90 Days to Feel Again

Over three years of epic disappointment have tested my resolve to affect positive change--resolve I'm hoping that regular writing will help me regain.

The last three and a half years have been the hardest of my life. My difficulties ostensibly began in late 2019, when a three-years-long divorce I thought was drawing to a close was started anew. Hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers and clinicians, years of appeasing my ex and the court, of enduring the extreme stress of possibly being deprived of my money and children —in a matter of days, all of this proved to be insufficient to extricate myself from the parasitic and malevolent industrial Family (Court) dismemberment complex. I have had no contact with my two sons and best friends, Finn and Ryder, since October 2019 and was recently stripped of all legal and physical access rights.  

My boys and me in happier days.

For a year or two, I silver-lined my situation, seeing the separation as a chance to go big dismantling the system that normalizes separating children from their parents, particularly fathers (I am one of about 20 million “erased” parents in the U.S.). Though not as extreme as my situation, my father was denied access to me and my brother when we were children by my mother and the court system following my parents’ divorce. As a child, I was conditioned to hate and distrust my father by my mother’s shit-talking, which was made easier by the limited access the court gave my father. It wasn’t until adolescence when I established a loving relationship with my father; soon after which, I moved in with him, just like my brother did a couple years earlier. 

I wanted to ensure this unholy cycle of alienation and separation didn’t happen to my boys when they grew up. For some time following the initial separation, I did my best to expose the ugly system through writing and other content creation. I also tried running for president, reasoning it was easier to win the presidential election —and its veto power —than it was to extricate myself from the Kings’ County Family Court System. I’m not convinced I was wrong about that.  

I also saw the separation as a time to establish myself as a business leader, which could provide me financial and social capital to aid my efforts to get my boys back. 

Throughout 2020 and 2021, alongside some of the top real estate researchers, operators, and technicians, I pushed the Change Order Group (COG), a “real-estate consultancy and development firm with a mission to ready the world’s built-environment for the environmental, economic, and social challenges of the 21st century and beyond.” Despite my best efforts and urgency of our services, I was unable to land jobs or secure funding for COG, so in 2022 I shifted my attention to another startup idea, Run Haus, a “real estate infrastructure designed to make it simple to connect with oneself, community, and planet on a daily basis.” That did not receive/has not received funding, either. 

In my efforts to expose and dismantle the system of family dismemberment, I took on dismantling several other systems near and dear to me. I spoke out against the industrialized, market-backed destruction of earth and its myriad lifeforms, particularly as it relates to real estate and consumer behavior. I spoke out against the dehumanization of humans through media disinformation and the normalization of lifestyles with no historical or biological referents. Separating sons from their loving fathers makes sense in a world that builds $500 million condos on disappearing Florida coastlines, that gives senile octogenarians the keys to the future, that thinks obesity is beautiful and that it’s okay for people to stare at screens for hours a day. 

I can’t say whether my efforts to expose and dismantle the aforementioned systems worked. Time will tell. I can say my efforts were effective in lending evidence for my lack of mental stability to those looking to make such an argument, which I’m convinced thwarted my ambitions to be reunited with my sons. My efforts were also effective in accumulating a host of rich and powerful enemies, which I’m convinced thwarted my business ambitions. 

Today, my silver lining is long gone, rubbed away by the expanding gulf between how things are and how I want them to be. I’m scraping by materially and emotionally. The sadness and anger that fueled previous acts of protest and creation are replaced by numbness.    

My 90 Day Feel Stuff Again Challenge 

The lack of tending to this newsletter is a byproduct of my numbness. I expended so much effort doing what I felt was the right thing to do, only to be dismissed, rebuffed, and exiled. In the wake of several big disappointments over the last few months, my normal, dogged desire to do right has been supplanted by an existential “why should I fucking bother?” 

Historically, I relied on words and writing as my vehicles for transformation. It’s how I make sense of the world and find my way through it. But, unlike Chat GPT, writing takes effort —effort that’s hard to summon when my internal narrative is, “why fucking bother?” 

In an effort to regain feeling and elucidate why I should bother, I’m giving myself the challenge. For the next 90 days, I will post something to Substack (and possibly Medium). Some notes about the challenge: 

• I’m posting —not necessarily writing —every day, meaning I may post videos, music, art, external links, etc. There’ll be plenty of writing, but my main goal is to develop the habit of sharing what’s on my mind. 

• Whatever narrative cohesiveness my posts have is incidental and/or accidental.  

• To ensure I fulfill my challenge, there’ll be minimal editing (grammar or content), which often takes as long as draft writing.

• No posting on Saturday, which is basically my sabbath. 

Today is day one. July 16, 2023 will be 90 days.

I hope what I post/write is useful, and I encourage you to like it and share it, if so inclined.