We expect someone who looks old to be old. We expect someone who acts young to be young. We expect the teenage years to be about activity, the twenties to be about discovery, and the thirties to be about settling down–or something like that.

Most of these expectations go unnoticed until someone falls short or simply lives outside of them. Expectations are difficult to identify, let alone define, and many are subconscious. We do not expect the same things from one another. Thankfully, there is enough overlap that I can speak generally here.

I’ve been writing publicly since I was sixteen years old. I began with faith, devotions, and theology. Every so often I would write a somewhat controversial article from a faith perspective, and it would bring a lot of traffic to my website. It felt good. It also connected me to people around the world, some of whom are still my friends today.

The 2015 accident put a slight pause on my writing career. Sort of.

Literally a week after waking up from a coma, I wrote an article called “Coma, Christ, Conviction.” But I didn’t write much after that one. For some reason I stopped writing at the end of 2017.

In 2018, I was inspired to write again and take a new direction. In the fall, a few weeks into my first semester at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, I created cameronfathauer.com. I still remember what was going through my mind. And now that I’m reflecting on it, I’m encouraged because it feels as though my original vision for the website has come to fruition.

I wanted a space for my writing and thinking. I had admired and watched others do this in their own way, and I wanted to do it myself. I was also thinking about my developing legal career, though it was in its earliest stages (first semester law student, lol), and how I wanted to present myself publicly. I wanted the website to be a public container for my life after the brain injury: the pains, passions, and hopes. A digital space where I could be honest about the unusually multifaceted and rather complicated man I am, while giving glory to the God carrying me through it.

It was never a PR project, an attempt to finely tune my public presentation for the masses. If it was, I sure wasn’t doing it right.

My first post on the website was about my struggles with suicide. “Life’s Only Requirement.” Not the most positive start. But it was an honest one. After looking it up just now, I see that the end of this month will mark its eighth anniversary.

Writing about depression and suicidal ideation led the Dean of Students to reach out to me. I guess another student, or multiple students, had expressed concern. Now that I think about it, I wonder what kind of impression I had made on my law school colleagues.

A year after that first article, I became a father to Scarlett Jane. Then came the triplets: Albert, Charlee, and Frankii.

When my Maurer ’21 peers thought of Cameron Fathauer, what came to mind? “Law student. Brain injured. Depressed. Suicidal. Married. Father of four under two. Writer. A piece of work.”

And they were right, assuming that’s what they thought.

But that’s why I write: to put in the work.

The expectations of what a twenty-year-old is supposed to write about do not typically include depression, suicide, or theological and philosophical reflections on those topics. But I had to write. I felt compelled to write. This has been my pattern for years, and Saving the Subject felt similar. I had to write the book and get it out quickly.

For a long, long time, I’ve wanted more people to read what I write. I know what Solomon says about fame and vanity, but that hasn’t made me stop wanting a wider readership.

Yet 2026 has felt different. It’s been a great year for me mentally and vocationally. The best year I’ve had in the eleven years since the accident.

I found myself writing most when things were most difficult, and I know that’s common for writers. Putting two and two together, I wonder if my desire for more clicks, likes, and shares was not simply rooted in pride or vanity. Maybe some of it was. But I think I also wanted to share the relief and rescue God worked out in me through my writing.

God used words to create worlds, and I’ve used words to recreate my own. I wanted others to experience the semantical salve I found during the most difficult years of my life.

2026 has not been like 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, or 2025. Now when I post an article or essay on my site, it has a slightly different flavor or tone, given the insights I’m finding on top of the mountain, no longer in the valley.

Sure, I would still love for more people to read what I write. But I hope the words can point beyond me. God used words to build a world to glorify himself. The words I write are not meant to build a world to glorify myself. If they are, they will let us all down.

The reason I titled this “What am I supposed to write at 28?” is because I’m not writing to meet expectations, and I never have. My life, by God’s grace, has been the furthest from every kind of expectation: medical, social, educational, and otherwise.

I might get more readers if I wrote for the algorithm. But then I wouldn’t be writing for cameronfathauer.com. I’d be catering to the crowd and building up my own world, which we all know is fated to crumble.