Growing Weirder and Wiser

Life and the Law of Averages

Photo by Jeremy McKnight on Unsplash

One of my readers recently suggested the idea of doing a weekly series where I republish some of my older work, and I decided to run with it.

Some weeks I’ll dust off old pieces I wrote back when I had only a few hundred readers. Others, I’ll share something that’s brand new to Substack.

This story below is one of the very first op-eds/essays that I ever published on Medium back in 2022 (it’s hard to believe I’ve been writing online for over three years now!).

For me, one of the most interesting parts of this writing journey has been looking back and seeing all of the ways that my voice has shifted over time. The instincts that drove my word choices even six months ago are different than they are today. There are pieces from my library whose authorial voice sounds so alien that I can hardly even believe it was a slightly younger me who wrote them.

Unlike most of my pre-2024 work, I’d like to believe this one has actually aged pretty well. I think the sentiment here is timeless, and it’s a message that I’m even more willing to stand behind today than I was when I wrote it.