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This might be my final post of 2025. I’m not entirely sure, because I’m not consciously in charge of the timing of my writing. The engine fires on its own—if I don’t jump in, it goes rogue.
I had planned to finish The Microcosm and use it as my first-year finale,
but I have divergent plans for it now.
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Before I started to write online, my mind had been trained to expect retribution for not just recounting my experiences, but for having perception of them at all. Noticing behavior, its impact on me, and stating it with normal human emotion—or more recently, without it—got me a first-class ticket to being told that I had expectations of others that were too high. That I was “sarcastic,” “holier-than-thou,” and, my favorite, “a PR nightmare.”
I got enough distance from most of that in the van that in January, I finally set the jar of worst-case scenarios to the side and just started making something tangible of everything that made sense to me, even if it never did to anyone else. After all, no air strikes were deployed when I posted my first essay about my childhood in 2023, and after I moved to the Columbia area, someone I had never met before rode up next to me on the Katy and acknowledged me for that piece.
So I wrote about meeting Lael Wilcox, and then about bike race plans that were promptly knocked off the shelf. I leaned into letting myself be hopeful again on my 30th birthday, and personified Gratitude as a peer rather than a debt collector. I finished a short story based on ideas I had as a teenager and tattooed under my collar bones.
Then the plot thickened; I stayed at the wheel partly because I let myself use this blog as an SOS signal to avoid the “What did you do to put yourself in this situation,” response that used to come when I asked directly for help.
Somewhere in this timeline, Aaro and Michelle Froese placed a quiet bet on me, and I initiated the rebuild protocol again.
My mind started to reorganize, and I felt emboldened enough to start writing in a way that exposed me even further. I documented patterns of manipulation, and eventually, attunement so others could see the social risk calculation I had to develop at work.
I publicly failed more bike objectives than when I was homeless and documented exactly where I found my limitations, yet no one told me I had “punched above my weight.”
I wrote a bomb, and no one retaliated.
And as my momentum increased, something I can’t explain started happening.
Others I hadn’t officially met started to greet me on the trail. Request my attendance. Forward my most philosophical essays—the ones I thought were most likely to get me labelled as “reading too much into things,” and “pulling things out of my a**.”
In other words, I showed new people who I was,
and they treated me kindly.
Absolutely no one has said “you shouldn’t be the way that you are,” or treated me as a problem to be dealt with in over a year.
And I’ve had enough time to consider the forces that have allowed me to stay whole,
that if at any time someone names me as “The b***h everyone thinks I am,” my survival isn’t hinged on correcting the record.
It’s nourished by the curiosity to say,
“Explain your reasoning.”
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I have my next resolution ready for New Year’s Day.
And it’s bigger than me targeting the 2026 Mishigami Challenge.
I will the machine. 