Welcome to Your Life

"How do you stay productive with a podcast and a Substack?" I don't hunt for ideas, I try to tell the truth about what's happening inside me, and that supply refills every morning. Add small daily work, a low bar for first drafts, and respect for your own energy, and the pattern holds on bad days too. This one is about keeping a conversation going.

A listener asked how I get past writer's block, and I have a one-sentence answer that costs nothing. When there's nothing to say, I write what I'm feeling about having nothing to say. It works because a block is rarely an empty well. It's usually a feeling parked in the road, waiting to be named. This one is about the sentence that opens the door.

Somebody asked how I recharge after a particularly busy season, and the honest answer surprises people who only know the public me. I'm an introvert, I'm 56 instead of 36, and my body no longer accepts promises about resting later. Balance turns out to be the wrong picture, and rhythm is a better one. This one is about the quiet after the loud.

The house is rebuilt, and John asks what it is for, and who it is for. He walks back through the week, and through the season, from a sealed room to a rebuilt house, and to the neighbor who sees a porch light on and knocks. This one is about what grief makes possible.

A family stands on a new porch holding a key, and almost nobody walks straight in. John looks at a Harvard experiment where people tore up a drawing and felt less grief, and offers four ingredients for marking an ending. This one is about the door you forgot to close.

After the debris is cleared and before the crew arrives, a bare slab sits there and nothing seems to happen. John borrows a sixteenth-century phrase for that stretch and asks why it isn't a delay in the work. This one is about the part nobody can see from the street.

John's back gets a second hearing, with Robert Boyle in 1662 as his expert witness. He borrows the law as a picture: the amount of a loss is fixed, but the volume of the life holding it can grow. This one is about making your grief roomier instead of smaller.

John comes home from Dallas tired in a very particular way, and two words said quietly across a room explain why. He looks at what "me too" does for a person, and at why a sorrow still described in the third person has no one to grieve it. This one is about signing your name to a loss.

The same ruined sofa has two prices on a claim form, and grief has only ever accepted one of them. John walks through a fifteen-minute exercise with three columns, one sheet of paper, and a single word per line, no matter how heavy it gets. This one is about giving a loss a size.

Every other year John hosts a conference full of people who have lost families and churches without a single death. He looks at what a funeral actually does, and at how a loss becomes legitimate the moment one person treats it as real. This one is about the one person who says it counts.

A front moves through and my back files a complaint before the forecast does. This episode looks at the order recovery crews follow after a storm, from safety to repair, and what it says about grief that moves back and forth. This one is about going through a loss instead of around it.

After a storm, a stranger with a clipboard asks what was in the house, and almost nobody can answer. John looks at why a loss you can't list is a loss you can't rebuild from, and at what happens in the brain when a feeling gets a word. This one is about the first step, which is a name.

In 2003 a man in St. Louis painted a bicycle white and chained it where a cyclist had been hit, with permission from no one. John closes the week with that bicycle and the four ways a loss gets denied standing. This one is about the loss that has no marker yet.

Your access gets revoked at 5:01pm, and nobody mentions it at the retirement party. John looks at the endings we throw cake at, and at the threshold nobody marks anymore, from the empty nest to the last day of a career. This one is about the ending that came with a celebration and no permission to be sad.

Psalm 88 is the one psalm that never turns toward hope, and somebody kept it in the book on purpose. John looks at why a loss of faith -- or even a deconstruction of it -- gets repaired or ignored but rarely mourned, and at Mother Teresa's private darkness.

Everything happens for a reason fits on a magnet, which is exactly the problem. John looks at the sentence people reach for when they can't stand next to a loss, and at a man at a tomb who knew how the story ended and wept anyway. This one is about the reason you handed yourself too soon.

Somewhere in your employee handbook is a table that decides who counts as your family, and it has no row for the friend, the coworker, the ex, or the dog. John looks at what happens to a loss that is perfectly real and has no official place to land. This one is about grief that never got permission.

Every closed container eventually goes bad. Every pile that gets turned becomes something usable. John closes the week by asking what the difference actually is, and why the effort you’re putting into outworking your grief might be the exact thing keeping it in place. This one is about what it means to let a loss become something instead of just surviving it.

Some years hand you one grief at a time. Other years, they arrive in a pile, small enough that each one alone seems like nothing worth mentioning. John talks about what it’s like to watch the losses accumulate at a certain age, and why a small thing can suddenly hit with a weight that has nothing to do with its size. This one is about the grief you never stopped to count.

Not every grief starts with a death. Some losses just need something that mattered to be gone — a person still living, a relationship still unresolved, a version of a life that simply isn’t coming back. John looks at the kind of grief nobody sends a casserole for. This one is about the losses you’re not allowed to call losses, and what it costs to keep pretending they aren’t.

A house can be built around a single stopped moment, and everyone inside it can forget there was ever a different time. John looks at what happens when grief stops moving — not because it’s too big to survive, but because moving on has started to feel like a betrayal. This one is about the difference between carrying a loss and being kept by it.

Some grief doesn’t disappear when you stop looking at it. It just moves underground, where it costs more to maintain than it would to feel. John looks at what happens when a house gets built around a room nobody enters, and why the writer who put his own grief on the page — under someone else’s name — ended up freer than the ones who kept the door shut. This one is about what suppression actually...

At the Emmys on September 14, Macaulay Culkin stood with Dan Levy and Annie Murphy to remember Catherine O'Hara, who had died eight months earlier, and somewhere in it he told the room to call their mothers — and a great many people reached for a phone they couldn't use. The reach is the thing worth understanding, and grief research spent most of a century getting it exactly backwards. Thi...

Before America had public parks, it had Mount Auburn, and people took picnics there — a cemetery in 1831 that drew crowds who came to walk, socialize and be outdoors among the graves, and that went on to inspire Central Park. We eventually built parks and separated the two, and something got lost in the split. This one is about the nearest piece of open ground to your door and why ten minutes of i...

In 1990 Japanese cardiologists described a heart that balloons into the shape of a pot used to trap octopus, brought on by sudden emotional stress, and named it after the pot. A broken heart turns out to be a diagnosis with an echocardiogram attached — and the good news buried in it is that the shape comes back. This one is about who would notice if you were unwell, and why that person is infrastr...