We are all born expecting to live within our father’s gravity. To feel the safety of his presence. The warmth of his glow. To have a center that holds us in place while we learn who we are. But what happens when that center is absent? When you are cast into open space before you ever learned what it felt like to be held in orbit?

My father was funny, capable, and cool, and I deeply loved him. He was also a meth addict whose emotional absence left a gravitational void in my psyche that I spent the next three decades trying to fill — first with a heavenly father who would never leave, then with surrogate fathers who eventually did, then with achievement and mission and the relentless pursuit of proving my value to men who held positional power over me. When he died, he took with him the last quiet hope I had been carrying. The faith went first. Then the certainty. Then the identity I had built on top of both.

This publication is the map I’m making of that wreckage. It exists first for my four daughters, who need me to become the gravitational center my father never was for me — and who deserve a father who did the work of understanding why. But it’s also for anyone who has ever been thrown from orbit and is still trying to find their footing in the open space.