PS C:\> tar -xf Interstate_42_v1.zip

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Application_Install.exe

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A year ago today, I walked into an office on a Sunday, signed in one last time, and left my badge, my laptop, and a 25 year career sitting in a cubicle. I had no plan. No backup income. No degree to fall back on. Just a nervous system that finally said no more and a life that was about to come apart at every seam I had been holding together with performance and avoidance.

I am not the same person who walked out that door. I have lost a career, a partnership, an identity, countless friends, and most of my extended family along the way. I have also found sobriety, integrity, my own nervous system, the truth about how my brain has always worked, and the first version of love for myself I have ever actually believed. This is the interstate that one exit turned into. Every mile of it mattered, even the ones that wrecked me.

That is the application. The rest is the source code.

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Source_Code.txt

The open-source code below is free, for you to analyze, modify, and build your own application with.

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> five minutes that ended 25 years: career_terminated.log

I started writing this as a text message to someone I am getting to know. It turned into several paragraphs, then it turned into this. So I am going to tell it the way I told her.

I remember being a kid and saying I wanted to be a doctor. Or an astronaut. Or president. Or whatever it was that week. There were people lined up for blocks telling me why I couldn’t, or why it would never happen. Nobody saying “you can.” And the same kind of people existed throughout my whole life, telling me all the reasons why I couldn’t do something I wanted to do. I used to associate with people who kept me stuck, instead of people who just wanted to see me happy and doing what I loved. It took me many years to understand that who you associate with really matters.

When I left my IT job a year ago today, I had people, including my partner at the time, my extended family, friends, and even my own sister, telling me how I shouldn’t have done it. That is was a bad move. How much money I was walking away from. How good the state benefits were. How I would lose my pension. How I was throwing away a 25 year career I had built. How I wouldn’t be able to afford certain luxuries anymore. How the stress was worth it. On and on. Always about the money and tangible “benefits” and never about what was right and healthy for me.

The IT career was never my idea. It was my mom’s. It was chosen for me. You are good at computers, therefore you should do that for the rest of your life to make money. You will join the Air Force, and they will train you, and you can go to college for free afterwards.

Mind you, I graduated as a valedictorian and could have had a free-ride scholarship to attend college nearly anywhere I wanted to, and choose a path I was actually interested in without having to get permanently injured by military service just to get the GI Bill and have a “free” education afterwards.

I resented all of this every day. It hurt me mentally more times than I can count.

Not many things in life are certain, but resentment is a toxic emotional poison, I can assure you of that.

This all came to a head on a late Thursday afternoon, a phone call from a woman in HR I had never even heard of, who knew absolutely nothing about me. In the span of five bizarre minutes, my integrity, ethics, and values were questioned. I was being unfairly judged and falsely accused. When the call ended, I felt physically ill. I called in sick the next day.

“I’m 41 now, and I am physically and emotionally exhausted just trying to maintain my health. Continuing to tolerate conditions that undermine that effort? Being falsely accused and surveilled? That’s for the birds. And, last time I checked, I am not a bird.”

Two days later, on a Sunday afternoon, I went into the office, signed in one last time, sent an immediate resignation letter, and left my badge, laptop, backpack, and tools in my cubicle. For one of the first times in my life I had the courage to say, not in these exact words, absolutely not going to allow it, you just messed with the wrong person, and you aren’t getting another opportunity to do it again.

I walked away from a 25 year career and a job I secretly hated. I called it Exit 41. It was the beginning of emotional sobriety.

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> the avoidant pattern the exit finally exposed: avoidance_root.sys

I suspected it was a good idea to quit even though there was a lot of uncertainty staring back at me. I have come to realize over the last year that it very well may have been one of the best decisions I have ever made. But the exit itself was only the first domino. What it knocked loose underneath it took the rest of the next year to fully see.

The financial impact of leaving a six figure job directly led to me seeing a big pattern I had been living in for my whole life. Avoidance. Avoidance of my fear of losing love, being rejected, and/or being abandoned, all rooted in a fear from early childhood of being alone. A fear that this decision a year ago allowed me to conquer and completely put to rest. I finally found freedom from that demon.

I avoided being honest. I avoided hard conversations. I avoided asking for help or partnership with anything I was struggling with. I kept everything nice and smooth on the surface, containing it inside myself until my internal instability became bigger than my ability to manage it. That avoidant pattern is what allowed years of emotional strain to keep building quietly instead of getting addressed honestly, and it is what led directly to the relationship decision I made a few months after I quit.

