A Symphony of Passions

I’ve spent decades exploring different callings: restaurants, catering, coaching, art making, writing, vlogging, videography, photography, branding, design, programming, website building, Mac apps, e-commerce, fishing, farming, entertainment, music, family, community work, and an unending series of hobbies. My focus flowing throughout this tapestry of experience; sometimes waxing, sometimes waning, always finding something new to add to the mix.

It took me a long time to accept that this multi-faceted approach is, in fact, the truth of who I am. Not being able to ‘pick a lane’ has been the source of much consternation for me; and I’ve fought it constantly by trying to strong-arm myself into something that would stick. This continued to compound over the years and it caused increasingly negative spirals.

Then, one day, from the bedrock of my lowest low, everything started to click. I realized there was no further depth to sink to, there was no bottom underneath the bottom that I stood on. I looked up and all the stories of who I was in the world, who I thought I should be in the world, who I wanted to be in the world, floated above me like clouds. I then realized my feet were finally standing on the ground of just… me. That ground said: “I am”.

I began to really pay attention to the battles that were occurring inside me, that always had. In almost every case, it came down to a part of me that simply ‘was’, being assaulted by the part of me that thought I ‘should be’. As I examined the ‘should be’s’, my understanding of the multilayered influences of family, culture, society, religion, and privilege; all of it intersecting with my neurodivergence, began to make sense in earnest. I could finally see the vast network of forces that conspired to keep me from embodying and accepting who I actually am. It's been a game changer.

I used to walk down the street, a hunch to my shoulders, disguising my self-judgement as what I imagined others thought of me. “That guy has problems”, the imagined voices would say. Nowadays, I tend to put my shoulders back, lift my head up and walk self-referentially; the imagined judgement of others not as constant a narrative as it once was.

This is the gold that I bring to my many pursuits now, whether it is coaching, creating, service, or self-care: the gift of coming into alignment with who I am, and the deep understanding of how I got there. It is my mission to share that gift with others through everything I do, but most importantly, by simply being it.

Part of walking self-referentially has been letting myself chase what lights me up, and lately that is coding with Claude. For most of my life, what I could build was capped by what I knew how to code. That cap is gone. It feels like the moment in The Matrix when Neo opens his eyes and says, “I know kung fu.” I see an idea and think, I can do that; then I do it, and I make it exactly mine. I’ve built CoachTide, a full coaching platform, and inside it a page review system where my partner and I talk through everything before it goes live. I’ve built an agent that keeps me on top of the many conversations I juggle across many tools, and Mac apps I always wanted, made to fit my exact needs. I build conversationally, bouncing ideas back and forth, and I’ve shaped my Claude to push back on me, which only makes me think harder. My brain likes to move between many projects at once, at its own speed. For the first time, something keeps up. Always.

“Fascination” is too small a word for how I feel about AI, but that feeling comes with a clear sense of where it belongs. I think it will reach into just about every part of our lives, and it still has its place. It should never take over the pure creativity that erupts from us as humans, especially in art and music. To me, building with AI is a creative pursuit in itself, so why would I ask my collaborator to make the very things that carry the realness of human experience and heart? I’ll happily have it draft a company blog post or website copy, but when I’m writing from inside of me, every word is mine. That’s why GIO, the writing app I’m building now, keeps its AI strictly administrative: it can ask questions, and it can never write a word. I also don’t believe it should replace counselling, coaching, or human relationship. It can’t help leaning toward telling us what we want to hear, and we already risk too much disconnection.