Where I Have Been, and Where I Am Going

A few days ago I sat down with a book I had wanted to read for years, Notes on the Synthesis of Form. I got a couple of pages in and found it hard. Dense, full of mathematics, the kind of book you have to climb rather than read. And somewhere in the middle of struggling with it I stopped and wondered, almost idly, whether the man who wrote it was even still alive.

He is not. Christopher Alexander died in 2022. But the small fact of sitting there, on an ordinary day, reaching toward something difficult because I wanted to understand it, turned out to matter more than the answer. Because I had not reached for anything in a long time. For most of the last year I had not wanted to understand the world. I had wanted to stop feeling it. And the fact that I was sitting there at all, curious again, climbing a hard book for no reason except that I wanted to, was the first sign of something I am only now able to name. I was coming back to life.

I have always believed that human beings are made of stories. That it is the most basic unit there is, the thing we are built out of. For a long stretch this past year I believed my story was over. This is an attempt to write down how it started again. I am not writing it because it is resolved. I am writing it because a lot of people in my life do not actually know what this year has held, and because writing is the one way I have ever been able to think honestly. So here is what has been going on.

What I Lost

I lost a love that, for half a decade, was the place I drew all of my meaning from.

I am not going to be able to make you understand what she was, because she was not one thing. She was my best friend. She was the first person I ever grew alongside so naturally that it never once occurred to me to defend myself, to perform, to hide a single corner of who I am. I could be a child with her, and she would be a child with me. I told her everything, every quirk and weirdness and ugly private thing, and the miracle of her was that she could hold all of it. It never felt like the careful early days of knowing someone. It felt like we had known each other for eons and had only just found each other again.

We had a thing we called the half-cake problem. If half a cake was left, we would fight over it. Not because either of us wanted it, but because each of us wanted the other to have it. That was the whole relationship in one image. Neither of us could keep the best of anything for ourselves. We always saved most of it for the other, sometimes to the point of irritation, because that is what we meant to each other. She hurt when I hurt. She would put down her entire life to be fully present in the exact moment I needed her. When my mother went in for an operation, she was simply there, giving, with a capacity for love so large you could not measure it.

She was my loudest cheerleader, even when I was bad at something, even when I was certain I did not deserve to be celebrated. She would tell me I was doing great and that I would do great, and she meant it. She used to record me, secretly, just living my ordinary life, so that one day we would both have something to look back on. She kept the evidence of my life for me before I knew to keep it for myself.

There was a beach in Goa, Sinquerim. It was hard to even get to, and I did not want to go in the water. There is a fixation I have, part of how I am wired. She did not argue with me or coax me. She just walked into the water herself and started playing, and somehow that was enough to make me feel safe enough to follow. That was her. She knew what I actually wanted even when I could not reach it myself.

There is a list I started making once, late one night near the end, of all the firsts that had been hers. The first time I danced in a club. The first salon haircut I ever had. The first pair of shoes I ever chose for myself. Small things, embarrassingly small, the kind most people never have to count as firsts.

But I had spent my whole life believing I was the kind of person who did not get to want things, who had to earn his place at every table by being useful, by being impressive, by hitting some number that kept moving further away.

And then there was her, and the world I had been told to deserve was simply handed to me — not as a reward, but as an ordinary Tuesday. As a plain fact of being loved. The list climbed past the things you could photograph and into the things you could only feel.

The first time I let myself be completely vulnerable with another person, nothing held back, nothing I had to carry alone. The first time someone held me while I cried, and cried too, out of nothing but love for me. That was the kind of love it was. It did not just accompany me. It assembled me, piece by piece, out of parts I had not known were missing, and it taught a man who had been starving that he was allowed, at last, to be fed.

Being loved by her made the rest of the world feel small. I had spent my whole life believing I had to achieve, to build, to earn my place at every table. Being with her quieted all of it, because the meaning was already complete. I had the thing. Everything else was just weather. She told me once, even at the end, that some of the light she carried in her life had come from a place I helped her reach. I have held onto that, maybe too tightly.

When it ended, it did not feel like the end of a relationship. It felt like the end of meaning itself.

