery removed the tumor, and three days later I opened my eyes to a new reality. I could walk, I could talk, but when I looked at my wife, her name was gone. I called her Precious—the only word I could find. A failure of memory, yet perhaps the truest name of all. Recovery has been less cure than re-calibration. Memory gaps are frequent. Conversations vanish. I had to relearn how to write, letter by halting letter. My days are scaffold by alarms, notes, and calendars. When people ask how I am, I don’t list symptoms or struggles. I simply say, “Seven Degrees Left of Center.” It’s not an answer—it’s who I’ve become. |
| Some days I sit down to write and discover that my brain has filed for a temporary leave of absence. The cursor blinks at me like it is judging my life choices, and I stare back at it as if I can intimidate it into giving me an idea. It never works. The cursor always wins. When I have absolutely nothing to write about, I usually start noticing strange details around me. The coffee mug with the chipped rim. The way the air conditioner makes a sound that might be normal, or might be a small creature living inside it. These tiny things start showing up in my writing because, apparently, my imagination takes whatever it can get during an idea drought. I used to panic on days like this. I thought a blank mind meant something was wrong with me as a writer. Now I realize it is just part of the rhythm. Creativity needs time to wander off into the woods and argue with itself. Eventually it returns, pretending it never left, carrying a half-baked idea that it expects me to be grateful for. So when I have nothing to say, I write about the nothing. I write about the silence, the strange thoughts, and the coffee that somehow tastes both weak and bitter at the same time. I write until the nothing starts to feel like something. And it always does. It just takes a moment of patience, a deep breath, and occasionally a cup of coffee strong enough to jolt the muse back from wherever it wandered off to. Some days the words flow. Some days they crawl. And on days like this, they stand around, shrugging. So I write about that too. |
| There’s an odd limbo I fall into every time I finish a writing project. It’s not rest. It’s not celebration. It’s more like wandering around my own house, opening cabinets and forgetting why I walked into the room. My brain keeps asking, Shouldn’t we be writing something? and I keep answering, I know… I know… I’m working on it. I always think the “in-between” will feel peaceful, like a mini vacation. Instead, it feels more like I’ve misplaced my keys, my plot, and possibly my sanity. I suddenly remember every abandoned idea I ever had and start poking at them like leftovers in the fridge. Some are still good. Some should have been thrown out a long time ago. I try to relax—read a book, drink a hot cup of coffee before it becomes iced coffee against my will—but the next story is always tapping on the glass somewhere in the distance. It never rings the doorbell politely. It just lurks until I notice it. So here I am again, between projects, pretending to be calm while waiting for the next idea to jump out and tackle me. It always does eventually. In the meantime, I’ll be wandering around, opening mental cabinets, looking for inspiration or at least a snack. |
| I told myself I’d be calm about this part. That I’d send Seven Degrees Left of Center off to my beta readers, close my laptop, and simply… wait. I lasted about three days. There’s something oddly vulnerable about knowing people are reading your work in real time — not in theory, not “someday when it’s published,” but right now, while you’re pacing the kitchen, overanalyzing every comma you didn’t change. It’s like handing someone your diary and then pretending you don’t care if they notice the smudged pages. The funny part is, I trust my beta readers. Completely. I asked them because they see what I can’t. But waiting for feedback still feels like standing seven degrees off-center — close enough to balance, but just tilted enough to make me aware of every little wobble. So I do what writers do when they’re waiting: reorganize my files, convince myself the coffee maker sounds like an incoming email notification, and reread my own sentences until I’m sure I’ve broken them. But somewhere in all that waiting, something shifts. I start realizing that this is part of the process — not a pause, but a space. A quiet moment where the story breathes without me. It’s humbling, really. Because feedback isn’t just about fixing flaws; it’s about learning to let go, to trust that what you’ve built can stand on its own while others walk through it. Maybe that’s what this whole book has been about from the start — learning to navigate slightly off-center, to find direction even when the compass spins a little wild. So, I wait. Coffee in hand. Inbox open. Still learning the art of patience, one refresh at a time. |
| Some days my brain feels like a computer with too many tabs open. Half are frozen, a few are playing mysterious audio, and one politely asks if I’m still there. Spoiler: I’m not. It always starts small. One story idea sparks another, and soon I’m juggling a memoir, a couple of sci-fi worlds, and a blog post about how I can’t focus on any of them. My mind tries to organize it all but loses the list somewhere behind a cold coffee mug and a half-remembered sentence that was going to be brilliant. Each unfinished project sits there like a neglected pet, watching with sad eyes. I promise I’ll come back soon. Of course, I rarely do. Yet too many projects also mean too many sparks, proof that the creative pulse is still alive even if it beats out of rhythm. Maybe the goal isn’t to finish everything. Maybe it’s to keep the compass needle moving, even when it spins the wrong way. |
