I wrote something on my fortieth birthday that I never showed anyone.

It started like this:

"I graduated high school late, left college early, was fired from my own company, and led multiple unsuccessful businesses. I've been through my wife being diagnosed with breast cancer while living in a distant country, have two children with autism, and struggle to make ends meet on a monthly basis. I have no savings, fight for everything I have, and diagnosed myself with Alcohol Use Disorder."

I wrote that four years ago, sitting alone, trying to make sense of a life that felt like it was held together with duct tape and good intentions.

Here's what I didn't write: I was still drinking.

I'm Keith. I'm 45 years old. I live on a Mason 43 sailboat named Lost and Found and today — as I write this — I'm anchored at Sandy Hook, New Jersey, at the entrance to New York Harbor. Twenty-two to thirty knots of wind out of the west. Divorce papers finalized this morning. Sailing north toward my kids.

It's that kind of day.

The boat is named Lost and Found because that's what it is. I bought her after losing most of what mattered. A marriage. A business in Grenada that got partially swallowed by government corruption. A storage unit full of climbing gear I forgot to pay for. My relationship with my kids. My sobriety — that one I found my way back to. Day 1,349 as of today.

I didn't grow up planning any of this. I grew up on a 30-foot Pearson Wanderer called the Judi Ann — named after my mother — sailing out of Long Island with my family. I fell in love with the water before I had words for it. I fell in love with surfing around the same time.

I also fell in love with a girl in Hoboken over PBR tall boys and Jameson on the rocks, and we talked until sunrise about changing the world through sustainable seafood. We kissed. We dreamed. We built a life together.

Then I drank it down. Slowly. Then all at once.

This is not a sailing blog.

I mean — I sail. I'll write about that. But what I'm really writing about is what happens when you strip everything away and find out who's left. What you do with the wreckage. How you sail back toward the people you love when you're the one who caused the storm.

I've been fired from companies I built. I've run a tuna operation in Grenada and watched a government official tank it to protect whatever corrupt thing we'd stepped on. I've hauled out a boat in the Caribbean and had a stranger on the dock next to me recognize me from the surf, and that stranger — somehow — is the reason I got sober. I've had lightning strike my boat two days before I was supposed to sail north to see my kids.

These are all real stories. I'll tell them all.

That birthday essay I wrote at forty ended like this:

"This is a book of life. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It's a book about living — floating, literally and figuratively. It's a book that will normalize the abnormal that is a part of, and defines, all of us."

I'm 45 now. The book is still being written. I'm going to write it here.

I chose to not follow a beaten path, and I've had to bear the weight of clearing my own. That's not a complaint. It's just the cost of living the way I live — wide open, forward, sometimes too fast. Some days that weight is manageable. Some days it pins me to the bunk at 4am listening to the water move against the hull.

But the morning always comes. And so does the next passage.

If you've ever lost something you built, loved someone and couldn't hold the marriage together, or found yourself starting over later than you planned — I think you'll find something here.

If you don't relate to any of that, then you'll just find some truly unbelievable stories.

I'm glad you're reading.