Drifting Sublime Hope, by Zach Girard

A Memoir of Difference, Sickness, Death, and Life

On the day Zach Girard collects his high school diploma, he learns that his father has leukemia. Over the next five years, grief, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the pressures of early adulthood force him to confront questions he has spent much of his life avoiding.

Drawing from personal journals, Zach recounts his father’s death, his transition, and his diagnoses of autism, anxiety, and moral scrupulosity OCD. He writes candidly about self-harm, medication, friendship, work, and the search for a life that feels honestly his own.

Drifting Sublime Hope is a raw and deeply personal memoir about growing into an identity, surviving profound loss, and learning that stability need not mean perfection. It is the story of how one young man kept living – and slowly found reasons to believe that a meaningful life was still possible.