Becoming a parent has settled something within me that I didn't know needed settling. My 20s were all "fuck its"—this life is an empty void, man's attempts to forge meaning from it are a fool's errand, so let's get high and party and ignore the rules and push the limits as far as I can.

Then came a decade of recovery: feeling emotions for the first time, facing the darkness within my mind, cleaning up all my relationships, learning to stop constantly lying and just tell the truth, trading fidgeting for stillness, all that integration, all that relentless, must-find-God meditation and spiritual seeking. It brought me to an unexpected peace, a goodness I never imagined possible as a sober junkie, where my day-to-day existence was mostly joyous.

But my son has opened something new in me, something that's hard to language, beyond the obvious changes of lost routines and less time to do my work and work on myself, this whole new relationship with tiredness and energy.

He's dropped me into waters smoother and deeper—a Tao, a more natural understanding of the way things are, which I know sounds lofty. To say "this is why we're here, to raise babies" feels both too reductionist and perfectly true—at least for me, watching myself learn to stumble and care as my parents did before me, a lineage of survivors before them. I'm only getting started, but parenting has already shattered my expectations in every direction. It forces you to lose yourself and adds an immaterial depth to your ambitions, yet somehow wraps you in a profound simplicity—there isn't time to do half the things I thought I needed to, and life was always going to find its way.