November 17th, 2025 - The New Coast
Dear TNY,
“The New Coast” is good. I think really good, but I’m an unreliable narrator right now.
It’s simply told. Bleak. The descriptions are vivid. Raw. I was pumped when the two brothers did not find their sister, because that level of sentimentality would have ruined the story. Instead, we got more raw. More bleak. Also, this story doesn’t self-identify in time. We don’t have a year or a war or any known products to go by. We don’t have names of people or towns or descriptions of race or ethnicity. I guess, the best we have is that we know there are airplanes, trains, and a radio. So this could be WWII (I don’t think WWI because they didn’t have bombers back then). But, hell, it could be a conflict in Southeast Asia for all I know. And I love this aspect of the story because we don’t get distracted by real-world facts. We are immersed inside the world we are given, no external authenticity required.
Really, it just made me sad. And also, because I’m a giant pussy, it made me feel guilty about my own sadness, the perceived size of it, and how it is nothing compared to the sadness of all of these people. But the therapist says you can’t compare sadness like that. We are the center of our own worlds, therefore our emotional state is at the center of our perception. And the size of that can go from being a toddler with a medium-sized splinter in your foot, in which the whole world is excruciating pain, to these boys in this story, in which the ground was disintegrating below their feet and the whole world was pain and yet they seemed to feel nothing. So there’s no reason to handle pain comparatively. It’s not possible.
Pain.
I have been in a lot of pain for a while now. Physical pain, sure. I’m getting older. But emotional pain.
Today, I got out of bed and decided to kill myself.
I put my pants on, three or four days old without washing, maybe more. Having worked every one of those days but one in them. I put on yesterday’s socks, still damp and cold from sweat the day before. I grabbed a worn out shirt to work in, another gift from my sister. And after I had put my boots on and was lacing them up, I thought, “Today is as good as any other; really, it’s just the practicality of it. Let’s get the work done we have to do today and then we’ll kill ourselves in the shower so the clean-up is easier.” I knew my gloves (for the work) were in the van, and I figured I’d grab the sharpening kit which was with them to make sure the lone kitchen knife I have was sharp enough to do the job. And then I went to work.
Brief pause.
My sister. She worries about me. She got in a huge fight with my mother this week. About me. Turns out my mother still believes it is our job to fix our relationships with her, as if she has done nothing wrong. She went so far as to ask my sister, “Do you even respect me?” To which my sister rightly responded with, “No. How could I? You’ve become a horrible parent.” That was the end of the phone call.
This reminds me of punitive relationships. J said to me more than a year ago she didn’t want to be a part of a punitive relationship. I’ve thought about that a lot. I looked at my life, my mother for instance. Punitive. My father when I was a child? Punitive. My ex-wife? Punitive. Many of my relationships? Punitive. This made me think I was doing something wrong. But, my friends, I started looking at my relationship with J. Punitive. Specifically punitive from her to me. Like, constantly. In fact, the more I looked at relationships, the more punishment I found. Why? It’s supposed to be there. The lack of penalty for poor behavior is why we don’t like modern children. It engenders a diminished or nonexistent sense of personal responsibility or accountability. Under these conditions, all of our actions become everyone else’s fault. “I did X because I was the victim of Y.”
Our relationships are rife with punishment. Sure, we don’t want to be punished when we act badly, but when our hearts are broken, do we not want some semblance of that pain to exist in others such that they can understand how badly they are hurting us, not because we want them to experience pain, but we need them to understand, viscerally, what’s happening such that hopefully they will stop? But some of us, maybe all of us at one time or another, fade into and out of having the ability to process this. My mother included. She does not have the emotional capacity to fully understand that she, too, can be the villain. She, too, has hurt people as badly as she has been hurt. J, too, used me, did not take care of my heart, and then abandoned my love because it wasn’t enough for her. And blamed me for that.
And friends, my love is enough. Your love is enough. All of our love is enough.
The abandonment I was subjected to? Not about me. At all. How do I know?
Last night I talked to a former partner. We were texting about a mass that has been located inside her torso, undetermined as of yet. And then I called and we talked for almost 3 hours. We discussed our kids and our love lives. Our professions and parents. We laughed and definitely cried. And near the end she started explaining to me that so many of the relationships I have had, when they ended, came along with a line that looks different each time, but can be summed up as this: They did not love me the way I wanted to be loved. And I guess I had not told her this before, but I had told another former partner, but the woman I called last night did love me the way I wanted to be loved. Exactly how I wanted to be loved. And I left anyway. So I seized the opportunity to inform her that of all of my past, she had loved me the right way. She, as you suspected, was not pleased. She started crying and asked why I left anyway, knowing that it was right. And I said, “I don’t know, but I know it wasn’t about you.”
