On the 8802 Plum Blossom, the TWSBI Diamond, and the Season That Tried to Take Everything
I want to be honest about what this period was, without making it more beautiful than it deserves. There is a temptation, when writing about survival, to retroactively arrange the difficulty into something that reads cleanly; to let the fact of having come through it soften the edges of what it actually felt like while it was happening. I am not going to do that. What happened was genuinely terrible in places, and the resilience that carried me through it was not graceful or photogenic. It was the quiet, stubborn, slightly bewildered kind; the kind that mostly looks like just not stopping, because stopping was not a available option.
Two pens mark this period. The 8802 Plum Blossom and the TWSBI Diamond 580 in extra fine. Together they hold the full weight of a season I would not wish on anyone and would not trade for anything, because of what it showed me about who I am when everything is taken away at once.
The Grief Before the End
For three months before my separation, I cried every day. Multiple times a day. At work, in bathrooms, in cars, at desks, in the specific private architecture of a person who is grieving something they are still inside of.
This requires some explanation, because the standard understanding of grief positions it as a response to loss, something that begins after the thing is gone. What I was experiencing was anticipatory grief, which is its own particular category of suffering, and in some ways a more disorienting one. The thing had not ended yet. I was still there. Still doing the work, still present in the building, still performing the daily rituals of a professional life that I could feel, with increasing clarity, was being dismantled around me. I was mourning a living thing. I was attending the funeral of something still breathing.
Because it was more than a job to me. I want to say this plainly, without embarrassment, because the cultural script that says we should not be too attached to our work has always struck me as advice designed by people who have never found work they genuinely loved. I loved this work. Not in the abstract, not as a category, but specifically: the particular problems it asked me to solve, the things I could see that no one else seemed to be looking at, the diagnostic pleasure of identifying the gap between what a system claimed to be doing and what it was actually doing. I got off on it. That is the accurate phrase. The intellectual engagement was genuine and deep and mine, and watching it be taken apart was a grief with real weight to it. Three months of crying. Every day. Multiple times. I am noting this not for sympathy but for context, because what comes next only makes sense against the backdrop of how much I was already carrying when the next thing arrived.
The Diagnosis in the Middle of Everything
They told me, in the middle of this, that they had found something. That we were in diagnostic testing. That if they could not find a solution soon, I had three to five years. At worst, two weeks.
I am going to let that sit for a moment, because it deserves to.
Three to five years. Two weeks at the worst. The doctor said these words to me while I was already in the middle of grieving my professional life, while I was already spending portions of most days crying in bathrooms, while I was already operating at the outer edge of what a person can sustain. The universe, apparently, had decided that the timing was acceptable. One weekend and two working days after that conversation, I was unemployed. And without insurance.
The Body’s Rebellion
What followed was the kind of medical chapter that you read about in other people’s accounts and think: that cannot have all happened at once. It happened all at once.
Removed from two medications, placed on a bridge drug. The bridge drug produced severe periorbital edema; the tissue around my eyes swelling with a thoroughness that was difficult to look at and harder to see through. My tongue swelled. My potassium dropped, a condition called hypokalemia that produces a particular kind of systemic wrongness, a weakness that is less a symptom than a full-body argument against continuing. And then my heart began to feel strange. Not metaphorically. Literally strange, an arrhythmia, ventricular tachycardia, the heart doing something that hearts are not supposed to do, communicating through the language of irregular rhythm that the situation had become serious. My cardiologist was on vacation.
I took myself off the bridge drug. I assessed what I knew, which was considerable, and what I could do, which was limited, and I made the calculation that the drug was causing more danger than it was preventing. And then I had to make it two weeks. What I remember most clearly about those two weeks is the calm. Not a performed calm, not the calm of someone pretending to be fine; the genuine, slightly eerie calm of a person who has been stripped of every external stressor simultaneously and discovered that what remains, at the absolute bottom of things, is actually quite steady. The job that had been making me cry every day for three months was gone. The impossible standard, the daily diminishment, the grief of watching something I loved be slowly ruined, all of it, gone. What I had instead was a body that needed managing and two weeks to get through and the quiet of a life suddenly emptied of the particular noise that had been making me sick in ways I had not fully understood until it stopped.
I have never been more calm in my life. This is information. Important information, about what that job had been costing me, information I could not have accessed any other way than by its removal.
