The monument I built to leave behind didn’t last for long. The cabin started rotting almost as soon as we finished it.

We had built no foundation or floor so the walls lay in the dirt. We left the bark on the logs so moisture from the ground lay trapped against the wood. As the logs rotted, the walls sank. Eventually, the roof weighed directly on the door and the doorframe. The door cracked down the middle and jabbed into the ground, half opened. With the door opened, someone stole the stove. Then the two-by-fours holding up the doorframe snapped and the logs shifted, exposing long spikes on both sides of the doorway.

There was a time when you could still turn sideways and slip through the door without getting cut. I would sit for a few minutes on one of the beds and look out at the woods and the waterfall through the jagged triangle that the doorframe made. But then enough logs rotted so there was no longer the head space even to stoop and sit down. After that, I sat on the roof, in the same way I sat on the wall opposite my father’s grave, and talked to the teenager I used to be. Once, I showed my decomposing cabin to a friend I met studying at Oxford. He suggested burning it down.

My entire life I have suffered from what Nietzsche called “the melancholy of all things finished”:

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way—before one began.

Some lessons I applied to the little cabin we built as a playhouse for Isabelle and Caroline, though finishing that left me dreaming about rebuilding the cabin above the waterfall once my children grew older. When Isabelle was in high school, she and I started planning to do that. It would be my third cabin. We had to start by demolishing the cabin that was there.

Demolition we scheduled for a week we spent at the farm on vacation. We organized our tools of destruction on the front porch and then posed for Suzanne before walking to the waterfall.

We scraped the shingles off the roof with shovels. You can see how close to the ground the roof had sunk by the fact that my mother’s dog, who could barely jump on a couch, had followed us up there.

Then we pulled out all the nails.

We bagged the shingles and the nails and the chimney that was no longer attached to a stove and packed all this out to the road. Then we burned the cabin down. It wasn’t as criminally insane to do this during a wet summer in New England as it would be in other parts of the country, but that is not a strong defense. We had a gas powered pump, about the size of a small chainsaw, that I brought up there to control the fire. Except once the fire started, I couldn’t get the pump running for almost an hour. Any one of my children can tell a very detailed story, which doesn’t reflect well on me as a citizen and a parent, about how certain it seemed that we would lose control of the fire and burn down the forest around us. The pump finally started. Water from the stream prevented any spread from the fire. The next day we raked out hinges and more nails and other hardware from the ashes and packed those out as well.

For about a year, I went to sleep at night imagining how the new cabin would look. We would have a porch in front, cantilevered past the edge of the hill and overhanging the waterfall. The dimensions would be larger. The walls would be higher and the roof steeper so we could have a sleeping loft. And though I knew we would never do it, I dreamed of building a stone chimney with rocks from the stream. But once the site was clear, once we had marked the trees we wanted to cut, I couldn’t face it. All the planning and problem solving, any daily tension about how much we got done, felt too much like my job.

After Baseline folded, I joined an Indian software company that specialized in educational publishing. I spent almost two years selling software services to American publishers—traveling constantly, wearing that watch the TSA agent recognized in Logan Airport. Then I joined the product development team at Curriculum Associates, a small educational publisher north of Boston. About 100 employees occupied half of an office building next to a beaver pond. The other half was empty—unused cubicles or concrete floors like an unfinished basement. Quarterly company meetings didn’t use all the chairs in the cafeteria, the parking lot wasn’t even half full in the middle of a working day, and I had some kind of pressing business with almost everyone I met in the hall.

Developing a new digital product, I worked harder than I ever had before. Dozens of emails waiting in the time it took to drive home. Conference calls at nine or ten at night to discuss some crisis before the next day began. Hours spent awake in the dark, thinking and worrying. Weeks and weeks in a row without any time off. But what we launched engaged teachers and children and delivered results. Revenue rapidly increased. Two years in a row, we started January with twice the employees we had the January before. It became harder to find a seat in cafeteria or a parking spot after ten in the morning or to recognize all the faces I saw in the hall.

