I have been a people pleaser my entire life. Even when I should not have been. What people would think of me mattered. It shaped my words, my silences, the softer version of myself I kept handing over to be liked. Even when it cost me something. Even when it should not have mattered at all.

That stops here.

Not out there, where I still have to smile and agree and make myself small. But here. In these stories. Here I owe no one a gentler version. No one to protect, no one to flatter, no one to keep comfortable.

There are only two people I would never make small. My wife, and our son.

She is the most beautiful thing that has happened to me, and he is the cutest proof that she stayed. There was a time my body was quietly trying to leave. A life threatening illness, and a fight I did not have the strength to win on my own. She won it for me. Mostly by herself, in the stretches when I had nothing left to give it. I am here, writing this at all, because she refused to let me go.

So when I say there is nothing I would not do for her, I am not reaching for a pretty line. I would burn the whole world down for that woman and call it a fair trade. Our son has the easiest job in it. He only has to exist, and be loved past all reason.

Almost everything else you will find here is invented. The people you meet in these stories come from my imagination. A few of them carry the shape of something I once saw, or lived, or could not put down. But I stitch them together myself, and the seams are mine.

If I am obsessed with anything, it is that. The imagination. The stubborn, private work of holding pieces together until they become a story that feels true, whether or not it ever happened.

I think them. I write them. That is the whole arrangement.

• Good writing needs indulgence.
• A story written to be liked belongs to no one.
• Some things are only worth writing if they cost something.
• If it does not risk something, it is not worth reading.