I ended a 16-year relationship and turned 47 in January 2024.

A few months prior, I decided to pull the trigger on a long-forming plan to move back to my home state of Louisiana from my adopted state of North Carolina, which also meant pulling the trigger on blowing up a career from which I’d been trying to leave for at least five years. I’d been itching to do this even after training for it and taking out student loans for it and ultimately sacrificing much of my mental and physical health for it. It took me nearly a decade to truly recover from all of that training — and a full decade to get student loan forgiveness through PSLF.

Sunk costs and all that gone, my head seemed to clear and I asked myself (about the relationship, about the geography, about everything): what the hell am I doing here? (insert proverbial *gestures around wildly*)

Joan Didion famously wrote that “in the end, we all become stories”…

… and my story has moved toward some significant plotline shifts. And we all like to tell our stories, even those of us who tend to be rather private about them in general. I suppose that’s what I’ll do here. If you’re interested in some of those stories, I’d love for you to read them, to get some engagement and subscribes, but really only for shits and giggles.

I miss the early days of the internet and blogging — think circa late 90s, early aughts, where you could create a bloggy sort of community around your little stories, goofy quiz memes, and random daily observations.

Of course this was back before social media, and I guess social media did take the place of that for a hot minute (especially MySpace — thanks, Tom), but as I watch social media shift from those interesting early days to a capitalistic attention economy wet dream where everyone is branding themselves and influencing or selling something, I have a sneaking suspicion that folks looking for some authenticity, especially those of us a certain age, will find their way back to the kind of communities we created with LiveJournal, LastFM, and other spaces that were not technically “social media” back in the day. [And I’d bet money some young tech kid will reinvent that shit and make a lot of money off of it while the rest of us oldsters stand there screaming, fists raised, to get the hell off our lawn.]

I’ll do my best to stand in that kind of early web 2.0 authenticity. I have no skills to teach you, no true insights into anything that you should be paying for, other than that I genuinely believe the secret to life has something to do with protein (go ahead, write that down somewhere, as I swear it’s some kind of holy grail truth key).

I’ll try to post weekly, but I guarantee nothing.

I’ve started so many of these little projects only to abandon them eventually. But I think I’m in a space right now where I need one of these little projects more than I ever did, here in this — what? midlife crisis? period of transition? personal chaos cloud?

Humans wanna be seen, even when they say they don’t. I’m no different. But no promises here to make myself seen on the regular. When I do show up, I’ll try to be funny. That’s about all I can offer.