Six Weeks Later: The Life That Kept Moving While I Was Trying to Catch Up
It has been six weeks since my pinky arthrodesis.
Six weeks.
And somehow it feels like forever since I last sat down to write.
That probably sounds ridiculous considering how much writing has occupied my life this year.
I've written more than I ever imagined I would.
I've spent countless hours thinking about books, manuscripts, publishing, faith, history and all the strange things that happen inside my head when the world finally becomes quiet.
Yet sitting here today feels unfamiliar.
I have missed this.
I have missed opening a blank page without knowing exactly where the words are going.
I have missed the freedom of writing something that doesn't need to become a book, doesn't need to be formatted, doesn't need a cover, doesn't need another technical decision.
Something that can simply exist because I needed to write it.
To be truthful, the past six weeks have been a whirlwind.
My body has been recovering from surgery while my mind has been trying desperately to keep up with everything else.
And there has been a lot of everything else.
Some of it wonderful.
Some of it exhausting.
Some of it so consuming that I have barely noticed how much time has passed.
I've been busy building things I once only imagined building.
I've been learning about publishing, wrestling with technical problems, making decisions, questioning those decisions, and occasionally wondering whether I have completely lost my mind.
And in the middle of all of that, something extraordinary happened.
Two days ago, my collection of blog entries was published across six volumes, available for people to download for free on Google book store under Refined by Fire Press.
Six volumes.
My writing.
The words that began here, on this blog, have become books.
I keep returning to that thought.
Not because I suddenly believe everything I've written is brilliant.
Absolutely not far from it.
Some of those entries were written when I was angry.
Some when I was grieving.
Written when I thought taking my life was the only way to close out the last chapter of the book of my life.
Some when I was struggling to understand myself.
Some when I was grateful for things I could barely explain.
Some when I was trying to make sense of faith, suffering, love, memory, addiction and the ordinary business of getting through another day.
And now they exist together.
Six volumes of a man trying to understand his own life while he is still living it.
I don't quite know what to do with that feeling yet.
Perhaps that's why I needed to sit down today.
I think I have been so busy making things happen that I haven't given myself much opportunity to understand what has happened.
Six weeks ago, I was looking at my hand and trying to comprehend the finality of what had happened.
My left pinky had been surgically fused.
A clinical word for something that becomes intensely personal when it is your own finger.
Bone removed.
A shortened finger.
A screw inserted.
A joint permanently fused.
The movement that existed before surgery is not coming back.
I knew that going into the operation.
I understood what the procedure involved.
But knowing something before it happens and living with it afterwards are two different experiences.
I am still discovering that.
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from reaching for something without thinking and being reminded that your body has changed.
It's difficult to explain unless you've experienced something similar.
The mind remembers the old movement.
The hand has a different arrangement now.
And somewhere between the two, I have to learn.
I have spent so much of my life using my hands without giving them much thought.
Working.
Writing.
Cooking.
Holding books.
Making coffee.
Patting my cats.
Shaking somebody's hand.
Doing ordinary things that never seemed particularly important until one of those ordinary things became difficult.
It's amazing what we take for granted.
I don't mean that as some grand inspirational statement.
I mean it quite literally.
You don't usually wake up and celebrate the fact that your fingers bend.
You don't spend breakfast admiring the mechanics of holding a cup.
You don't stop halfway through typing a sentence to thank every joint for cooperating.
You expect your body to do what it has always done.
Until it doesn't.
And then the smallest movements can become reminders of something permanent.
I am grateful for the surgery and the medical care I received.
But I would be lying if I said gratitude had eliminated the frustration.
It hasn't.
There are moments when I still look at my finger and feel a strange sadness.
Not overwhelming sadness.
Not every minute of the day.
But something.
An awareness that a part of my physical life has changed in a way that cannot be undone.
I don't think I have finished processing that.
And perhaps six weeks isn't a particularly long time to process something permanent.
The calendar says six weeks.
My mind occasionally behaves as though I should have sorted everything out by now.
That is one of my less helpful habits.
I can be remarkably impatient with myself.
I imagined recovery would create space.
Time to rest.
Time to read.
Time to write.
Time to sit with my thoughts.
Instead, my mind seems to have found a hundred different places to go.
There have been publishing projects.
Technical problems.
Decisions about books.
Decisions about presentation.