What the Stress Had Been Doing
I want to say something careful here about the adrenal tumor. They confirmed it during this period. Confirmed, also, some extreme hormonal activity that had been operating underneath everything; underneath the crying, underneath the professional grief, underneath the years of trying to perform competence and steadiness in an environment that was, I now understood, actively in conflict with my biology. The adrenal glands sit above the kidneys and produce cortisol and adrenaline and a suite of other hormones whose balance is not incidental to a person’s experience of being alive. A tumor on an adrenal gland is not a small thing. The hormonal dysregulation it produces is not a small thing. And the degree to which chronic, sustained, inescapable workplace stress can interact with an endocrine system already under siege, this is not a small thing either. I finally had some answers. Not all of them. Not the easy kind that resolve everything cleanly. But the beginning of a map, which is more than I had before.
Three months of daily crying, leading up to the separation.
Since the separation: not once. There was no more need for anxiety medication four times as day. A bottle of Ambien sat untouched. I am not drawing a simple causal line here. The situation is more complex than that, and I hold appropriate uncertainty about what caused what. But I am noting the data point, because data points matter, and this one is striking enough to deserve acknowledgment.
What Got Built in the Wreckage
Here is what I did, in the month between unemployed and employed:
I built a website for myself, The Tenebrous Archive, an integrated home for every part of my identity that my professional life had been crowding out. I built a second website as a consultant.. I gave a keynote speech at a virtual conference. I completed two ghostwriting gigs that were published under other names and received well. I received four permanent job offers and accepted one by March thirteenth, 2026.
I navigated a medical crisis without insurance, alone, with a cardiologist on vacation and a body staging what amounted to a formal protest against everything that had come before. I did all of this without crying once.
I am not presenting this as heroism. I am presenting it as evidence; evidence of what becomes possible when the weight that was consuming the energy required to do it is lifted. Three months of daily grief at a job. Then removal from the job. Then a medical emergency, a diagnostic journey, an insurance gap, a financial uncertainty, a completely open and unstructured future that could have gone in any number of directions. And more was accomplished in that open and uncertain period than in the preceding years of stability combined. This is also information.
The Plum Blossom and the Diamond
The 8802 Plum Blossom fountain pen is, on its surface, a pretty pen. The name tells you what the aesthetic is: floral, delicate-looking, and soft in the way of winter. The plum blossom as a symbol carries, within aesthetic philosophy, a meaning that the surface prettiness does not fully announce. The flowers bloom in late winter, contrasting with the snow and foreshadowing the spring. They symbolizes inner strength and resilience; perseverance in the face of adversity. They represent hope.
I spent two weeks not knowing if I would get through them. I got through them. I got through them, I think, because I had been studying impermanence for nearly three decades and had some practice sitting with the awareness that nothing is permanent, not the bad and not the good and not the self that experiences either.
The TWSBI Diamond 580 is a different kind of object. The demonstrator barrel, clear, transparent, the ink reservoir visible in its entirety, is a pen that has nothing to hide and
makes a point of this. You can see exactly what is inside. How much is left. What color it holds. There is no concealment, no opacity, no mystery about the mechanism. What you see is what is there.
The Diamond represents seeing through; through the difficulty, through the performance, through the layers of story that obscure what is actually happening. The extra fine nib is precise and demanding, a nib that insists on clarity. And the ink I chose to fill it with, that particular quality of ink that catches the light differently depending on angle, that reveals its full character only in motion, only to someone paying close attention; this is the shimmer that only a life well lived can appreciate. Not a life free of difficulty. A life that has been through enough to know what it is looking at when it catches the light.
The Love Letter
This is not a triumphant story, exactly. Triumph implies a clean arc, a final victory, an ending that resolves everything. This is not that. The adrenal tumor is still a fact. The hormonal activity is being managed. But resilience is not the absence of damage. Resilience is what you do with the damage. It is the capacity to look at a situation that has stripped away your job, your insurance, your health stability, and your certainty about the future simultaneously, and to still, somehow, build things. Write things. Speak at conferences. Take four job offers and choose the right one. I bought two pens for this season. One for resilience and balance and the grace of blooming. One for transparency and clarity and the shimmer that lives inside a life that has been genuinely tested and has not broken. They sit together in my collection, marking a period I survived not because it was easy but because I am, it turns out, someone who does not stop. Not because stopping is beneath me. Because there was always one more thing worth doing, and the doing of it turned out to be stronger than whatever was trying to prevent it.
That is not a small thing to know about yourself.
That is, perhaps, the most important thing.
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