I have heard “Adam, what are you talking about?” a lot in my life. Enough that it probably deserves its own entry in the archive, somewhere between the songs that explain my entire personality and the several thousand other pieces of evidence that I have, in fact, been like this for a while. We’ll be talking about one thing and I’ll say something about another thing, except in my head it isn’t another thing at all. It’s the thing we were talking about after it went through seventeen other things, stopped to listen to a song, remembered somebody I knew twenty-five years ago, and came back wearing a different shirt. I followed the whole trip. You heard the sentence before we left and the sentence after we arrived. Of course you’re confused. I have apparently forgotten to provide transportation. When I was a kid that embarrassed me, and I would chase after the conversation trying to explain how I got there. Now I mostly laugh at myself, laugh with whoever is looking at me like I’ve just started speaking underwater, and still try to explain how I got there. That part hasn’t changed. I really want you to see the connection.

And when you do, when you go “Ohhhhhh!” and laugh with me, that is one of the times I feel the most seen. Which sounds like an awful lot of emotional significance to assign to somebody finally understanding a joke, but there you go. Welcome. This is what we’re working with. I’ve been spending all this time digging through the digital remains of my life, old posts and conversations and songs and photographs, trying to understand the person who made them, and the more I find, the more I recognize the way I’m finding it. The Wygle Wide Web is a pretty good name for the project because it’s also a pretty good description of what’s happening in my head. Everything has links. Sometimes I know where they go. Sometimes I click one and discover that we’re apparently going to spend the afternoon in 2000. I don’t necessarily want to go back to 2000. I just want to know why this thing over here is still connected to that thing over there, and whether younger me knew something I’ve forgotten, or whether he was completely full of shit. Both are possible. Occasionally in the same paragraph.

The best way I’ve come up with to describe the speed is The Flash. My brain makes connections so quickly that by the time I say something, I’ve already been somewhere you couldn’t see me go. I know how that sounds. Please don’t read this as an announcement that I’m smarter than everybody. I’m the same guy who has to walk down the hall with his laundry actively making sure he remembered the Tide pod. Sometimes the speed is useful. Sometimes it crashes and burns. Sometimes I can understand a new idea, connect it to a bunch of old experiences, and do something useful with it almost immediately. Sometimes I can build an extremely convincing conclusion out of information that hasn’t finished arriving yet. Being quick doesn’t protect me from being wrong. It just means I can get a substantial amount of construction completed before somebody points out that we’re on the wrong fucking lot.

There is also a tennis match, because apparently one metaphor wasn’t going to be enough to explain this situation. The match is the way the thinking feels while it’s happening. One side is often creative and the other side is systems, and an idea goes across the net, gets worked on, and comes back. Can we do this? What would it take? What if we did it this other way? My attention follows it back and forth. I’ve described it as feeling almost physical, like I’m turning to watch the ball, even though I’m not actually moving. Sometimes I notice that I’m watching the match, which is its own weird little experience. There’s the thinking, and then there’s me becoming aware of the thinking and realizing I should probably say something out loud or write it down before we’ve moved on. I can’t really control how it starts or runs. I can control the navigation a little. The match has already started by the time I find my seat.

The players depend on what we’re doing. When I’m working on a video, the systems part knows that setting everything up properly makes the creative part easier later. Creative Adam would quite happily start making the colors pretty, because that’s fun, but I learned that doing that too early makes the rendering take longer, so there’s a reason for the order. I like making things beautiful or funny. I also like building the process that lets me get there without wasting a bunch of time. Those interests live in the same head and keep answering each other. When I’m dealing with something emotional, the match can feel more like Logic and Emotion. When I’m excited and trying to get ahead of myself, it’s Flash on one side and Logic on the other going, “Hey, we’ve learned this lesson, just slow down and take it easy, man.” Worry contributes too, although Worry has given me enough bad information over the years that I don’t automatically trust the commentary anymore. Very confident. Frequently wrong. We’ve all met that guy.

