The only time I’ve been to Burning Man was 2019 and that year’s theme was “Metamorphoses.” I was part of Minimal Viable Camp, known for their Blinky Things Hospital and Burner Boards.

We were roughly 25 founders & executives spread across 6 or 7 RVs and I took two, three-minute showers a day. The gift I offered folks was these really nice full-body camping wipes for those that didn’t have the kind of setup I found myself in. A woman once came up to me and asked, “Can I just hug you? You look so shiny and clean. And I need that.”

She really did.

We hugged for a moment and as she pulled away I handed her one of the wipes. She immediately burst into tears, hugged me again, and exclaimed with excitement, “You’re Mr. Clean!”

And thus I was given my playa name.

I have so many great memories from that week, but there’s one in particular that I think about regularly, especially lately.

There’s a post office out there. They have all of these nifty postcards that you can send to people and they get them weeks or months later.

I went and got a card and I wrote it to my future self.

I still have it.

Justin,

First night on the playa & you haven’t looked at a computer or phone in several hours.. Stop what you’re doing & be present.

Writing it, I felt gratitude, mostly. For how present I was. How peaceful. The dry cough that had started in 2012 was gone. I wasn’t scanning for threats or worried about what and where I had to be next. I was just there, in the moment. I remember having a defiant strength in that moment.

“Yes, but of course I will always feel this way,” I thought as I wrote the card.

I wasn’t thinking about work.

What stays with me aren’t the exact words. It was the feeling.

Remember that feeling?

This is who you are.

That was a year and a half into my first CEO job. Things at the company were going well enough and while I was away we ended up closing the largest deal in our company history at that time.

Remember this feeling. Be present.

...I didn’t. And I wasn’t.

In early 2018, my ex-wife and I filed for divorce. That same time period, I became a Founder & CEO for the first time. So I never really had time to grieve. Or heal. Or reflect. It was just go, go into the next thing. The next meeting. The next milestone. The next move to a new place four different times. 2020 in San Francisco. Then a new city across the country.

I even quickly jumped from one relationship to the next. I don’t know if I was chasing or surviving. Trying to fill a void that you simply can’t by looking outward.

At the end of that year, I gave one of my first big talks for my company, Spectrum Labs. It was at a dating app conference, at Shutters in Santa Monica. I was so nervous, I don’t remember a word I said. But it was the first time that I was speaking publicly at an event as a CEO. I had done it many times as an employee, but when it’s yours it hits very differently.

That’s you up there.

Afterward I went out on the beach and called my mom. I was lit up with excitement.

Every summer on our family vacation, she and I used to walk the beach at 6am before my brother, sister (LOL - it would be HOURS later for her) and dad got up. Just the two of us, picking up shells along the beach. Maybe the one thing like that that we have ever shared.

This time it was a phone call, and I was on the beach in Santa Monica.

I told her about my to-feel list. Three things I wanted to feel for that year that I had developed after starting monthly therapy. I even had my employees create their own. Basically, instead of resolutions, you come up with the things you want to feel and then work backwards into the rituals, habits, and routines that help you feel those things.

My very first ones were joy, love and peace.

I think it was the emotional release of the anxiety of public speaking that unblocked some stuck energy or memories and we got to talking about joy. And then about her mom, my grandmother. Nana. She passed away in 2012. She spent her life visiting people in hospitals and nursing homes and schools. Hosting Tupperware parties. Spending a lot of time with the church. Organizing community stuff. Holding space for people.

Her name was Joyce. Joy.

And that’s when it hit me. That’s why she was so happy, and so loved. She gave it. In my mind, she is the definition of joy & pure love. I think she just was that way because of how she spent her time. I really wish I could talk to her now, so many questions.

I’m always here.

We both started crying. Then we talked about how much we missed her.

That list, and that call, are what really started me down this whole inward path. I can literally pinpoint specific events and conversations that happened.

Like sparks or breadcrumbs that were planted.

I then went on a main quest for joy, and it led me to Burning Man. And to that card. It also helped me recognize that there are so many other ways to feel love than just romantic. It’s all connected. Ohhhhh the peace I felt in that moment of writing that card.

But I was still locked into the job and the role for a few more years. A seed round. Then a Series A. COVID. A Series B. And the burnout was a boiling frog. It wasn’t just the company pressure of being a first-time founder. It was all of it. Life, you might say.

In 2023, we sold Spectrum. But there was no break. No relief. We pivoted straight into the next company, to take another stab. I was CEO and co-founder, still burned out, and I carried it right in with me.

“Uncomfortably Numb” by Pink Void.

That year I went to a Nate Bargatze show in Nashville. His first time selling out the big arena. I went with some of my closest friends and everyone had a great time, he’s great and I really love comedy shows. But I don’t think I laughed once in two hours. I was completely within my own mind, a blank stare into the empty abyss of my worries and fears.

