I was on Substack, scrolling through titles like someone wandering a used bookstore, not knowing what they’re looking for until they feel it in their gut. That’s when I found it. Still Here by Shain Parwiz. Simple words. But they stopped me. Not the kind you breeze past. They ask you to sit down.
“There are days the anger runs hotter than the grief. Days I want to punch the sky for being so goddamn empty. For being so silent.”
I didn’t know the man. I just knew I had to. I reached out, told him I wanted to write something about him. Not to inspire, not to quote. Just to understand. He said yes.
His byline hit hard too.
“Survivor of loss, addiction, and disillusionment. I don’t write to inspire. I write because it’s the only thing I’ve got left that still feels like mine.”
There was no filter on that sentence. Just bone and breath. I didn’t want to polish anything. I wanted to sit in the dirt with it. See what I could learn.
We talked in messages. Not long ones. Not interviews. Just fragments. Observations. The way real people talk when they’ve lived enough to stop performing.
“I’m not trying to motivate anyone,” he wrote. “I write to mark the moments that never made it into photo albums.”
That stuck with me. Everyone wants the before and after. No one wants the middle. The hollowed-out places where you survive without a finish line.
Shain’s life doesn’t read like a comeback story. He says so himself. “I don’t owe anyone a narrative arc, a quote that fits on a mug.”
He lost his father young. He says 15 was the year the steady hand vanished. After that, life was something he had to steer alone. Sometimes crashing, sometimes drifting, always writing. That’s what stayed.
His earliest memory of real writing was journaling in school. From age 7 to 16, every student had to keep a journal. Most wrote what they thought the teacher wanted to see. So did he. But then he started keeping a second one. The real one.
He filled it with the things no one wanted to hear. The bullying. The isolation. The noise in his head after his dad passed. The things that couldn’t be said aloud because people flinch when pain isn’t pretty.
That second journal was survival.
Later, it was punk rock that gave him permission to feel. Not just the sound, but the ethos. Henry Rollins became, in his words, his “punk rock dad.”
That made sense to me. The way Henry never minced words. The way rage and sadness shared the same stage. It’s not about screaming — it’s about honesty. Even if your voice shakes. Especially then.
Zines, lyric sheets, interviews — that’s where Shain got his truths. Not textbooks. Not counselors. Pages stapled together in someone’s bedroom, telling it like it is.
He learned early:
Pain isn’t shameful.
Grief doesn’t expire.
Vulnerability isn’t weakness.
You can question the silence.
I asked him once if he thought his writing helped people.
“If someone reads my work and feels less alone, not inspired, but seen, then I’m grateful.”
He made it clear — he’s not here to save anyone. He’s here to survive. And if that survival echoes in someone else’s bones, all the better. But that’s not the goal. He doesn’t dress his wounds up for Instagram.
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His Substack isn’t polished. That’s the point. It’s a journal with punctuation. Sometimes it’s a whisper. Other times it punches through your chest.
One day, he wrote:
“Sometimes just not pretending, that’s enough.”
That line still floats in my head. Like smoke from a fire that hasn’t gone out yet.
When he hits publish, he said, there’s always a split.
One part of him exhales — the relief of not carrying it alone anymore. But another part tenses. Because once it’s out there, it can’t be protected. It’s naked. And people can be cruel.
But most aren’t. Most, like me, read his work and just think: God, someone else feels it too.
That’s not inspiration. That’s solidarity.
He told me something once, quiet and matter-of-fact:
“I know what it’s like to have everyone turn away because you still haven’t ‘gotten over it.’ That kind of loneliness is crushing.”
He doesn’t write as a teacher. He writes as someone on the floor, picking up broken glass, bleeding just enough to notice.
That’s what drew me to him. There’s no arc. Just fragments. But somehow, in the broken pieces, there’s shape.
There’s a reason he replies to every message. Even from strangers. Especially from strangers.
“They took the time to read something I almost didn’t publish,” he said. “That kind of connection — over things that maybe should’ve stayed private — feels rare. And I treat it like it matters.”
It does.
A lot of people write about healing. Few do it while still bleeding.
Shain’s words aren’t wrapped in bows. They don’t try to fix you. They don’t pretend to fix him.
But they make space.
And maybe that’s the thing — he writes not to inspire, but to hold space for all the feelings we’ve been told to hide. Rage. Loneliness. Emptiness. The kind of ache that doesn’t go away, only learns to walk beside you.
He once wrote,
“I bleed in my journals. I write from my gut — sometimes soft, sometimes sad, sometimes angry or defiant. That’s what being human looks like to me.”
That’s the truth. Not the polished kind. The kind that comes out in lowercase, with coffee stains and tear smudges.
That’s what I saw in Still Here.
And that’s why I wrote this.
Cheryl Strayed, author of Tiny Beautiful Things and Wild, once wrote, “When you speak with the truest, most intimate voice about your life, you speak with the universal voice.”
Shain lives that.
He doesn’t decorate the pain. He gives it a chair, lets it sit down, and listens to what it has to say.
Maybe that’s all any of us can do. Maybe that’s enough.
So this isn’t a story about redemption. It’s a moment. A shared silence between strangers who’ve both carried too much.
I reached out to understand. What I found was someone who doesn’t flinch from the truth, even when it burns.
He writes so the wound can breathe.
He writes because the silence is too loud.
He writes because it's the only thing that still feels like his.
And in doing that, without trying, without performance, he gave me — and maybe you — permission to do the same.
Just to be here.
Still.
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Inspiration for This Story.
I came across Still Here by Shain Parwiz while scrolling through Substack late one night. One line stopped me cold: “There are days the anger runs hotter than the grief.” It wasn’t just writing — it was someone surviving in real time. I didn’t want to write about hope. I wanted to write about honesty. About what it means to keep showing up with your scars unhidden. Shain doesn’t write to inspire. He writes to stay alive. That moved me. So I reached out, and this story came from that space — raw, quiet, and painfully human.
—John Rinaldo
 | A guest post by
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Hey John
Mind blowing 👌🏿👌🏿
There are many lines which were very strong but the best I like are these lines
👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽👇🏽
I’m not trying to motivate anyone,” he wrote. “I write to mark the moments that never made it into photo albums.”
🙂
Thank you and thanks also to Shain