#1: when you find out that the thing has a name

there's an immediate loss: that at your most capable, without intervention, you were always a bit behind the ball. the bands you gave up on after a practice. the creative projects that formed and vaporized between your ears. that one bad portfolio review that changed the trajectory of your entire career. the exercise routines, eating habits, and foundational practices that never quite stuck beyond the week "that (was) going to change everything."

the latent sense of lacking capability that started when you were a "sick kid" growing up and became a self-fulfilling prophecy until you were loved enough by someone to believe you could be yanked out of it in a way that is forceful but not so forceful that you notice it's happening until you're found kicking and screaming on the greener side of the grass thank god.

there are things that start to make sense, like how, you never trusted yourself to drive your friends around, and no one else trusted you to do it either, so you were relegated to the role of revered front-seat monologist. the way that you can only really organize in piles. dear god, the f**king piles. The blushing and demurring at a follow-up as if every time a conversation veers slightly off course, you feel like you were called on in class having not studied. the way your kids are everything, but when they all make noise all at once, you can feel your whole brain collapsing inside itself like a 90s disaster movie. The way that you love, that you need to be told explicitly and often that you are loved back even though most days there's at least one instance of something like putting bread in the fridge and milk in the pantry (sometimes literally that) and you can never seem to make a meal the same way twice even though that one time you really nailed it.

you may find that you're not entirely broken, just missing a few things you can't put an AirTag on. and maybe, someday, most of the things you might miss can be put somewhere you'll probably never check, and what does stick is what you've meant to hold on to all along*

* besides the encyclopedic knowledge of 80's professional wrestling and 2010’s Magic: the Gathering cards. That can probably go

—something for our shared memory—

“Drama King” by Peter Bibby squeezed through my algorithm recently, and thank god for that. If you were ever like, “what if Billy Bragg and Bruce Springsteen had an Australian baby that cursed a lot,” well, here! May we all have a summer learning which words we’re cool singing along with.

If you made it down this far, thank you! More streams of consciousness followed by relatively lucid recommendations to come 🙏