This blog is an unexpected time capsule of who I was before I knew myself. A lot can change in ten years, and a lot did. But a lot also didn't. There are things I thought I'd have achieved by now, places I expected to have been, skills I anticipated I'd have mastered. A lot of the dead air of daily life that I used to spend pursuing a path I believed I was leading has been filled up with grief. I expected to have become someone, and instead I've spent half a decade re-evaluating everything I once knew about myself. Choices feel more perilous than they once did. Opportunities are more suspect. Trust is now the hardest thing to give away. I'm more exhausted than I once was. Not just from age (39 isn't all that old) but from the repetition of disappointment in promises, institutions, repeating cycles. I am more disillusioned and apathetic than ever before about the constant demand to prove worth to be worthy of living. It was easier to find my place in the world wh...