The Actual Plot

For a long time, I assumed life would keep me reasonably informed about upcoming plot developments. Not all of them, obviously. Just the major ones. A quick email would have been nice, a calendar invitation or even a vague heads-up. Instead, life tends to operate on a need-to-know basis. And apparently, I rarely need to know.

Most of the things that have fundamentally changed the direction of my life arrived entirely without warning. There were jobs I wasn't planning to take, conversations I wasn't planning to have, opportunities that appeared at exactly the wrong time and versions of myself I hadn't met yet. None of them were in the script — or at least, not in the version I’d been given.

At the time, these moments felt like disruptions. It felt as though someone had wandered onto the set, ignored the stage directions and started improvising. For a long time, I kept waiting for the real story to resume, for things to finally get back on track. The problem was that life seemed completely unbothered by my definition of "the track." It just carried on.

Eventually, I started to notice a pattern. The moments we remember most clearly aren't the ones that went according to plan. They are the ones where the plan fell apart and something else happened instead. They aren't necessarily better and they aren't necessarily worse. Just different.

Which is partly why I've started writing these stories. They are not stories about having everything figured out. They are simply an exploration of what happens when we discover that life has been working from a completely different script the whole time — and that, despite our repeated requests, it remains entirely unwilling to share a copy.