Track 25: Let’s Burn the Map Together, Shall We?

Notes From a Recovering Cartographer Of All The Wrong Routes

(Yeah, there’s music playing under this. You hear it. You feel it in your ribs before you know what it is. I’m not gonna tell you who wrote it. Or where it came from. Doesn’t matter, I’ll tell you later. All you need to know is this: It fucking burns. It moves like smoke under a locked door. Like a memory you can’t outrun. Like grief dressed in velvet with a knife behind its back. This isn’t a soundtrack. It’s a fucking funeral dirge for everything I had to kill to stay alive. And every note? Every aching, soaring, goddamn holy note, is something I set on fire to become this version of me. This music doesn’t play behind the fire. It is the fire. And if you feel it too, you already know why this post exists. Let it play. Let it burn. Let it say what words never could.)

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Yesterday, someone replied to one of my notes. A stranger? A ghost? Maybe a time traveling version of a woman I don’t know, but almost remember. Not really. But I have some ideas. Ideas that feel aligned in the best way. Like I’ve met her in a life I never lived… or a dream I forgot to wake up from.

Anyway,

She asked:
“There’s a map?”

And I replied:
Yes. There’s a fucking map.

There’s always a map. A map you burn. That leads to a bridge you burn. That leads to a version of yourself you burn, too. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the fucking point. Maybe survival isn’t about finding your way back. Maybe it’s about having the nerve to keep walking with no map, no bridge, no version of you left to rescue. Just ash. And instinct. So yeah. Let’s burn the map together, shall we?

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The Fucking Map

You were handed it young. Not on paper. Not in words. It was more like injected into your nervous system before you even knew what a nervous system was. Invisible ink on your bones. Drawn by parents who didn’t know better, teachers who were just trying to get through the day, lovers who only loved the filtered version of you. Society, religion, capitalism, shame, all of them with permanent markers and shaking hands.

It wasn’t even malicious. That’s the tragic part. They meant well. Well-ish.

The map said things like: “Here’s how you’ll be lovable.” “Here’s how you’ll be acceptable.” “Here’s how to disappear politely in a world that only rewards polished ghosts with great credit scores.”

The subtext? Keep your voice down. Don’t cry in public. Apologize for needing anything. God forbid you’re messy. Or loud. Or real. So you followed it. Because at first, it worked. Smile enough, nod enough, perform well enough and the world gives you little prizes: approval, attention, occasional sex, a LinkedIn endorsement from a man named Craig.

But then something cracks. Not always dramatically. Sometimes it’s just a Tuesday.
You’re eating leftover Pad Thai on a couch you love with a person you don’t trust,
and suddenly you feel it, the weight of the map in your chest, folding in on itself like a black hole made of “shoulds.” A breakup. A death. Or worse, fucking clarity.

And you finally see it:

This map was never drawn for you. It was drawn for the version of you that made them comfortable. The obedient one. The agreeable one. The one who knew how to dim his light just enough to not be abandoned. You carried that version like it was sacred. Hell, you defended it. Built your entire fucking personality around it. And then one day, in a moment of violent grace, you realize: Fucking map, it’s not just wrong. It’s killing you.

So what do you do? You burn it. Not out of rage. Out of mercy. Out of the exhausted love that says, “I would rather be lost than fake for one more fucking mile.”

You strike the match. You light the trail. You watch it go up in flames like a liar’s last excuse. And yeah, being lost is terrifying. But at least it’s honest. At least the fire’s yours. Because maps are for tourists. And you? You’re here to build kingdoms out of ash.

The Stupid Bridge

Burning the map? That’s the appetizer. That’s the bit you post on Instagram with a cute caption.

The bridge is where the universe stops whispering and starts throwing punches. The bridge is made of every lie you told to stay comfortable. Every almost love. Every “safe” job that felt like emotional chloroform. Every version of you that smiled through the ache because rocking the boat felt scarier than drowning in silence.

And sure, crossing the bridge feels like growth. At first. It feels like momentum. Like evolution. Until you hit the edge. Until you feel the drag of everything you’re still carrying: people, roles, projections, survival scripts so worn in you forgot they were costumes.

