This is a strange way to start a post on Mirror, my first post on Mirror at that, but sometimes it’s good to lean into strangeness.

After all, it’s been a strange year for everyone, and for me particularly it’s been VERY strange.

More on that later.

Maybe…

But strangeness is good, and especially in this weird, blossoming world of tech, culture, and internet craziness that is Web 3. For me at least, I tend to be attracted to the strangeness in certain projects.

So, maybe what I’m about to tell you will resonate in some way, even though it’s sort of weird.

Anyway, let me start with my last therapy session.

I usually do my therapy through a video call, mainly because I’m too lazy to drive down to my therapist’s office, but also because I don’t like driving that much, and also a few years ago, I made the decision to not own a car. I mean, my family has a car, but my wife and kids are usually using it, and I’m usually on foot most of the time.

So, I was on the video call with my therapist, and I was giving him an update on my conversion disorder (sometimes called functional neurological disorder). This is part of the VERY strange stuff I mentioned, and I don’t have time to go into it all in this post, but for context, just know that conversion disorder is real (or so they tell me), and it’s a psychosomatic thing that makes me twitch and stutter sometimes, and I also learned that it may have been what the girls in the Salem Witch Trials had when they were freaking everyone out with their hysterics, which for some reason I thought was cool.

What makes me twitch and stutter is still sort of a mystery. That’s why I’m still in therapy every week! But in general, the idea is that it’s a psychological conflict that presents itself in a physiological way, ie. the stuttering and twitching stuff that I do.

So what is the psychological conflict you may be wondering?

Me too!

Wouldn’t that be nice if I figured it all out and didn’t twitch and stutter anymore? I was actually worried for a bit that I had early signs of ALS, which is my literal worst fear. Sometimes I stutter when I try to order in the Chik-Fil A drive through, and now I have my wife do that bit. I get really bad around birthdays and holidays, and if it gets really really bad, I can go catatonic.

If you have any psychoanalytical theories, shoot them my way, but in general, I have a strong thesis going, and this gets back to why in the world I would be posting all of this on Mirror.

Who am I?

No, this isn’t the part where I go into my career highlights, At the deepest level, I think at least part of my psychological conflict comes from this essential existential question.

Of course, on the outside, I have it made. Great wife and family, nice neighborhood, kids are awesome, etc, etc.

Internally though, the question deepens when I think about my vocation. Vocation, to me, is a word that simply describes how I spend my days in exchange for value of some sort.

The kicker is that I’ve always avoided wanting to define my vocation, because in a way I would be defining myself, and that scares me perhaps.(See? The therapy is helping.)

In the past year, I’ve had many people ask me what it is I “do”. What is my job? How do I make money? How do I spend my days?

At one point my wife even asked me that.

The answer is, I do all sorts of things, but that usually leads to a longer conversation... So, I usually just say I’m a consultant, and do my best to duck out of the conversation.

But back to the reason for this essay, and specifically for putting this essay on Mirror, which I had to campaign hard to get access to!

A Vocational Multiverse

I cringe at using the word “multiverse” here, but oh well. You tell me if there is a better term for it.

I plan on using Mirror to launch various research/art projects, while also using this as my space for personal explorations.

The projects that I'm considering probably couldn’t be more different from each other in theme, and who knows what will be in my personal explorations. So, at it’s core, maybe this is all a deeply personal experiment in me trying to exercise the psychological conflict that is triggering my conversion disorder by leaning into the disparate, and possibly dissociative nature of my interests.

We shall see.

In regards to Mirror, I don't have any meaningful Web 3 analysis that isn't already being explored by someone else on Mirror that is smarter than me. However, I’m intrigued by the intimate nature that this type of platform can create with a potential audience, and the way that Web 3 allows creators and their audience to be aligned with each other.

So, I’m planning on using Mirror to hopefully “listen” to whoever might be reading this. I’m under no illusions that these posts will go viral, or that any meaningful number of people will find their way here. So, it’s not really about the wisdom of a crowd.

In a way, it’s about fate, providence, or whatever you may want to define it as. The universe?

More to come...

Thanks for reading!