Decisions about how I want Refined by Fire Press to grow.
Questions about my blog and the larger body of writing that has accumulated here.
And all the ordinary things that continue happening regardless of whether somebody is recovering from surgery.
Life has an irritating habit of refusing to stop because you've had an operation.
I sometimes think I have been using activity to stay ahead of my own thoughts.
That isn't a comfortable admission.
Because I genuinely love what I have been doing.
I love the publishing work.
I love watching an idea become something tangible.
I love learning.
I love solving problems, although I could happily live without some of the problems I've encountered.
But there is a difference between being occupied by something you love and giving yourself no room to feel anything else.
I am beginning to wonder whether I have been doing a bit of both.
There have been moments when I have moved from one task to another almost automatically.
Finish this.
Check that.
Open another page.
Fix another problem.
Make another decision.
And before I know it, another day has disappeared.
Then another.
And another.
Suddenly six weeks have passed.
My finger is healing.
And I am sitting here wondering where the hell the time went.
When I started writing these entries, I wasn't sitting here with some enormous publishing strategy.
I wasn't imagining hundreds of pages gathered together under one title.
I was writing.
Sometimes because something had happened.
Sometimes because I couldn't stop thinking about something.
Sometimes because my faith was being challenged.
Sometimes because a memory had found its way back into the room.
Sometimes because I needed to get something out of my head before it followed me into another sleepless night.
And sometimes because I was happy.
I think that last part deserves mentioning.
My writing hasn't only come from suffering.
There has been joy here.
Gratitude.
Laughter.
Friendship.
Food.
Coffee.
Work.
The pleasure of discovering an old book.
The excitement of beginning something new.
The beauty of a quiet morning when nothing particularly dramatic is happening.
I don't want my entire body of work to be remembered as the writings of a man who was perpetually wounded.
There is more to me than that.
There always has been.
But suffering has certainly occupied a substantial amount of these pages.
And I don't apologise for it.
Some of it changed me permanently.
Some of it took years to understand.
Some of it I still don't understand.
I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that every painful experience must eventually be justified by something beautiful.
I believe God can redeem what has been damaged.
I believe that deeply.
But I don't believe I need to celebrate the damage.
There are things I would gladly have lived without.
There are people I wish I had loved better.
There are years I wish had unfolded differently.
There are decisions I would change.
Those things are part of my story.
So are the moments of joy.
So is the faith that somehow survived alongside them.
So is the life I am living now.
There is something confronting about gathering your writing into books.
A blog entry has a certain freedom.
You write it.
You publish it.
And eventually it moves down the page as newer entries take its place.
People might read it.
They might not.
Somebody might discover it months later.
But a book feels different.
A book asks you to look at the writing as a body of work.
Suddenly you notice the things you keep returning to.
The words you use.
The questions that refuse to leave you alone.
The contradictions.
The changes in your thinking.
The ways your faith has matured.
You begin to recognise patterns.
And some of those patterns are uncomfortable.
I have written about survival more times than I can count.
About grace.
About shame.
About memory.
About the past.
About trying to become somebody without despising the person I used to be.
About love.
About loss.
About Christ.
About the fear of wasting a life I fought so hard to keep.
And somewhere among all of those subjects is a man who has spent an enormous amount of time asking whether he is enough.
That one is particularly confronting.
Enough for whom?
Enough for what?
Who decided there was a measurement?
And why have I spent so much of my life trying to reach it?
I don't have a perfectly formed answer.
But seeing those questions gathered together has made me realise how long I have been carrying them.
Some of these things have been with me for decades.
They didn't begin when I opened Blogger.
Blogger merely gave them somewhere to go.
I also find myself thinking about the people who might eventually read these books.
There is no price attached to the downloads.
No expectation that somebody needs to purchase my reflections to gain access to them.
I wanted the writing to be available.
That mattered to me.
Perhaps somebody will download a volume and never open it.
Perhaps somebody will read a few pages and decide my writing isn't for them.
Fair enough.
I don't expect everybody to connect with what I write.
Some of it is deeply Christian.
Some of it is uncomfortable.
Some of it is personal in ways that probably make certain readers wonder why I would publish it at all.
Some entries are uneven.
Some are angry.
Some are quiet.
Some never arrive at a comfortable conclusion.
That's the nature of what I have written.
