In The Power of Hate, the Impact of Kindness, I shared about a cruel comment left on a video I posted. It was meant to celebrate strength after a limb difference diagnosis, but one hateful remark lingered longer than I expected.

I wrote the piece because it reminded me how much words matter. Hate can be sharp and loud. But kindness carries weight too. For every cruel voice, there were countless messages of support and love.

What moved me most was the choice in front of me. I cannot control what people say, but I can choose what shapes our story. I can choose compassion, advocacy, and to raise my son in a world where dignity is louder than hate.

- Anna Borle

What the Fire Made

an essay in survival



I have been broken in ways that don't show up on x-rays.

Not once. Not in one clean catastrophic moment I could point to and say, *there, that's where it happened.* But in layers, over decades, the way stone erodes. A childhood that taught me conditional love and called it God. A system that failed me when I did everything right. Children I couldn't reach across distances that weren't geographic. A body that kept showing up to a life that kept asking more than I thought I had left to give.

Most people who know me now see the poet. The coach. The man who sits with other people in their darkest seasons without flinching. They don't always see what it cost to become that person. What had to be burned away first.



I learned early that love has conditions.

That it arrives with fine print,
with a list of requirements,
with a door that locks
when you stop performing
whatever version of yourself
they needed you to be.

I spent years trying to pick that lock.
I spent more years understanding
there was nothing on the other side worth opening.



The first grief most of us carry is the grief of the family we were supposed to have. The love that was supposed to be unconditional and wasn't. The people who were supposed to show up and didn't. This grief doesn't come with a funeral or a casserole or a date you can point to on a calendar. It's the slow accumulation of absences. The gift that wasn't sent. The call that wasn't made. The moment you needed someone most and heard silence where a parent was supposed to be.

That grief shaped me before I had language for it.

Then life stacked more on top.

I lost children to circumstances I could not control. Not to death, but to distance, to systems, to the long corrosive work of years without access. If you have ever loved a child you couldn't reach, you know this particular grief has no clean edges. It doesn't resolve. It just becomes part of how you move through the world, carefully, with one hand always slightly outstretched.

I lost versions of myself. The man I thought I was supposed to be. The father I imagined I would be. The believer who thought doing the right thing guaranteed the right outcome. Each of those losses required mourning for something that wasn't a person. It was a future. An assumption. A story you'd been telling yourself about how your life would go.



And then there was Beth.



She arrived in my life and stayed for twenty-three years. She loved people exactly where they were. No performance required, no conditions attached. She was the antithesis of everything I had been taught love was, and she showed me, slowly, over years of watching her do it, what it actually looks like to love someone without an agenda.

She kept bees. She knew things about growing and tending and patience that I'm still learning.

She died last August.

It broke something fundamental. Not something that can be fixed. Something that has to be rebuilt differently, the way a bone that breaks badly heals carrying the record of the break forever, sometimes stronger at the fault line for it.

I have two teenagers at home who lost their mother. I watch them do the math every day, figuring out how to become people without her there to witness it. I am doing the same math. We are learning the same country together with no map.



Grief is not a river you cross.
It is not a valley you pass through.
It is not a season with a known end.

It is a country you move to.
And you will learn its seasons,
its particular quality of light in November,
the way certain songs mean something different now,
the way you reach for your phone
to tell someone something funny
and remember.

You will build a life in this country.
Not the life you had.
A different one.
Real and yours
and full of things worth staying for.



Transformation is not a reward for suffering. It is not something grief does to you automatically, the way heat is supposed to turn coal into diamonds. Plenty of people suffer and come out the other side diminished, hardened, closed.

The transformation I'm talking about is a choice. Made in the dark. Made when you can't see what you're choosing toward, only what you're choosing away from. Made badly and imperfectly and sometimes reversed and made again.

I had to choose, more than once, to stay. To keep showing up for children who needed a father when I had nothing left. To keep learning how to love people I had been failing. To keep writing when writing was the only thing that still told the truth. To keep getting out of bed in a house where someone was missing who had made it a home.

Those choices, accumulated over years, over losses, over failures and small corrections and trying again, that is what made me who I am.

Not the suffering. The choosing.

---

I am a poet. Over thirty years, over six thousand poems, every emotional landscape I have ever survived. I am a coach who sits with people in their hardest seasons because I have been in seasons like theirs. The grief. The betrayal. The systems that failed. The love that taught me better. The loss that recalibrated everything.

I did not arrive here clean or whole or finished.

I arrived here forged.

---

If you are in the fire right now,
it burns.
I won't tell you otherwise.

The person on the other side
is not a better version of who you were.
They are a different person.
Built from the same material
but shaped by what you survived.

Grief is permanent.
So is the person it makes you.

And love, the real kind,
the kind without conditions,
the kind I had to have modeled for me
by a woman who kept bees
and knew things about tending,

love is worth every broken thing
that taught you how to give it.

I survived this.
You can survive yours.

We are still here.
Still choosing.
Still becoming.



*Bear Sage is a poet, intuitive/empathic reader, and life coach with over thirty years of writing experience and more than a six thousand poems. They work with people navigating grief, trauma, and transformation from the Appalachian mountains.*

You can find more of his writing by subscribing to his BearSage Substack

- Near Sage

The Weatherman Winks

The alarm rings
like it always does.
Same pitch.
No mercy.

Morning settles in
with a cool and calm
I can’t afford.

Clothes changed.
Meds measured.
Syringes lined up
like an ellipsis
in a tired,
run-on sentence
running out
of action verbs.

Lift. Adjust.
Check the clock.
Check his breathing.
Check myself.
Again.

I used to laugh
at the weatherman
trapped in repetition
on Groundhog Day.

I still do—
but now I relate
to the cloudy nature
of it all.