That decision, while poorly executed, was absolutely necessary, because the pattern was bankrupting me, literally and emotionally. I did not see it clearly while I was inside of it. It took losing the income and the identity that came with it to finally see what the avoidance had been quietly doing to every part of my life, not just one relationship, but almost every relationship I had ever been in.

What I did not know yet, and would not learn for almost an entire year, is that a piece of that avoidance was never really avoidance at all. Some of it was a brain working exactly the way it was built to work, just without a name for it.

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> the night I avoided one last time and detonated everything: critical_system_failure.exe

I ended that long term partnership the same way I had avoided everything else. In seconds, not a conversation. I shifted the blame for my own problems onto the person who had stood next to me and loved me. Within 24 hours of ending it, the furniture was gone and the apartment was empty. Years of love and companionship, completely obliterated by my impulsive and avoidant decision.

I did not see it as avoidance in the moment. I saw it as protecting myself. It took weeks of sitting in the wreckage to understand that I had simply done the same thing I always did, just at a much bigger scale and with far more permanent consequences. I had managed my internal struggles alone for so long that when they finally surfaced, they came out as destruction instead of conversation.

“I carry deep remorse every day that I can’t repair and heavy guilt I may never resolve. I may never get to make amends. I can’t take any of it back, it happened, and I wish it never had.”

Ending that relationship, while I didn’t know it in the moment, was necessary for me to break out of a plethora of unhealthy patterns I had been living in. Twenty identified since and still counting.

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> who am I without the patterns: ego_death_torture.exe

Five days after that night, I was sitting in the rubble of an empty apartment, completely alone, and five patterns I had been living my entire life surfaced at once. Avoidance, performance, rescuing, lack of boundaries, anxious attachment. I could no longer ignore them, so I had to stop doing them. My ego, and the only version of life I knew how to live, died right there.

That was not a metaphorical death. It felt like one. There was no version of me left standing that I recognized, and no roadmap for who was supposed to show up next. I had spent decades building an identity out of performance and rescuing other people, and without those things to hold onto, I had absolutely no idea who I actually was underneath them.

“I did not gently lose myself. I destroyed a relationship and a few days later, completely destroyed an identity that was killing me and people I loved. And it detonated my entire nervous system.”

That was the start of what I wrote about in Ego_Death_Torture_v1.zip. I had that emotional space because I had finally stopped making the wounds worse, and I began the actual work of healing them. My IFS practitioner and my therapist were waiting for me as I fell. They did not hand me the answer to who I am. They helped me start asking the questions honestly for the first time.

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> you are a system, not a single file: internal_family.readme

The first real crack in the autopilot was Internal Family Systems, IFS for short. You are not one thing. You are a whole internal family of voices, feelings, reactions, and responses that have been accumulating inside you since you were a kid. IFS calls these parts, and every single one of them, no matter how destructive or terrifying or confusing, was created for a reason. They were built to protect me, even the ones that nearly destroyed me.

Before IFS became a part of my life in late 2023, I was running on what amounted to fate. Drunk, medicated, performing, running. The life of every party and the death of every relationship. The cycle kept repeating because I had never once stopped to actually look at it. Carl Jung said it plainly, that until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. That is exactly what I had been calling it. Bad luck. Wrong circumstances. Wrong people. The universe conspiring against me. It was not fate. It was me, on autopilot, hitting the same walls over and over.

When I stopped running from my parts and started loving them instead, something enormous shifted. I stopped hurting myself, and I stopped hurting others. Not because I became a better person in some abstract sense, but because I finally had enough awareness to see what I was doing and why, and a person who truly sees themselves cannot keep inflicting what they now know is pain. It becomes impossible.

I tell people that my changes are permanent. Some don’t believe me. But it is 100% true. Knowing the patterns that hurt me, and willingly hurting myself by continuing to do them, makes about as much sense as eating broken glass or cutting my own fingers off. Why would I do that?

Know better, do better.

Period.

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> the manifesto I wrote so I would never go back: TuOS_v_now.sys

My operating system, TuOS, is the way I live and operate now. Take it or leave it, it’s not about you, it’s about me. I’m walking away from almost everything I used to have and know in my life, leaving so much behind, for good, forever. I’m being accountable for my decisions and changes by identifying and changing my unhelpful patterns, and changing who and what I allow in all aspects of my life now. Seeing my shadow and no longer ignoring it. Healing it. I’m severing ties to everything I don’t need anymore.