But perhaps somebody will open one of those books during a difficult night.
Perhaps they will find an entry about shame.
Or grief.
Or addiction.
Or the exhaustion of trying to hold everything together.
Perhaps they will recognise something.
Not necessarily agree with me.
Not necessarily share my faith.
But recognise something human.
I think that would mean a great deal to me.
Because some of the loneliest experiences in life are made worse by the belief that nobody else could possibly understand them.
And then you read a sentence written by somebody you've never met.
And for a moment, you feel less alone.
Books have done that for me.
I would be grateful if something I wrote could do that for somebody else.
Refined by Fire Press has become such an important part of my life that I sometimes forget how personal the whole thing is.
I can become absorbed in the technical side of publishing.
Files.
Formatting.
Covers.
Distribution.
Metadata.
Listings.
The thousand little details that seem determined to stand between a manuscript and a finished book.
And believe me, there have been moments when I have wanted to throw the entire process out the window.
Publishing has an extraordinary ability to make a person feel intelligent one minute and completely incompetent the next.
You solve one problem.
Wonderful.
Then discover three more waiting behind it.
You spend hours working on something that looks perfectly straightforward until you attempt to make it work.
And suddenly the simplest task becomes an afternoon.
I have laughed at myself more than once.
I have also become frustrated.
Very frustrated.
But beneath all of that is something I care about deeply.
I love books.
I love what they preserve.
I love the thought that somebody can write something during one period of history and another person can encounter those words generations later.
The writer may be gone.
The house they lived in may be gone.
The people they knew may be gone.
The world around them may have changed beyond recognition.
But the words remain.
I find that extraordinary.
And that is part of what draws me toward restoring historical Christian works.
There are voices from previous generations that I believe deserve to remain accessible.
Not because every writer from the past was perfect.
They weren't.
Not because I agree with every sentence.
I don't.
But because history becomes poorer when we stop listening to the people who came before us.
And because faith has a history much larger than my own experience of it.
Refined by Fire Press gives me an opportunity to participate in preserving some of that history while also contributing my own writing.
I feel a deep passion to preserve the apostolic fire.
One part of the work looks backwards.
Another looks forwards.
And somewhere between the two, I am trying to build something worthwhile.
But I have also been thinking about the danger of becoming so consumed by the things I am building that I forget to inhabit the life in which I am building them.
That is a difficult balance for me.
I know how easily my mind can become occupied.
Give me a project and I can disappear into it.
Give me a problem and I will keep thinking about it long after I should have stopped.
Give me an idea that excites me and suddenly I want to understand every possible way it could develop.
I can become obsessive.
I know that about myself.
Sometimes that determination helps me accomplish things I once thought were beyond me.
Other times it leaves me exhausted.
And the strange part is that exhaustion doesn't always convince me to stop.
Sometimes it convinces me to work harder.
As though the answer to being overwhelmed is to overwhelm myself more efficiently.
I can see the absurdity when I write it down.
Living it is another matter.
My body has needed rest.
My mind has wanted momentum.
The two haven't always agreed.
There have been moments when I have felt guilty for not doing more, even while recovering from surgery.
Which is ridiculous.
I know.
But knowing something is ridiculous doesn't automatically stop you from feeling it.
I have spent a significant portion of my life measuring myself by what I accomplish.
How much I can do.
How much I can carry.
How much I can survive.
How much I can produce.
And then I write entire essays about grace and enoughness.
There is something almost comical about that contradiction.
I can tell somebody else they are worthy of love without earning it.
I can speak passionately about the Gospel and the freedom of receiving what we could never earn.
Then I have a quiet afternoon and start wondering whether I should be doing something useful.
Apparently I am still learning to believe some of the things I write.
The surgery has made that contradiction more difficult to ignore.
I cannot force a fused finger to become something else through determination.
I cannot make recovery obey my preferred timetable.
I cannot negotiate with bone.
There are limits.
Real ones.
Physical ones.
I have spent years writing about accepting the things I cannot control.
Now I am living with another reminder.
My hand has changed.
There will be adaptations.
There will be movements that belong to the past.
There may be moments when I become frustrated by something that once required no thought at all.
And I will have to learn how to live with that.
I am not interested in pretending this is some beautiful experience.
There is beauty in the care I received.
There is beauty in the body's ability to heal.