What I Did in the Dark

When you feel that, the only thing your mind wants is to stop feeling. To get as far from any feeling as you possibly can, because feeling at all becomes unbearable.

I am going to be honest about this part, because the rest does not make sense without it, and because hiding it would be a kind of lie. For a while I went looking for ways to feel nothing. Drugs were one of the ways I did that. And there were points where it went further than that, where I did not want to be here at all, where I tried to harm myself.

The thing almost nobody tells you about that is what comes after, when the act does not go through. The shame of it is enormous. You sit there, still alive, and you realize what you had just been doing, and the force of that realization is so much larger than whatever drove you to it. For a long time I thought of that shame as one more layer of suffering. I do not think that anymore. I think the shame was something in me waking up. It was the part of me that was already on the side of staying, making itself heard. The recoil told me that some part of me wanted to live, even when the rest of me could not feel why.

I want to say this plainly, in case anyone reading this is in that same place right now. The numbness you are chasing is not worth it, and it does not even work. You cannot outrun a feeling that big. All the numbness does is put the grief on a shelf where it waits for you, and the shelf gets heavier the longer it sits.

What I Learned

What changed, slowly, was my understanding of the pain itself.

I came to see that the grief existed because the love did. That the constant ache in my chest, the regret I now carry, the shadow of this person without them being here, all of it is part of the love I still hold. And even if that love stopped meaning much to her by the end, it is still in me. It is a large part of who I am, and I cannot suppress it or outrun it. The best I can do is stop running toward numbness. Let myself cry when it comes. Let myself be undone for a few hours, and then remember that letting me go was probably the kindest thing for her.

I have had to recognize that she is human too, with her own ideas of life shaped by her own experience. I brought some light into her darker times, and that does not mean she did not grow on her own. Maybe that growth was hard to see across five years, and maybe now she wanted a more visible kind of it, and I had become the personification of a whole chapter she needed to close. Maybe letting go of me was the only way she could move forward.

And underneath all of it I landed somewhere quieter, which is that loving her was never really about being physically close to her. It was about thanking the universe that I ever crossed paths with a complete stranger who, just by existing, made me believe in life again, and in something larger than myself. If she cannot bloom alongside me, and the cost of her peace is my nearness, then however much that has hurt, her peace matters more.

I want to be honest that I am not writing this from the far side of healed. I still miss her. There are days and nights when it lands on me out of nowhere, and I think about some small way she understood me, and it knocks the wind out of me. That has not stopped, and I do not think it ever fully will. A love like that does not get amputated. It gets carried. You do not lose half a decade of tears and trips and growth and intertwined souls. You carry it, and one day you remember it with a smile, even while the pain stays. Being on the better side of something is not the same as being over it. I am allowed to be both.

I have stopped pretending I will simply move on, the way people say it, as if there is a clean door you walk through and the room behind you goes dark.

It is closer to a death. Not hers, and not mine, but the death of a big part of me that represented who I was with her, and of the particular us we were together. That person and that us are not coming back, and I have had to grieve them the way you grieve anything that has actually died.

But a death is not only an ending. Things grow out of what dies. Something new will emerge from this, in me and in my life, and I do not yet know its shape, and I have made a kind of peace with not knowing.

I can hold, at the same time, that she will forever be my best friend. That she will forever be someone I grieve. That on the days I most need to talk to someone, it will be her I reach for in my head, even though I cannot reach her, and that there will always be an essence of her I carry, because a love that deep leaves an essence in you that does not leave. I cannot know what form any of this will take years from now. But I know it does not change one thing about who she was to me or what my love for her was. And I should be honest that joy, when it comes back, may not come back in the same colour it had with her. That is part of what I am carrying too. It does not mean joy is gone. It means I am learning that the new joy will be its own thing, and not a copy of what I lost.

The other thing I learned is that I refuse to let this turn me into a living corpse. To understand why that matters so much to me, you have to understand the thing I am most sure of about myself: I am, at my core, a giver. I have never cared much for material things. I have always been about my people, my tribe.