In January, I wrote and shared the manifesto with my platonic love, daughters, extended family, and friends. Writing it out gave me a huge sense of relief, like finding a map when you have been lost, like visually seeing the results of all the suffering and pain, like reading the lessons and knowing there was something good from all the chaos. TuOS is not a metaphor I made up for the blog. It is the actual document I follow daily, versioned and revised as I learn, currently at version 4.2. It is not soft. It does not bend for guilt, for nostalgia, or for other people’s discomfort with who I have become.

I’m learning big lessons, and gaining priceless wisdom, from reflecting on a lifetime of decisions that weren’t fully aligned with my wants, needs, values, morals, and ethics. These decisions in my life hurt me, and hurt others, time after time. Again, know better, do better. That is my only option and mission in life. Doing better for my sake and for the sake of everyone around me, in every aspect of my life now. So I can be who I really am.

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> the filter I built so I never make that mistake twice: decision_engine.sh

At some point early this year, everything distilled down to three rules. Be ethical, do no harm if I can avoid it. Only choose things that are emotionally and physically safe. Do what I want and need accordingly. If it is unethical or unsafe, I am not doing it. Full stop. That filter was simple and it applied to everything, but a few sentences were never going to be enough to actually keep me out of my old patterns. So over the months that followed, I built something far more structured out of it. That early filter was the seed. What it grew into is what I call The Decision Matrix, and I run it now every single time I am about to make a decision, big or small.

The Decision Matrix is not a feeling, it is a sequence to eliminate ego, feelings, and emotions from my decisions. It walks through a Regulation Check first, am I actually calm enough right now to be making this decision, or is my nervous system the one steering. Then a Core Check, does this align with what I actually want and need, separate from what would be easiest or what would keep someone else comfortable. Then Emotional Cost, what will this cost me in stress, anxiety, regret, or resentment, and am I willing to pay it. Then Integrity and Alignment, is this in line with my morals, my values, my ethics, and the manifesto I follow in TuOS. Then a Pattern Check against the patterns I already know I am prone to, avoidance, rescuing, performance, people pleasing, anxious attachment, and all the others. Then Relational Integrity, is this honest, and does it respect the other person involved as much as it respects me. And last, Future Self, what will the version of me standing on the other side of this decision think of the choice I am about to make right now.

Notice what every single section of that matrix is actually asking. None of it is asking whether the decision makes logical sense to anyone else, or whether someone else would approve. It is asking whether my parts are okay with it. Whether I am about to burden them or respect them. Whether I am about to run my bus from the driver’s seat or let a scared, panicking passenger grab the wheel. It is me checking in before I act instead of paying the price after. When the answer at any step points toward a problem, I do not do the thing. Period. My conscience stays clean. My nervous system and emotional health stays prioritized. Non-negotiable. Forever.

I did not understand for most of this year why a system this structured, this sequential, this much like a flowchart, was the only thing that ever actually worked for me. Most people manage decisions with their ego, feelings, and emotions. I needed something closer to a checklist before I could trust myself to act. That difference turned out to matter more than I knew.

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> owning the wreckage instead of explaining it away: being_accountable.cfg

The changes I made at first were terribly executed. Terribly timed. Terribly delivered. Terribly received. I made a big mess of a lot of things in this process, and I know it, and I own it. It wasn’t without collateral damage and that part will forever suck. I burned these bridges to the ground, and it was no accident, but it was also not to intentionally harm others. In the moment it felt like it was the only thing I could do to protect myself from the shadows that were emerging.

Learning to demonstrate ownership and accountability meant sitting in that mess instead of running from it, and eventually it meant making and living amends wherever I actually could. I sat down and wrote letters of amends to people I had emotionally harmed over the years. I wrote them not to get anything back, not to repair things, not to make anyone agree with me or feel better about me. I wrote them because I had been carrying unspoken words for months, and the weight of them was driving an anxiety I could not shake any other way.

The letters had no blame in them. No explanation of their parts in it. No defense of mine. No acknowledgement needed. Not needing them to change their feelings about me. It was simply, here is what I did, here is what I understand the impact to be, here is why I was wrong, here is how I am being accountable by not repeating it. Because that is what real amends is. Not the letters. The not repeating. You can apologize until you are blue in the face and it means nothing until change is demonstrated and mistakes are not knowingly repeated. That is how you live with a clean conscience. Not by saying sorry. By being different.

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> putting the bottle down for good: two_years_dry.runtime

That breakdown was necessary for me to get completely chemically sober and stop numbing the pain from all of it. Alcohol killed my father. It kills 178,000 people in this country every year, and I was going to be its next victim eventually. Two years sober from alcohol now, and coming up to six months free of cannabis in a week from now, remaining completely chemically sober.

