FRESH POST!
I woke up this morning at six o’clock and realized the excuse was gone.
For the last six weeks, I’ve been rebuilding my website.
Six weeks.
It is not the most complicated website in the world. It is a handful of pages, a blog, some writing, some links, some sections that point people toward the different things I’ve been making.
A friend even kind of laughed when I told him how long it had taken.
And I understood why.
From the outside, six weeks sounds ridiculous.
But that is the way it is, buddy.
I only have so much in the stack every day.
I get up. Stretch. Try to get the body moving. Eat. Maybe drive one of my kids somewhere. They’re in Grade 12 now, their last year of high school, so there is a whole other world opening up around them. University. College. Applications. Decisions. Money. Their futures.
Then there is the house.
Call the insurance broker. Figure out whether we have the right coverage. See if we can get a better rate. Get somebody over to fix the back door. Make sure the family machine keeps moving.
Normal shit.
Then somewhere in there I try to make something.
One day I worked on the website for about three hours straight. By the end, my hands had curled inward. Pain was running up my arms, through my neck, into my traps from using the trackpad and keyboard too long.
That was the workday.
So yes, it took six weeks.
And this morning I woke up and the website was basically finished.
That was supposed to feel good. Right?
Instead, I started freaking out.
Because when I first started rebuilding the site, the whole idea was: get this thing finished so I can get back to writing.
Then somewhere along the way, I think the website became a very convenient place to hide.
There was always something else to fix.
Another page.
Another little design thing.
Another link.
Another reason why I didn’t have to sit down in front of a blank page and ask myself the question I apparently did not want to ask.
Do I still have anything to say?
That’s the fear.
Have I run out of ideas?
Have I lost my momentum?
I can already see the difference online. When I stop engaging, engagement disappears. Nothing particularly mysterious there.
But it gets inside your head.
Maybe people stopped caring.
Maybe I disappeared.
Maybe I waited too long.
Maybe the thing I thought I had found a few months ago is gone.
Then there is the bigger question.
How much can I really say about MS before I start repeating myself?
I cannot walk very well. My neck hurts. My hands and feet tingle. My muscles tighten. I get tired. My body does weird shit.
Great.
How many different essays can you make out of that before everybody goes, yeah man, we get it, you have MS?
Because most days are not dramatic.
I am not waking up every morning screaming, “Oh my God, I have multiple sclerosis.”
I am just living with multiple sclerosis.
And most of living with it is ordinary.
Breakfast. Kids. Household shit. News. A book. Dinner. Maybe a bad walking day. Maybe a better one. Some pain. Some fatigue. Go to bed.
Do some version of it again.
I’m really into historical fiction right now. I can disappear into Roman times or sixth-century Britain for a while, which is probably healthier than spending the entire day staring at what is happening in 2026.
So what exactly am I offering here?
What makes my ramblings of a madman so important?
I don’t know.
I actually think I want to leave that question sitting there for a minute.
Because there are millions of people living with disability.
Millions of people living with chronic illness.
There is nothing automatically profound about my life because I have MS.
Maybe some of this is ego.
Writing publicly probably always contains some ego.
You are essentially saying: I noticed something. I thought something. Give me five minutes of your life and listen.
That is a strange thing to ask of another person.
But I also think I have spent a lot of my life trying to build something that felt bigger than where I started.
I grew up in government housing with a single mother who had her own issues and her own struggles.
Even as a kid, I remember having this feeling that my life could be more.
I wanted more.
Not necessarily more stuff.
More possibility.
More meaning.
More evidence that where you started did not have to decide where you ended up.
For a long time, I thought I was building that.
Then MS came along and took a wrecking ball to quite a bit of it.
Career.
Body.
Strength.
The way I understood usefulness.
The way I measured myself.
So I started building again.
Apparently that is what I do. Build, rebuild, rename things, adjust, find another way through.
And I’m starting to wonder if finishing something is actually when the fear gets loudest.
Because while I’m building, I know what I’m doing.
There is a task.
There is direction.
There is something in front of me.
When the thing is finished, there is suddenly space.
And space asks questions.
What now?
What are you building next?
Will it matter?
Will anybody care?
Are you capable of doing it again?
Is this thing you are trying to make actually larger than yourself, or are you just making noise because you are scared of disappearing?
Maybe the real question is what happens after the changed life stops feeling new.
Because eventually the diagnosis is old news.
Eventually the catastrophe becomes the furniture.
MS does not disappear.
It just becomes part of the room.
And then you still have to live.
You still have to call the insurance company.
You still have to get the back door fixed.
You still have to drive your kid somewhere.
You still have to think about money.
You still have to worry about their future.
You still have to read your book, make dinner, watch football, laugh at something stupid, argue with somebody, love somebody, get annoyed, get tired, wake up and do it again.
Maybe that is the changed life too.
Maybe that is most of it.
Not the dramatic moment where everything changed.
The Tuesday morning twelve years later when your hand hurts and you are comparing insurance rates.
That is not very cinematic.
But it is real.
And maybe I have spent too much time wondering whether real is interesting enough.
This morning I thought I had nothing to say.
I was genuinely panicking about it.
Six weeks building this website so I could finally get back to writing, and then the second I finished, I thought:
Fuck.
What if there is nothing there?
I don’t have a neat answer to that yet.
I don’t want to end this by telling myself that of course I have endless ideas and everything will be fine.
Maybe I will get stuck again.
Probably.
Maybe some days there really will be nothing worth saying.
That is probably true too.
But this morning I sat down believing I had absolutely nothing.
Then I started talking about having nothing.
And somehow, there it was.
Maybe that is enough for today.
The website is built.
The excuse is gone.
Now I guess I find out what I have left to say.