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> Display 202609: BETTER_OFF_ALONE.MP4
Application_Install.exe
I recently had my 43rd birthday. I have blown out 42 candles before this one, and every single one of those was lit by a version of me that was numbed, masking, performing, or flat out running from his own goddamn life (this year’s candle, for the record, was lit by a guy who actually knows what a candle is for).
This is the first birthday. My first one as an adult completely sober. This year I got clean, found out my brain has a name for the way it has always worked (turns out “the way it has always worked” has an acronym now, and it explains a truly embarrassing amount), set boundaries with a LOT of people (a full-time job with no PTO), buried patterns I had been dragging around since I was a kid (moving is expensive, emotional baggage is free, apparently), and watched one small act of kindness on a pier turn into something that has touched over 35,000 people who will never know my name (my one shot at fame and I’m still anonymous, incredible).
If this whole year had to fit inside one sentence, it would be this one. I am better off alone than I ever was inside messes of relationships dressed up as love. Not lonely. Not settling. Not waiting around for someone to make it official. Genuinely, measurably better off, and it took losing every excuse I had left to keep avoiding that truth before I could finally sit still long enough to hear it (sitting still, for the record, is not a skill I came factory-installed with).
I woke up that morning 250 feet above the streets of San Francisco, and for the first time in my life, the asshole waking up on his birthday is the same one who is still going to be here tomorrow. No mask. No costume. No performance for anyone watching. None of the old patterns. I haven’t had an ounce of mania in almost three years, according to a team of competent and highly qualified mental health professionals who all agree I am completely stable. This year and moving forward, I could give a fuck less what anyone outside that team thinks.
I am a person who loves everyone unconditionally, has firm boundaries with those he allows in his life, truly loves himself, protects himself, values himself, knows his worth, is accountable for his mistakes, is continuously reducing the suffering he causes himself and others, allows nobody or anything to control him, does not allow fear to control him, and always holds others completely accountable for the ways they harm him. If that means I am an asshole, then I am the biggest asshole you will ever meet, and proud of it (framed certificate pending).
This is not a highlight reel. This is an inventory, and it is not pretty in every line. Some of this shit is beautiful. Some of it cost me people I loved. All of it is mine, and I am not asking a single person’s permission to own it.
Somewhere along the way this year, the stories I had been told about myself finally stopped holding up under their own weight, and something underneath them, something a lot closer to the truth, finally had room to settle in. That is the whole arc of this post if you want it in one line. Everything else below is just the receipts.
That is the application. The rest is the source code.
Source_Code.txt
The open-source code below is free, for you to analyze, modify, and build your own application with.
> the odometer at the summit: birthday_stats_43.log
3:53AM walk to the top of Alabama Hill in support of a friend who was struggling with mental health. Several of us did 4AM climbs of Alabama Hill in support of them.
Before the story, the numbers. I do not say this to brag. I say it because a year ago I could not have told you what a single day of mine looked like, let alone 365 of them.
A year like this does not feel countable while you are living it. It only turns into numbers when you go looking for them afterward, the same way you do not feel yourself grow taller, you just notice one day the doorframe is lower than it used to be. I started tracking almost everything sometime around February, half because my AuDHD brain needed something concrete to hold onto while everything else felt like free fall, and half because I did not trust my own memory of a year this big to stay honest without receipts.