The Hall of Remembering is where I go looking when I need to remind myself that we have been down a road before. I talk myself through what happened, what I thought was happening, and what actually followed. Those aren’t always the same story. Something can feel incredibly familiar without my interpretation being right, and something can have gone badly without every choice leading up to it having been a mistake. That’s part of what I’m trying to preserve with all this archival work. There’s what I remember now, there’s what I actually wrote or said then, and there’s what I think it means today. If those disagree, I want to know that. I don’t want to quietly repair the old record until it says whatever makes current me look the most reasonable. Current me is already doing plenty of talking. Sometimes it’s useful to let the guy who was actually there get a word in, even if what he has to say is embarrassing.

I remember my therapist, Mary Allison, my therapist, telling me after we’d been meeting for a few months that she was surprised by how quickly I processed our discussions. In my memory, she said she often needed to spend weeks going over things with other clients, and I’d come back the following week ready to move on. I think the speed and the pattern recognition have a lot to do with that. Give my brain an idea and it will keep batting it around, finding places it fits, finding places it doesn’t, taking it into rooms we weren’t originally discussing. Mary Allison taught me Radical Acceptance, and she helped me understand that the meaning I attach to an event is something I can reconsider. The event happened. What I decide it says about me, or what I learn from it, doesn’t have to stay exactly where I first put it. That was a useful thing to hand a brain that is always making connections. I could change some of the connections.

My parents moving to Arizona is a good example. For years there had been talk of them possibly moving up near us and our kids, and when they chose Arizona instead, it was hard. This was in the buildup to what I call The Break, and I was already carrying a lot. My first feeling was personal: they picked somewhere else. They picked Steph and Arizona. I had to work not to turn that into betrayal, because even then I knew that wasn’t a fair meaning to give their decision. And Mom and Dad, if you’re reading this, I love you. I understand. I understood then that there were good reasons, and the years since have only made their choice easier to understand. But the interesting part for this story is how quickly the meaning could move. I went from being disappointed that they wouldn’t be near my family to being excited that Steph and her brand-new babies would have Grandma and Grandpa to grow up with. That shift didn’t require weeks of slowly talking myself into a brave face. The connection happened at Flash speed. I could see something wonderful in the same event that had just hurt my feelings.

A lot of this started changing for me around COVID. Yes, I realize “the pandemic changed my life” is hardly an exclusive club, but that’s part of what’s amazing about it. So many of us were inside that enormous shared interruption, looking at our lives. When it was time to go back full time with The Tacoma Rainiers, I didn’t want that life anymore. I didn’t want to keep working my ass off to make something happen in quite the same way. I wanted to see what life brought me, and I became a stay-at-home dad. Then the plumbing broke and a waterfall of other problems followed, because apparently my life had notes on the water imagery before I did. Things went sideways. There was The Break, the trip to LA, a month in residential mental-health treatment, learning I was bipolar, and a whole lot of figuring out what to do with that information. Mary Allison worked with me here in Tacoma before and after. None of that fits into one clean paragraph, but it belongs here because these ideas came into a life that needed them.

These days I describe it with whatever water metaphor happens to float past. Mind like water. A goldfish. Just keep swimming. Water off a duck’s back. Pick an aquatic franchise, apparently I’m in it. If there’s something I can act on, I do. If there isn’t, I try to accept it and move forward. I’ve always been able to make some big transitions once I accept that they’re actually happening; what’s changed is the meaning I carry with me afterward. And acceptance gets misunderstood if it makes me sound like I’m just floating around delighted by every disaster. I can be hurt. I can be disappointed. I can wish something had gone differently. When my marriage ended, I accepted that I couldn’t change Heidi’s decision, and I still spent a day crying in bed. Then I went back to work the next day. I don’t have a particularly elegant explanation for that. I needed to keep going, I guess. Twenty-two years didn’t become emotionally finished because I could understand that they were over.

