The end of a project rarely coincides with the end of its usefulness. When I walked away from The Rational Martian in late 2021, I did not walk away from the work itself. The collaboration that had begun in the push and pull of discipline and witness had run its course. What remained was not absence but residue: fragments of what we had built together, lessons in what could and could not survive strain, and a conviction that the failures I had been writing about were not abstractions but realities that demanded continuity.
This is where January 2022 begins for me. Not in rupture, but in a new register.
The Collapse That Would Not End
By the first week of the year, the nation had grown weary of pandemic language. “Post-COVID” was spoken as if the virus had packed its bags and left. In reality, hospitals were still filled with patients who carried the long tail of infection. The staff were stretched beyond recognition, the reserves of stamina exhausted. It was not a wave anymore; it was erosion.
I had spent the previous two years in hospitals where every hallway was a ledger of choices: who got a bed, who got the last available dose of remdesivir, who was intubated, who was left to wait. The public image of healthcare was one of coordinated response. The reality was triage in perpetuity.
Even when the acute surge receded, the collateral damage remained. Patients with delayed diagnoses arrived sicker. Chronic conditions worsened in silence. Preventive care had vanished from whole neighborhoods. The collapse had simply changed shape.
The Weight of Severance
When I stopped writing as part of a duo, the absence was not stylistic but structural. The Rational Martian had always been two voices: one urging discipline, one recording failure. The interplay gave it tension. When that fell away, I had to decide what my own testimony required.
What I realized was that I could no longer dilute. Euphemism, rhetorical balance, careful packaging—these belonged to a partnership. Alone, the responsibility shifted. My words needed to carry the weight of bodies I had watched deteriorate in waiting rooms. They needed to document what I had seen in nurses who could no longer pick up an extra shift because they had already worked through their reserves of endurance.
Severance meant stripping away the layer that cushioned the reader. What remains here will not comfort. It is not supposed to.
The Clinic as Fault Line
By early 2022, I was spending more of my time in a neighborhood clinic in Philadelphia. The contrast with the tertiary hospital was not one of scale but of exposure. In the hospital, failure was distributed across departments. In the clinic, it was intimate and unshielded.
A mother brought in her two children, both coughing, both underweight. She had lost her job in food service when her restaurant closed in 2020, and the loss of income meant rationing groceries. The children were not starving, but they were not thriving. Malnutrition was the shadow symptom of a pandemic economy.
An older man came in with uncontrolled diabetes. His last appointment had been in 2019. He missed two years of follow-ups because his insurance had lapsed and the reinstatement process was impossible to navigate without time, internet access, and patience he did not have. When he arrived, his blood sugar levels were catastrophic, his vision blurring, his feet beginning to lose sensation. This was not delayed care. It was denied care disguised as bureaucratic inevitability.
The clinic revealed the true cost of systemic neglect: not just disease, but the narrowing of options until survival itself was contingent.
What Re-entry Demands
Starting again as a writer in this new context meant committing to record without adornment. What I saw had to be translated into testimony that resisted the temptation to soften.
Re-entry also demanded something of me personally. Severance from one project had coincided with the severance of a relationship. That fracture could have silenced me. Instead, it clarified the stakes. If I stopped writing, the failures I was witnessing would remain undocumented. If I continued, there was at least the possibility that testimony might outlast fatigue.
The re-entry point is not optimism. It is obligation. To witness and to record is not a luxury. It is the only counterweight to silence.
What This Year Will Be
I begin this year not with predictions but with commitments. Each month I will record what I see in clinics, in hospitals, in communities where health is always provisional. I will not write policy papers. I will not offer abstractions. I will write bodies, hallways, the smell of bleach that cannot cover the odor of infection, the waiting rooms that double as holding pens for a system that no longer functions.
This is not pessimism. It is recognition. Systems are collapsing not because collapse is inevitable, but because collapse has been permitted.
The act of writing here is not to persuade. It is to testify. What I record will not make for easy reading. But it will be precise, factual, and unsentimental—because that is what the moment requires.
Severance is behind me. Re-entry begins now.