Breadcrumbs, Puzzles, and Questioning Everything

For most of my life, I carried shame about almost everything.

Shame about my childhood sexual abuse.
Shame about my parenting.
Shame that I could never hold a full-time job for longer than a year.
Shame how I left nursing.

Shame for not meeting any of the milestones that society pushed.
Shame for not fitting the script everyone else seemed to follow.

That script or blueprint of what a “successful life” was supposed to look like: go to school, pick a career, build steadily, get married, raise a family, stay the course. And when my life didn’t match that blueprint, and it never has, I blamed myself. Always.

The truth is, I barely knew myself. I was afraid to be me, so I never got to know me.

And now, at almost 50, I’m finally trying to figure that out.

Here’s what I’ve realized:

Blueprints only make sense if your life is supposed to be linear. As a neurodivergent, mine isn’t.

My life is a puzzle.
Every unfinished project, every detour, every moment I thought I “failed” — it’s actually a breadcrumb leading to a piece of that puzzle. On their own, they look random, broken, incomplete. But when I zoom out, I can see how pieces I dropped years ago find their way back into new work, new frameworks, new apps.

None of it was wasted. None of it was meaningless. It was all part of assembling a system that’s uniquely mine.

Two things helped me see that:

• PGQ. The framework I’m building has helped me see myself not as broken, but as a system producing logical outcomes. It gave me a way to map my loops, my capacities, my self-states, and realize none of it was random.
• Self-awareness. I’ve stopped swallowing the blueprint whole. I’ve started questioning it.

Now I know:
My path is my own.

It won’t look like anyone else’s.

And that’s okay.

This is what this site is for. To document the breadcrumbs, the puzzle pieces, the experiments, and the reframes. To make the invisible visible, not just for me but for anyone else who’s tired of blaming themselves for not fitting a life they never chose.

Some people will still look at me and see “flaky.”
But I know better now.

Because shame doesn’t build systems that work.
Curiosity does.

And I’d rather follow breadcrumbs into a puzzle of my own making than force myself into a blueprint that was never mine.

✨ That’s the experiment I’m running here: to question everything, to live without erasure, and to see what happens when I stop blaming myself and start becoming myself.