life just keeps going
Life just keeps going.
Thank God.
I don’t think I’ve figured anything out from writing this book.
I think I’ve just become a little softer.
A little less interested in winning.
A little more interested in paying attention.
When I started writing this book, I wanted to leave behind answers.
Now I’d rather leave behind permission.
Permission to change your mind.
Permission to fail.
Permission to grieve someone for twenty years.
Permission to laugh in the middle of heartbreak.
Permission to become someone your younger self never could have imagined.
Growing up
I think part of growing up is realizing you can love a version of yourself that no longer fits your life.
There is a version of me that wants motion at all times. Airports. Hockey bags. Loud bars. Last-minute trips. Another round. Another story. Anything in life worth doing is worth overdoing. That guy carried me for a long time.
Then another version of me showed up.
The husband. The father. The writer. The guy who wakes up early to sit quietly before his son gets up. The guy looking for peace. The guy who wants roots instead of just momentum.
For a while, I thought one of them had to die.
But I think the real tension of adulthood is learning how to hold both. Adventure and stillness. Freedom and responsibility. Chaos and peace. The wave and the tree.
Maybe that’s why this period of my life has felt so strange. It isn’t that I’m lost. It’s that two identities are colliding, and neither one wants to let go easily.
Maybe that’s what being washed up really is.
Not failure.
Just the tide forcing you onto a new shore long enough to decide who you actually are.
Washed Up - Coming this fall
Everyone keeps asking me what the book is about. Most ask what washed up even means. Often times it was hard to answer this question because my grief was ever evolving.
Below is a conversation I had with claude ai to provide the reader and myself some clarity:
It’s about a man who lost his father at 21 before he was finished being made by him, and has spent the years since trying to figure out who he is without that anchor.
The fatherhood piece with Beau isn’t just a new chapter. It’s the mirror. Becoming a dad cracked you open in a specific way because it put you back in contact with everything you lost and everything you never got to finish with your own father. You’re raising a son while grieving the father who didn’t get to see you do it.
The “washed up” framing is doing more work than it might seem. It’s not just self-deprecating humor about getting older. It’s about a guy who had a clear identity — hockey, Lake Placid, his dad, his crew, a certain kind of uncomplicated joy — and then the tide went out and took most of it. And he’s been standing on the shore ever since trying to figure out what’s left.
But washed up also means what the tide leaves behind. What remains after everything recedes. And that’s actually the hopeful version of the story — that what’s left when you strip away the role self, the performing, the managing, the grief you never processed — is still someone worth knowing. The true self list. The guy who smiled, trusted his instincts, lived without ego, loved his people fiercely.
Your dad is the throughline. Beau is the destination.
That’s the book...
If you’ve made it this far…
Go outside.
Call somebody you love.
Put your face into the wind.
And remember
We’re all just washed up on another shore.
See what you find.
I’ll see you next for the book launch!
— Molesy