I’m harder on myself now than I used to be. Don’t feel as sharp as I once did. Don’t rate myself as skilled or superior at much of anything, if I’m being real. Life experience, travels, and ideas… yes, plenty of those. But going by how existence gets tallied in the mainstream sense? Failed experiment. The mandem adult checklist is thin on checks. Marriage, divorce, parenthood, those are ticked. The rest? Nah.

I could go on about how I took the path of least resistance through expatitude and house husbandry, and how now that that chapter’s closed, reality has caught up fast and rear-ended my life something proper. I could. But I won’t. I don’t regret the path. And I couldn’t have seen coming the mental health and physical health stuff that hit fast and hit hard and took people I loved deeply. They’re gone now. As for the current path? It’s not great, if I’m being honest.

That said, I’m not trying to run from it. Used to be, I stayed up to the challenge because the future felt like it had something in it for me. That script got balled up and binned in 2019. Most things written since have followed. It just hasn’t been an encouraging stretch, and it may not become one. So, the most pressing item on the agenda right now is figuring out how to hold onto whatever generational wealth I’ve got left to give my daughter something to land on down the road. A nest egg, small as it might be. But glancing back at the checklist, even that feels like a pipe dream. Damaged goods and all that.