The cannabis was always the harder one. It was tangled up with managing what I believed were antipsychotic side effects, with anxiety, with a brain that processes the world differently than most. For years I thought my relentless chasing of relief was a personal failure, weak willpower, poor discipline. It was survival. But survival and recovery are not the same thing, and at some point I had to choose recovery even though survival had been working, technically, for a very long time.

Chemical sobriety was necessary for me to finally discover my nervous system, and the information it hadn’t been able to give me while I was numbed. It would also, a few months later, be the thing that finally let me see something about myself I had been carrying my entire life without a name for it.

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> the signal finally got unmuted: nervous_system_online.log

Substances don’t resolve nervous system dysregulation, they suppress the signal. When the suppression ends, everything that was always there becomes audible at once. My sobriety turned into a living hell for the first two and a half months. I remember telling every professional in my life how much I didn’t understand why everything was getting worse the further I got into sobriety. It was absolutely maddening. They all said the same thing, “keep going, it will get better.”

The signal is finally unmuted. It’s loud before it calibrates. That has helped me discover and understand where my patterns developed, and what kept me in them. It helped me understand what good people and bad people look like for me on a nervous system level. Same with activities, events, and jobs. My un-numbed nervous system keeps helping me make healthier decisions, often before I have consciously worked out why something feels wrong, my body already knows.

That signal is not loud anymore the way it was in those first months. It calibrated, just like everyone told me it would. It is quieter now, but it is never silent, and I have stopped wanting it to be. A loud nervous system that tells me the truth is worth more than a numbed one that told me nothing at all. What I did not know yet was exactly what that signal had been trying to tell me underneath all the noise.

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> grief arriving in layers, not in order: grieving_scars.stack

None of this grief arrived as one clean loss. It arrived as a stack. The partnership I ended. The actual ending and how it happened. Losing my own identity by choosing to dismantle the patterns that were keeping me alive while quietly destroying me. My parents, gone for years. The people I have lost in the past several months. Losing the substances that kept me comfortable for my entire adult life. And underneath all of it, an older grief, a childhood wound that gets freshly activated every time something lands as unjust, or I feel shame, or people intentionally hurt me.

These do not grieve on the same timeline. When one layer quiets, another that was waiting behind it begins to move. That is not regression. It took me a long time to stop treating each new wave as proof that I was failing at healing. The grief was never linear, and once I stopped expecting it to be, I stopped fighting myself every time an old layer resurfaced.

These don’t grieve on the same timeline. When one layer quiets, another that was waiting behind it begins to move. That’s not regression.

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> standing in something that can't be performed: integrity_check.sh

And when I stopped increasing my suffering, I found love for myself for the first time. Gratitude didn’t save me. Integrity did. Every single thing that killed my relationships wasn’t a character flaw, it was damage wearing a costume, and I finally stopped letting the costume run the show.

Integrity is not a feeling I have on the good days. It is the thing I check myself against on the bad ones, when the old patterns are loudest and the easy choice is the one that would have caused harm a year ago. It is the difference between who I say I am and who I actually am when nobody is watching, and for most of my life those two people were not the same person.

That is who I am now, and the person I am building, page by page, inside Apexis. Not a finished product. A work in progress that I am no longer ashamed to let people see clearly.

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> the version of me that doesn't follow me anymore: ghosts.exe

The guy who needed to perform his worth for the world to validate it, the guy who twisted himself into a pretzel trying to keep peace instead of telling the truth, the guy who called avoidance communication. Ghost. He is not who shows up anymore.

I still see flashes of him sometimes, in old photos, in the way certain situations used to trigger him into action without thought. But he does not run things now. He is a memory I carry with compassion, not a costume I put back on. I know exactly what brought him into existence, and I am still learning exactly what it took to finally let him go.

My daughters see the difference. The friends still in my life see it. Something shifted that cannot be faked, because it shows up in the smallest moments, not just the big ones.

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> the brain underneath the patterns: neurotype_detected.log

In June, as I continued the grief and integrity work, and after nearly six months of complete chemical sobriety, I learned something about myself that reframed nearly everything I just told you. I am autistic. I had suspected it for a few years and know I know it is true. I have been my entire life, all the way back to kindergarten, and I never knew it, because I had been masking it without even being aware I was doing it.

