Someone posted a list. Fifty items, numbered, each one a sentence or two — a way of moving through the world I’d never heard named that plainly. The kind of list that circulates because people read four items in and stop scrolling.
I didn’t stop scrolling. It was early, the room still dark except for the screen, and I opened a blank page and started typing.
Not the items — a place to score them. Zero to four for each one, doesn’t land to this is my life, a page that would add it up and hand me back something when I was done. It took about as long to build as it takes to make a good cup of tea. Then I went back and answered honestly, one at a time. I didn’t expect to take it seriously until it started to feel like I was being pranked.
Seventy-one out of a hundred, when the page finished adding.
The high ones clustered where I’d have guessed, if I’d thought to guess. The static of not knowing I’m tired until hours after I should have stopped. The particular loneliness of being surrounded and rarely known. The tax of watching myself do a thing while I’m doing it. Being loved for a version of me that was easier to love than the real one. The specific homesickness for a place that was never on any map. Getting language at sixty-five for something that would have changed everything at fifteen.
The low ones clustered too. Grief, thirty-five. The register where feeling arrives faster than it can be sorted, twenty-five.
I looked at the shape of it (sharp on the noticing, flat on the feeling) and thought, that tracks. That’s who I’d have said I was, if anyone had asked, before I ever saw the list.
Except flat isn’t quite right, once I looked more closely. The grief with a cause attached (a specific reason a life didn’t happen, a decades-later reckoning that landed the moment I finally traced where it came from) scored low. Hand me a why and it moves through fast. It’s the other one, the place that was never on any map, that never hands me a why. Nothing to trace, nothing to release. So it stays, alone, high, pulling a cluster that would otherwise have gone quiet back up to thirty-five. Emotional intensity didn’t get any of that. Not absent. Just quiet, next to how loud the rest of it was.
Then I closed the page and wanted, immediately, to know what it would have said twenty years ago. Ten. Three months ago, before a specific week I could name if I had to.
I got as far as opening a second blank page before I noticed what I was doing.
This isn’t new. Give me a rabbit hole and I’ll go all the way down it — survey every cavern, map every branch, build the one page that finally organizes what I found. Then, standing in a room I now know completely, I start looking for the next hole in the floor.
There’s an item on that list for this. Not by name. Nobody wrote “the compulsion to re-measure what’s already been measured” as its own entry — but it’s in there, underneath a few of the others, the way a pipe runs under a floor.
I know that reach. I’ve built a working life around it.
The second page is still open. Cursor blinking after a “1.” I haven’t decided which year to ask it about yet.
Written in response to Lily Jedynak’s “50 Experiences Nobody Explained” (Dr Lil’s Substack, June 28, 2026).