Caregiving insists
on staying,
on asking the same questions
without remorse.

By noon
I swear I’ve lived
this lunch hour before—
the paperwork loop,
the calls that circle back
to nowhere,
the polite voices trained
not to hear urgency
or promise resolution.

Late afternoon stretches
like a hallway
that keeps adding
trap doors.

I feel the weight of yesterday
sitting inside today,
stacked neatly,
unpaid.

And still—
he smiles.

Not the kind
the movies cash in on.
A small, brave,
blink-and-you’ll-miss-it focus—
a moment he locks in
and says I’m here.
And so I stay.

Something shifts then.
Not the schedule.
Not the prognosis.
The light…

It sneaks in sideways—
through a window
I stopped looking at,
landing on his red curls.
The murky forecast clears.
The weatherman winks at me.

I realize the day
isn’t repeating.
I am.

And repetition,
handled with care,
becomes devotion.
Becomes proof.

Early evening exhales.
The sun lowers itself gently,
a gracious nod
to my revelation.

Tonight, I stand
in the afterglow.
Even the moonlight
feels earned.

Tomorrow,
it won’t matter
what the shadow says—
I’m choosing hope,
anyway.

- Chris B.

My Drug of Choice

Sometimes someone else’s truth helps you see your own more clearly. That happened to me this morning while reading a note about grief and addiction. This post is about pain, recovery, and the growth that comes from facing what hurts.

I am at the beginning of the world’s most boring day. After sitting in traffic for what felt like a short lifetime and dropping my little guy at school, I am now spending the next two to four hours waiting for my car to be serviced. I generally hate being bored, so I fill my empty time with music, podcasts, or, like this morning, with reading and writing. I rotate between Substack and books, but today I wasn’t feeling creative and I didn’t bring a book along, so Substack it was.

As soon as I opened the app, a note caught my attention. It was written by a Substacker I follow closely. He writes about grief and addiction, two topics close to my heart. He is a man who has lost important people in his life and who spent years burying his pain beneath alcohol. Today, he shared a heartfelt realization that while he no longer drinks, he has once again been burying his pain, this time under the high of weed. In his note, he acknowledged his struggle and vowed to stop, to feel the pain underneath instead, to keep writing, to use his grief to connect with others who are struggling like him.

It’s funny. Even though I have never struggled with an addiction to a substance, I have always felt a deep kinship with people who have. It took me years to understand why. It is because anorexia, my drug of choice, is not so different from addiction at all. My high came from restriction, from the sense of control that filled the space where pain should have been. And while anorexia may not look like addiction on the surface, underneath, the similarity is striking.

My relationship with anorexia started like a love story. Anorexia didn’t feel like punishment at first; she felt like a gift. She made me feel special, almost untouchable. She gave me something to hold on to when things around me felt unpredictable. Her rules were simple, and the more I followed them, the more powerful I felt. Hunger gave me a kind of high. I liked how it made the noise of life fade into the background. In those early days with her, I thought she was protecting me. I felt clear, disciplined, and strong. When she was near, I didn’t need anyone else. She made me believe I was in control.

But like many unfortunate love stories that start out with passion, the beginning was an illusion. What felt like freedom quickly turned into dependence. The line between choice and compulsion blurred so quietly that I didn’t notice it disappearing. I thought she was mine, but really, I always belonged to her. Each time I went back, I told myself this time would be different. I swore I could manage her, keep her in check, stay in control. But she always took more. She crept into every decision, every meal, every thought. I lied to protect her. I built my days around what she allowed. I made excuses and rearranged my life to keep her close. At first, she whispered; later, she barked orders. What once made me feel strong eventually made me feel small.

It is hard to explain the grief that comes with recovery. I used to think recovery meant relief and gratitude, maybe even joy. And sometimes it does. But before it felt like that, it felt like heartbreak. Letting her go felt like losing a relationship that made sense. I missed her certainty, her structure, her control. I missed the way she dulled every pain. No one told me that letting go would break my heart before I could rebuild. I mourned the loss of something that tried to destroy me but also once made me feel alive. I think that confusion is part of what kept me sick for so long. I had to learn to live without the very thing that once helped me survive.

Even now, I still hear her whisper sometimes. She is quieter now, but she will always know where to find me. The difference is that I no longer mistake her for love. What I have now is steadier, more forgiving, more real, even if that means facing painful feelings. What I have now is not the high of control or the safety of disappearing, but the relief of presence.

We all transmute our pain in different ways. Some people drink. Some overwork. Some scroll. Some starve. The forms vary, but the purpose is the same: to protect ourselves from what feels too big to bear. That is the thing about pain. You can bury it, numb it, or disguise it, but you cannot make it disappear. Sooner or later, it finds a way to the surface.

I do not restrict anymore, at least not now. I have learned to be careful with the word never, because first loves are seductive. They know our weak spots. They whisper to us when we are most vulnerable. Even without anorexia, I still find ways to cover my pain. I bury it in busyness, in striving, in perfectionism, in my phone, in constant motion. But every time I slow down enough to notice, I realize that what I am running from is rarely as dangerous as it feels. The key is to recognize the defense, and then to pause, and finally, to feel what it is covering. Like my fellow Substacker, I am learning to notice when I am burying pain, and like him, I am trying to use that as an indicator that I need to face difficult feelings.

If there is anything my writing has taught me, it is that pain is sticky. It waits. It finds its way out. You cannot choose whether you will hurt, only how you will meet the hurt when it comes. So when pain finds me again, as it always does, I hope I will choose to face it. To write it. To share it. And I thank that fellow Substacker for reminding me that facing pain and telling the truth about it is how we keep each other from being alone inside it.

- The Therapist Who Came Undone