- 2110 miles walked (apparently that’s how far you can get from your problems on foot, still working on it)
- 2 months unable to walk more than 1mi/day due to a mystery hip injury
- 4.1 million steps (my Garmin Watch and I have a very codependent relationship now)
- 3,250 flights of stairs climbed, roughly (the “roughly” is doing a lot of AuDHD-brain-forgot-to-count work here)
- Two pairs of Chacos worn through, one pair of Altras retired (RIP, you served an emotionally chaotic year honorably)
- Over 9000 miles logged on road trips, across 6 states (yes, it’s over 9000, I had to)
- 5376 miles flown (all of it spent pretending the tray table was fascinating)
- 172,000 words written across 76 blog posts (a full memoir nobody asked for, published anyway)
- 8 social media accounts completely deleted (turns out peace of mind was hiding behind the delete button the whole time)
- 23 harmful patterns identified and stopped immediately (early detection, folks, it’s not just for cancer)
- Over 4,000 photos taken, including 150 fine art nudes with a new friend (art, mom, it’s art)
- 892 selfies 🤟🤟🤟🤟 (a man who finally likes what he sees, mostly)
- Over 250 videos shot, 18 of them dance videos (nobody asked but everybody watched)
- Almost 200 pier sunsets watched (cheapest therapy in Bellingham, free parking not included)
- 78 hours in therapy (a bargain compared to what some relationships cost)
- 150+ hours in community at the Growing Veterans Farm (turns out dirt and community are both good for a dysregulated nervous system)
- 3 new tattoos (cheaper than therapy, way more permanent)
- 10 sticks of deodorant used (a personal record)
- 15 x-rays received (my skeleton has seen more radiation than most nuclear plant workers at this point)
- 22 vials of blood drawn (vampires, take notes, this is how it’s done)
- 1 CT scan (a very expensive way to be told “we don’t know either”)
- 286 of the 365 days sober, 241 of them continuous since 1/6/26 (the math nerds can do the rest, I was busy not drinking)
- 9,125 pills taken, on purpose, tracked, and accounted for (my pharmacist and I are basically pen pals now)
- 76,800 magnetic pulses delivered to my brain through Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) (3x the magnetic field of Earth, still no working compass for relationships)
- 2084 hours asleep (in the sense that actually counted as rest)
- 36 nights slept in a bed other than my own (professional couch surfer, unpaid)
- A handful of relationships tried this year, all ended by me, because staying would have cost me more regulation than I was willing to trade away again
- 2 women kissed (one was a stranger (not a date) on New Years Eve (bucket list item)) (the bar for 2026 was on the floor and I still cleared it)
- 1 night camped (turns out I prefer my discomfort indoors, with plumbing)
- Zero peaks summited (I peaked emotionally instead, several times, loudly)
- One shirt size dropped (the “stress diet” nobody should recommend but everybody compliments)
- Unemployed the entire year (a full-time job of feelings, unfortunately unpaid)
- Over 35,000 acts of kindness sparked in two countries, coast-to-coast in the USA, and counting
Some of these numbers surprised even me when I added them up. I did not set out to walk 2110 miles or wear through two pairs of shoes. I set out to leave the house on days when staying in bed would have been so much easier, and the miles were just what accumulated underneath that decision, one afternoon at a time.
Other numbers are harder to look at. 9,125 pills is not a small thing to type out loud. I am not going to pretend that number does not sit heavy some days. But every single one of those pills was tracked, accounted for, and taken with intention, by a person who is finally regulated enough to manage his own care instead of avoiding it or numbing through it with something else entirely.
None of that happened because I had it figured out. It happened because I finally stopped numbing enough to notice what my life actually was, and then I did something about it every single day.
> the valley I was standing in a year ago: base_camp_42.log
A year ago before I turned 42 I had already walked away from a 25 year career (best financial decision that felt terrible in the moment, a real theme for the year), but I had not yet walked away from the patterns that career had let me avoid for two decades. I was still performing. Still rescuing. Still managing everyone else’s comfort before my own. I had connections already dying under the weight of everything I had never said out loud, and people in my life that mistook my silence for stability. I did not know yet that the brain running all of it was autistic. I did not know the akathisia I attributed to medication was stimming. I did not know that almost every relationship I had ever had was built by a person wearing a mask so old he had forgotten he put it on.
I did not know any of that while I was standing in it either. That is the cruel trick of a pattern, it never announces itself as a pattern while you are inside it, it just feels like your personality, like this is simply who you are and how relationships go for people like you. I thought avoidance was just being a private person. I thought performance was just being likable. I thought rescuing everyone around me was just being a good person (turns out it’s actually just an expensive hobby). None of it had a name yet, so none of it could be questioned yet.
Somewhere underneath all of that was a fear I never said out loud to anyone, not even to myself in so many words. The fear of being alone. I filled every open space in my life with somebody, anybody, because the silence of my own company felt like a verdict, like proof that nobody would choose to stay if they actually got a good look. So I never gave anyone the chance to leave an empty room, I made sure the room was never empty in the first place.
I spent years talking into rooms where nobody was actually catching a word of it, and I kept mistaking the silence that came back for something I still had to earn. I ran a kind of tab in those relationships that never once got paid down, always a little further behind, always one more thing to prove before I would finally be enough to keep (loyalty program with no rewards, five stars, would not recommend). And some of them, the worst ones, kept me close enough to see the whole time, close enough to want it, while somehow always standing just on the other side of a door that never fully opened. Near is not the same thing as inside. It took me most of a lifetime to learn the difference.
Looking back at that version of me from where I am standing now is strange. Not because I do not recognize him, I do, painfully well, but because I can finally see how much energy it took to keep all of it running at once. Performing while avoiding while rescuing while masking while filling every silence with a body that was not always good for me, stacked on top of each other, all day, every day, for years. No wonder there was nothing left over for honesty.
