The Sticky Note on the Bathroom Mirror I Stopped Reading Months Ago There is a yellow sticky note stuck to the corner of my bathroom mirror that says "He Is Good" in my own handwriting, written in shaky blue highlighter during a week eight months ago when I needed to see it fifteen times a day just to make it to bed sober. I wrote it the morning after a phone call I never want to repeat. For weeks I read it every time I brushed my teeth, some mornings saying it out loud like I was trying to convince a stranger. Lately I just brush around it, the way my eyes slide past the soap dish and the light switch, a fixture in the room instead of a sentence I actually believe. I noticed that this week, and it unsettled me more than the crisis that made me write it, because at least back then I knew I was struggling to believe something true. Now I had quietly stopped noticing I had stopped. I am nine years sober, and I used to assume doubt happened once, in a dramatic season, then...

The Update Progress Bar That's Said "2 Minutes Remaining" for the Last Half Hour RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 10, 2026 My laptop has been sitting open on the kitchen table since six this evening, a gray bar inching across the screen under the words "Installing update, 2 minutes remaining," and it has said exactly that, two minutes remaining, for thirty-one minutes now. I have closed the lid and opened it again twice, as if that might shame the machine into finishing. I have googled whether it is safe to just unplug it, found conflicting answers, and closed the browser tab more irritated than when I opened it. My wife asked if I wanted to just leave it overnight and deal with it in the morning, and I told her no, like a man who has somewhere urgent to be on this laptop at nine o'clock on a Saturday, which I do not. I just cannot stand the two minutes that refuse to become zero. I am eight years sober, and for most of those years I told ...

My wife asked me last night why my phone takes so long to open, and I made some excuse about the battery, when the real answer is that I am currently running thirty-seven open tabs of real estate listings in four different towns we have no plans to move to. A cabin with a wraparound porch two hours north. A fixer-upper on three acres I would never have time to clear. A brick colonial with a kitchen nicer than the one I already have, which I remodeled myself four years ago and was genuinely happy with until about six weeks ago, when I started doing this again. I do not call a realtor. I do not run the numbers with my wife. I just scroll, late, after she is asleep, collecting houses like a man building a raft out of driftwood he never intends to actually float. I am thirteen years sober, and for a long time I assumed this particular restlessness had nothing to do with the thing I used to drink over. Drinking was an emergency. This is just browsing. But sitting with it honestly this w...