Part DNA, part defense mechanism, this natural pull always caused me way more trouble than benefit in my personal life. It saved me too. My experience from within was often the opposite of what it seemed from the outside (easy, relatively privileged, frequently enviable): to me, the way the world works felt heavy, complicated, and rigid. When I realized, early, that I could apply analysis and precision to pain, to understand it, tame it, one thing cut through it all: clarity.  

I wrote the first draft of the Anticipatory Grief Protocol while I was experiencing it firsthand. I couldn't find anything that could help in what was happening, and I needed help: my feelings were intense, contradictory, punishing, and everything else slipped: her, the room, the future. There were times I was no longer sure I would come out of it. So I built what I needed, as I had done before, many times over.

It worked. 

And then I started noticing patterns. What I was experiencing was not the first crisis I'd been through that didn't resolve. The emotions that opposed each other and would make Niels Bohr proud; the thoughts I couldn't say out loud to anyone, not even to the people I loved most; the feeling that I was enduring both alone: none of it was new to me. 

So I kept building. 

I don’t claim permanent answers. The only constant in my life is revision, which is also the only method I trust for this kind of work. I build maps; the territory gets clearer as more people move through it, which is why the version numbers in Paradox Crisis Protocols matter. 

One more thing: I’m a professional writer. I've loved most of what I've done. This is the first work where the thing on the page matches the thing in my head. 

Above everything: 

There are two of us in this, and it would never exist without both. Theodore Papageorgiou built and runs everything that makes this work exist outside my head: the website, the systems, the back end. This work started during one of the harder periods of our life together, in a household that had (and still has) its own weight to carry. He kept everything intact and running while I thought and while I wrote. That's the part that doesn't show. It's the part that makes anything possible.