There is beauty in discovering that life continues after something permanent has changed.
But the loss itself doesn't need decorating.
I am allowed to miss what my hand could do before.
I am allowed to be frustrated.
I am allowed to feel grateful.
I suspect that is how adaptation happens.
Through ordinary life continuing.
Making coffee.
Opening a book.
Working.
Writing.
Reaching for something.
Learning.
Occasionally swearing under my breath.
And getting on with it.
There is another thing I have been thinking about since the books were published.
The people who appear in my writing.
Some directly.
Some indirectly.
Some without names.
Some through memories that probably mean far more to me than they would to anybody else.
I have lived a complicated life.
I don't say that to make myself sound interesting.
There are parts of it I wish had been considerably less complicated.
I've made mistakes.
I've hurt people.
I've misunderstood people.
I've been selfish.
I've been frightened.
I have cried and struggled.
I've allowed old wounds to influence new relationships.
And I have sometimes mistaken the intensity of a feeling for evidence that the feeling was telling me the truth.
Writing about those things can be uncomfortable.
Because once the words are published, you cannot pretend you never admitted them.
They're there.
On the page.
I think that is part of why I have become so attached to writing honestly.
I don't want to spend the rest of my life producing a carefully managed version of myself.
I've spent enough time worrying about how I am perceived.
I would rather tell the truth as best I understand it.
Even when that truth is incomplete.
Even when I later discover that I misunderstood something.
Even when it makes me uncomfortable.
But I am also conscious that other people have their own stories.
Their own memories.
Their own understanding of what happened.
And I don't get to own those simply because I have a blog.
My perspective is mine.
It is not the entire history of everybody who has crossed my path.
That distinction matters to me.
I can tell the truth about what something felt like without pretending I possess every truth about what happened.
I am learning that.
Sometimes slowly.
And then there is my faith.
Christ has been present throughout this writing in ways I don't think I fully appreciated until I began seeing the entries gathered together.
Not every piece is a sermon.
I don't want every piece to become one.
Sometimes I write about a song.
Sometimes about a person.
Sometimes about a difficult day.
Sometimes about the peculiar way memory can interrupt an otherwise ordinary afternoon.
But faith is part of how I understand those experiences.
I cannot separate it neatly from the rest of my life.
Nor do I want to.
I have walked with Christ for many years.
And I am still learning.
That might sound strange to somebody who imagines faith as a destination where all the difficult questions have already been answered.
My experience has been rather different.
There are things I believe deeply.
There are things I still wrestle with.
There are prayers I have prayed for years.
There are experiences I cannot explain.
There are parts of my history that still hurt.
And there are moments when the grace of God feels so personal that I struggle to find language adequate for it.
I don't want to manufacture certainty where I don't possess it.
I also don't want to pretend uncertainty has erased what I believe.
Both are part of my experience.
I can be grateful and exhausted.
Faithful and frightened.
Hopeful and disappointed.
I can love Christ and still struggle with myself.
I can believe in redemption without understanding every part of the story.
There was a time when I felt compelled to explain everything.
To find the lesson.
To identify the purpose.
To make sure suffering eventually arrived somewhere respectable.
I am less certain that every experience needs to be turned into an explanation.
Some things happened.
Some things hurt.
Some things changed me.
God was present.
And there are parts I still don't understand.
Perhaps I can leave some of them there.
I have been wondering whether I have allowed myself to enjoy what I've accomplished.
Properly enjoy it.
Without immediately thinking about the next project.
The next problem.
The next technical issue.
The next improvement.
Because there is always another idea.
There is always something I could be doing.
But I think I owe myself a moment to acknowledge what has happened.
Not because the work is perfect.
Not because I expect it to change the literary world.
But because I followed something through.
Something deeply personal.
Something that began with ordinary entries on a Google blog.
That means something to me.
I remember the younger version of myself who could barely imagine certain parts of the future.
The man who was trying to survive things he didn't know how to explain.
The man who carried shame.
The man who made mistakes.
The man who struggled with addiction.
The man who lost people.
I wish I could show him the life I have now.
I don't know what he would say.
He might laugh.
He might be confused.
But I think he would be surprised.
By the fact that we made it here.
That there was a life beyond the years he was struggling to survive.
A life with work.
Books.
Faith.
Friendship.
Coffee.
Cats.
