William Robinson was a Baldwin County Sheriff’s Deputy, twenty-six years old, and my best friend. He’s been dead for thirty years and I still haven’t figured out what to do with that.

Most people aren’t protecting who they are. They’re protecting who they were, for an audience that moved on, in a context that dissolved. The overhead is real. The asset isn’t.

Nobody handed me a syllabus for the things that actually mattered. The neighborhood did. And some of those lessons hit harder than anything I learned sitting at a desk.

Somewhere between my first Exchange server and my fourteenth PowerShell script, I lost sight of the fact that there’s a whole other version of me that would have been happier moving dirt for a living.

I’ve worn a lot of labels over the decades: hardware guy, IT veteran, self-taught coder, grandfather. None of them tell the whole story, and some of them are starting to feel like clothes that don’t fit anymore.

Seven Royal Caribbean cruises, and the hardest part was never the packing. It was figuring out how to be a person who isn’t useful for a week.

At 55, I’ve made peace with being a guy who doesn’t fit cleanly into any category the internet has invented for people like me. That peace took longer than it should have.

Flash, our Miniature Dachshund, lived 16 years in this house and left a hole that doesn’t make sense on paper. This is an honest account of what that actually means.

After a long break from the gym, I’m back under the bar at 55 — and the thing that surprised me most wasn’t how much strength I’d lost. It was how honest the whole process is.

A diagnosis doesn’t change who you are. But it does change how much energy you spend pretending to be someone else — and that’s where things get complicated.