Feelings are one of the stranger parts of this whole thing, because I’ve said for years that I don’t really feel my feelings, and then I have to explain that I absolutely do have feelings. Plenty of them. The issue is finding them when I need them. I can know there’s something I need to cry about without being able to just sit down and cry about it. So I have routes. If it’s a breakup, I have a playlist. If I need a good cry, I can put on a movie I know will get me there. Happy tears, sad tears, either one can work. Then, once I’m crying, I can hear myself thinking that I’m going to cry about what I want to cry about instead of whatever the movie wants me to cry about. Thank you for your beautiful story. I’ll take it from here. It makes me laugh describing it, but that really is something I do. And finding younger me writing about the same kind of thing in Adam At Last surprised me. I had forgotten how long I’ve been trying to find my way into my own feelings.

The tennis match keeps going while I cry. Usually Logic has a lot of control, and then Emotion gets hold of the game and takes over for a while, and the whole thing becomes more intense. Afterward it gets fuzzy. Both sides feel tired, like they need a break, and I feel satisfied. It’s a really nice feeling. I don’t always need a long discussion afterward, either. If something weighs heavily, having a strong conversation about it can be difficult. Lately I’ve been watching movies with my kids, and I love looking around and finding out that we’re all crying. There’s acknowledgment in that. We don’t have to turn the living room into a seminar. They don’t necessarily know everything that a scene is hitting in their forty-five-year-old dad, and I don’t need them to. Sometimes the shared tears are enough. Sometimes I do wish there were another adult there who knew enough of my life to understand why this particular thing got me. I’d like to know why it got them, too.

That’s part of the desire underneath all these words: being known, as the poets said, inside and out, backwards and forwards with my heart hanging out. Which is a ridiculous thing to try to accomplish with a blog post, but I’ve never been particularly restrained about providing context. Religious trauma, mental health, four kids, a long marriage, a divorce, the songs, the friends, the things I’m proud of and the things I wish I hadn’t done; they’re all part of the person sitting here. Mars Hill is an especially difficult room to walk somebody into. I reject what I was taught there, and some of what I believed and said and did is horrible to look back on. Understanding how I was shaped matters to me. So does owning my participation. I want someone to understand how far that history reaches without assuming that telling the story means I still believe it’s toxic masculinity bullshit. I don’t. The old material is still mine, though. I can’t understand the change by pretending the earlier person never existed.

One of the ways Radical Acceptance has grown for me is accepting the agency of the people around me. My kids get to be themselves. Someone I love gets to want something different from what I want. I can tell you what I see and how I feel, but even if I have an incredibly detailed explanation, you still have your own mind. That is a surprisingly demanding thing for a person whose instinct is to make the connections visible until somebody understands. My dad used to say I should be a used car salesman because I could convince people of anything. Funny, yes. Also something worth watching in myself. There have been times when I thought I was explaining what was already true, and from the other side I was putting pressure on a conclusion that belonged to somebody else. We can only exist within our own cells. I don’t get to climb into your head and verify the answer, no matter how convincing the tour I’ve just given of mine.

Dating makes that machinery visible, but this is not going to become a parade of exes. We nearly took that exit while talking through this post, and I had to point out that I was trying to explain my brain, not assemble a reunion special. There is one moment I keep thinking about, though: sitting on my couch with someone I really liked, listening to music and talking, her legs across my lap. We both found it romantic. I wanted the next thing. She later told me she’d wanted to stay in the moment we already had. I had asked before things escalated, and she had said yes; she also told me afterward that she hadn’t felt pushed, while explaining that she’d gone into people-pleasing instead of saying what she needed. I want to keep those details together because I don’t want to flatten either of us into a moral for my essay. When I imagine that evening now, I’d like to get up, flip the record, come back, and keep talking. I could ask what she wants from the moment instead of letting my excitement supply the next destination. I’ve practiced that conversation in my head. I haven’t had the same situation come around again, so I don’t get to announce that I’ve perfected it.

And slowing down internally can feel jarring, like pulling an emergency brake on a vehicle that’s going way too fast. From the outside I can wait, and I’m much better at handling uncertainty than I used to be, but inside I may still be talking myself through the reasons we’re waiting. Logic is returning Flash’s serve. The excitement doesn’t disappear. I can remain thrilled and still have to remind myself that the next thing doesn’t need to happen right now. I’ve also learned that letting somebody else set the pace isn’t a complete answer, because I can get swept along faster than I’m ready for too. So much for solving the whole problem with one nice rule. I have more experience to consult now. I survived the divorce, the biggest rejection I can imagine for myself, and found joy again. Waiting for an answer is more survivable than it used to feel. That doesn’t mean every future test has already been passed.