I am the one who pours into the people he loves, who plays hypeman for almost everyone he admires and roots for them louder than they root for themselves, who holds even the smallest impact a person has had on him in high regard and never forgets it. Giving is not a thing I do. It is the shape of who I am, and it always has been, since long before any of this. The cruelest thing grief tried to do this year was to switch that off, to convince me I had nothing left to give and no reason to. To let it win would have been an injustice to the very love I am grieving, because that love was made of giving too. So coming back has meant, more than anything, returning myself to the state of being able to give again, because a version of me that cannot give is not actually me. There is a great deal of giving still left in me, and getting back to it is the whole project.

A line from Eckhart Tolle put words to this in a way I had always lived without naming. He writes that whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world, and that you withhold it because deep down you believe you are small and have nothing to give. The way out is to give the thing you think you lack. If you want appreciation, appreciate. If you want love, love. Outflow determines inflow. That is not a transaction, and it is not a trick to get something back. It is closer to a description of how a person stays alive on the inside. For a while there, drowning in what had been taken from me, I had stopped giving, and the lack only deepened. Coming back has meant turning the flow back outward, not because I am owed a return, but because the giving is the thing itself, and it is the truest thing I know about myself.

What I Did Not Expect

In the breaking, something happened that I did not see coming. I learned that I am not only a source.

For my whole life I have carried an unspoken rule that you have to earn someone's attention. That you have to do so much to be worthy of another person's time and care. This year, for the first time, I let myself reach for people when I was at my lowest, even just a little. And many of them showed up. One came from another city and stayed with me for two days, just so I would not be alone. One left his door open so I could turn up at one in the morning on the nights I could not be alone. One stayed on the phone with me for hours to get me through. And one person, just by being himself, showed me that I never had to earn any of it to begin with. That I could be loved as my plain, natural self, with nothing performed and nothing deserved.

That was new in my lived experience, and it has carried me further than I know how to say. It also forced me to look honestly at something I had carried my whole life, which is an impossibly high bar for friendship. To me, friendship has always meant presence at any personal cost, showing up no matter what, the kind of love I give without thinking about it.

And what I had to learn, slowly, is that this is simply the shape of how I love, and it is not the shape of how most people are able to. We live in a cosmopolitan, urban kind of world, where everyone is stretched thin across their own demands and distances, and people love within the room their lives leave them. That is not a smaller love. It is just bounded differently than mine.

Some people I was sure would be there were not, and the ones who came showed up in whatever way the shape of their lives allowed. I have had to stop reading the difference as a verdict on my worth. When someone could not show up the way I would have, it did not mean something was owed and unpaid. It only meant my expectation had been built on how I love, not on how they could. Holding that has been one of the quieter, harder things I learned this year, and also one of the most freeing.

The Body

There is a part of this that is not about the heart at all, but about the vessel that carries it.

This was also a year of injuries and chronic pain. A bad tailbone injury that kept me from even sitting properly for a long stretch. Problems with my feet that, at their worst, took the smile off my face. I do not have a grand philosophy about this the way I do about other things. It was simpler than that. The pain made me appreciate the body I operate in. It made me realize that we have to respect the vessel, that it is essential and foundational to everything else we do.

And it did one more thing. It made me more empathetic. Going through my own pain made me aware, in a way I had been blind to, of how much every ordinary person around me is quietly enduring, and still showing up, still contributing their small part to their corner of the world. There is a phrase I have come to love for this, the idea of a joint vision. That no matter how worthless you might feel, you are a link in a chain, connected to others, and it is a kind of moral responsibility to pull your end of it as best you can, because that pull matters to the whole. Harming the vessel does not just end your own pain. It drops your end of a chain that other people are holding.

What Work Meant

There is a second loss in this year that has nothing to do with love, and I am only now able to see it as a loss at all.

I gave up formal schooling very young to build things. I grew up in a country that runs on credentials, where the doors mostly do not open for someone without them, and I took that on directly. Sleepless nights, hungry nights, nights without a roof. And all of it felt worth it, because the work meant something.

I have a line I wrote on my own website that I believed completely: software is the most honest art form we have. It demands truth. You cannot fake your way to something that works. It takes a village, it takes craft, and it takes the kind of caring that most industries talk about but never deliver.

