I can explain the objects of my interest carefully and exactly. I can tell you what a story does when it tightens its fist. I can tell you why a certain book or manuscript survives its transmission or copy and another dies. I can name the theorists, theologians, the histories, the stakes. I can also explain baseball statistics, film framing, classroom dynamics, institutional language, the weight of a syllabus. I can describe things until they become legible, and kind. What I cannot explain—what feels like it has quietly slipped out of my hands—is why I ever reached for these things in the first place.

There used to be reasons. Or maybe there were only stories that functioned like reasons. Narratives I carried the way other kids carried gloves or lucky socks or underwear. I believed that desire pointed to somewhere, and that interest was evidence of a future. Now my pursuits feel like objects I keep polishing long after forgetting who gave them to me. I move from task to task with fluency, competence, even grace, but without a center of gravity. I am very good at doing things without knowing why I am doing them.

As a kid, I believed in baseball with a devotion that bordered on theology. The diamond was a geometry I trusted. The rules were finite. Improvement was visible. You practiced, you got better. You can scale by the number of hours committed to the diamond. You didn’t need to explain why you loved it; the love was obvious in the body—in the dirt on your knees, the ache in your shoulder, the way your attention narrowed until nothing existed but the ball leaving the bat. For a while, I thought I would be great. Not metaphorically. Literally. I could imagine it: the stadium, the name on the back of a jersey, the future opening instead of closing. A play I remember to this day is when a ball came straight to my face when I played second base, and I could see the seams spinning because of the anxiety I had about how this ball, should it struck me between my eyes, would possibly end my future of this sport; but without thinking I caught the ball and tossed it back to first for the double play. Before I could think of what happened, the inning was over and I was jogging back to grab my bat. We were the bulldogs, and I wish for instead to call ourselves the handsome Dans.

But I was also a child who could see endings too clearly. I watched other boys grow taller, faster, stronger. I felt my own limits present themselves early, like a horizon that refused to move no matter how much I ran toward it. I understood that athletic greatness was not only about love or effort. It was about luck, bodies, physics, timing. I could see the version of myself I would become if I stayed: competent, maybe admired locally, but capped. The story already written. That vision depressed me in a way I didn’t yet have language for. It felt like mourning a life that was still technically available but already exhausted.

So I stopped. Not dramatically, only quietly. I traded cleats for books, practice for study. Academia offered something baseball could not: an illusion of infinite extension. There was always another idea, another question, another credential. No visible ceiling. No obvious end. It rewarded thinking the way baseball rewarded repetition. I learned quickly how to be good at it. I learned how to perform seriousness. How to turn curiosity into discipline, and how to turn discipline into identity.

And for a long time, that worked. Being academic became a kind of survival strategy. If I couldn’t be physically limitless, I could be intellectually endless. If I couldn’t trust my body, I could trust abstraction. I told myself stories about rigor and vocation and calling. I learned to explain my interests so well that the explanations began to replace the interests themselves. The language did the loving for me.

Now I am years into a doctoral program, and I am still here, still producing, still trying to meet expectations. On paper, the arc makes sense. But inside, something has thinned. I feel like someone who has been walking for so long that stopping feels more frightening than exhaustion. I am not burned out in the simple way. I am estranged. I can no longer access the original hunger. I only know the motions that hunger once justified.

When people ask me why I do what I do, I answer with fluency. I speak about pedagogy, ethics, aesthetics, inquiry. I sound convincing that I almost convince myself. But the truth is quieter and more unsettling: I don’t know anymore. The reasons have eroded through use. Like a word repeated until it loses meaning. Like a field overplayed until the grass refuses to grow back.

What frightens me is not failure. I am good at this. I know how to continue. What frightens me is the possibility that continuation has replaced desire entirely. That I chose academia because it delayed endings, and now I am inside an ending I can’t recognize. That I escaped one visible limit only to inhabit a subtler one: a life organized around explanation rather than belief. It now sometimes seems like a weird miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on doing this for years on end. They could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seems admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

Sometimes I think of that kid on the baseball field, already grieving his future before it arrived. I want to tell him something hopeful. But I am not sure what I believe. I want to say that choosing thinking over swinging a bat was not a mistake. I want to say that the reasons will return. But honesty interrupts me. All I can say is this: I learned how to be very good at surviving the loss of reasons. I learned how to keep going. And now the work is not to explain why—but to sit with the ache of not knowing, and see if something new dares to begin there.