I didn’t set out to write a book.

I set out to survive. The writing came later. First to carry me through the night, then to remember what I was losing, and finally, to figure out what I had lost.

This is the culmination of about thirty years of trying to figure out how much my mind could take before the lights went out, and learning, later than I should have, that the lights do not have to stay out permanently.

I did not know that for a long time.

My memory is not a reliable narrator. This book will make that clear. There are years here that I lived through without being present for them; that is not a metaphor, but a reality. I have written what I remember, noted where memory fails, and tried not to invent what I couldn’t recall. Where I have taken creative license with dialogue or sequence, I have done so in service of emotional truth rather than factual precision. The feelings were always real. The fog was always real. The losses were always real.

This book is not a recovery memoir in the traditional sense. I will not tell you that God or the steps saved me or that one conversation changed everything, though all of those things are true to some extent. What I will tell you is that I was broken, in ways I didn’t have language for, for longer than I knew, and the process of becoming a person again was slow and unglamorous and is, honestly, still ongoing.

I wrote this for the people who have stared into the void and waited for the end. For the people who know what it feels like to be in a room full of people and yet completely unreachable. For the people who have buried someone and then had to figure out how to keep breathing in the same world that just took them. For the people who did something they never thought they were capable of and had to decide who they were going to be after that.

I also wrote it for the version of me that had no idea any of this was coming, the kid who fell asleep in music history class in 1996 and thought that was the hardest thing he’d ever have to do.

If you came here looking for answers, I don’t have them. I’m not sure anyone does. But if you’re just trying to figure out how to keep moving, you’re in the right place.

We just keep moving.

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If you want to know more about how I ended up here doing what I do, maybe check out the book: Fragmented

~ Ryan