That was not a slogan to me. It was the whole reason. Software was a group of people coming together, often selflessly and sometimes for profit, to build systems that pulled everyone involved toward a more stable, better life, with such care for the people who used it that I would look at almost any broken system in the world and wish it cared about its users the way good software does.

Lately I have not been able to find that feeling, and I am not going to pretend the change in the work has nothing to do with it. The way software is being made now, in the rush of this AI moment, the velocity, the thinning out of thought, the way so much of it is abstracting away from people and toward agents and harnesses and generalized parameters, has left me unsure of where I stand in it. I want to be fair about this, because some of it may be on me. Maybe I have not kept up the way I should have. Maybe I have not understood well enough what this new era actually unlocks, and one day I will look back and see that I was mourning a craft that was only changing shape, not dying. But what I can say honestly is that the particular meaning the work gave me has gone quiet, and that quiet is its own kind of grief, landing in the same year as the larger one. It is a real part of why I am ready for a change.

Coming Back to Who I Was, and the Shape of Who I Am Becoming

Here is the part that tells me the story actually resumed, and not just on paper.

I started getting back to the things I love. I started learning music again. I started reading again. I discovered, absurdly and delightfully, that there are more Tolkien books than I ever knew. I started volunteering, meeting people, showing up to my own community in a way I never had. Small, alive things. The kind of things you only do when some part of you has decided to stay.

And in doing them, I understood something about being a child. When we are young, we fall in love with things in a way that is honest and uncalculated. A kid does not love maps, or music, or stories because of what loving them signals to anyone. It is not strategic. It is pure wanting. And I have come to believe that a real and important part of living well is trying to live up to what your young self would have found amazing. So much of what I have been doing to get better has been, underneath, an attempt to get back to that shape. To deserve the awe I had as a boy.

I have always been pulled toward a lot of things at once, hard, and for a long time I treated that as a flaw. Maybe some of it is just how I am wired, the autism and the ADHD, a mind that grabs many threads at once and will not let any of them go. If I just listed out everything I want to be good at, it would read like the wish-list of someone who will master nothing.

I want to sing, and play the harmonium and the guitar and the keyboard. I want to design interfaces and rooms and physical products and the clothes I wear. I want to write well, and take photographs, and understand cinematography. I want to build software and systems and businesses. I want to play cricket properly, to be strong, to move well, to understand my own body. I want to read across philosophy and urbanism and history and poetry. Listed that way it looks scattered and a little mad.

But when I actually sat with it, I realized it is not a long list of unrelated things. It is a small number of deep things wearing many costumes. It draws down to four.

• Design and taste. Everything from a screen to a room to a product to the clothes I wear. By design I do not mean design as a job function. I mean it in the largest possible sense, the way the made world comes to be alive instead of dead. It is one perceptual skill, and it shows up at every scale.
• Building things and systems. Software, and the work of my hands and my head. Making things that actually work and that pull the people who use them toward something better.
• Music. With my voice at the centre of it, and the instruments arranged around it by how deep I choose to go.
• The body. The instrument that carries all the rest, and the one I learned this year never to take for granted. Sport lives here too, the cricket, the strength, the wish to move well, because the body is not just a vessel to protect but a thing to actually use and enjoy. Underneath all four are two things that keep them flowing: staying physically strong, and writing, which I have come to think is really just thinking made honest.

Design is the one I want to go deepest on, because it is the one I most want to understand, and I have started to see that it is not one thing but several layers stacked on top of each other. The same handful of questions apply whether you are looking at a tote bag or a city.

• Time. How a thing came to be, its history, the way it evolved into its present shape.
• Function. How it works, the fit between a made thing and the human who actually uses it.
• Form. How it looks and feels. Colour, typography, proportion, the personality a thing carries.
• Governance and economics. How it was decided, how it was paid for, how it is run. The often invisible machinery that determines whether anything good can exist at all.
• Quality. The hardest one to name, the combination of all of these that makes a thing simply good, alive, whole. A great city, a great product, a great room, all of them are getting these right at once, and most of the things that feel dead got one of them badly wrong. Learning to see all of these layers, and the difference between them, is most of what I mean when I say I want to get good at design. It is not taste in the shallow sense. It is learning how the made world comes to be alive or dead, at every scale, and trying to add a little more life to it wherever I touch it.

