The Pilot Light
A lyric essay for the tired, the dogged, and the delusional
At some point — and you’ll know exactly when it happened, even if you can’t say out loud that it happened — you stop vomiting and become a pilot light.
This is not a metaphor I invented. This is what it actually feels like. There was a period of your life when you had so much to say. You were a geyser. You were a busted fire hydrant in July. You posted. You performed. You workshopped. You sent the email. You pitched the thing. You stayed up until 2am finishing the thing no one asked you to finish, and it felt holy, and you were certain — certain in the way only the young and the not-yet-humiliated can be certain — that the world was waiting for you specifically.
And then, gradually, the pressure dropped.
And now you’re a pilot light. Small. Blue. Quiet. Still technically on.
Here is what no one tells you about creative middle age: it is boring. Everyone prepared you for the possibility of failure — the rejection letters, the dry spells, the midnight crises of confidence. What they did not prepare you for was the particular agony of logging onto Twitter/X and seeing everyone else vomiting up what they have to say, and feeling not envy exactly, but something more deflating. Something like: I already did that.
I already had my stretch of life where I had so much to say.
The world still spins. The discourse still churns. The algorithm still wants content, always content, forever content. And you are standing at the edge of it going: hm. You know what sounds good right now? A walk.
So you go for a walk. It is early March. Not ski week yet, not spring break yet, just a regular Tuesday that the housewives have somehow claimed for themselves. You put one foot in front of the other past the Sacred Heart, past the park where the retired men play bocce with alarming intensity, past the coffee shop where the barista has the energy you used to have and it’s annoying as hell but also kind of beautiful.
And you think: maybe I should work at that coffee shop.
And then: no.
And then: maybe.
You are hungry. You stop at a Subway.
This is not a shameful thing. Subway is a perfectly fine establishment that has been unfairly maligned by people who have too much going on to appreciate the democratic beauty of a footlong. You are not one of those people anymore. You are a person who asks for the wheat bread and then asks if they can take the bread out from the middle — can you hollow it out a little, yeah, just scoop it — and you get the turkey with extra meat and you say sure, throw some shredded cheese on there, why not, let’s have a hell of a time, spinach, tomato, jalapeños, pepperoncinis, cucumbers, yellow mustard, sriracha, bang.
You eat it on a bench.
You think: this is actually incredible.
You think: I am a pilot light eating a Subway sandwich on a bench in early March and the sun is on my face and I am not dead and I am not homeless and I have not had a fight with my mother in eleven days.
Eleven days.
Here is what the defeated know that the stoked do not: silence has a texture. When you quiet down enough — when you stop performing your passion, stop staying stoked about tech or craft or the industry or whatever machine you were feeding — you can actually hear things. The world without you. The sound of it going on.
And yes, this is terrifying for about six months.
And then it starts to be interesting.
Because here is the thing about being a pilot light: you are not out. You are pilot. You are the one that, when the gas comes back on, when the thing you cannot name yet arrives, you will be the reason the whole burner catches. You are not done. You are conserving.
This is what we’re telling ourselves. This is the beautiful, necessary, possibly insane story we are choosing.
There was a period — you remember it, you dream about it sometimes — when everything was working. You had a routine. You woke up and made the coffee and went for the walk and came back and sat down and the words came. Or the work came. Or the ideas came. You were in it. The gym, the good salad from the bodega with the Caesar dressing, the podcast, the Paris Review in print, actual print, falling asleep on the couch and waking up still good, still humming, still you.
You were so yourself then.
And now some days you think: was that it? Was that my window? Did I sleep through the second act?
And here is where I need you to stay with me, because the answer is no.
The answer is definitively, stubbornly, delusionally no.
Dr. Martin Luther King asked: What are you doing for others?
On your worst days you will answer: nothing. I am doing nothing for others. I am eating a hollowed-out Subway sandwich and staring at my phone and going to the library to do the puzzle and watching the housewives circulate.
But you are also still here. You are still walking. You are still, at some embarrassing and unkillable level, trying. You went outside. You did the lap. You thought the thoughts and then you wrote them down or recorded them or sent them somewhere because you are a person who cannot fully stop, even when they want to, even when stopping looks like wisdom.
That compulsion is not nothing. That compulsion is everything.
Here is my pitch to you, fellow pilot light, fellow dogged delusional millennial who was promised a lot and got a different thing:
Keep going.
Not because the breakthrough is definitely coming. Not because the algorithm will eventually reward you. Not because the hustle, as they say, pays off. Keep going because the alternative is becoming someone who used to. Someone who had a voice, who was a writer, who did make things, all past tense, all amber, all museum.
The funniest and most humiliating thing about creativity is that it doesn’t care if you’re in the mood. It doesn’t care if you’re relevant. It doesn’t care if your last thing landed. It just wants to know: are you still in? Are you still available?
Say yes. Even on the bench. Even with the sandwich. Even when what you make is a 35-minute sad walk that you transcribe and title and post anyway, because at least it’s something, at least it’s yours, at least you are still the kind of person who makes things out of their suffering rather than just suffering.
We are going to be rich.
I don’t know when. I don’t know from what. Some of us will write the thing and some of us will build the thing and some of us will teach or bake or perform or start the late-career band we always meant to start, and it will work, and it will feel as good as we thought it would, and we will be sixty and thriving and insufferable about it.
This is a delusion. This is also a plan.
The pilot light stays on.
Get on your bike. Get the sandwich. Go do the puzzle. Let the sun absorb into your skin.
And then come back. Sit down. Start.
You are still a writer. You are still tender. You are still a voracious reader.
Language still loves you. It just got quiet for a minute.
It’ll come back. It always comes back.