In-Between Versions of Myself

Lately, I’ve had the strange feeling that different parts of my life are moving at different speeds. Some things I spent months building are suddenly finished, while other parts of me seem to be arriving late to the transition. My professional life feels like it has already moved forward in my head, even if the circumstances haven’t completely caught up. Creatively, I have more ideas and more ways to express them than I know what to do with. Personally, there are parts of my life that still feel like they belong to whatever came before this. Nothing is particularly wrong. If anything, more things are working than they have in a long time. That might be what makes the feeling so strange: I can tell that I’ve changed, but my life hasn’t completely rearranged itself around the person I’ve become yet.

August started moving before I realized I was moving with it. On August 2, I made an app, which turned into an intense build week, which happened to coincide with my first job interview. One thing kept opening into another. I was building, rewriting, thinking, upgrading my website, changing systems, figuring out what came next—and then, before I really had a chance to come down from any of it, I was back at work. The following week, I had to wake up in the middle of my normal sleep window for an orthodontist appointment, then went straight back into another stretch of nightlife shifts carrying what felt like a growing sleep deficit. Nothing individually seemed dramatic enough to explain why I felt so scattered. It wasn’t until I looked at my calendar that I realized I’d basically been going for two weeks straight.

Then, somewhere around the middle of the month, the whole thing finally broke. I slept for a couple of hours and had this unusually deep dream where I was trying to use apps and complete tasks, except nothing worked the way it was supposed to. When I woke up, something felt different. I showered, brushed my teeth, washed my face, did the dishes, made the bed, poured some coffee, and started clearing things out. I reorganized Notion, updated Todoist, synced everything with my calendar, and collapsed months of folders on my desktop into a few categories that actually made sense. None of it was particularly ambitious. That was the point. For the first time in weeks, I wasn’t building anything or trying to get somewhere. I was just looking around at everything that had changed and putting myself back inside my own life.

There was a time when nightlife felt like an entire world opening up in front of me. I was in my twenties, living in New York, and everything still had information in it—the music, the clothes, the neighborhoods, the women, the rooms, who knew who, where everyone was going next. I wasn’t just going out; I was learning how people worked. Eventually I got interested in the machinery underneath it too: body language, micro-expressions, attraction, status, communication, all the little things happening underneath what people were actually saying. I did the main quests and then somehow spent years doing the side quests. But after a decade, there’s only so much more I can extract from the same world. The new songs aren’t mine in the way those songs were mine. The new places don’t carry the same charge. I can watch people in their twenties discover their version of it now and genuinely think, have fun, y’all. I already rode this ride.

The strange part is that I still work inside that world. Four nights a week, I’m surrounded by a social vocabulary I already know by heart while becoming increasingly interested in things I barely know at all. I can hear another conversation about who’s going where after work and feel my brain shutting down, then read one sentence about why a software team changed something when their product reached scale and immediately have six questions. Startup culture isn’t new. Software isn’t new. People have been eating lunch and arguing about products and programming languages for decades. But I haven’t lived my version of that world yet. There are mistakes I haven’t made, people I haven’t met, rooms I don’t know how to navigate, and things I don’t even know enough to recognize yet. Maybe that’s why work has become so strangely exhausting lately. I’m spending part of every week paying attention backward while my curiosity is pointing forward.

The strangest part is how quickly an old environment can bring an old vocabulary back online. I spend four nights surrounded by conversations about nightlife, women, who knows who, where everyone is going after work—the same social language I spent years becoming fluent in—and without realizing it, those things become salient again simply because they’re what the environment keeps asking me to pay attention to. It doesn’t feel like regression so much as temporarily inhabiting a version of myself whose concerns I already understand. Then the workweek ends, I get some distance, and my current vocabulary starts flooding back in: writing, development, systems, publishing, career, ideas. Every Sunday I spend a few hours feeling strangely disconnected from myself, and then, almost like clockwork, something switches over. Oh. There I am.

And then today, on my off day, I update my Venmo and Cash App handles to reflect the current me, do some digital housekeeping, and drop off my laundry. While I’m out, my friend texts that he’s heading to the park. I ask if he’s still trying to hoop. He says yeah. Cool. I grab my basketball and head to the courts.

For the first time since I was a kid, I shoot around with a friend and catch up on life. Somewhere between shots, we talk about how happy we both are that summer is almost over. September starts tomorrow. We’re ready to get back to work.