It started with three papers.

1. To Practice, or Not to Practice Law
2. Money Can’t Buy Love
3. Ignorance is Not Bliss

Three things that have haunted me since college … written down not to publish, but to understand.

I sent them to a dear friend who’d transferred to an Ivy League school after the first semester of our sophomore year. He called the moment he finished reading. If he’d known what I was carrying back then, he told me, he never would have left. And the journey I described had already helped someone he knew, facing something similar.

That call is the reason this book exists. What I thought was private turned out to be portable.

The papers were only the first thing I wrote down. The rest arrived the way it always has … unannounced, and never in words.

My best friend Bruce calls this my Mu Mu Journey. It’s his softening of woo-woo, delivered with love and one eyebrow raised. I adopted it without argument, because he isn’t wrong and because I’ve stopped needing him to be. It’s mine now. It’s also the middle section of this book.

Mu Mu is a run of short stories, each one a sign I walked past and came back to. A red-tailed hawk on a ledge in the rain, soaked through and still perched … photographed the morning I lost my job of twenty years. An eagle that circled my Minneapolis window and turned west the day I said out loud I was moving to San Francisco. A gate number in a South Dakota airport, in a photograph I’d taken myself, on the trip where I first tried to end something my family had been handing down for four generations. It sat on my phone for two months before I looked at it properly. B44. The Master Builder.

And the music, which is how most of it reaches me first. A melody surfaces before I know what it’s about … an album I bought with a cousin who’s been gone eleven years, a song stopped mid-performance by a stranger on a stage who somehow found the heaviest heart in the room. The meaning trails the sound by hours, sometimes years. I’ve stopped arguing with the order.

I’m not asking you to believe any of it. Bruce doesn’t, entirely, and he’s still my best friend. What I’ll say is that the signs were legible the whole time. I was the one running late.

And then there’s the part where you do something about it.

Losing My Distortion is a nonfiction account of the patterns I inherited, the ones I chose, and the long work of telling them apart. It isn’t advice … I’m not qualified to give you any, and the people who are don’t usually write like this.

But it’s built to be used. Alongside the story are the diagrams I drew for myself along the way, the frameworks I used to find the shape of what I was living through and get some leverage on it. Nothing in them is theory. Every one of them came out of a moment I couldn’t think my way through, so I drew it instead. They’re on the page for you to borrow, argue with, or redraw entirely.

The distortion in the title is the version of yourself you assemble out of what you were handed. Some of it was given in love. Some of it was given carelessly. Almost none of it was chosen.

Losing it is not a loss.

Think memoir with a map.

Losing My Distortion is the third book in a series that includes Keep Looking Up and I Really Did Leave My Heart in San Francisco. It is currently in progress.