All Is Bonus (Including Whatever This Is)

I like my life. I’m having a surprisingly hard time explaining the rest.

This week I sat in a wooden cabin in Taiwan, looking through a giant window at an old tree with the sun coming through it.

The place had cost more than I initially wanted to spend. Of course I’d been annoyed about that. Then I sat there looking at the tree and thought… yeah. Okay. Worth it.

An old tree and wooden cabins seen through the wide window of our cabin in Taiwan.

There’d been bike rides, photography, time with Noela. These moments where I look at her and think… A-MA-ZING, we actually get to do this life together.

Endgame. I’m done. All is bonus.

I still want to build things. I have ideas. Quite a lot of them, unfortunately for the amount of hours in a day. But if I look at my life as it is, today, I want it.

Then some work feedback arrives in the evening and takes up considerably more of me than I wanted to give it.

And underneath the annoyance comes this other question.

Why the fuck am I stressed if everything is fucking okay?

A reasonably normal message

We sent a client 2 landing-page directions. He liked one more than the other. Some things needed explaining. Some things he wanted changed.

Writing that down makes it sound like a normal thing that happens when you send someone 2 landing-page directions.

Which is annoying, because it was.

I could explain the reasoning. Ask what exactly wasn’t working for him. We could redo something. He pays for that. It’s part of making things for people.

I knew all of this. I could respond properly. The feedback still hit me in the evening, and I found myself trying to work out why it had hit me that much.

Another exchange was more frustrating. I’d sent findings, made changes, followed up. No answer. Then a question arrived which, from my side, seemed to require going back over things I’d already explained.

That one did annoy me for a reason. I wanted some engagement with the work I’d put into it.

But even there, I could see myself adding things. They loved what I did for years, and now one experiment doesn’t work and this is what happens?

Maybe. Or maybe they’re just busy currently and haven’t properly read the messages. I don’t actually know. The silence doesn’t come with a little label explaining which interpretation to select.

Either way, there I am. Thinking about it.

I can step back now. Wait. Let the first reaction pass before answering. That’s a huge difference from earlier versions of me.

The thing can still sit with me afterward.

Some of this I want to keep

I talked this through with AI (obviously). We went through the usual possibilities. Boundaries. Being understood. Leaving consulting. Wanting to become a builder.

At some point I had to correct the conversation because it was starting to make the whole thing sound wrong.

Some of the consulting can end. Some work is worth keeping.

NodaCop, which Noela and I built together, stays. She enjoys parts of the work, we both earn money, and together we can do work I wouldn’t have taken on alone. Another client means reliable income and something we built being wanted again. Some frustration is worth that.

At Charcuteria, my funny lil sausage business, people buy things and sometimes write me as well. There’s work involved. Doesn’t stress me though. They buy a product and not me.

So we clarified that. What stays. What can go. Yadi yadi ya rational obvious things… I know it’s that easy.

Which is its own kind of annoying, because I was still sitting there with the other thing.

The adult is confused

For years I had ways of approaching myself when something hurt.

Inner child work. Talking to different parts. Listening to the scared one, the angry one, the part that felt broken or insufficient.

There was often something concrete… I didn’t like my body. I didn’t feel good enough. I was afraid of showing something I’d made.

I could find a conversation to have inside myself. Often times something softened. I calmed down.

Last year I went through what I call my “final integration chapter”. A slightly ambitious name. Apparently I enjoy naming releases.

But the change was real. Those parts became much less separate. I could create, show myself, own my shit. Things I’d been wrestling with for my whole life stopped taking up space.

Now when I try to locate whoever needs talking to, it feels like me.

Adult me.

A stressed adult, perhaps. An anxious one. Even the word is hard to get right.

I look around for the particular thing that’s wrong, and I keep finding a life I’m happy with. I have choices. I have money to give myself room. I love my girlfriend. I like my body. I can make things and put them into the world.

Apparently telling myself true things doesn’t automatically make the feeling leave.

Can somebody give this thing a handle?

The impulse is to explain it.

If I can find the question, I can answer it. If there’s a task, I can do it. If there’s a conversation, I can have it. Then hopefully whatever this is will let me get on with my day.

But I can’t always find the thing to do.

It’s also intermittent, which makes describing it extra fun. I still have that positive Gleichgültigkeit. I can relax. I can be somewhere, enjoy it, feel grateful, leave things alone.

Then something from outside pushes into my attention. Work. Expectations. Something I can’t control but somehow now have to have a relationship with.

The AI asked what I’d like to say before making it reasonable or polite.

That answer came really fast.

Let me fucking alone in being me myself and stop pushing shit on myself.

Get the fuck out of my lane/zone and just let me be!

I dont want to do anything right now and just do whatever the fuck i want and how i want it.

I wouldn’t send that to the person asking for landing-page changes. I can hear the difference between their request and everything arriving with it inside me.

But that’s what came out when I stopped trying to explain it nicely.

I changed the house

A few months ago I wrote about a house I’d built for someone I used to be.

The work, the usefulness, the familiar role. Rooms I’d built through years of saying yes and knowing how to help. Eventually I could feel myself folding smaller to stay in them.

I made changes. Quite substantial ones.

And now I keep reaching for the house again to explain this feeling. Something like… I changed how I live, but some of the old outside still knows where to knock.

I can choose whether to answer. I can decide what belongs to me. But keeping my own perspective sometimes takes concentration. Someone else’s urgency arrives and I have to actively leave it with them.

Maybe I need a timeout. A proper holiday. I know some space would calm me down.

But as I was talking about it, I wrote that it felt a bit like a breakup.

I want to keep loosening those old arrangements. That part is clear.

What am I losing, then?

I have no idea.

Maybe the last piece of structure. Or a chain. Maybe a container that holds me so I don’t explode. Maybe familiarity. Being useful.

The AI asked what I meant by explode.

Excellent question. I had apparently introduced an explosion without knowing what was exploding.

The sentence I almost deleted

What I could say was this: I built my life to be independent and self-sufficient. I can decide almost anything. That brought me joy, expansion, and the chance to actually find out what suits me.

It also means a lot of the structure is in my hands.

What gets my attention. Which work I take. When I stop. Where we go next. How much room I leave around the things I want to do.

I’ve written about the maintenance cost of freedom before. I know choosing everything comes with work.

Then I wrote this:

Maybe if I loosen the last of it, I’ll really have nothing to complain about anymore.

And almost deleted it.

Because… I basically already have that now? I like my life.

Am I now trying to find a problem with having no problem? Have I just invented a very convenient explanation because the paragraph was going somewhere?

It’s slippery.

I get close to a sentence that seems to explain it. Then I look again and it holds about half. Sometimes less. Enough to be interesting. Enough to keep me talking. Never quite enough to go… yes. That’s it.

The tree in Taiwan was real. So was the gratitude. I want to keep building with Noela. I want to keep loosening the work that costs too much of me.

And somewhere in there, sometimes, I feel stressed in a way I can’t quite get hold of.

Today I tried talking to it. Then explaining it. Then explaining why I couldn’t explain it.

Now I’ve written an article.