That was 42. Surviving, and calling it living, and lying to myself about which one it actually was.
I do not say any of this to trash the guy I was. He was doing the best he could with a system that had never once been given an accurate manual. But I am also not going to pretend he had it right, because pretending that is exactly the kind of lie that kept him stuck for twenty years.
> putting the poison down for good: chemical_sobriety.exe
January 6th, 2026, I took my last hit of the last substance I had left, cannabis, seven days prior to completing two years free from alcohol (efficient, if nothing else). That date is my sobriety date now, full stop, chemical sobriety, no asterisks, no bullshit. The first two and a half months were a living hell. My nervous system, unmuffled for the first time in my adult life, came online all at once and it was loud as hell (imagine every notification you’ve ever silenced going off simultaneously, forever). Every professional in my life told me the same damn thing: keep going, it gets better. It did. It calibrated. It is quieter now, but it is definitely never silent. And even that said I have stopped wanting it to be. It’s my guide. My buddy.
I want to be specific about what that first stretch actually felt like, because saying it was hard does not begin to cover it. My skin felt like it belonged to someone else. Sounds I had tuned out my entire life suddenly came in at full volume, refrigerators, fluorescent lights, other people chewing (chewing, it turns out, is a war crime when your nervous system is raw). I could not tell the difference between anxiety and simply being alive without a chemical buffer between me and the world, because I had never once experienced the second thing as an adult.
There were nights I genuinely did not know if I was getting worse or getting better, and no amount of research or podcasts or advice from people who meant well could answer that question for me. The only thing that answered it was time, and staying, and refusing to pick the substance back up even when picking it back up would have made that exact night infinitely easier.
A loud nervous system that tells me the truth is worth more than a numbed one that told me nothing at all.
I am not 2.75 years sober from alcohol and eight months sober from everything else because I am disciplined in some abstract, admirable way. I am sober because I got tired, bone tired, of being the only person in my own life who did not know what was actually happening inside me. Sobriety did not give me peace right away. It gave me access to the truth, and the peace came later, slowly, once I stopped being afraid of what the truth was going to say.
> the brain that finally got a name: audhd_pda_detected.log
Underneath the sobriety, underneath the grief, underneath every pattern I had already started dismantling, was something I had been carrying since kindergarten without a word for it. I am autistic. Specifically AuDHD, and specifically carrying a Persistent Drive for Autonomy profile, PDA (a full starter pack, no assembly required, some assembly deeply required).
The day I read the criteria for AuDHD and PDA and saw my entire childhood laid out in clinical language instead of moral failing, I sat in my car in a parking lot for almost twenty minutes without moving (the parking lot equivalent of buffering). Every teacher who called me disruptive. Every job where I was labeled difficult. Every relationship where I was told I was too much, or too rigid, or too intense, all of it got recontextualized in the span of one afternoon. I was not broken. I was undiagnosed.
PDA specifically explained something I had never been able to explain to another human being without sounding dramatic. Being told what to do, even about something I already wanted to do, can trigger a full nervous system alarm in me that has nothing to do with defiance and everything to do with a perceived loss of control (my brain: how dare you suggest the thing I was already going to do). I spent years apologizing for reactions I did not understand, calling myself stubborn, calling myself difficult, when what I actually needed was language, not shame.
Every framework I have ever built for myself, TuOS, the Decision Matrix, all of it, makes sense now in a way it did not before (basically I built myself an operating system because the default settings never worked). I was not building an unusually structured life because I liked structure. I was building the only kind of system a brain like mine could actually trust.
None of this erases the accountability work. It explains the mechanism underneath some of it. Knowing why a car will not start does not mean you are no longer responsible for getting it fixed (also, turns out you can’t diagnose-and-vibes your way out of an actual mechanical problem, who knew). It just means you finally know where to look under the hood instead of blaming the driver for everything.
> the storm I stood inside instead of running from: pre_crisis_intervention.log
This was also the year of my life I went through my first hospitalization that had nothing to do with substances. Nothing to do with a bipolar episode. Nothing to do with mania. Nothing to do with psychosis. Everything to do with an extremely difficult stretch of life circumstances that overwhelmed my capacity to cope in the moment. I wasn’t actively suicidal or wanting to end my life, but my mind started shifting into a passive state of not being disappointed if a bus ran me over. That’s when I knew I was heading towards a dark place I didn’t want to get anywhere near. The hospitalization was preemptive, before a crisis, not after one (proactive scheduling, my one adult skill). That distinction matters more than I can explain to someone who has only ever seen the after version. It meant a part of me finally trusted the system enough, and trusted myself enough, to ask for help before the wheels came off instead of after. I spent 48 hours in a facility, voluntarily, journaled 30 pages, had no medication changes, and was allowed to leave at my own request at the end. When I asked if I could leave, I already had a safety plan written and follow up care plans. In the past, all of my hospitalizations were after I had already entered a crisis state, were always caused by drug and alcohol induced mania and psychosis, were almost always involuntary, and were very traumatic. It’s been almost 3 years since that has been the case. Sobriety has improved my mental health in ways that therapy and medication never has.
