Brain on Fire

Erin Doom

Feast of the Nativity of Our Most Holy Lady the Theotokos & Ever-Virgin Mary

Anno Domini 2026, September 8

The Fire

I cannot keep up with myself.

This morning, while driving my Amazon Flex route, my mind was running wild. One thought followed another so quickly that I could barely hold on to the first before the second arrived. One idea turned into three more. A phrase appeared. Then an image, along with a book title. And then things began connecting and the outline of a reflection was born. By the time I reached for a way to capture one, two more had already appeared, and I was struggling to hang on to the first.

This continued through the afternoon. It followed me home. Ideas arrived while I was trying to complete other tasks, while walking from one room to another, while driving to a home to test water. More things were passing through my mind than I had the ability to preserve. Some of them came back. Some of them, I think, are simply gone.

My brain is on fire.

I do not mean that I am merely busy. I have been busy for most of my life. Nor do I mean that I have a long list of things I would like to accomplish. Lists can be written down. Tasks can be ordered. Projects can be assigned a place and a deadline. “Can” is the operative word here, because I have never been particularly good at organization. But this is different.

It's as though something has been kindled and now refuses to stop burning. The fire leaps from one part of my life to another: from a memory to a book, from a word to an encounter, from the arrangement of a room to the formation of a human being. A tire becomes a backyard project. A delivery route becomes a meditation on carrying words. An old sales call becomes a reflection on anger, dignity, and repentance. A yellow notepad becomes part of a larger vision for how a person might practice becoming. Nothing remains a singular thought or idea for long. Everything seems to point beyond itself.

The Treasury

This did not begin yesterday. I have been reading intensely since the second grade. I can still remember sleepovers with my friend Thomas Stanga when we would read through the entire night—mostly Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown books. But that was forty-five years ago, and the reading did not stop. Which means that today I have almost five decades of reading and study, work and travel, teaching and institution-building, failures and endurance—not merely facts stored in my mind, but knowledge accumulated in the mind and body.

I now possess a rich treasury I could not have assembled all at once: books marked and remembered, notes and lectures, things written and taught, the immense body of work gathered through Eighth Day Institute, and the wisdom that can come only from having lived through what one once merely studied. The resources were there, but they did not yet form a coherent and integrated whole.

Now they are rushing toward one another. The fire is not creating something from nothing; it is drawing from the treasury and revealing unsuspected relationships within it. That may be the strangest part of this experience. I am not suddenly receiving an entirely new life. I am seeing the life I have already lived begin to disclose its shape. Experiences that once seemed disconnected are recognizing one another. A desire first felt decades ago finds its place beside something I thought of yesterday. An apparent detour reveals that it supplied material I could not have received by remaining on the road I had chosen for myself.

The fire is not consuming the past. It is illuminating and synthesizing it. I cannot help but think of my patron saint, St. John of Damascus, who gathered the inheritance he had received and gave it ordered form. His example deserves a fuller reflection of its own; here it is enough to say that synthesis can itself be an act of creation.

The Gift and the Anguish

And yet illumination can be overwhelming. We often speak romantically about inspiration, as though the creative life consists of sitting quietly beside a window in a coffee shop until a beautiful idea arrives. We imagine the writer gratefully opening a notebook and receiving the gift. But what happens when the gifts arrive faster than they can be opened? What happens when the mind produces more than the hands can carry?

There is exhilaration in it, certainly. I haven’t felt this alive in a long time—seven years, to be exact. After what felt like an eternity of wandering in the wilderness, during which time much of life felt depleted, stalled, or darkened, I do not take this energy lightly. I remember telling people that there was simply nothing in me, absolutely nothing. I know what it is to wonder whether the best work is behind me, to have no clear path forward, to try to make something happen and discover that desire alone cannot make it live.

So I receive the fire with gratitude. But gratitude does not eliminate the anguish of losing what it gives. Each forgotten idea leaves behind the faint sense that something valuable has vanished. I can sometimes remember the feeling of a thought without remembering the thought itself. I know that a connection appeared. I know that, for a moment, I saw something. But when I reach back for it, there is nothing there except the knowledge that it once passed through me.

