4. The Reclamation Plan

There’s a stretch of time that lives between stories. Not the beginning, not the end—just the hush that follows a decision, the ache that comes before the shift. A moment suspended in breath. A space where nothing blooms, but everything stirs. That’s where we begin.

I didn’t know I was unraveling when it began.

I thought I was just tired.

Tired in a way that felt earned, maybe even noble. Tired from doing the good work. The necessary work.

The kind of work that demanded my disappearing into it. 

But the disappearance lasted longer than I expected. It outgrew the job. It outgrew the calendar. It followed me home, into my journals, into the part of me that used to sing.

Eventually, I couldn’t find my way back to the creative life I once knew—not because it was gone, but because I no longer knew how to name what mattered. What to keep. What to mourn. What to rebuild.

That’s where this began—not with a resolution, but with a quiet truth I could no longer ignore:

I had abandoned my voice. And I wanted it back.

But I didn’t want to “start over.” I wasn’t interested in reinvention. I wanted something else—something slower, more honest. I wanted to trace what had carried me underneath the noise. To remember the shape of what was still alive.

That’s how The Reclamation Plan was born.

Not a list of goals I had. Not a productivity system to do more. I no longer wanted more. I wanted less. A lot less. My spirit and mind felt fried, and I was the live wire sparking, about to catch fire.

I also felt completely detached from myself. I couldn’t keep up the appearance that everything was fine, that I was okay.

God, I wanted to curl up in bed or on the couch and stay there forever, or at least stay until I felt like myself again. Until I had will again.

So I sat down to write. To mine the depths of a years-long archive that grew in shape and form like a long shadow in the heat of day before the sun sinks behind the mountains.

I created The Reclamation Plan as a kind of compass, a gentle structure to hold the fog of creative return, the messy middle of healing. But I still didn’t know what the healing would look like, and even now I still don’t completely know.

Back in April, when everything felt raw, I didn’t realize I was at the throbbing center of sharp realization: I no longer wanted to pursue the career I worked so hard to build, maybe forever; no longer wanted to strive to become the perfect version of myself, nor wait for my writing to do the same.

In this mental state? In the midst of yet another depressive episode?

No. I couldn’t do it anymore. I felt split to the core.

This plan wasn’t conceived as linear. And it still isn’t. In fact, so much of what will follow here is my act of tracing, of remembering. Finally shining the light on years of writings, in the context of my life now, in the thick of a nervous breakdown.

This plan doesn’t promise transformation on command as I so often tried to do in my twenties. It simply offers a container for myself. A way to walk with what still pulses and to shape it into something more.

Over a short period of time, it’s become a framework for this entire archive. A loose rhythm. A spiritual and creative practice I can continue to attune to, my words my tuning fork.

A reminder that I don’t have to be fully healed to create something meaningful and put it out into the world. I don’t have to wait until I’ve placed every piece of the puzzle before I begin.

Why, why, did I feel like my life needed to reflect some sort of thing I fantasized about years ago in order to pursue the one thing I always loved? To pursue the written word? To create the art I so desperately craved to read?

At least I knew bone deep that I could start now. A true leap of faith. A scattered, frantic scramble to sift through the fragments and finally put some sort of a semblance of self in words, into the art I wanted you, dear reader, to read.

You’ll notice it unfold here as I make sense of it all.

Each phase of this so-called Reclamation Plan has its own rituals and writings. Its own pacing. Its own questions.

All of it is part of the same practice: learning how to live again without abandoning myself.

If you’re here, maybe you’ve known some version of collapse, too. Maybe you’re already standing at the edge of return, unsure what to bring with you.

I know I was.

I know I still am.

So, then, a blessing, for me, for you, for us:

Let this be a place where I don’t have to rush becoming.

Where I can rebuild my voice slowly.

Where I can trace the life that still wants me. And, maybe, along the way, fall in love with a life meant to be lived.

Let this be a soft season.

Let it be unrushed, unnamed, unfinished.

Let it begin like breath.

The map begins here. My map. The very start, the inhale, the story in reverse, but forever unfolding.

In rhythm,

Michael