My psychiatric medications changed a few times this past year, some to correct a side effect that turned out not to be a medication side effect at all, and some added specifically to manage sustained nervous system activation and anxiety from difficult life circumstances outside my control. None of this nervous system shit and medications for it is for anything actually wrong with my own brain chemistry. None of these changes were to treat or control bipolar disorder or depression, those are already well controlled.
I am not ashamed of one bit of that. Bodies keep score whether you want them to or not (mine apparently keeps score in a spreadsheet with pivot tables). Mine was simply finally allowed to tell the goddamn truth.
> boundaries with actual teeth: no_contact_everywhere.cfg
I set hard boundaries this year with a LOT of people, some of them people I have known my whole goddamn life (loyalty points, it turns out, do not expire, unfortunately). Some of these people have made it well known that they don’t like me, my boundaries, and me expecting them to be accountable for their behaviors. I have not responded to most of it. Not because it did not hurt like hell, but because my integrity matters more to me than being right in the moment, and an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind and my conscience dirty.
People love to tell you that setting a boundary means you stop caring. That is backwards. I set that boundary because I still cared enough about my own nervous system to stop letting someone else’s hostility live rent free inside it (the only tenant I’ve ever had who never paid a cent and still overstayed their welcome). Silence, in the face of someone actively trying to provoke a reaction out of you, is not weakness. It is the loudest form of no I have ever been capable of giving.
Part of that boundary work meant what may have been the last time I ever see some people. There were people who crossed boundaries I had already made clear, and that behavior is what ended some of these connections, not me walking away from nothing. I did not make those calls lightly, and I did not make them out of anger. I made them because staying in connection was costing me pieces of myself I am not willing to hand over to anyone anymore. Anyone. I have made peace with their absence from my life now.
Some connections I have grieved before I ever ended them, which is its own strange kind of loss, mourning something while it is still technically alive. By the time the actual boundaries went up, most of the grieving had already happened quietly, in private, over months of watching the same pattern repeat with no willingness on the other side to look at it honestly.
I have spent enough hours behind a camera this year to know what it looks like when a shot is out of focus, and I know now that several of those relationships were exactly that, blurred at the edges the entire time, and I kept insisting the picture was sharp because I wanted so badly for it to be. It was never going to resolve itself no matter how long I stood there squinting at it. Some pictures are just out of focus, and the only fix is to stop holding the shutter down on the same frame and finally move the lens.
And when a few of those goodbyes actually landed, when the door finally shut for good, what came after was not the grief I had braced for. It was something closer to the first full breath after holding one too long underwater, that involuntary, almost embarrassing relief of air finally moving all the way through your chest again.
Every single one of those endings left an empty chair somewhere in my life. A year ago an empty chair would have sent me into a panic, looking for anyone willing to sit in it, no vetting required (the hiring standards were, in retrospect, criminally low). This year, for the first time, I let the chairs stay empty. I did not rush to fill a single one, and the quiet that moved in where those people used to be did not feel like punishment. It felt like room to finally hear myself think.
> retiring the performance of goodness: water_drop_shutdown.log
This was also the year Operation Water Drop ended, and with it, the end of performative volunteering altogether. I spent years doing good things in ways that were still, underneath it, about being seen doing good things (charity work with a laugh track only I could hear). That is not accountability. That is a pattern, just one wearing a nicer costume than the others. I let it die on purpose, the same way I have let every identified pattern from TuOS die this year, on purpose, one at a time, and counting.
Operation Water Drop was good work. I am not walking that back. People got water who needed water. But somewhere inside doing it, a part of me was also quietly building a story out of it, a version of myself as the guy who shows up, the guy who helps, the guy other people can point to and say look how good he is (main character energy, but for hydration). That story needed an audience to survive, and needing an audience is the tell.
Real accountability and real generosity do not need anyone watching. The moment I noticed myself checking who saw a good thing I did, I knew the good thing had stopped being about the person I did it for and started being about me (a plot twist nobody claps for). That is an uncomfortable thing to admit about work that genuinely helped people, but discomfort has never once been a good reason to avoid the truth.