On Lisa Thee’s podcast, GO! Reboot Your Life, I put it this way: “I’d masked it as well as I could.” Lisa and I were working together back then. “I would have never known,” she said, “that you weren’t on Cloud 9.” The outside was keeping up appearances, the inside was in pain. A nervous system stuck in a state of hyper-vigilance. I’ve told people I felt like a duck swimming in the pond. You see the head, held high, composed, calm even. Driven as he swims towards something. But underneath? Those little legs were kicking frantically and I really didn’t know what I was swimming to or away from.

Then came 2024. Between July and November-ish, my mom got cancer, and recovered. My dad had a stroke. My best friend from college died. My cousin died. My uncle died. I broke up with the girl I had been with for over a year. And in September, about ten months in, I had to shut the new company down. I wrote about that year back in January.

It took me twenty years to feel, not just learn, that you should never let your identity or self-worth get wrapped up in your job. Good or bad.

From September to December I was a hermit. I stayed in my place in Miami. I may have left the apartment only a handful of times. Two of those rare times were visits back home to see my family for the holidays.

A day at the low was filled with these kinds of thoughts. You think you’re the worst. You reflect and overanalyze and ruminate on all the mistakes you made, people you’ve upset or disappointed. You ignore calls and texts. The slightest bit of pressure of anything from anyone puts you over the edge into a state of paralysis. It’s a very gray existence color-wise, if that makes sense.

Thank goodness my vice is/was isolation, so substances, alcohol, drugs etc weren’t part of the picture. But sitting at home by yourself in your own grief can be just as toxic.

I went home for Thanksgiving, and then again for Christmas. My family didn’t really ask questions. I don’t think they even knew how bad I felt. They just loved me. Made me laugh. Played games. And that unstuck a lot of the energy I was holding on to at that time. Really good conversations with my mom and dad, my grandfather and great aunt, my sister and her family. Gosh, I have such great nieces.

I’m certain they don’t know how much those two visits put me back onto a path of really healing myself.

Thank you. Truly.

Even though I had done talk therapy monthly from late 2018-March 2025, I didn’t start the real inner game work until that March 2025. Not that talk therapy wasn’t working...there was just a different path ahead for me.

Retreats for reflection, for healing, for connecting. I went looking for purpose, and to let go of the grief. The past. You even learn about past lives and generational stuff. It runs deep. Woof.

All of them included some element of sound, breathwork, and meditation. And it really worked for me.

On Lisa’s show I said what I wished I’d had back when I was really going through it, was “a big brother... just someone to, you know, say, hey, it’s all good, man, or give me tough love.”

I have two mentors who do that now. They’re both calm, empathetic, rational, loving, strong men who’ve been successful in very different areas. One built companies in tech. He’s a lot more pragmatic, but a highly empathetic leader. The other works as something of a coach, you might say, helping thousands of people. He’s the grounded and creative free spirit teacher type.

They both work with me on the inner game, just through different lenses. A genius, loving-grandfather figure and a wise, older brother that has a ton of raw & interesting life experience.

Mostly, they help me to see myself.

Thank you. Truly.

It was mid last year in working with them on the journey inward, that I started to remember that we’re all many things.

The first thing I remembered was being a warrior and having the warrior spirit.

I got it back. The spark. It felt like regaining my own agency and power. Confidence. There’s a story about being the “scorpion king” that will be shared in due time. When I’m ready.

Then it just kept extending. I’m a kid. An artist. A poet. A musician. A gamer. A creator. A son. A brother. A lover. A comedian. Who & what you are blur into this sea of memories and abilities.

I’m just...me. Comfortably myself.

I’d written a list like that once before. When Nana (Joyce) passed in 2012, I wrote her eulogy. It went something like this.

“She was a mother. A wife. A sister. A grandmother. A daughter. A friend. A caretaker. A visitor. A baker. A seamstress. An artist. A church member.

“And at the heart of it, she was Nana.

“Our Nana.”

In a town of 800 people, she was everybody’s Nana.

On Friday I asked on X, “Who makes you happy?” My own answer started with “Myself.” And there were many others on that list. But for me, it has to start with myself.

Two years ago, I wouldn’t have been on my own list. I wouldn’t even think about it that way. I definitely wasn’t making myself happy that September to December, or in the months maybe even years leading up to it. I don’t know if anyone would have been on that list because of the state of mind I was in.

I’d say I put myself back on the list around May of last year. Specifically May 11th.

Eleven.

I’ve been thinking about these essays, and in writing them I’ve developed something I really like.

The journey inward leads upward, and then outward.

More on the upward journey another time. But what I will say, is that at our core, connecting all of us, is love. That’s all we are, at the center of us.

