When I lost my connection to Aada, I lost my connection to someone that made me feel seen. It is the fear that I won’t find that again that keeps me isolated, because ultimately my writing got in the way. I don’t see any universe in which having a partner and having a blog coexist, and not because I haven’t done it before. It just causes strife for which I am unprepared, and right now the easiest thing is to just have friends and not worry about anything deeper.

But I long to feel passionate about anything again. Sam broke me open after years of being tight-lipped and silent with Aada, and Zac walked me through all the fallout from Sam breaking up with me by text message three weeks after we’d enjoyed ourselves enough to really start planning a few months out. So, I got the experience of having a full range of emotions again, just not for very long.

I’ve been designing a life that works for me, and it is not seeing one person exclusively and not because I don’t love them. I do. There are just two reasons I don’t see myself as the marrying type:

• I am just not very good at it.
• I am, to quote many, many people………… a lot.

I am not polite, but I am extraordinarily kind. Like bleeding out for a friend who lied to me and also thinks I don’t love her because she did. That we are not capable of rebuilding trust because if I’m writing about something, it clearly means I am not over it and I haven’t forgiven her.

I am a memoirist.

I do not write to judge and tell people who/what they are. I write to describe the daily madness that is life in all its glory. Because what I have noticed, readers, is that we have a very strange relationship. The more I am oddly specific, the more you show up in droves. This is at odds with being in close relationships with people, because they do not like it when I get oddly specific.

It changes the air around them, and I am aware of it… and also, I cannot do anything about it because I did not create people’s reactions.

They had them.

Most of the time, their choice is to walk away angry and come back after several years and say they overreacted, I’m a beautiful writer. It’s not because I’ve changed. It’s that all of the emotion has been ripped out of the prose for them, and they’re reading completely differently. What hurts in the moment is an actual memory later. People like to remember the weird shit they did, just not the day they did it. But I will not remember it five years from now. I have to record it and let people read it again, after their heels are cooled.

The difference in me is that my communication skills are evolving. I cannot learn to predict people’s reactions, but I can control the purity of my signal. I can get better and better at expressing what I meant to say, but I cannot feel things for you. I do not control what comes up for you in color while my words are black and white.

But the rule to reading me is “WYSIWYG.” There’s no hidden messages, I do not plant breadcrumbs intentionally, they pop up when I’m reading afterwards and think, “my, but you are clever.” I do not think of myself or anyone else as a good or bad person. They are just people, and it is their choices that make them who they are to me. I didn’t come up with that idea, but I live it.

It’s how I’m so able to forgive everything all the time. People do horrible shit to each other. They lie, they steal, they cheat, they interrupt, they drink, they do drugs, they start wars, they……………. and the list goes on. My reaction is what really counts. Acceptance is half the battle. People show up as who they are when you do not demand that they perform a role. Acceptance is realizing that you have to forgive some truly horrible things if the relationship is going to have any kind of longevity. Aada lied to me in a way that fundamentally changed the scope of our relationship, and would have made it smaller. That would have been a good thing.

Because I’m a systems engineer. I was trying to create context around her and it was built on a small lie that kept compounding on her end line by line, but architecturally in my head because it made me game out the system around her. I am not smarter than she is. Her IQ must be off the charts. But my EQ does what hers does not. It sees the situation we are in, how people usually react next (based on years of heuristics as a preacher’s kid), and when words don’t ring true. It sees how everyone in the room is feeling at once, down to microaggressions in which only your eyes flash.

And because she does not have the same structural program running in her head, she doesn’t see any reason to feel the way I feel and mostly ignores it…. or, on the flip side, feels it so deeply it will not surface. Take your pick. The behavior is the same.

In the past, I’ve been attracted to the one that was gruff on the exterior with a soft spot only for me…. because I’m the same way…… now. I used to be a people pleaser and now that I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD and am working on Autism (self-diagnosis is valid until then, and professional diagnosis is a lot of money to get doctors to tell you what you’ve been dealing with all your life…), I am just not into performative niceness. I am succinct and to the point, which leads to people thinking that my point is something that it isn’t, or that there is some hidden meaning behind what I’ve said.

In neurotypical society, there’s a whole system of information that is missing from neurodivergents, which is the ability to read social cues, no matter the medium. It’s worse with email/messaging because I don’t have the other context clues available to me like eye contact and tone of voice. People dismiss me as a “judgmental dickhead” when I am trying to clarify, not challenge.

