This is the part where I'm supposed to list credentials.

Normally that's where people tell you which university they escaped from, which companies they impressed, and which acronyms live after their name. None of that is especially relevant here.

So instead, here's who wrote this in the only way that really matters:

I am, structurally speaking, one of the maladjusted.

I grew up inside the same default stories everyone else got: work hard, be good, follow the rules, respect the right people, and things will more or less make sense. I tried. For a long time. What I ran into, over and over, was the gap between how life was described and how it actually felt from the inside.

The systems I was handed—moral, social, cultural—didn't install cleanly on my hardware. They produced a lot of error messages and not a lot of meaning. I spent years assuming that meant something was fundamentally wrong with me.

Unfortunately (or fortunately) I also came with some built-in bugs/features:

• a brain that refuses to stop taking things apart
• a tendency to keep asking "why?" long after other people have switched to "that's just how it is"
• an almost physical allergy to performance and pretty lies
• a compulsive need to turn whatever I'm living through into some kind of model

Put that together and you get someone who:

• tried most of the standard fixes
• watched them fail in increasingly interesting ways
• and then, out of sheer survival, started building a different way of operating

Over time, other similarly misaligned people started finding me. Not through marketing—just late-night conversations and long messages that begin with "I don't really know who else to say this to, but…".

I listened, dissected, tested ideas against reality, refused to pretend things were fine when they weren't, and shared the frameworks that had actually survived contact with my own life.

Some of those people credit this way of thinking with the fact that they're still here, or at least not as lost as they were. Talks I gave, things I wrote, offhand comments I barely remember—other people remember them as turning points. I'm more uncomfortable admitting that than I probably should be. But pretending it never happened would be its own kind of lie, and this "school" is supposed to be allergic to those.

So what gives me the right to write this?

Nothing official. No council of elders signed off on it. No board certified me as fit to talk about maladjustment or survival. The universe doesn't owe me, or you, a stamp of approval. It also doesn't owe either of us a happy ending.

What I have is:

• a long history of not fitting
• a stubborn habit of trying to understand why
• a set of mental tools that have actually kept me functional
• and enough pattern-recognition to see the same architecture in other people who thought they were alone

I'm not writing as a guru, or a therapist, or someone who has "arrived". I'm writing as a structure that has been under stress for a long time, has rebuilt itself a few times without collapsing, and took careful notes in the process.

Being "maladjusted" doesn't make me better or more important than anyone else. It just means the default scripts fit badly enough that I had to go dig for alternatives. These notes are the result of that digging.

You don't owe those notes any reverence. Treat them like any other map:

• If something here matches the terrain of your life, use it.
• If it doesn't, drop it without ceremony.
• If it mostly fits but needs adjusting, good—that's you doing the work this school actually cares about.

That's all the authority I'm claiming: I've been where a lot of this hurts, I've watched other people hurt in similar shapes, and I've spent an unreasonable amount of time reverse-engineering what still works when the default answers don't.

If that's the kind of voice you're willing to hear from, the rest of the site will make sense.

If not, your existing systems are probably working well enough. You don't need to be here.