For most of my adult life, I carried around a quiet suspicion that something was wrong with me. Not in a dramatic way, but in the subtle, corrosive way that comes from years of trying to fit into environments that were never designed for the way my mind works.
I kept trying to force myself into job shapes that didn’t match my cognition, and every time one of them failed, I assumed the failure was mine. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I do now: I was trying to build a life on top of a foundation that couldn’t support it.
And the moment I stopped feeling bad about myself, the entire structure of my career snapped into focus.
The shift didn’t happen all at once. It happened slowly, then suddenly, the way clarity often does. I realized that my mind wasn’t broken; it was simply built for a different kind of work.
I’m not a task‑execution person. I’m not someone who thrives in environments where the goal is to maintain the status quo. I’m a systems thinker. A relational thinker. A dialogue thinker.
My ideas don’t emerge in isolation. They emerge in motion — in conversation, in iteration, in the friction between what I see and what the world pretends not to see.
Once I stopped treating that as a flaw, it became the engine of everything I’m doing now.
The real turning point came when I stopped trying to contort myself into roles that drained me. I had spent years trying to make traditional jobs work, thinking that if I just tried harder, or masked better, or forced myself into a different rhythm, something would finally click.
But nothing clicked. Nothing stuck.
And the moment I stopped blaming myself, I could finally see the pattern: I wasn’t failing at jobs. Jobs were failing to recognize the kind of mind I have.
I was trying to survive in environments that rewarded predictability, repetition, and compliance, when my strengths are pattern recognition, critique, and architectural insight.
Once I stopped fighting my own nature, the energy I thought I had lost came back almost immediately.
That’s when I started writing every day. Not as a hobby, not as a side project, not as a way to “build a brand,” but as the central act of my life.
I didn’t change my personality. I didn’t change my résumé. I didn’t change my “professional story.”
I changed one thing: I wrote.
And the moment I did, the world started paying attention.
My WordPress engagement spiked. My LinkedIn impressions climbed. My analytics lit up with traffic from places that made me sit up straighter — Redmond, Mountain View, Dublin, New York.
Thousands of people were reading my work quietly, without announcing themselves, without commenting, without making a fuss. They were just there, showing up, day after day.
It wasn’t because I had suddenly become more interesting. It was because I had finally stopped hiding.
When I stopped feeling bad about myself, I stopped diluting my voice. I stopped writing like someone hoping to be chosen. I stopped writing like an applicant.
I started writing like a columnist — someone who isn’t trying to impress anyone, but is trying to articulate the world as they see it.
And that shift changed everything.
My work became sharper, cleaner, more architectural, more humane. I wasn’t trying to get hired. I was trying to be understood.
That’s when my career trajectory finally revealed itself.
I’m not meant to be inside one company.
I’m meant to write about the entire ecosystem.
Not as a critic, but as a translator — someone who can explain the gap between what companies think they’re building and what they’re actually building. Someone who can articulate the future of AI‑native computing in a way that’s accessible, grounded, and structurally correct.
Someone whose ideas aren’t tied to a single product or platform, but to the next paradigm of computing itself.
The more I wrote, the clearer it became that my ideas aren’t a walled garden. They’re a framework.
No AI company is doing what I’m proposing — not Microsoft, not Google, not Apple, not OpenAI.
My work isn’t about features. It’s about architecture.
- Markdown as a substrate.
- Relational AI.
- Continuity engines.
- Local embeddings.
- AI as a thinking partner instead of a search bar.
These aren’t product tweaks. They’re the foundation of the next era of computing.
And foundations travel. They’re portable. They’re interoperable. They’re valuable across the entire industry.
Once I understood that, I stopped waiting to be chosen. I stopped waiting for a job title to validate my thinking. I stopped waiting for a PM to notice me.
I started building the body of work that makes me undeniable.
Systems & Symbols isn’t a blog series. It’s the anthology I’m writing in real time — the long‑term intellectual project that will define my voice.
Every entry is another piece of the architecture. Every critique is another layer of clarity. Every insight is another step toward the life I’m building.
And that life is no longer tied to a single destination.
My goal isn’t to end up in one city or one company or one institution.
My goal is to build a life where I can write from anywhere.
- A life where my work is portable.
- A life where my voice is the engine.
- A life where my ideas travel farther than my body needs to.
- A life where I can write from Helsinki or Baltimore or Rome or a train station in the middle of nowhere.
A life where my mind is the home I carry with me.
I’m not chasing stability anymore.
I’m building sovereignty.
And it all started the moment I stopped feeling bad about myself.
Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.
Stories That Are All True 