TWC

About

I'm Miguel.

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I came to this late. Before it, I had a life that looked perfect from the outside and came apart anyway, and I spent a year putting it back together in a shape I recognized less and liked more. I mention it because it's the only credential I have. I didn't learn this as a job first and a skill second. I learned what men carry by carrying it myself, badly, in front of everyone, and then having to sit in the quiet afterward and figure out how to put it back together and what it had cost.

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That's also when I noticed the thing I can't stop noticing now. How much a man will hold himself up without ever setting any of it down. How rarely anyone offers to take an end of it.

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A travelling wellness company

Most of what I do happens somewhere other than where I live.

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Ottawa is home. It isn't where most of the work is. The men who write to me are also from Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and cities I never thought about until someone mentioned them. So I go. An Airbnb in a city I barely see, for a few days, and a drive or flight back. For a while now, in both French and English, and it suits me more than I expected it to.

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There's something in the travel that helps, I think. I arrive from nowhere and leave for nowhere. A travelling companion. A man can tell me things he can't tell anyone who'll still be there Tuesday. By then, I'll be gone.

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The company, the massage, and what they are for

Sometimes its only talk. Dinner that runs long, a walk neither of us turns back from, a film that neither of us watches.

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Sometimes its a warm room and a bottle of oil and my hands working down a man's back while he says nothing at all for an hour.

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Most are both, in an order we don't decide in advance. The massage is often what makes the rest possible. It gives a man something to have booked. He can say he wanted his shoulders looked at. He doesn't have to say he just wanted somebody in the room to talk to.

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I don't work from a script. The first ten minutes are mostly listening. What he's holding in his head, what he lets go of easily, what he doesn't. After that everything finds its own shape. What a man asks for and what he's actually after are rarely the same thing, and I'd rather follow the second one.​

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What you can count on

No last name required. Nothing written down. No trace of you anywhere I could lose it. Everything on here is nice and secure.

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You will never be asked to explain yourself to me. Not why you're writing, not what you want, not why you waited this long to ask for it.

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I'll say the other part plainly, since it saves us both time. Most men who write to me only tell me what they want done to them and never ask who's on the other end. I turn those men down. I take the ones who want to know who I am as much as they want anything else, and that filtering is most of my work.

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The writing

I write here about being diagnosed with bipolar I, about addiction, and about rebuilding after a great deal of wreckage. Not the recovery arc where everything gets better. Not the story where suffering turns into wisdom. The ongoing, unglamorous work of living with a brain that tilts without warning.

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A diagnosis like mine comes with a crowd, and its mostly not a good one. You learn to live alongside the voices and not hand them the microphone. Most days it works.

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The two things sit on the same site on purpose. A man who reads the essays in Writings knows exactly who's going to be in the room with him later that night.