Personal¶

What the Record Shows

There is a kind of performance that no longer feels like performance because you have been doing it so long that it has settled into your bones.

Each morning arrives with its own familiar ritual: the steady voice, the practiced calm, the expression that says, "I belong here." After enough years, it becomes automatic. People hear you speak, ask for your judgment, trust what you have to say. Your name appears on work that matters.

From the outside, it can look like certainty.

But beneath all of that, there can still be a quieter voice saying something else entirely:

It has a name, of course: Imposter Syndrome. That old habit of treating your own record like disputed evidence.

That voice is stubborn. It doesn't yield easily to experience, praise, or proof. It survives accomplishment with an almost insulting ease. It can sit in the same room with a long career, meaningful work, and the respect of other people, and remain completely unimpressed.

I've spent most of my professional life inside the orbit of very large institutions, places whose names carry their own kind of weather.

On paper, my record isn't especially mysterious. I've held serious roles. I've contributed to products and open source projects people actually use. I've written extensive designs and documentation that helped people do their jobs. I've even written a book. I've earned certifications and accreditations, sometimes less out of ambition than out of a private need to quiet the voice that keeps insisting I've not done enough. I've stood in rooms where others came to listen, and I've spoken at more technology conferences than I could name without stopping to count, somehow managing not to waste their time.

Lost in Shades of "I'm Okay"

There is a particular meanness to depression.

It doesn't always arrive like a storm. More often it comes like summer heat: slow, saturating, difficult to argue with. It settles into the walls, into the body, into the space between one thought and the next, until everything feels heavy with it. The house seems to take it in. Even the light looks tired by the time it reaches the room.

I have known days when the floor felt like the safest place to keep my eyes. Old wood, scarred and splitting, honest in its damage. Floorboards don't ask anything of you. They don't expect performance. They don't require you to explain why lifting your head feels like lifting stone. Looking down became a kind of prayer then, if prayer can be made out of exhaustion. I studied every crooked crack as if it might tell me how to stay in one piece. Lost in shades of "I'm okay."

T.J. Came Running

I was 13 the day I learned that love and safety were different things.

For years afterward, I remembered it as sounds. Not the worst sound, not even the one that should have mattered most, but the smaller ones that came before it, ordinary details preserved in perfect condition.

The bus brakes hissing on the county road.

The car engine idling with that low, stubborn tremor old engines have.

Gravel and clay ticking under the tires.

It was an afternoon like a hundred others, so ordinary it seemed beneath notice. Which is often how disaster arrives: without warning, dressed as routine.

Under That Kind of Sky

The area of South Georgia I came from did not announce itself as haunted. It called itself ordinary. It was made of fence lines, gravel, ditches, heat, livestock, debt, prayer, rust, and long stretches of road that seemed to vanish into weather. Nothing in it asked to be mythologized. Still, looking back, it feels touched by something darker than hardship alone. Not a ghost story exactly, but a place where ruin had a pulse and memory seemed to live in the ground.