Perhaps it will return. Some ideas do. They circle back days or years later, often in a slightly different form. Others may be gone forever, and I am reluctantly learning that I have to accept that. No system will capture everything. No archive will be large enough, no workflow fast enough, no tool effective enough to preserve every spark. The mind is alive, not mechanical, and its movements cannot be completely predicted or contained.

I am beginning to understand that the task is not to catch the entire fire but to tend it faithfully. That distinction matters because my instinct is to build a container as large and complex as the abundance itself—to create the perfect system before another thought escapes. But the attempt to preserve everything can become its own form of paralysis. I can spend so much time constructing the machinery of capture that I cease doing the work for which the ideas were given. A fire does not need to be catalogued before it can provide light; it needs somewhere to burn.

Three Fires

I've been wondering when all of this began. Was there a particular day? A decisive conversation? A moment when the first spark caught? I cannot find one for this present fire. But not long ago, while trying to explain all of this to my daughter Esther, I realized that this is not the first time my brain has been on fire. It's the third.

The first was in Colombia. I was in my twenties, and an idea for a gap-year program began taking shape with the same kind of insistence: one thought opening into another, books and people and possibilities rushing toward one another, accompanied by sleepless nights journaling the emerging vision. That idea eventually developed into what I started calling the Catechetical Academy during my years at Eighth Day Books and Eighth Day Institute.

The second came with the creation of Saint John of Damascus Institute, the work that later became Eighth Day Institute. Again, something that had existed only as fragments began demanding form.

And now there is this third fire. It carries traces of the first two, but it is not merely their continuation. It is gathering the whole of my life—the books, the work, the failures, the silence, the people, and the questions—into something I could not have built in either of those earlier seasons.

The Next Faithful Step

Each of those earlier fires has a story of its own, and I will probably tell those stories elsewhere. Here it is sufficient to recognize the pattern: none of them began with a completed plan. What I find, each time, is a series of small steps. I asked a question. I followed the answer. I noticed what emerged and took another step. A name became clearer. A phrase found its place. A motto emerged. An old desire moved closer to embodiment. One thing led to another, and another, and another.

None of the individual steps explains the fire. Most of them seemed almost embarrassingly small at the time. But somewhere in the walking, something ignited. This may be one of the great mysteries of vocation: we often expect clarity to precede action, when clarity is sometimes granted only through action. We want the map before we begin. We want to understand the whole before committing ourselves to the part. But perhaps the whole is not waiting to be discovered from a distance. Perhaps it can be seen only from inside the work.

Take the step that is in front of you. Then take the next one. Not because you can already see where they lead, but because faithfulness to the next step changes what you are able to see.

Gathering the Pieces

For a long time, I didn't know exactly what I was trying to do. I had a fairly strong sense that my time at EDI had come to an end. And I knew that I did not want a conventional nine-to-five life. I also knew that I still loved books and ideas and great conversations. And of course, the Church Fathers. And then I started running, which led to ultrarunning—a natural progression for my strange mind: if I can run 13 miles, I can run 26; if I can run 26, I can run 31 (50K); if I can run 31, I can run 62 (100K); if I can run 62, I can run 100; and if I can run 100, I can run 250 (that's the next goal).

Through those long distances I discovered the formative power of physical struggle. Somewhere in the midst of all of that, I was trying to determine whether these seemingly disconnected parts of my life could become a new work, one capable of supporting my family. Now I suspect I was not inventing something new so much as gathering the scattered pieces of something that had been trying to take form throughout my life.

The fire was not lit in a single moment. It was kindled little by little through decades of reading, working, failing, remembering, enduring, and beginning again. For years the embers may have seemed cold. Then one faithful step gave them air.

A Work Called Podvig

That gathering has now become a work of building, and I find myself building two things at once. One is the body of work itself: the essays, reflections, stories, questions, practices, and books now pressing toward form. The other is the place capable of receiving them, ordering them, and placing them into the hands of others.

Now that work has a name: Podvig. This is why I begin with the fire. What follows will not be one isolated project or an occasional essay. There is so much more burning. And a mind-boggling amount of material is already beginning to take shape.

Now I cannot keep up, and perhaps I am not supposed to. Perhaps my task is simply to remain near the fire: to receive what I can, preserve what I am able, release what I cannot, and give form to the next thing that asks to be made.

Some sparks will escape, and some will return. And some, by grace, will become light for someone else.