Each day is a new day to understand love. My brain is disintegrating, just like the fields underneath the feet of the boys in this story, except under my fields in my brain is an ocean of love. And that love moves in and out of me, always so powerful, a big storm at sea. And it’s always night, there’s no clarity, and I’m riding giant, overwhelming waves, spending more time underwater than at the surface. Thrust up, desperately trying to stay on top until the wave reaches its deadpoint and I’m weightless for a moment, the wave now retreating while I keep Newton’s momentum up for a breath more before being thrown into the trough, ragdolling down the face as I go, where I get pummeled once more, in the darkness, unclear which direction is up.
Today, love feels like the only thing that matters. But I don’t even know what it is anymore. I did to that woman, the one from last night, what J did to me. And I didn’t do it to just her. I did it to a few others. Once in 2012. And in 2013. And in 2017, 2018, 2019. And it was done to me as well. Three times. What I don’t know, anymore, is if any of this has to do with the love we experience, the one that comes from within and is projected outwards. Of that love I am sure. I think, maybe I just don’t understand how to receive love. Or maybe none of us do? Or maybe I have too much self-worth and it was never enough. But I know this. It wasn’t them. It was me. An inability to say, and fully believe, “You are enough,” to the ones who said it to me.
In fact, I am 44 years old and for the first time in my life, with full cognitive understanding, I have pointed at a person and said, “You are enough.” Regardless of the pain, the heartbreak, the inconsideration, and the diminishment of my humanity, she’s enough. I look at all the pieces and parts of her that she does not like about herself, the ones she tries to eradicate by creating other shiny but less genuine pieces, I look at those original pieces like in a museum, but in this museum I can pick up the art. And with each piece, after I pick it up, I caress it, lay upon it the most delicate kisses, and whisper quiet stories to each one about how beautiful they are, how wonderful it has been to experience them, and how they are enough, just as they are. Unfortunately, that’s not enough. And, I’m not sure it ever will be.
So I finished my work today, cleaned up all the demo materials, bagged and ready for the junk hauler. And I sat down to write this, but the podcast that I was listening to wasn’t quite over yet. Ten minutes to go, so I waited it out. Now, I should say, I don’t listen to self-help podcasts or self-actualization podcasts, which I think pander to our self-centered nature and offer superficial validation that creates ideas like “non-punitive relationships” or “radical transparency”, all things that are poisoning the real waters of love in the name of selling books or ad revenue. I listen to crafted stories that don’t instruct you how to be. Like your short stories, or what your short stories are supposed to do, these stories I listen to give you the information and then they let you tap into your empathy and feel. And by feeling, you actually become more love. You become a being comprised of the infinite power of love that is trapped inside a meat sleeve that does not possess the skills to express it. And oh is it so much more love that you can ever express to anyone. So much more love that you can even understand yourself. So much that you can forgive punishment. Pain. Heartbreak. You can forgive the people who hurt you. Who threw your love away. And, maybe one day I’ll have enough to forgive myself for all the pain I have caused. So much pain. But that’s how you win, as a human. You take your empathy out for a run. You exercise it. That’s the point of art. All of it. To make the only cure for the human condition more accessible to ourselves, not less. To share. To give. To sacrifice. To compromise. To acquiesce. To let go. And to understand that love, as Steve Koyczan says, “…lives like a heart shaped like a jar that we hand to others and say, can you open this for me? And we always get the same answer. Not without breaking it.”
So today, I decided to kill myself.
But then I finished the podcast, written by Jonathan Goldstein, and it ended with this:
We live our lives in the desperate hope that if we find the right words, tell the story the right way, our love will be understood. We will be understood. We hope even as we misconstrue and grow offended, and talk past each other, we hope love, some iota of it, will get through. Even though time and time again we’re disappointed.
And so today I’m not going to kill myself. I’m going to keep trying to find the right words. To tell the right story. And even though I have been so disappointed and I have disappointed so many others, I’m going to keep hoping. That one day I’ll understand love to the next point in which I say, “You’re enough,” I’ll be able to hear it coming back at me and accept it.
Nick