What I had been calling akathisia for years, a kind of restless inner agitation that I attributed to my medication, was stimming. What I thought was social anxiety suddenly showing up after I got fully sober was never new anxiety at all. It was autism, and my actual inability to tolerate large amounts of social stimulation, finally visible without substances there to blunt it. Sobriety did not create that struggle. Sobriety removed the only thing that had ever muffled it.

A huge amount of the nervous system activation I described earlier in this post, the signal getting unmuted, the calibration that took months, was not only grief and trauma surfacing. A significant portion of it was the cost of masking itself, the sheer physical and emotional load of performing neurotypical for an entire lifetime without ever knowing that was what I was doing. I think very differently than most people. I always have. TuOS and my Decision Matrix make complete sense to me because they are logical, structured, almost mechanical, and that is exactly how my brain has always needed to operate to function in a world that runs primarily on intuition and unspoken social rules I was never able to read the way other people seem to read them automatically.

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> a lifetime of being misread: misunderstood_by_design.txt

I have used logic based systems my entire life to navigate things that come naturally to most people. That difference cost me. I have experienced trauma, emotional abuse, and bullying directly because my brain works differently and the people around me did not have a framework for understanding that, including me. I was punished, excluded, rejected, abandoned, unloved, and misjudged for things that were never actually choices, they were simply how my brain processes a world built for a different kind of mind.

This discovery is not separate from everything else in this post. It is the foundation underneath all of it. Exit 41, sobriety, the end of the relationship, the patterns, the ego death, all of it stripped away enough of the performance that the actual architecture underneath finally became visible. I would never have found this if I had stayed numbed, stayed performing, stayed in the career and the relationship and the coping mechanisms that kept the mask glued on tight enough that even I could not see it.

Masking is its own kind of identity, and I am losing that one too now, on top of everything else I have already lost in this past year. The awareness of the mask is making it very difficult to keep wearing it. I am at the very beginning of a long, lifelong process of learning what it looks like to take it off, in pieces, in the situations where it is safe enough to do so. I do not have a finished version of myself to offer you here. I have a beginning.

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> how a hidden brain builds a codependent life: masking_and_codependency.map

Autistic masking and codependency are not two separate stories. They grow from the same root and they feed each other for years before anyone, including the person living it, can tell them apart. Masking means constantly monitoring other people’s reactions, suppressing your natural responses, and performing whatever version of yourself you have learned keeps you safe and accepted. Codependency means orienting your entire sense of worth around managing other people’s needs, moods, and approval. Once you put those two definitions next to each other, the overlap is not subtle. It is the same survival strategy wearing two different names.

For an undiagnosed autistic kid growing up in environments that did not understand or accommodate a different kind of brain, masking is not optional, it is survival. You learn fast that your natural reactions, your natural pace, your natural way of communicating, gets you punished, mocked, or excluded. So you build a second self designed entirely around what keeps other people comfortable. That second self becomes so practiced it eventually feels automatic. It becomes the performance, the rescuing, the people pleasing, the inability to set a boundary because boundaries are exactly the kind of disruption a masked nervous system has been trained for years to avoid at all costs. The avoidance I wrote about earlier in this post, the performance, the anxious attachment, all of it had genuine roots in real relational wounds, and underneath those wounds was also a brain that had been taught since childhood that being fully and visibly itself was not safe.

That same dynamic bleeds directly into substance use. Masking is exhausting in a way that is very difficult to explain to someone who has never had to do it. It is a full time job running underneath every single social interaction, every job, every relationship, every family gathering. Substances quiet that effort. They lower the volume on the constant monitoring and self correction long enough to feel something closer to normal, or at least to feel less like you are failing at being a person. Addiction was never actually just about numbing emotional pain or chasing dopamine for me. Part of it was numbing the relentless labor of masking itself, every single day, for decades, without ever knowing that was what I was actually doing.

This is also why sobriety cracked the mask open instead of simply healing old wounds and leaving everything else intact. Once the substances were gone, I no longer had a way to quiet the underlying load, and the mask itself became unsustainable. What looked on the surface like new anxiety, new sensitivity, new difficulty tolerating people and noise and plans, was the actual cost of masking finally becoming visible without anything left to cover it. I am not unraveling. I am decompressing, for the first time in my entire life, from something I carried so long I forgot it was even a weight.

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> the standard I still had to set this month: no_contact.cfg

This work is not finished, and it is not theoretical. A few weeks after that discovery, I made the decision to go no-contact with my extended family after months of being emotionally abandoned and ghosted by them. My daughters are not included in any of this. They have been incredibly supportive of me since we reconnected after our estrangement, and that connection has only gotten stronger this year.