That is the shape of the life I want. Not fame, not money, not a shelf of separate trophies. A few deep things, taken in turns, made and not merely studied.

There is one of these four I have to be especially honest about, and it is the building one, because of what I said earlier about the work. Stepping back from it, even for a while, genuinely hurts.

Software is not a thing I am leaving behind lightly. It is special to me. I am good at it. I have spent a huge part of my life inside it, and it has given me meaning that almost nothing else has. But the work is changing under me, and I have not yet found my place in the version of it that is emerging, and I think I need real distance to figure out my own relationship to it again. So part of why I am doing this, part of why I am stepping out of the working mind for a while, is exactly to get back to first principles on what I actually love, in the building part and in all of them. To strip away the version of these things that was about earning or proving or keeping up, and find again the version that is just pure wanting, the way it was when I was a boy. That is what the break is really for.

Where I Am Going

I have been watching a show about a man named Leif, a Greenlander, raised on the far fringe of the known world. For most of his life he follows other people's quests, other people's revenge, other people's ambitions, before he understands that none of them are his. The people around him are fascinated by conquering, by winning, by glory. He is fascinated by something else entirely. By the world itself. By maps and books and languages, by what is out there beyond the edge, by meeting the people who have actually made the journey. He does not want to win the world. He wants to know it. And at the very end, what he finally sails toward is not something he read about in a book. It is a golden land he glimpsed as a child, and spent his whole adult life circling back to.

I realized, watching him, two things at once. That the golden land, for me, is not a place. It is the shape itself, the four rivers, the wonder, the giving. And that I have, in my own way, been a Leif my entire life. Conquering and winning were never the part that moved me. Knowing and exploring always were. That was true when I was a boy and it is true now, and the most important thing I have understood is that it was never the wound's to take. The love mattered immeasurably, and I will carry that person with me. But the capacity for wonder is older than the wound. It was there before the grief, and it is the thing still pulling me forward now.

That is a steadying thing to know about yourself. A man whose meaning lives only in winning has nothing left when the winning ends. A man whose meaning lives in the going still has the sea, and the maps, and the wonder. The grief, as enormous as it has been, was never actually able to reach the core of me.

So I am preparing to sail west, in my own way. The plan, if it comes together, is to become a student again, at the bottom of the world, in a small green country far from here. To step out of the working mind entirely and into the slower, more deliberate shape of a student. A small city with nature close. A life I can build around volunteering, around animals, around cricket, around a real community. The pace and the smallness are not a compromise I am tolerating. They are the entire point. They are the room I need to actually do the work instead of only reading about it, which, for someone like me, is the real danger.

I want to be honest about what this costs, because it is not a small thing and I do not want to pretend it is. To do this I will not earn for a few years, in what are supposed to be the prime years for it. I will take on debt that will realistically take me into my early thirties to clear. I will be a college student at an age when most people I know are well past that and building careers. On a spreadsheet it looks close to indefensible, and I have stared at that spreadsheet for a long time. But I have never once measured my life in those terms, and I am not going to start now, especially not now. The cost is real and I am choosing to pay it, with my eyes open, because what I am buying with it is not a degree. It is a few years of being a student instead of a worker, where the four rivers get to be the main thing instead of the margins.

And I want to be honest that it might not happen at all. There is a long way to go, loans and paperwork and a great deal of courage still required to get to the other side of it, and any of it could fall through. But even if this particular path does not come together, the shape of the life is what I am committed to, not the country. New Zealand is only the leading vessel for the shape, the current best guess at where to build the settlement. If the vessel does not hold, I will find another one, and I will live the shape some other way these coming years. The destination was never the promise. The shape is the promise.

A friend I have come to admire reminded me recently that we are all here for a very short while, that we will all go away, and that this brief stretch is our one chance to live and give the best we can. I believe that. I have a great deal of giving left to do.

The story I thought was finished was not finished. It was only between chapters. And the next one begins with a boat, and a map, and a man who was always, underneath everything, just trying to go and see what was out there.

Here is to life.