christopher david

On secrets, survival, and the first thing I ever finished for myself.

I want to tell you something I've never really said out loud before. Not fully, and not like this.

I published my novel I'm on My Way in 2003. I was thirty years old. I started writing it at twenty-seven from one of the loneliest places I've ever been in my life—a place of feeling unseen, unworthy, and desperate for a love I couldn't figure out how to reach.

On the outside, things looked okay. I had a job in finance, I was dating, and I was living on my own. But I was also stuck—professionally, because I hadn't finished my degree and was starting to feel how it was limiting me—and privately, in ways that were so much harder to name. My family and I were distant. Not because of anything dramatic. But because I was keeping a secret—one I'd been carrying since I was about five years old—and the weight of it had made me pull away from the people I loved most.

I hadn't said it to anyone, really. Hadn't fully said it to myself. And the not-saying had become its own kind of weight—this ongoing story, this recurring theme, that I didn't quite know how to navigate. I just knew what I felt, and I hated it.

So I birthed the character Jared Covington. I'd always said I'd name my first son Jared—and in ways I understood even then, that's what this felt like, an extension of me. The part that wanted more, that was relentless about searching for more, even when more felt so far out of reach. I described Jared on the back of the book as "a sometimes bitter, sometimes angry, but always hopeful young man." Even then, I knew exactly who I was writing about.

I wrote most of this novel at home, late, with headphones on. One song I kept returning to was Mary J. Blige’s, Be Happy. Not because it was comforting. But because it was accurate. It described, in six minutes, the gap between where I was and where I needed to be. I wasn't analyzing the song as much as I was living inside it. And that's exactly what writing this book felt like—living inside the thing I couldn't yet say.

Some sections I could barely get through. There were pages upon pages where Jared was asking the same questions I was asking myself at two in the morning, and writing them down meant I was admitting they were real. That I was as desperate and lonely as Mary and Jared. That I had built my entire sense of self and stability around things and people that couldn't hold the weight I'd given them.

Because of this, there was a part of me that thought I wouldn't finish. Not because of the writing—I enjoyed that. But because finishing would mean I would have said it all, out loud, in print for others to find and read, permanently. 

But I did finish. And more than two decades later I still remember what that felt like—because it was the first time in my life I had completed something that meant something to me. Not for a grade, or for a job, or for anyone else. For me. That feeling was like no other feeling I had ever felt, and it changed something in me. From that moment, I started looking at everything in my life that was unfinished—and I went about the intentional business of tying up loose ends. One by one.

Reading the novel now, all these years later, I can see how young my writer’s voice was. How much he was feeling without the tools to understand what he was feeling. It hurts a little, if I'm being honest, because I can hear how loudly that young man was crying for help in the only way he knew how. And, at the same time, I'm equally glad he found a way to ask.

So if by some chance you're somewhere he was—searching and building your whole world inside someone else's—I want you to hear this: don't. Build your world first. Then construct a bridge to theirs, one you can walk across and back, and burn if you have to. The love you're looking for isn't missing or outside of you. You may not have located or even know the language for it yet. But I can assure you, it's in you. It's always been in you.

Learn to speak the language of your own heart. Everything else flows from there. That's what I needed to hear in 2003, and that's what Jared needed too.