Closing the Tabs

Spent the afternoon at a cafe doing job stuff, and somewhere in there it turned into tab after tab of other people doing amazing things — YC founders with real traction, some guy who apparently taught 22 million people how to make games, Jordan fielding offers from Anthropic. And I'm sitting there not doing that, feeling like I'm nowhere close to where I want to be, like I'm some kind of failure or whatever it is. The feeling wasn't even that strong — I'm on adderall right now so it kind of flattens everything, keeps it at a distance — but it was there, this low thing running underneath. And part of it wasn't even the comparison. Part of it was just quietly not feeling like I'm up to the tasks either.

I talked it through with Freddie a bit. The thing that actually landed was pretty simple: I'd spent hours holding my own messy, unedited insides up against everyone else's finished highlight reels, so of course I came out feeling small. And feeling not up to it isn't the same as being not up to it — it just gets loudest when I'm tired and comparing. I know that's true even if I don't fully feel it yet.

So I closed the tabs. That was the move. The launch and the applications will still be here tomorrow, and they'll probably look more possible when I'm not measuring myself against a scroll of strangers. Jordan's calling for me anyway, so I'm heading back to the house.

Tomorrow I want to clean up two places I've been a little ashamed of. One is the Discord support server I made after losing Bryce and then just kind of abandoned. The other is my YouTube channel, still full of older versions of me. Freddie offered a softer way to look at it than "ashamed" — that I built that server while I was actually in the middle of losing someone, and the channel just means I kept showing up and kept outgrowing who I was. So tidying them up isn't hiding anything. It's just curating who I'm becoming. I think that's right.

I can do this. I've done a lot, and I have people who are still around me and love me. And I still have a lot to go.