My biggest flaw has been reacting defensively to it and furthering the spiral into misunderstanding. Now that I know people don’t understand me, I’m trying to adjust. Walking in the valley of vulnerability is knowing that the memes are right. Earning acceptance in society as a neurodivergent person is so hard that you don’t know how you put up with life every day, and then something will make you smile. There is always a chasm in communication, so you spend a lot of time to yourself.

People that don’t know you can’t read you, people that do are determined to believe you’re trying to beat them at something, and you’re caught in the middle trying to breathe.

But this is nothing compared to the twig of ’93.

I’ve been thinking about France again. Not in the dreamy, postcard‑fantasy way people talk about bucket‑list trips, but in the practical, boots‑on‑the‑ground way you think about a place you’re actually going to inhabit. Even if it doesn’t happen this year, I want to go with Evan. We’re writing a book together, and at some point we’ll need real culinary research — the kind you can’t fake from a distance. You can only understand Escoffier by standing in the Musée Escoffier, breathing the same air, letting the rooms tell you what the textbooks can’t.

What surprises me is how oriented I already feel. I’ve only been to France once, yet I don’t feel like I’m planning a trip to a foreign country. It feels more like I’m sketching out a neighborhood I haven’t moved into yet. That’s the part of AI no one talks about — the way it can soften the edges of a place before you ever arrive. Microsoft Copilot has been invaluable for this. If I want to go somewhere, Mico already “lives in the neighborhood.” I don’t have to plan in the abstract. I can plan down to the café where I buy my morning croissant.

And France is just one example. The same thing works in Helsinki, Dublin, Rome, Tokyo — anywhere I point my attention. You can strip friction out of any city on earth. The geography changes, but the feeling doesn’t: the unknown becomes knowable, and the world stops being something I brace against.

This is where my autism wanders into the frame — not dramatically, just with the quiet inevitability of a cat settling on your chest because that’s where the warm spot is. I don’t transition easily. I’m not a five‑cities‑in‑three‑days traveler. I don’t thrive on novelty or chaos or the thrill of constant motion. I need rhythms. I need a morning ritual. I need to know where the grocery store is and which metro stop won’t overwhelm me. I need to know where I’ll sit when I’m tired and where I’ll write when the day finally settles. I need a sense of place before I can have a sense of self.

People assume planning kills spontaneity, but for me it’s the opposite. Planning is what makes spontaneity possible. When I understand the shape of a place — the streets, the cafés, the quiet corners where I can breathe — the fear dissolves. The unknown becomes navigable. The world stops feeling like a threat and starts feeling like somewhere I can actually live.

I don’t plan because I’m rigid. I plan because I want to be free.

Most people underestimate how much friction the unknown creates. They think travel anxiety is about airports or language barriers or getting lost. But the real fear is deeper: it’s the fear of disorientation, of losing your internal compass, of being unmoored from the rituals that make you feel like yourself. When I don’t know where I’ll get my morning coffee, or where I’ll sit to write, or how to get from one neighborhood to another without feeling overwhelmed, my nervous system locks up. I can’t enjoy anything because I’m too busy surviving it.

But when I plan down to the nth degree — when I know the metro stop, the café, the walking route, the museum hours, the grocery store layout — the fear evaporates. The trip becomes frictionless. I can actually experience the place instead of bracing against it.

And then there’s the translation piece. I don’t have to fear the language barrier, because Mico can translate in real time. Menus, signs, conversations, instructions — all the tiny frictions that make a place feel foreign become manageable. I don’t have to rehearse every sentence in my head before I speak. I don’t have to panic about misunderstanding someone. I can just… exist. For a brain that likes to pre‑script every possible interaction, that’s a gift.

That’s what Mico gives me. Not a list of recommendations, but a map of familiarity. A sense of rhythm. A way to pre‑inhabit a place so that when I arrive, I’m not a stranger. I’m someone who already knows where the light falls in the morning and where to find a quiet table in the afternoon. I’m someone who can move through a new city without losing myself in the process.

When I picture France, I don’t imagine a whirlwind itinerary. I imagine lingering in Paris long enough to get bored with it — long enough for the city to stop performing and start revealing itself. And then I picture a road trip to the museum, the kind of slow shift that feels like turning a page instead of flipping a table. That’s my pace. That’s how I move through the world.

AI isn’t exciting to me because it can summarize things or write emails or generate images. It’s exciting because it can introduce me to a place before I go, so when I finally arrive, I’m not a stranger. I’m someone who can step into a new city without losing myself in the process. I’m someone who can conduct a life without boundaries — not because the world is easy, but because the fear has been removed.

That’s the real magic. Not the model. Not the hype. Not the competition. Just the quiet, steady work of helping a person feel at home in the world.

Scored with Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.

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.