So I let it end. Not because helping people stopped mattering to me, it matters more now than it ever has, but because I needed to rebuild how I help people from the ground up, starting from a place that does not require anyone clapping for it (a standing ovation of exactly one, and he’s fine with that).
> one stranger's kindness became 35,000: oah_project_scaled.sh
In February, a woman on the pier who called herself Cherish showed me a small, unearned act of kindness at the exact moment I needed it most. She has no idea, to this day, that it turned into anything at all. That is the whole point. Her act was anonymous towards me, and I am paying it forward to the world in the same fashion.
I think about her sometimes, this stranger who has no idea she is the reason 35,000 acts of kindness now exist scattered across two countries. She did not do anything extravagant. She did not spend money she did not have or go out of her way for hours. She did one small, generous, thirty second thing for someone who happened to be me, on a day I happened to need it more than she could have known, and then she walked away and never thought about it again.
To pay that single moment forward, I started something this year called OAH. What those three letters actually stand for is only known to the people already inside it, and I am keeping it that way on purpose (the only secret in my life I’ve actually managed to keep). There is no official method. No app, no chain letter, no script to follow. It is intentionally anarchical. Fifteen known agents are running it right now, and every one of them is free to recruit more, and every single person who joins is free to spread it however the hell they want to. Nobody is in charge of how. That is the design, not a flaw in it (the first organization I’ve ever run with zero meetings, and it’s thriving). Over 35,000 acts of kindness later, across two countries and counting, one woman on a pier who will never fully grasp what she started is proof that one small, unearned, beautiful act of kindness can genuinely change the world if you just let it move.
I get updates sometimes, secondhand, filtered through however many degrees of separation, about acts I had absolutely nothing to do with, started by agents I have never met, spreading in directions I never could have planned or controlled. That loss of control is not a bug. It is the entire reason it works. The moment I tried to manage or brand or centralize it, it would stop being what it actually is and start being about me again, the same mistake I already made once with Operation Water Drop.
Somewhere out there right now, someone is doing something small and kind for a total stranger, and neither of them will ever know it traces back to a woman who called herself Cherish standing on a pier in February, or to me, or to any of it. That is not a flaw in the design. That is the entire point of the design.
> teaching the herd to face the storm: herd_project_launch.sh
This year I also started carrying something with a lot more weight than my own words alone. The bison, Tatanka, running head down and horns forward straight into the storm instead of away from it, was given to me this year with explicit permission from Bunny Sings Wolf Engberg, an Ambassador of the Lakota Dakota Nakota Nation, on the condition the teaching is always credited back to where it came from. I have also started building real connection with the Lummi people here at home.
I want to be careful here, because this teaching was given to me, not invented by me, and it does not belong to me. Bunny Sings Wolf Engberg trusted me with something sacred to her people, and the only condition attached to that trust was that it always gets credited back to where it came from. I take that condition seriously, more seriously than almost anything else I am building right now.
Out of that, I started building something called herd. All lowercase. Period at the end, on purpose (a punctuation choice with more commitment behind it than some things in my life). It stands for Heart Empowerment Rising Direction, and the whole idea is simple, and it is not mine alone to keep. A single bison facing a storm gets torn apart by it. A herd facing that same storm, head down, horns forward, together, walks straight through it and comes out the other side. herd. is about bringing that same power to anyone facing a storm of their own, so nobody has to charge into theirs completely alone.
herd. is still mostly an idea right now, more scaffolding than structure. But the shape of it is already clear to me. Storms do not care whether you are ready for them. What determines whether you survive one is not how strong you are alone, it is whether you have people beside you who are willing to put their own heads down and horns forward next to yours.
I do not think that contradicts anything I have learned about solitude this year. There is a difference between being alone because you are terrified of what happens if you are not, and choosing to stand shoulder to shoulder with a herd because you want to, from a place that no longer needs it to feel whole. I had to learn how to survive completely on my own first. Only after that did herd. even become possible, because I finally had something solid to actually stand next to someone else with, instead of something desperate to hide inside of them.
I have spent most of my life facing my storms completely alone, by necessity or by habit or by both. I do not want that for anyone else who does not have to go through it that way. That is what herd. is actually for.
> better off alone than better off in the wrong company: solitude_as_strength.log
I dated a handful of people this year, and I ended every single one of those connections myself, because continuing would have increased my suffering and none of them could respect a boundary once I set it. I spent roughly 75 percent of this year single, and I did not rebound into a damn thing to avoid feeling that. I have been celibate this entire past year of my life, a quarter of that time not by choice, and the rest of it fully by choice, because I was not about to trade my own regulation for connection with someone who could not meet me honestly.
