Why I Need to Leave Pocatello One of the hardest truths I've had to accept is that I got stuck in Pocatello, and I don't believe this city was ever where I was meant to rebuild my life after everything that happened with Jeff. Looking back, it probably should have been the last place anyone wanted me to remain considering the circumstances. People often assume that my struggles with alcohol and drugs were about relationships or personal failures. They weren't. Those things became coping mechanisms, and much of that came from the reality of living here. For me, Pocatello has always felt like a place centered around work, obligations, and survival rather than creativity, growth, and truly living. People who love this city may have a completely different experience, but mine has been consistent for years. Life here often feels repetitive and stagnant. There is very little sense of newness, possibility, or flourishing. It feels like the same day lived over and over again. A per...

On Beauty: The Quiet Rebellion of Being Alive There is a lie we are told from childhood, and most of us believe it without question. The lie is that beauty is vanity. That to care about how things look, how they feel, how they resonate in the chest when you stand before them — this is frivolous. Decorative. A luxury we can ill afford in a world of deadlines and diagnoses, of bills and bad news. But beauty is not vanity. Vanity is the desperate clutching at a reflection, terrified that without it, you will cease to exist. Beauty is the opposite of that terror. Beauty is the smile given freely to a stranger who looks like they are carrying the weight of a private war. It is the candle lit in a window when the night presses close and the news cycle howls. It is the hand extended not because someone has earned it, but because they are human and hurting and here. It is the song hummed under your breath when your heart is so weary it can barely keep time, because some part of you...

The Unsealed Life: A Portrait of Living in Motion I can tolerate almost anything except repetition. Not the repetition of labor, or of responsibility, or of showing up day after day—that, I can do. I can live inside structure as well as anyone. I can work, meet obligations, exist within systems that appear, from the outside, to be stable and disciplined and sound. What I cannot do is watch the days begin to mirror each other. Because for me, repetition is not neutral. It does not feel like comfort. It feels like erosion. A slow, quiet erasure of texture. The kind of life where one Tuesday becomes indistinguishable from the next, and then from the next, until they stop being remembered as separate experiences at all. They collapse into a single, flattened loop. And somewhere in that collapse, something essential begins to go missing. Not motivation. Not productivity. Not even happiness, exactly. Presence. And for me, presence is the only thing that makes a day worth living i...

I Don’t Need to Be Reinvented—I Need a Place Where I Can Finally Become There is something I have been trying to say for a long time, and it never quite lands in simple sentences. It doesn’t fit neatly into “I’m unhappy,” “I need a change,” or “I don’t belong here.” It’s more structural than that. I am not confused about who I am. I am not searching for identity. I am not lost in the sense people usually mean. What I am experiencing is something quieter, more frustrating, and more invisible from the outside: I have become internally aware of a version of myself that I have never actually been able to live inside a real environment long enough to test—not in a stable way, not in a sustained way, not in a way where it becomes real through repetition and feedback. Instead, I have lived most of my life in environments that only ever reflect back older versions of me. And that creates a very specific kind of psychological pressure: You know you are not who you were, but every...

What Broke In Me  An Exposé on Emotional Architecture, Attachment, and the Anatomy of Feeling Cut Off --- I came into my relationship believing in one thing with my whole body: we are each other’s home. I was fully monogamous. That was not a performance or a preference I was trying on. It was the structure my nervous system needed to feel safe, to feel like the ground beneath me was solid. I did not enter partnership with a contingency plan. I entered it with the assumption that when two people choose each other, they build a shared container—an emotional territory that belongs to the relationship first, and to the individuals only insofar as they are still tending that shared ground. He was not monogamous. That was known. And so we negotiated. Negotiation, in the beginning, felt like love. It felt like compromise, like maturity, like the kind of flexibility that people praise in modern relationships. We started with threesomes—shared space, shared experience, still us ...

A Life I Can Actually Live I don’t think I am trying to escape relationships. I think I am trying to stop forcing myself into versions of them that don’t fit me. For a long time, I believed that love had to come with structure: shared housing, shared finances, shared future, shared legal identity. Marriage was supposed to mean permanence. Cohabitation was supposed to mean commitment. Dating was supposed to lead somewhere predictable. But what I learned through experience is that when those things blur too quickly, I lose myself inside them. So now I’ve started to notice something simpler and more honest about myself: I don’t do well when love, obligation, and logistics all become the same thing. I do better when there are lines. Clear ones. Roommates are roommates. That is structure, contract, clarity. No emotional ambiguity required. Love, if it exists, should be allowed to breathe without immediately becoming a system of dependence. Because when dependence enters t...

What I Was Missing: A Post-Mortem on a Marriage That Couldn't Breathe An exposé on what made us unhealthy, what might have made us whole, and the geography that quietly dismantled what love had built. --- I. The Illusion of Closeness For a long time, I believed that the problem was us. That if we had just communicated better, tried harder, loved more completely, things would have been different. I spent months—years—turning over every conversation, every missed cue, every moment where something felt off but I couldn't name it. What I didn't understand then, and what has taken me until now to see clearly, is that the problem was rarely between us. The problem was the system I was living inside with her. We were together constantly. We lived together, worked together, built a business together, shared the same stress, the same town, the same social field. On the surface, that sounds like intimacy. In practice, it was suffocation dressed up as closeness. Be...

AN EXPOSÉ ON ABSENCE   What Pocatello Has Never Provided   By Dustin W. --- I. The Diagnosis What has been missing in my life here is not simply people, companionship, or activity. It is something more subtle and more foundational: ambient life—the steady, unassigned presence of human existence that allows me to feel held by the world without needing to be actively held by any one person. In Pocatello, life does not form a continuous background for me. It comes in isolated structures: home, family, obligation, work, or highly defined social spaces such as bars or established relationships. There is little in-between space—no neutral field where I can exist without being socially accounted for. This absence creates a specific kind of existential compression. I am never simply "a person in a place." I am always someone's acquaintance, someone's family member, someone's history, or someone's observer. My identity is never allowed to loosen. It ...