There was an event earlier in June where several extended family members hit me all at once in a fifteen-minute span of time, claimed they had no idea how I was doing, and said they were worried about me, while my own website traffic logs showed me clearly that they had been reading everything I write, closely, the entire time. They knew exactly how I was. They said otherwise anyway.

A year ago I would have chased that. I would have manufactured a reason to reach out, engineered a conversation to surface what their silence had already answered, and called it communication. It would not have been communication. It would have been anxiety wearing a trench coat, a man who could not tolerate endings reaching for control and calling it connection.

I didn’t do that this time. I ran it through the Decision Matrix instead of running it through my fear. I am not choosing love that harms me. Period. Emotional sobriety means having standards with people and rejecting everything that increases my suffering, even when that something is family. Especially when it is family.

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> the boundary got tested within days: boundary_violation.log

I did not even get a full week of quiet before the no-contact boundary was tested. Not even 24 hours. One of them emailed me almost immediately after I went and asked for no-contact. The email accused me of having asked them to give me space, which I never said. It demanded an immediate conversation about my decision. It insisted there had simply been a big misunderstanding. And it excused months of silence by claiming they had forgotten to reply to me, nearly five months after I had last reached out to them.

Forgot. Almost five months. Nearly half a year of silence, reframed as an “oopsie” instead of a choice.

This is exactly the kind of thing my Decision Matrix exists for now. A year ago I would have answered that email within minutes, defended myself, explained my reasoning, tried to manage their feelings about my boundary so they would stop being upset with me. Today I ran it through Regulation Check, through Emotional Cost, through Relational Integrity, and through what my Future Self would think of engaging. The answer on every single line was the same. Responding would not be communication. It would be re-opening a door I had already, finally, closed for my own protection. No-contact does not get negotiated by the people it was set in response to. That is what makes it a boundary instead of a suggestion.

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> what love looks like when I'm not performing it: slow_build.protocol

I am opening my heart up to a new connection I am getting to know, someone I had never experienced or chosen before. Someone safe, who doesn’t want me to harm myself with old patterns just to secure their love. I don’t feel like I have to be someone I am not to keep that connection. I am not made to feel like I am being people pleased or settled for.

What I see, consistently, is someone strong, intelligent, and emotionally healthy, with a compassionate and ethical heart. Someone who has been hurt and devastated in the past and is now fiercely protective of the love she has for herself, who wants happiness for herself and others, and who would never want someone else to feel pain coming from her. I am the same now. It is love for myself and for other people at the purest and simplest form there is.

She mirrors back to me all the work I have done since I left my badge on that desk a year ago. She shows me how my standards have changed, and the kind of woman I am choosing to explore something healthy with, versus who I used to settle for. And the best part is she does not have to do anything to give me that gift other than just being herself. She does not need to change anything to make me want to be around her. She is enough exactly as she is. So am I.

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> one year down the highway: odometer_reading.log

Today, June 30th, 2026, is a big day for me. A year ago I walked off a job with no plan, no degree to fall back on, and very little work experience outside of IT. I have permanent and total service-connected disabilities and other health factors that make a lot of jobs unrealistic for me. By every measurable societal standard I am setting myself up to wash dishes for a living, and because of the changes I have made, and the genuinely good experience I have had doing exactly that, I would be completely happy with it. Dirty dishes in, clean dishes out. Perfect.

I don’t need six figures and a fancy title to love myself. I don’t need it to find someone who loves me for who I am instead of what I can buy or who I can contort myself into being for them.

I had no idea, standing in that office a year ago, how much road was ahead of me, or how much of it would hurt. I lost a career. I lost a partnership. I lost friends. I lost an identity. I lost most of my extended family.

I had no idea that standing in that office a year ago, that nine months later on March 28, 2026 that I would be standing in a 10,000+ person rave, single, with an incredibly special platonic friend, listening to the words of Alan Watts being played in a mashup of two songs that transformed my life months ago, filled with so much happiness and joy that tears were streaming down my face, and that I would be completely sober in that experience.

In the past 365 days, I gained a truer understanding of my own brain than I ever thought I would have access to. I did not lose myself. I found myself, for what feels like the first time. The Exit 41 onto Interstate 42 was never a straight line. It was an exit ramp that turned into an entire interstate, and I am still on it, and I am driving it sober, honest, unmasked, and unrecognizable.

I am Tukayote. I am unrecognizable. I am love.

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