It starts with a “random” thought that springs up out of nowhere. Something my observational apparatus happens to pick up:
“I don’t bother naming things and then I assume they are remembered, taken into consideration from previous writings or sayings. Also, I don’t name them precisely, so they won’t be blown out of proportion and turned into labels. But this is misinterpreted too.”
For the first time.
This could be a title for everything. Literally.
Being the first to do things, introduce things, move through unfamiliar experiences, reject paths, or change course was never a deliberate attempt to “be different.” It simply felt obvious at the time — the only sane option available, the natural sequence. I never analyzed logistics much, if at all. What mattered was whether I was suffocating, or whether a directive appeared in my mind that rendered all other roads dull or would lead to dead ends.
A big part of why I could move through life this way was precisely because calculation was never the axis of movement. I also never named myself a “pioneer.” Doing so would have created a responsibility that was not mine to carry. Rejecting labels, refusing fixed identities, was one of the many initiations I innately took on. With initiations, there is no precedent to rely on, no stable ground to stand on.
Looking back, I don’t think I ever truly appreciated what I was daring — not just occasionally, but constantly. From the smallest decisions to the largest shifts. They weren’t isolated actions, but simply how I was wired. I became accustomed to being called weird, alien, difficult, uncompromising, too much, too picky — rarely as compliments. Over time, I didn’t pause to examine these labels or their consequences, which I silently endured. What was being lived demanded full presence, even as the cost of being misnamed was carried alongside it.
Pioneers are said to make “groundbreaking changes”. But consider what “groundbreaking” literally means. What I knew, assumed, or relied on before was no longer there. There was nowhere to stand, balance or lean on. Almost nothing familiar to refer to. This was challenging for those close to me too.
Even now writing doesn’t feel like it does justice to the scale of it — as though I spent most of my life not fully acknowledging what was being lived. Not because it was right, but because it was honest, and therefore inherently daring. Honesty doesn’t require security, agreement, righteousness, or admiration. More often, it cannot even breathe in those conditions. So I didn’t stop to assess, or to count, or to frame meaning. I simply breathed and moved.
My surroundings changed more often than most people change their furniture over an entire lifetime. I would move from everything to nothing — and back again — in the blink of an eye. Opposites became my familiar territory.
I learned to read the field quickly and efficiently because stable ground was rarely available. What people usually consider “safe ground” is largely an assumption anyway — a temporary arrangement mistaken for permanence. That realization came early, not as philosophy, but as lived physics.
People romanticize pioneers and admire visionaries — but mostly in retrospect and from a safe distance. Up close, reality looks very different, both for the one moving first and for those who attempt to remain nearby, for as long as they are able. There can be deep connection, unrepeatable intimacy, moments of closeness that defy language. But there is also unpredictability, repeated disruption of security, and an honesty that challenges others in ways they often didn’t anticipate — though, in truth, they were never uninvolved.
The same pattern followed me with language. How do you describe something that doesn’t lean on existing concepts or fit inherited interpretations? There was rarely time to search for the right words or invent new ones. Experience always came first, because everything kept shifting and demanded presence.
Even what I’m doing now is not simple. It feels like pulling my heart out to place it somewhere “over there,” trying to describe what has always functioned as my compass, my breath, my energy source. How many stops and restarts? How many resuscitations? I never kept count. Many came without warning; others arrived when I was convinced there would be no tomorrow.
People often speak of regrets — usually in relation to decisions, events, or outcomes. When I say I don’t have any, or that I don’t understand the question, it is often misinterpreted. Regret, as it is commonly framed, implies rejecting oneself for not having known the future — for learning, for changing, for becoming. That logic has never made sense to me.
There came a point when all the resets, nuances, risks, and changes compressed — or, as a scientist might say, collapsed — into a single, unpredicted, entirely new state, which I call “completion,” for lack of a better word. It was not one event, but many, revealing one whole structure that I’ve had to learn to navigate.
Metaphorically, it resembles a caterpillar entering its cocoon, a crystallized phase where nothing appears to be happening. The emergence of the butterfly is often romanticized or spiritualized as metamorphosis in human imagination, but that depiction and what it implies bears little resemblance to the actual process.
