Writings · Sola Exemplum
Sola Exemplum

Writings

Essays, letters, passages.

Shorter writings posted as they're written — and the archive of everything already said.

  1. 7 min read

    The question no one answered.

    The problem isn't that you stopped believing. The problem is that nothing else has been equal to the thing you stopped believing in. Something rang true, and nothing after it has rung the same way. That unfinished signal is what this book was written to name.

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  2. 5 min read

    Not because you're broken.

    The 3am feeling that something is fundamentally wrong with you is, in most cases, the least broken thing about you. It's attention. It's seeing the thing most of the people around you have been trained not to notice. The frameworks you were given failed not because you applied them wrongly, but because they were never true in the first place.

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  3. 8 min read

    What the church took from you.

    You probably walked away in your twenties or thirties. You probably told yourself, at the time, that you were leaving behind superstition. What you were actually leaving behind was a carefully managed redirection of the one question you kept noticing: why does any of this have to be like this? This essay is about what the institution did with that question on the way to becoming what it is today.

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  4. 6 min read

    On being awake without being healed.

    "Being awake" is a phrase that's been so thoroughly captured by marketing that it feels dishonest to use it. But there is something real underneath it — a state of awareness that doesn't come with a fix for the thing you've become aware of. Most of the teachings that pretend to offer the awareness skip quickly to the fix. This one refuses to.

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