For most of my life, alone was the scariest word I knew. Not spiders, not heights, not failure. Alone. I built entire relationships, entire versions of myself, entire years, around making absolutely sure I never had to sit with that word for very long. I would rather have been talking, did you even listen was a question I asked myself more than I ever said it out loud, starved for attention I told myself I did not need, always left with more to prove to someone who was never actually going to be satisfied no matter how much I proved (a performance review with a moving target and no raise).
Somewhere in the middle of this year that flipped, and it did not flip gently. It flipped the moment I finally let myself see how much of what I called love in the past was actually something else entirely. For years I held those stories up like they were solid, load bearing, something I could build a whole life on top of. This year I finally leaned on them and felt them give way, thin as they always were, and underneath them was a truth that had been waiting a long time for me to stop propping the lie back up.
I do not regret a single one of those endings, even the messy ones. The right person does not need you to abandon your own boundaries to feel loved by you. If keeping a boundary costs you the relationship, the relationship was never built to hold the real you in the first place.
I have stood on plenty of platforms in my life waiting for a train I had already been told, more than once, was never actually coming. I stayed anyway, because leaving the platform felt like giving up on something, when really the only thing I would have been giving up on was the waiting itself (Amtrak has better on-time performance than most of my relationships). And more than once I know I disappeared out of someone’s life the same way a candle goes out in a room nobody was watching, quietly, without ceremony, and they never circled back to ask where the light went. That used to devastate me. Now I understand it was just more proof of how little I had actually been seen the whole time I was busy trying to be everything.
Celibacy was not a punishment I put myself through, although my body filed a formal complaint about it more than once. Some of it was not my choice, and I will be honest about that instead of pretending it was some enlightened decision the whole way through (enlightenment and a dry spell look remarkably similar from the outside). But the majority of it was choice, and choosing it taught me that my worth does not evaporate without someone else attached to it, even though other parts of me had increasingly strong opinions on the matter. I am a whole person alone. I always was. I just needed a year of proof, and apparently a genuinely heroic amount of self-restraint, to actually believe it.
Here is the part I did not expect. Alone stopped being the scary word. Somewhere along the way it turned into the safest word I know. At the end of the day, when the noise dies down and it is just me and my own thoughts and nobody else’s version of events to untangle, I am not lonely. I am regulated. I am clear. I know exactly who I am when there is nobody in the room to perform for, and I like him (roommate reviews: five stars, would live with him again). I do not need somebody else’s presence to feel okay in my own skin anymore. That is not a consolation prize for being single. That is the actual win.
In the middle of all of that, I found one of my best friends, and a truly platonic love, the kind that asks nothing of me except honesty, and gives the same back without condition. Proof that connection without cost is possible, I just needed to stop being willing to pay for it with pieces of myself first.
> passing the climb to others: peer_support_impact.log
I helped several veterans, community members, and my own daughter get sober this year. I peer supported more than 25 people through leaving toxic and emotionally abusive dynamics with friends, partners, and employers. I did not do any of that by telling people what to do. I did it by showing them what it looks like to actually do the work, out loud, in public, on this blog, every single week (an oversharing habit that finally found a purpose).
Watching my own daughter get sober this year is not something I can write about without my hands shaking a little on the keyboard. I do not take credit for her choice, that was entirely hers to make. But I do believe showing her what honest, unglamorous, un-performed recovery actually looks like up close made it easier for her to imagine it for herself.
Peer support work has taught me more about my own healing than almost anything else this year. You cannot fake presence with someone who is actively leaving a toxic dynamic. They can smell performance from a mile away. Showing up real, every single time, is the only currency that means anything in that room.
Twenty five people is not a number I am claiming credit for either. Every one of them did their own work. What I did was sit next to them while they did it, and remind them they were not crazy, not too much, not the problem, when every other voice in their life had spent years telling them otherwise.
> the shutter never stopped: 4000_frames.raw
Bouldering became a hobby I love this year, out of nowhere. Photography kept going, over 4,000 frames, including 150 fine art nudes with a new client who has become a friend. 250 plus videos, 18 of them dance videos tied to specific songs and specific milestones I will never forget. 172,000 words across 76 posts on this blog alone (an output that would concern a normal person, but here we are). None of that is output for the sake of output. It is proof, to myself more than anyone reading this, that the person underneath the mask actually has something to say and something to make.
Bouldering found me almost by accident, and it turned into one of the only places in my life where my brain finally shuts up. There is no room to think about anything except the next hold when you are six feet off the ground trying not to fall (a surprisingly effective form of therapy, and cheaper than the actual kind). That kind of forced presence is rare for a mind that runs as loud as mine does, and I did not know how badly I needed it until I found it. Most of the time I am up there alone, and for the first time that word means peace instead of danger.