Plans.
A publishing press.
And ordinary mornings he hadn't yet imagined.
That thought still catches me off guard.
I am not going to pretend the past six weeks have been some uninterrupted season of triumph.
They haven't.
I've been tired.
Distracted.
Frustrated.
Excited.
Overwhelmed.
Grateful.
Sometimes all within the same afternoon.
There have been moments when I have felt incredibly encouraged by what I've accomplished.
And moments when I have wondered why my mind seems incapable of resting.
I have missed writing like this.
I have missed sitting with something long enough to hear what I actually think.
There is a difference between producing words and spending time with them.
Lately I have been doing a lot of producing.
Publishing.
Organising.
Building.
Making things work.
Today I wanted to return to the part of writing that existed before all of that.
A blank page.
A thought.
Another thought.
The freedom to admit that I don't have everything worked out.
I don't know exactly where Refined by Fire Press will be in five years.
I don't know how many people will read what I've written.
I don't know what my writing will look like a year from now.
But I know I want to keep writing.
I want to keep learning.
I want to read more.
I want to become a better author.
I want to give the books carrying the Refined by Fire Press name the care they deserve.
And I want to remember that I am a person before I am a publisher.
Before I am an author.
Before I am somebody with a list of projects waiting to be completed.
I am a man living a life.
I am a child of God, A life that has already contained far more than I expected.
A life that has hurt.
A life that has surprised me.
A life I am still learning how to receive.
As I sit here writing this, six weeks after surgery, I am struck by how strange the passage of time can be.
Six weeks ago, my attention was fixed on my hand.
On pain.
On recovery.
On the reality of a permanently fused joint.
Today that reality remains, but life has continued accumulating around it.
Decisions have been made.
Problems have been solved.
Other problems have appeared.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I have been changing too.
Perhaps not dramatically.
Perhaps in ways I won't understand until much later.
I have a habit of wanting to recognise change while it is happening.
I want to know what a season means before it has finished.
I want to understand what I am becoming before I have become it.
And I am beginning to suspect that this is an exhausting way to live.
Sometimes you only recognise a chapter after you've turned the page.
Sometimes you don't know what mattered until years later.
And sometimes you spend six weeks so occupied with everything around you that you forget how much you needed a quiet hour with your own thoughts.
I think that is what today has given me.
An opportunity to hear myself again.
Without another publishing problem demanding an answer.
Without needing to make an announcement.
Without trying to convince anybody that I am doing wonderfully.
I am doing some things wonderfully.
Other things are difficult.
That's a fair description of life at the moment.
And I am comfortable leaving it there.
I have no idea how many more entries I will write.
I hope there will be many.
I hope I will still be sitting somewhere years from now with a cup of coffee, opening a page and wondering what on earth I am about to say.
I hope I never become so concerned with being an author that I forget how to write like a person.
I hope I can continue to tell the truth even when it makes me uncomfortable.
And I hope Refined by Fire Press continues to grow into something that reflects the things I genuinely care about.
But for tonight, I don't need to build anything else.
I am proud of what I've accomplished.
There.
I said it.
I am proud.
Not of being perfect.
Not of having all the answers.
Not of somehow becoming a man who no longer struggles.
I am proud that I kept writing.
That I kept learning.
That I stayed with something long enough to see it through.
And perhaps I am a little proud of the man who wrote those entries too.
The one who didn't always know what he was doing.
The one who sometimes wrote because he was hurting.
The one who sometimes wrote because he was happy.
He deserves a little kindness.
I think I am finally learning to give him some.
My finger is still healing.
My mind is still catching up.
There are things from these past six weeks I haven't fully processed.
And tomorrow there will probably be another task waiting for my attention.
But tonight I have been able to sit down and write again.
I didn't realise how much I missed this until I started.
I think I'll leave the publishing work alone for the rest of the evening.
The books can exist without me checking on them.
And for once, I might allow myself to enjoy what has already been accomplished.
Not because everything is finished.
Not because I have finally figured out how to slow down.
But because, for a little while tonight, I have stopped long enough to notice the life I am actually living.
And what an extraordinary six weeks it has been.
About the Author
Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 6.1 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.
- Read the Memoir: Kissed by Death on Amazon
- Explore the Journey: Follow Dylan on Google Maps
- Connect on Instagram: @porkysparadise
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