After the first year we doubled in size, the CEO worried that we would have trouble solving problems because we didn’t know each other well enough. He organized a management retreat where we did a getting-to-know-you exercise called a lifeline. Each of us stood in front of a group and graphed the story of our life since college. The vertical axis was happiness. The horizontal axis was age.

You were supposed to tell the story while you graphed, describing what you did and how happy it made you. We broke up into smaller groups of about fifteen people. In my group were voices on the other end of some of those late night calls, as well as new managers who had more qualifications than I did, people who wouldn’t have joined our company two or three years before. Former teachers talked about leaving the classroom and wept for the students who still needed them. I listened to software engineers with job histories since college describe their dot-com experiences and steadily increasing responsibility. I heard stories about wrong turnings and false starts in careers, failing projects in troubled companies, and even job loss.

But when it was my turn, I didn’t tell the truth. My line started after college. I graphed a year in the library, doing research for a reference publisher. I described studying Greek and Latin literature, as well as ancient and modern philosophy, at Oxford. Then standing at the easel before a ring of faces, I drew a black box about five years long. That’s how I labeled it: Black box. Some people laughed uncomfortably. I gave no explanation. Later, I avoided answering questions. When the line emerged from the black box I was married and working at Houghton Mifflin, the month Suzanne became pregnant with Isabelle.

I wrote a novel in the black box, with the same drive and intensity that I built the cabin. I drafted it waiting tables in New York City and then living by myself at the farm while it still had no electricity, before my mother lived there. I moved to Boston, married Suzanne, started a career, and finished the last chapter in the same room with Isabelle as she sat in her crib and babbled at me through the bars. For two years, I tried to find an agent and a publisher and finally published it myself. It never found an audience.

I started another novel after the first one failed, which I concealed in a wounded way. I built myself a study in our attic and wrote up there in the mornings before commuting into the office. At first, I wrote for two hours a day. As my family grew and my career demanded more time, writing became a narrower part of my day—now ninety minutes, now sixty, now forty five, and then it would be interrupted for months by the pressure of a project and I wouldn’t remember where I had stopped when I started again. So I gave it up. Around the time of the lifeline exercise, I had stopped writing all together.

For years after my father died, his friend Marc Schwartz still lived on the same block where I grew up in New Haven, nine houses down the sidewalk and then across the street. The summer after I finished at Oxford, just before entering the black box, I stayed with my mother for a few weeks. One evening, Marc stopped me on the street. I was walking and he was driving. He asked me what I planned to do next. Leaning on the roof of his car, I told him that I planned to live in New York, work in restaurants, and start writing.

He asked a few questions about that and fell silent, staring down the length of the street. “I worry about you,” he said finally. Then by way of explanation, he added, “Because you have visions.” He looked at me for a long moment.

I had to admit that was true. I did have visions.

“Your father never really had visions. Not exactly. That wasn’t the kind of person he was.”

Between my father’s death and my own illness lay a dream. He never planned for death, or so I thought as a teenager. I could plan for death. I could leave something behind. That was my vision. As the recession lifted and my career stabilized, as I transitioned into digital development at a company where everyone cared what our customers liked about our products after they bought them, the time when I might achieve that dream had long since passed. Yet even after I stopped writing, I kept starting again. I told myself I had stopped. I told myself I had failed, but I would start writing only to stop again. However many times I demolished the dream and then burned it down, it kept returning.

I still heard the sound of an audience, the way you might imagine it standing just offstage in an empty theater. What would I ever do now that could fill a theater? It felt like hearing voices. Suzanne is a clinical social worker. She once did an intake with a little, dignified man. He was homeless. In the course of the intake she asked him if he knew his diagnosis. He looked insulted and said of course he did. “I have depression and a little schizophrenia in my left ear.” The fact I couldn’t accept my own failure, the fact I still heard these ambitions in my left ear, felt at times like madness.