No existing publication on Medium had a place for the pieces I was writing: long, dense, interdisciplinary, refusing to simplify. The landscape had a gap, and the gap had a shape I recognised, because it was the shape of the work I had been producing for a year. The publication those pieces required would have to be built.

Apple Music's Replay surfaced eleven years of annual listening summaries. Each one was a precise rendering of a state I had occupied, more accurate than any verbal description I could have constructed. The clinical framework measured the translation and called its absence a deficit. It never asked what language the original was written in.

I encountered Nietzsche through Kubrick, not through text. For four decades the philosophical framework held: the mask as aristocratic necessity, the discomfort as proof of direction on the rope. The diagnosis at forty-eight corrected the address. The mask I had read as a philosophical choice was assembled at age four or five, before I had any say in the matter.

A psychiatrist on Reddit drew the line between autistic people who need full-time support and those with jobs, relationships, and an excessive interest in Dragon Ball Z. I belong to the second group. I read the thread in the half-light of a Sunday siesta and registered that I had walked into a room with a notice barring me from entering.

A bar in Lleida, 38 degrees outside, voices layered over voices. I carry a small bottle of cinnamon essential oil in my pocket. It does not calm me down. It creates a one-second window in which my regulation protocol becomes accessible again. One second is enough.

A podcast called La Zanzara seats politicians and commentators across from each other and applies just enough friction to watch the surface civility dissolve. Between minutes eight and twelve, the prefrontal cortex hands in its resignation. I have been taking field notes for years.