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Some weeks don’t give you answers. They just give you more questions.

At the end of the week before last, I found out that my daughter’s dad had passed away.

And yes, I call him her dad. Because that’s exactly what he was.

He raised her when I didn’t have the opportunity to. He was a good man, someone I’d known since high school. And he loved my daughter as if she were his own, all the while knowing that biologically, she wasn’t.

But biology doesn’t make someone a father. Being there does.

He was there.

From what I understand, complications from a kidney transplant took his life. And just like that, another good person was gone.

My daughter and I have had a strained relationship, to put it mildly. There are years between us that I can never get back, circumstances I can’t undo, and wounds that I don’t know if I’ll ever have the opportunity to help heal.

But when I heard about her loss, I reached out. I asked if she needed anything.

I didn’t expect a response.

And I didn’t get one.

That’s okay. I didn’t reach out because I needed her to acknowledge me. I reached out because she’s my daughter, and regardless of where our relationship stands, that will never change.

But throughout that week, and especially at the funeral, there was one thought I couldn’t get out of my head.

“I wonder if she’s thinking, out of both of my dads, why did I have to lose the good one? The one I actually had a relationship with?”

That’s a painful question to ask yourself.

Even more painful when you can’t honestly say you wouldn’t understand why she might feel that way.

I don’t know if that thought ever crossed her mind. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe that’s just my own guilt finding another way to remind me of everything I’ve missed.

But it was there.

And that thought led me to another one.

If the good die young, and I’ve lost so many good people, yet I’m still here, what does that make me?

I’ve lost people to addiction. I’ve lost people to circumstances nobody could have predicted. I’ve watched good people leave this world while I, someone who spent years actively destroying his own life, continue to wake up every morning.

There was a time when thoughts like that would have consumed me.

I would’ve crawled inside my own head, made a home out of self-pity, and convinced myself that every tragedy was somehow another indictment of who I was as a person.

But something was different this time.

Instead of wanting to disappear into those thoughts, I wanted to understand them.

I wanted knowledge.

Knowledge of my purpose. Knowledge of what my higher power has planned for my life. Knowledge of why I’m still here when so many people I’ve loved aren’t.

And therein lies the problem.

I want answers to questions that might take the rest of my life to understand.

I’m not particularly patient when it comes to the things that matter most to me. When I want something, I want to understand how to get it, what steps to take, and how long it’s going to take to arrive.

But purpose doesn’t seem to work that way.

There’s no instruction manual. No guaranteed timeline. No one standing at the finish line telling you that every decision you’ve made has been the right one.

Sometimes all you can do is keep walking.

So that’s what I’m doing.

And then came the next test.

I had a pop-up market scheduled where I was selling my original artwork and copies of my novels.

I was prepared. I had everything organized. I had plenty of help setting up. I showed up ready to have a successful event.

And financially?

It was a disappointment.

I sold two paintings, both because a friend of my sister’s showed up and purchased them. And believe me, I’m grateful for that support.

But it wasn’t the event I’d hoped for.

I had invested my time, energy, creativity, and expectations into something that didn’t produce the results I wanted.

And once again, I found myself standing at a familiar crossroads.

The old version of me would’ve taken that disappointment personally.

Maybe my art isn’t good enough.

Maybe I’m wasting my time.

Maybe I should stop trying to turn something I love into something I can live off of.

Maybe I’m just not meant for this.

But for whatever reason, those thoughts don’t have the same power over me that they once did.

Because I’ve come to understand something.

A disappointing result doesn’t automatically mean I’ve chosen the wrong direction.

Sometimes a bad event is just a bad event.

Sometimes people don’t buy your work.

Sometimes you put everything you’ve got into something and still walk away with less than you expected.

That doesn’t erase the talent, effort, or purpose behind it.

And it certainly doesn’t mean you quit.

I currently work in a manufacturing plant. It’s honest work, and it pays my bills. I’m grateful to have a job that provides me with some stability.

But I know, deep in my soul, that I wasn’t put on this earth just to spend the rest of my life working in manufacturing.

I don’t say that because I believe I’m above the work. I’m not.

I say it because there’s something inside me that keeps insisting I’m supposed to do more.

I believe I’m meant to help people.

That’s the one thing I keep coming back to.

After everything I’ve experienced, everything I’ve survived, and everything I’ve lost, I cannot shake the feeling that those experiences are supposed to mean something beyond the pain they caused.

Am I supposed to help people through my paintings?

Through my writing?

Through sharing my experiences with addiction, recovery, loss, and all the ugly things that come with being human?

I don’t know.

Maybe it’s all of those things.

Maybe it’s something I haven’t even discovered yet.

What I do know is that if I can eventually make a living through my artwork and writing, it would give me the freedom to dedicate more of my life to helping others.

And that matters more to me than any amount of recognition.

I don’t need to be famous.

I don’t need everyone to know my name.

I just want to build a life where what I do feels connected to why I’m here.

And perhaps the hardest lesson I’m learning is that I don’t have to know exactly what my purpose looks like to keep moving toward it.

I’m realizing as I write this that this post doesn’t really have a neat beginning, middle, and end.

There’s no groundbreaking revelation waiting in the final paragraph.

No sudden understanding of why good people die.

No explanation for why I’m still here.

No guarantee that my next art event will be successful or that I’ll ever reach the point where I can support myself entirely through my creative work.

Maybe this post is more for me than anyone else.

Maybe I just needed to take these thoughts out of my head and put them somewhere they couldn’t keep circling.

But here’s what I can tell you.

I’m staying the course.

I’m remaining clean and sober.

I’m still painting.

I’m still writing.

I still want to help people.

And I’ll keep showing up to my manufacturing job until the day my art and writing can support me without it. I’ll continue building that dream in the hours I have outside of work, because wanting a different life doesn’t excuse me from taking care of the one I have right now.

I’m not going to confuse patience with surrender.

I’m not going to mistake disappointment for failure.

And I’m not going to let the fact that I don’t have all the answers convince me that there aren’t any.

Maybe surviving when others haven’t doesn’t make me better or worse than anyone else.

Maybe it just means I’m still here.

And perhaps instead of spending so much time asking why, I should be asking what I’m going to do with the time I’ve been given.

I don’t know where this road ends.

But for the first time in a long time, not knowing isn’t enough to make me turn around.