And then, physics shows up. Yeah, fucking physics. You remember that post? The one about the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Entropy? That unstoppable law that says the universe is wired for chaos?

Well guess what, sweetheart, so are you.

At some point, you hit a bifurcation point, a literal, law of the universe moment
where the system (that’s you, your life, your bullshit) becomes unstable. And there’s no going back. You either collapse into the same old pattern, or you evolve into something new. Something unrecognizable. Something terrifying and true.

That bridge? That’s the bifurcation. And crossing it means death. Not physical. Worse. Identity death. The ego dies. The script dies. The polished ghost version of you who knew how to make everyone else comfortable? Fucking. Ash.

So what do you do?

You light the fucker up. No more hesitating. No more hoping someone comes to walk you across. You set the bridge ablaze like a goddamn act of spiritual arson.

And then you stand in the smoke. No applause. No fanfare. Just you, shaking and alive and finally done pretending this was ever about certainty. You don’t burn the bridge because you hate who you were. You burn it because staying would’ve meant entropy of the soul. A slow rot masked as "making it."

So yeah, physics said this would happen. The chaos is coming. The chaos is necessary. You’re not breaking down, you’re breaking through. And that, my friend, is the real fucking law of the universe.

The Scorched Me

This, this Substack, this raw, unfiltered, bleeding page exists for one reason only: because I survived the fire. And not in a "look how strong I am" kind of way. Not in a “built back better” bullshit inspirational poster kind of way. No. I mean I barely made it. I mean I came through crawling, limping through the wreckage of an 18-year war with life, dragging the carcass of a man I used to be, sifting through the ashes for anything that still had a pulse.

Let’s get one thing fucking straight: I didn’t burn the map for the drama. I didn’t burn the bridge for the metaphor. I didn’t burn myself for the fucking plot twist. I did it because I had to. Because if I didn’t, I’d be dead. Not metaphorically. Not spiritually.

Dead-dead. Fucking gone.

You see a writer. A voice. A man with wit and guts and grit. But before this? I was a fucking ghost. A polite hostage in my own fucking life.

My wife left me. She didn’t just pack a bag. She gutted the foundation. She took the story I thought we were writing together and erased me from every chapter. And I stayed. Like a goddamn fool. Still hoping for redemption. Still thinking love meant sacrificing yourself so someone else could feel whole.

Then my father, that mythological, wounded magician I spent my whole life chasing and hating and forgiving, killed himself. The man I worshipped. The man I hated.
The man I defended and resented and needed and buried long before the funeral. And here’s the truth no one wants: I fucking knew it was coming. I saw the signs. The silence. The withdrawal. The quiet rehearsals of goodbye disguised as grace.

I fucking tried everything, goddammit, you have no fucking clue how hard I tried. The calls. The visits. The “please god just hold on a little longer.” I threw my whole goddamn heart at a man who never figured out how to hold his own.

And he still left. You carry that? You carry being right about the thing you begged not to be real? You carry knowing that no matter how hard you loved him, he still chose the dark.

Then came the cruelest part: I almost lost two of my kids. Not to tantrums. Not to teenage rebellion. To the abyss. To that silent fucking undertow that pulls our children into places we can’t follow. I sat by hospital beds. I begged to trade places. I made deals with gods I didn’t believe in. And for a while, I truly didn’t know if they’d make it out.

You want to know why I burned? Because I was already on fire. Every part of me was already screaming.

And then, just when I thought maybe, maybe the universe had gotten tired of fucking with me, just when I let my guard down for the first time in years, she showed up. The woman. The twin flame. The myth I'd been aching for in silence. She looked at the rubble I was living in, the collapsed bones of my marriage, the charred remains of my family, the bloodstains left behind by my father's suicide and she said, "I see you."

And I believed her. God help me, I believed her. Because when you've spent your whole life being too much for people who never learned how to hold fire, the one person who doesn’t flinch feels like salvation. So I let her in. All the way in. No armor. No filters. Just my open chest: bleeding, trembling, begging to be enough. But she chose to not hold it. Instead, she dissected it. She turned it into a case study. She gaslit me like it was a fucking Olympic sport. Gold medal. World record. Flawless execution.

