I got here the long way.

The longer version

I got here the long way.

There’s you, and there’s the part of you that notices you. I call that the Observer.

I’ve spent my life figuring out how things work — old engines I’ve torn down and rebuilt, speaker boxes tuned to the cubic inch so the air and the power and the placement all agree before the sound does, wood and lasers and code and interfaces, bodies and biology I read new research on the way other people follow sports. None of it came with a degree. I just can’t put a thing down until I understand it to my own satisfaction, which is a higher bar than it sounds.

Alongside all of it, I could always feel things that don’t show up in a system diagram. What someone meant underneath what they were saying. The shape of something before it arrived. For a long time I didn’t trust it, so I stayed where things were legible — inputs, outputs, logic. Clean.

Then, in my forties, I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism, and the friction finally made sense. The same wiring that made ordinary life so loud was an antenna I’d never been taught to read. There was no lightning strike, no moment it all clicked — just life handing me situations the clean model couldn’t cover, enough times that I stopped pretending I wasn’t already seeing it.

Lately the curiosity has turned toward living things more than machines — I garden, I talk to the plants, and if I’m quiet enough they tell me when they’ve got something to offer. The same attention goes to whoever’s sitting across from me. Most of what I do is help you reach the Observer — the part of you that can step back and watch your own life happen — and stay there long enough to see the shape of what you’re already living. Part of that is sorting what’s consistent from what’s only projection: what’s real for you, and what’s just my own noise. None of it requires belief. It requires attention — the willingness to look at what’s actually there instead of the story you’ve been telling about it.