| It’s 5:45 A.M., and my internal compass has decided to spin like it’s auditioning for a weather vane in a hurricane. North? South? Who cares—it’s too early to be anywhere but horizontal. Yet here I am, eyes open, brain humming like an old fridge that refuses to quit. This is the hour when the world hasn’t quite committed to existing. The sky’s dark gray, the birds haven’t started their shift yet, and I’m trying to remember why I thought decaf was a good idea last night. My pillow whispers seductively, “You could still go back to sleep,” but my brain replies, “Or we could replay every embarrassing thing you’ve ever said since 2019.” There’s something crookedly peaceful about it, though. I imagine the compass in my head twitching a few degrees off center, pointing not toward True North but toward Something Else. Maybe that’s where the writing comes from—this odd place between insomnia and inspiration. The needle wobbles, and suddenly I’m thinking about unfinished stories, unspoken words, and whether chocolate toast counts as breakfast. By six o’clock, I’ll probably have convinced myself that being awake this early is part of my “creative process.” By seven, I’ll deny ever saying that and beg the coffee maker for mercy. But for now, I’m just lost in the quiet, a little off-course, a little amused, following a compass that never quite points where it should—and maybe that’s the whole point. |
| There was a time when my compass spun wild. No matter which way I turned, the arrow trembled, refusing to point anywhere solid. That’s what life felt like after everything changed—after the surgery, the gaps, the days when memory slipped through my fingers like water. I wasn’t sure who I was anymore, or how to find my way back. So I started to write. At first, it wasn’t healing. It was survival. The words were my breadcrumbs, scattered across the forest floor of confusion. Some days they led nowhere. Other days, they pointed—just faintly—toward something that felt like north. Writing became my way of listening to the silence inside me, of mapping the terrain I could no longer trust my mind to remember. Each sentence was a small calibration, a gentle nudge of the compass needle. Slowly, it began to settle. Not perfectly, but enough. Healing, I’ve learned, isn’t about returning to where you were. It’s about accepting where you are and learning how to navigate from there. My compass still drifts sometimes—it points seven degrees left of center more often than not—but that’s okay. That’s where I live now. That’s where I write from. Each word I put down is a direction, a choice, a moment of clarity in the fog. I may never find true north again, but maybe the point isn’t to. Maybe it’s to keep walking anyway, pen in hand, trusting that even a crooked compass can still lead you home. |
| I wake up most mornings and have to reconstruct yesterday. Not in a poetic way. I mean literally piece together what I was working on, where I left off, what I was thinking when I stopped writing. My desk is covered in yellow sticky notes. Little breadcrumbs I leave for myself. "Chapter 7, she realizes the truth" or "Fix the timeline in Part 2" or sometimes just "THIS MATTERS" with an arrow pointing to a paragraph I've underlined three times. I find notes in my own handwriting that I don't remember writing. They're instructions from a previous version of me to whoever I am today. It's frustrating. I'll sit down to write and spend the first hour just trying to remember what the story was supposed to be about. Reading my own notes like they're someone else's manuscript, trying to find my way back into the thing I was so certain about yesterday. But here's what I've learned: you can still write this way. You just have to be kinder to yourself. Leave better notes. Trust that yesterday-you knew what they were doing, even if today-you can't quite remember why. The story is still there. I just have to keep finding my way back to it. |
| Some days, my writing feels like déjà vu wearing a disguise. I’ll open a document, start typing, and somewhere between the third paragraph and a sip of lukewarm coffee, I realize—I’ve been here before. Not metaphorically. Literally. I already wrote this story. The plot? Familiar. The phrasing? Suspiciously mine. The twist? I forgot it existed. That’s the curse and comedy of brain fog. It’s like living in reruns without knowing what season you’re in. I can’t remember last week today, and sometimes not even yesterday this afternoon. But I keep writing, because maybe that’s how I find my way back to myself—one forgotten story at a time. Still, there’s a strange comfort in rediscovering my own words. It’s like meeting an old friend who reminds me who I was when I wrote them. Maybe that’s the point—not remembering everything, but rewriting enough to stay found. |
| There’s an unspoken rule in life: never make financial decisions before coffee. I broke that rule this morning. The sun wasn’t even up yet, and there I was—half-awake, trying to remember passwords that my pre-caffeinated brain had clearly placed in witness protection. Numbers blurred, screens blinked, and somewhere between “verify your identity” and “security question #3,” I questioned all my life choices. The bank was open. I was not. Now my brain hurts, my coffee’s gone cold, and I think I might’ve just paid my electric bill twice. Lesson learned: caffeine first, adulting later. |
| There's this thing that happens with stories. You get an idea and you're supposed to let it sit for a while, right? Let it marinate. Let it develop complexity. Let the story soak. But here's what they don't always tell you: if you let it soak too long, it dissolves. I've done this more times than I want to admit. I'll get an idea that feels urgent, that makes my fingers itch to write, but I'll think, no, not yet. Let it develop. So I carry it around turning it over in my mind, imagining scenes, working out backstories. And somewhere in all that thinking, the story loses its shape. What started as something I had to write becomes something I'm supposed to write. The emotional truth gets intellectualized into nothing. The clarity dissolves into overthinking. And the longer an idea sits, the more time I have to find reasons not to write it. But rush it too soon and you get something shallow a first thought instead of a real insight. So there's this sweet spot when the story has absorbed enough of your subconscious to be interesting but hasn't sat so long that it's lost its bones. I think you just have to learn to recognize the difference between an idea that's developing and an idea that's decomposing. One pulls you toward the page. The other lets you keep finding reasons to wait. Maybe the real skill isn't knowing when to start writing. Maybe it's knowing when not to wait any longer. |
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Sending prayers for continued improvement and recovery 