She took every raw, unfiltered me I offered, and made it feel like madness. Every time I spoke from the pit of my soul, she smiled like she was being patient with a child. Like my pain was inconvenient. Like I was ruining the moment. She told me I was overreacting. Too intense. Too dramatic. Sent me to therapy, not out of love, but for fucking control. She used words like “energy” and “self preservation” while slowly, methodically, pulling the rug out from under my goddamn reality. She took my trauma and dressed it up as instability. She took me and labeled it chaos.

And yes, goddammit, I fucking lied. Not to hurt her. Not to manipulate her. Not because I was a narcissist, or some villain in her rewritten memory. I lied because I was drowning. Because the truth is, I was coming apart quietly. Making miracles out of overdraft protection. Stacking confidence on top of credit. Trying to hold together a life built on charm, duct tape, and the fantasy that if I looked solid enough on the outside, maybe she’d forget how hollow it all felt underneath. I knew what she wanted: strength, stability, someone who didn’t shake. So I smiled through the cracks, hoping she wouldn’t notice the floor giving out beneath us. And I didn’t have it at the time. What I had was a storm I kept dressing up as a sunrise. So yeah, I lied. Because I thought the truth would make her leave. Because I loved her that much. Because I believed losing her would hurt more than betraying myself. But don’t you fucking dare call it betrayal. Call it what it was: A man terrified of not being enough. I didn’t lie to hurt her. I lied to keep her. To buy just one more day where I was worth loving. But the lie cracked. And when it did, she didn’t see the bleeding man behind it. She saw a headline. A label. A reason to run. But I’m done pretending she was chasing truth. She was chasing comfort. And I was never that. I was the chaos she prayed for and abandoned in the same breath.

And when I finally cracked, when I stood there holding my last ounce of hope and god honest truth in my shaking hands, she looked at me like I was a burden she regretted picking up and she fucking vanished. Not slowly. Not kindly. Like smoke. Like I’d never mattered at all. And that, that was the last goddamn match. That was when I stopped looking for something to salvage. That was when I knew: There was nothing left to fix. No one left to become. No path left to walk. Only fire. So yeah, I burned. Not as a rebirth. Not for symbolism. But because it was the only way out of the cage. Because this time, the cage was me.

What rose from that fire wasn’t some shiny rebirth. There were no butterflies. No enlightenment. Just this: A voice. A page. A Substack built from the bones of a man who lost everything and chose to keep fucking breathing anyway.

This isn’t a comeback story. This is a “fuck you for thinking I wouldn’t make it” story. This is what happens when the universe hits you with wave after wave, and you learn to become the shore.

What’s left is me.

The Scorched Me. No mask. No map. No need for applause. Just scars. Just truth. Just breath. And a hunger to never lie to myself again. So if you’re still here, reading this, thank you. But this was never for you. It’s for me. This is my fucking proof of life.

I burned the map. I burned the bridge. And I burned the me that would’ve rather died than be seen. What’s left? Not peace. Not wisdom. Not some soft lit redemption arc. What’s left is a fucking cathedral built from ash and memory. A voice that shakes when it speaks, but still speaks. Hands that tremble, but still write. A man no longer asking for directions, no longer begging to be chosen, no longer willing to shrink to survive.

This is not healing. This is aftermath. This is what crawled out when every exit was fire and every truth cut like glass.

If you came here looking for answers, I don’t have them. All I have is this:

You can lose everything, everyone you loved, everything you believed, even the self you spent decades performing and still fucking rise. Not like a phoenix. No. Phoenixes are pretty. Predictable. I rose like something that shouldn’t have made it. Like a goddamn animal with blood on its teeth.

So yeah, I might be scorched as fuck. But maybe, just fucking maybe, that’s holy.

I didn’t crawl out of hell to be saved, I came back to wrestle with God, look at her in the eye and show Her how fucking hard I can hit back.