One.

It's time for a new adventure.

When I turned thirty, I wrote the following message to my twenty-year-old self:

Dear younger me,

You’re about to go through the most difficult decade of your life, but it’s okay—you don’t know any better. It’s your first decade of adulthood, your first ten years with any semblance of agency, however crippled, and you can chalk it all up to growing pains. You’ll do your best, most of the time. Other times, you’ll be swallowed by your emotional tempests, but you’ll learn to temper them, and you’ll learn from your mistakes. You’ll try to move on and to heal, and you’ll learn that healing doesn’t mean returning to who you were before; the scars irrevocably transform you, but that’s okay too.

I’m here for you. I’ll always be the only one upon whom you can count, and I’ll always be here for you.

I love you.

I think twenty-year-old me would have grimaced upon reading this. He was busy and precocious, and he was on the other side of a teenage promise to end his life because life was actually starting to work out well for him: he’d managed to move across the country to the city he came to love; he’d begun working within the industry of his dreams, setting himself up for future career success; and he’d found a wonderful boyfriend, a man who loved him unconditionally. Things were finally trending positive, and this message would’ve only been a reminder that all good things come to an end, that it doesn’t get any easier to be alive. I don’t think he harbored any delusions to the contrary; rather, after having spent the prior decade crippled with severe depression, he would have liked to linger just a bit longer in the eye of the storm before venturing back out.

I wrote this message because I was feeling pensive. Melancholia is an unfortunate habit of my brain, stemming from my aforementioned teenage years, and I’ve spent years working to ensure that it isn’t its sole habit. Resilience is practiced, I know, but relapse is all too easy when certain things occur—and certain things did.

A YEAR WITHOUT WATER is about the most emotionally turbulent twelve-month period of my life. It is my attempt to divine meaning from the meaningless, to squeeze lemonade out of lemons, and to be honest with the world after having sequestered myself away for so long.

Ten years after my first romantic relationship, I reconnected with that ex-boyfriend who, trying to comfort me in the wake of my worst breakup ever, gently reminded me how guarded I was when I dated him; my response was to laugh about only having grown more guarded in the intervening years. But, a life lived from within the confines of my self-imposed walls may as well be a life not lived at all, and I’ve come to realize that I want to interact with the world, and—perhaps most importantly—I am willing to allow it to interact with me in return.

Humans are social creatures, after all, and I too am human.

I’m forced to confront the reality that this has been coming on for some time now. I’ve witnessed it manifest across my disparate online presences (disjointed by design because I came of age when we were taught to practice digital privacy), whether as the unintentional genesis of a niche socialist meme genre, the mobile gaming terrorist Mariah Carey impersonator, or the briefly-popular anonymous author of wittol fiction. In each scenario, I permitted myself to engage with what’s out there, just for the fun of it, and the tendrils of me that snaked their way elsewhere did so with the candor that accompanies any low-stakes endeavor; the outcome was that there were now bits and pieces of me scattered everywhere, each resonating with the people of each locale.

I think the word for that is “connection.”

That’s what this is really about, isn’t it? Connections, intact or severed, and the threads that tie(d) us to one another. I tried to obfuscate mine, tried to separate myself because I wanted to be unknown or because I suspected bad faith actors, tried to eke out a quiet existence, and still I was caught by the maelstrom that is life. So, I’m doing something different from now on; no longer will I deny myself that any more than I deny myself oxygen.

This Substack will update Tuesdays at noon, Pacific Time. (If you know why, keep it a secret for me, at least just for now.) It’s my outlet for sharing bits and pieces of the larger project I’ve been cooking up over the past few years, and it’s a mechanism through which I can refine my drafts as I work towards completion.

And, chiefly, it’s the process through which I try to answer the questions that have haunted me for years: Who was I before you? Who am I without you?

The answer, of course, is: Everything.