Lyle McKeany

McKeany on his evolving relationship with food. Rather than chasing a perfect diet — keto, paleo, intermittent fasting, the next protocol — he describes the slow, unglamorous work of slightly improving each meal: a vegetable he didn't have before, a sugar he replaced, a portion he made smaller. The not-so-simple trick is giving up on "eating well" as a binary identity and embracing "eating less bad" as a long, forgiving project that compounds quietly over years, especially for someone navigating parenthood, work, and the energy his daughter's care requires.

McKeany on the awkward branding problem of his own creation: having spent years positioning himself as a vulnerable memoir-style writer, he found himself drawn into the crypto/web3 space — a world whose tone, audience, and language could hardly be further from personal essays. The piece sits in the discomfort of writing about something his existing readers don't want to read about, and asks whether genuine curiosity is allowed to break the marketing frame you built around yourself.

McKeany's submission for the Soaring Twenties Social Club Symposium issue on the theme "Beginnings." A reflective essay (illustrated with a New York Public Library lithograph of Chinese birds) about the kinds of beginnings that don't announce themselves: the unremarkable Mondays that turn out to be the start of a new chapter, the silent ones that you only recognise as origins in retrospect, and the difference between the new starts you choose and the ones life imposes.

McKeany realises he has cried only once about his father's death — while his mother and brother, talking about his dad at his brother's house, both broke down together a year on. The piece sits inside the strangeness of that asymmetry and uses it as the entry point for a quiet, unprescriptive essay on grief: the way it has no obvious place to go, the way it doesn't follow timelines, and the way writing about it is one of the few ways to give it a temporary container.

A guest post McKeany wrote for Joshua Doležal's Inner Life publication, framed as a conversation between his present-day self and his eighteen-year-old self. The eighteen-year-old marvels at the iPhone, asks why they're here, and the present-day self walks him through the unexpected turns — band, divorce, falling for his wife on OkCupid, becoming a stepdad, his daughter Em's cerebral palsy — that taught him the secret power he didn't know he had: the capacity to stay present with what life actually hands you.

Written across 24+ hours of insomnia starting at 4:43 a.m. McKeany walks through his side-sleeper's clogged-nostril rotation, mouth-taping (learned from Jonny Miller's Nervous System Mastery course), and his lifelong identity as a night owl. After years of guilt about late-night writing, a therapist's question — do you actually believe creativity only flows in the morning? — let him embrace the truth that the sun's position has nothing to do with the work.

McKeany narrates his vasectomy day in real time — the unexpectedly friendly nurse, the lighthearted text exchange with his wife Allison from the procedure table, her decision to come in and watch (she once drove home from college to see her brother's C-section), and the surgeon working through small bursts of incomplete numbing. It expands into a meditation on his and Allison's family-planning arc, the decision after their daughter Em's severe cerebral palsy diagnosis, and the strange comedy of inhabiting a body that keeps breaking down.