The fine art nude work this year mattered to me in a way I did not expect going in. It is not about the images themselves, it is about trust, both directions, mine and hers, in a space that could very easily be exploitative if either person treated it carelessly. That said, we ended up having a lot of fun in the process (professional, tasteful, and occasionally somebody’s bare foot met a very unforgiving pinecone, or the tide came in faster than planned). It wasn’t just me directing and them posing, it was us collaborating together to bring out the best in my photographic creativity, and the best in her body. What came out of it is some of the work I am proudest of this year.
172,000 words is not a number I set out to hit. It is just what happens when you tell the truth in public every week for a year instead of holding it all in your chest until it rots. Writing this much did not heal me by itself. But it made the healing visible, to me and to anyone paying attention, in a way that staying quiet never could have.
> what the body kept while everything else changed: gray_hairs.log
I dropped a shirt size this year. I am lucky to eat 5 meals in an entire week right now with my nervous system dysregulation and the way it has destroyed my appetite and made eating very difficult (the world’s worst diet plan, zero stars, do not recommend). I also grew gray hairs into my beard this year that were not there before. My body kept a record my mind was still too fried to read. I do not resent those grays anymore. They are proof I survived something specific, not evidence that I am falling apart.
I catch myself looking at those gray hairs in the mirror some mornings, and instead of fretting like I used to with the first few, I just look at them. They are not a sign I am aging badly. They are a timestamp, physical proof that something in my life was genuinely, measurably that hard, hard enough to show up in keratin (Mother Nature’s version of a receipt). They are a badge of honor for me. I earned every one of them!
The shirt size is a different kind of marker. Some of that is stress I would not wish on anyone. Some of it is simply what happens when you stop drinking, stop smoking weed, and start walking over 2,000 miles in a year without trying to lose a single pound on purpose. A lot of it is unintentional, a nervous system that has been repeatedly reactivated by circumstances outside my control this year. My body changed because my life changed. It was never really about the weight.
I am not interested in erasing any of it, the gray or the smaller frame or any other physical mark this year left behind. Every bit of it is receipts. I would rather wear proof of what I survived than pretend the year was easier on me than it actually was.
I have watched almost 200 sunsets off that pier this year, and there is a specific minute in every single one of them, right after the color drains out of the sky and the temperature drops a few degrees all at once, when the day finally stops pretending and just tells you the truth about itself. That minute used to terrify me. I did not want to be standing there by myself when the light went. This year that exact minute became my favorite part of the day, the one place I go looking for quiet on purpose instead of running from it.
> the word she used that changed the math: finite_heartbeats.log
A month ago I sat in my primary care provider’s office to get some health issues checked out that had been building since mid-July. At the end of the appointment she told me plainly that if things did not clear up within a month, she was going to order a bone marrow biopsy to screen for cancer. Nobody had ever used that word on me before, not attached to my own body, not as a real next step instead of an abstraction on a screen somewhere (turns out “cancer” hits different when it’s not a zodiac sign). It shook me in a way I am still sitting with.
I do not have an answer yet. I do not know if that biopsy will even happen, or what it would find if it did. That is not actually the part of this that changed anything. The part that changed everything was noticing, almost immediately, how much of my own life I have been quietly saving for later. Next month. Next year. After this project. I have been living like there was an unlimited supply of later, and one sentence from a doctor was enough to remind me that nobody actually gets that guarantee.
People who get an actual cancer diagnosis often talk about finally living the way they always meant to, doing the things they kept postponing, saying the things they kept swallowing, because later suddenly stops feeling guaranteed. I do not want to need a real diagnosis to access that kind of clarity. The warning alone was enough. I am done waiting for permission from a calendar that was never going to hand it to me.
We get somewhere around 100,000 heartbeats a day, and not one of us gets to see the running total or know how many are actually left on the clock (a truly reckless design choice on the part of whoever built us). I am not spending mine the way I used to. Not on dreams I keep quietly filing under someday. Not on one more year of treating my own life like a rough draft.
So going forward I am living like I might not have much time left, hoping like hell that I have decades of it, and landing, realistically, somewhere in the middle of both of those truths at once. That is not morbid. That is the first time in my life I have taken my own mortality seriously enough to actually let it change how I spend a Tuesday.
> 250 feet above the streets, one year later: summit_43.log
That morning on my 43rd birthday, I woke up in a different bed than I have ever woken up in on a birthday before, 250 feet above the streets of San Francisco. Nobody handed me that morning. I built the year that led to it, one boundary, one sober day, one honest word at a time.