For a much less romantic demonstration of how I learn, I can go to Starbucks and look at Shift Tasks. I built a workflow over multiple closes, making mistakes, adding the things I missed, adjusting it until it became my external brain for work. These are instructions from myself. I pull it up and say, “Ok, where am I?” It’s a map, and I need an idiolocator, the little YOU ARE HERE marker. Please resist the urge to turn that into an enormous existential statement about where Adam is in his journey. Sometimes I am simply trying to establish whether I did the closing tasks. At this point I know the work; mostly the list is there to yell, “HEY, YOU FORGOT THIS THING ONE TIME, DID YOU DO IT TONIGHT?” It’s quite useful. Past Adam has relevant experience and apparently no interest in being subtle about it.

The money tasks are explicit because I forgot those specific things. I couldn’t just write “do the money stuff” and expect that phrase to unfold into all the right actions later. The missing chunks had to become visible. Check the drop boxes. Keys in the safe. Money in the safe, triple check. Each instruction is there for a reason. I find that funny alongside the way I can skip over half the connections in a conversation. In one situation I’m assuming you can follow steps I haven’t said; in another I’m deliberately spelling out the steps because I know I might miss them myself. At home I don’t have checklists for all the ordinary things. I narrate. Get the keys out, put them in the lock, turn, unlock, open the door. Did I bring the Tide pod? Do I have my keys? The keys have become a particularly persistent concern after nearly locking myself out. There is a lot of talking happening up there for somebody who is only trying to go outside.

Sometimes the monitoring is wrong in a particularly lovely way. I described a moment in my self-discovery notes when I thought I’d left my work mug behind. I’d already considered going back to get it, decided it wasn’t worth the trip, and planned to apologize when I returned to work. Then I opened the wrong pocket of my bag while looking for my keys, and there was the cup. Past Adam had already taken care of it. I just didn’t remember that he had. “Very nice of Past Adam,” was how I put it. I like that story because so much of remembering my own behavior can turn into remembering what went wrong. Here was evidence that I’d done the thing properly, waiting in the bag while I worked through a problem I didn’t actually have. The narration is continuous, but it isn’t omniscient. Sometimes we should check the bag before convening the inquiry.

I’m better at slowing down around money now, too. Most financial decisions. Most is carrying some weight there. I take time to think about whether I need another thing in my apartment and whether I want the hit to my wallet. But making memories with my kids is different. The drive to Bellingham I just wrote about meant taking money out of savings for gas, and when asked whether I’d do it again, my answer was that of course I would, in a flash. Yes, I heard it too. Finn got to spend time with Theo. I got time with my kid. I still want to be the dad who can make that happen. Where does that generosity become too much for my own stability? I’m still figuring that out. There are boundaries; I told Evelyn I’d buy her a puppy when she has her own place and if I have a better-paying job. But I don’t have a complete theory that makes every future decision easy. Sometimes I know exactly why I said yes, know what it cost, and would still say yes.

Which is why I don’t want to end this by announcing that Flash has finally learned to walk everywhere. I like a lot of what that speed has given me. I can regret how something happened without wanting to erase the life that followed, and I can remember joy without trying to move back into it. The early days with Heidi are still luminous and lovely to me, not painfully, but joyfully. The later pain doesn’t get to go backward and ruin every breakfast, every drive, every song, every laugh. There were four amazing kids and a whole life in there. There is a whole life here now, too. I love my new place. I’m making new memories. I’m finding old ones. The contradictions don’t feel like defects I have to eliminate before I’m allowed to enjoy any of it. They just are. I’ve got a tennis match running, water metaphors leaking into everything, a Hall full of things I’m still learning how to remember, and a map that occasionally needs to yell at me. If you’ve followed me this far and gone “Ohhhhhh,” then I’m glad. That’s what I wanted. Now, before I go anywhere, let me make sure I have my fucking keys.