I do not know exactly my 44th year of life looks like yet, and for the first time in my life, not knowing does not scare me the way it used to. A year ago not having a plan felt like free fall. Today it feels like standing at the edge of something with my eyes open instead of squeezed shut. I do not know if I will spend my 44th year alone or not, and for the first time in my life, that uncertainty does not feel like a threat either. Whatever comes will come. I am no longer terrified of what happens if nothing does.
Some part of me has known this for a very long time, longer than I have been willing to admit out loud. Not the details, I could not have told you a year ago that any of this was coming. But the shape of it, the general direction, the sense that the life I kept forcing myself into never quite fit right, that part I think I always knew, the same way you know a shoe is the wrong size long before you finally admit your feet hurt and take it off.
I spent a long time holding onto ropes that were not attached to anything solid on the other end, hoping if I just held on tight enough and long enough, something would eventually pull back. Nothing ever did. Letting go of a rope like that does not feel like falling, it turns out. It feels like finally noticing your hands were free this whole time.
This is my first birthday. Not because it is the first time I turned a year older. Because it is the first time the person waking up to celebrate it is not wearing a mask, is not numbed, is not performing for anyone in the goddamn room, and is not still living inside the patterns that used to run the whole show. My inner child got a real party this year, for the first time in his life, and he is smiling, and he is full of love, and nobody is ever taking that away from him again.
If you have read this whole thing, thank you for sitting with all 365 days of it, the ugly parts included. I did not write this to be inspiring. I wrote it because I turned 43 today, and for the first time, I actually like the guy who gets to blow out these candles, alone, in a room he no longer needs anyone else’s permission to feel okay in.
> the closing argument: ROASTED_POTATOES.exe
Having tried both, I can totally agree.
I turned 43 this year, and if the numbers above didn’t already roast me alive, let’s finish the job properly.
I built a personal operating system and named it after myself. Not a to-do list. Not a journal. An operating system. With version numbers. TuOS v7 exists, which means there were six prior releases of a man who apparently needed a changelog to function.
I have a page called Apexis where I explain, at length, that I am a lot of things. Most people update their dating bio. I published a manifesto.
I have a whole page describing myself as essentially unkillable, cockroach-grade resilience and everything, and this year that resilience got tested plenty.
I wrote a post about the subtle art of the Irish goodbye, and then spent several breakups this year proving I never actually learned how to do one quietly.
I have a blog post called “Circle Logic.” I did not need 1,500 words to figure out my relationships kept repeating the same fight on a loop, but apparently I wrote them anyway, so here we are.
I built a secret kindness operation with fifteen agents and an intentionally anarchic structure, which means I have more organizational infrastructure for handing strangers kindness than I’ve ever needed for anything else in my life.
I adopted a bison as a personal philosophy, complete with a lowercase-and-a-period brand name, herd., which is a lot of commitment for an animal I have never actually met.
I have walked over 2,000 miles this year, watched nearly 200 sunsets from the same pier, and somehow still needed a doctor to point out that some of my old habits were patterns and not hobbies.
I got diagnosed AuDHD with a Persistent Drive for Autonomy and built an entire decision-making framework because my brain couldn’t trust anything simpler, which tracks.
I have documented this recovery through a Vagus Nerve Stimulator, a TMS machine that hit my brain with three times the magnetic field of Earth, and enough blood draws to concern a vampire.
I quote Brené Brown, Melanie Beattie, Alan Watts, and Carl Jung on this blog on a semi-regular basis, and none of them, in their combined body of work, ever covered several of the specific situations I found myself in this year, so I had to figure those out myself.
I have written 172,000 words this year alone documenting my own healing in exhaustive, public, weekly detail, which either makes me the most self-aware man in Bellingham or means I just really like an audience, and at this point I’m comfortable saying it’s both.
I have been mania-free for two and three-quarter years, since the day I got sober, according to three separate licensed professionals and a psychiatrist who all agree on this fairly boring fact, which is a more thorough consensus than most of my other life decisions have ever gotten.
I am, by every metric on this page and several others across this entire website, gray-haired, over-documented, and walking 2,000 miles a year to outrun my own patterns while building an entire operating system named after myself. This is also the longest stretch I have ever gone single in my entire adult life, and it has been fucking fantastic.
And that, more than the manifesto with version numbers, more than the bison I adopted as a personality, is exactly why I am better off alone.
Gloriously, defiantly, doctor-verified better off alone.
I am 2KVYOT3. I am unrecognizable. I am love. 1 @rn b3tt3r 0ff Vl0n3.