Some folks say time is the most precious thing there is, I think it’s love. And when you go deep enough, you’ll find it. For yourself. For others. And it’s there, that you’ll discover your journey inward was upward and spiritual all along.

On Monday I posted: “Love yourself so you can give it to others.”

The best way to feel love is to give it. And I want it. So that means I need to give it out more. Like Nana.

From the outside, I don’t think anyone would notice much of a difference. I’ve always been the calm one. Collected. Grounded. Teacher energy.

It’s how I feel on the inside that changed by going inward. Rewired. Like a tree that’s had its roots cleaned, planted in new soil, given light and a fresh splash of water so that the fruit it bears tastes sweet.

Love for myself gives me the confidence to feel safe expressing myself. To tell these stories and share my authentic self, wherever that leads. I never really have, as the introvert behind the scenes. Hiding from threats unknown and even myself in a way. It’s why I didn’t have social media for the longest time. Instagram and Facebook? Still don’t.

These essays are part of the outward. So is the handpan. So is Elfen Town, the virtual space & social network we’re building inside Eleven Dunbar. The children’s book.

When I say it to myself, it comes out like a mantra. Inward, upward, outward.

If you rearrange the first letter of each word it spells...

I. O. U.

Holy crap. That’s an IOU.

And I think I know what kind of IOU it is. Not a debt. A promise to your future self.

That card at Burning Man was an IOU. I just didn’t know it yet. A promise that if I was present with myself and others, that I’d feel the thing I’ve felt so many times before.

Why was I urging myself to be present? To stop? It was because of that feeling.

Joy, Love, Peace.

It took seven years to integrate.

Last Sunday I moved into a place on the beach.

My first evening, I went in the ocean around sunset. And I started laughing. No one around. Just giggling to myself. Me. The dude who sat through two hours of Nate Bargatze without a laugh. I was like, where in the world is this coming from? It was such an odd overwhelming feeling but felt like pure joy.

And then I either thought something or heard a voice in my head, it’s hard to distinguish. But it said “remember.”

Seven years after I wrote that card, I’d finally stopped what I was doing. I was present. And I remembered.

The IOU came due.

When I was a kid in the late 90s, my mom had to yell at me to get out of the ocean. A hurricane was about to make landfall that evening, and we had a two-hour drive home. I used to spend hours just body surfing or wading in the water while the family was hanging out on the beach.

I loved it.

A Scorpio water baby through and through.

I hadn’t thought about that being a part of me in decades. Why did I stop doing something I once loved so much? Even moving to the beach, I never really went... but I’ve always said I wanted to live at the beach.

Now I swim in the ocean every day. First thing in the morning, or later in the afternoon. I meditate longer. I play the handpan more. This being a part of my routine now couldn’t be happening at a more relevant time for my own journey.

I love it.

I don’t know exactly where or what this duck is swimming towards, but I can tell you one thing...

He’s not swimming away from anything or anyone.

Including himself.

In drafting voice notes for this, sometimes my dictation tool would capture my southern accent saying “I owe you” as “I love you.”

Too good.

If you wrote an IOU to your future self, what would it say?

Last Sunday I wrote about the magical gift box handed me. A set of AI prompts that started interviewing me. It opened me up creatively in a way that I hadn’t perhaps ever experienced. It also brought with it reflection, gratitude, and action. I wouldn’t be writing these essays every week had it not been for that simple gesture.

It’s so funny. I didn’t even realize it when I wrote that article.

That wasn’t the first gift box.

The first one was a box of colored pencils.

A year ago, after the first time Gerhard and I met, he asked me if I journal. This was after spending a weekend together with twenty other amazing humans at a retreat. A weekend with reflection, gratitude and action at the center of it.

Oh this is how we pray.

“Do you journal?”

“Yeah... not really.”

Now... I reflect constantly. I’m what you might describe as an over thinker, over-analyzer...a lifetime of a nervous system living in a state of hyper-vigilance. And I remember everything. It’s one of the things that led me to that very place. But I’ve never really had a journal or captured my thoughts. Not opposed, just didn’t have the habit.

He said, “go get a box of color pencils and some paper. Document what you’ve experienced here.”

Not just any pencils, either. Faber-Castell. I asked which ones and he named the exact set. And the exact type of paper.

It took me a couple of weeks to actually get them. But I was pretty motivated coming out of that conversation. And then they sat in a box for another couple of weeks before I finally opened them. It was only when a friend came over and busted them out that my inner child said “heyyyyy those are mine, let ME do that too.”

The first thing I drew was a house.

The kid one. You know the one. Grass along the bottom. The sun up in the corner. A house with windows. A simple tree. No family or dog though.

And I kind of laughed. Because I drew it the exact same way I did as a kid. Same sun. Same house. Nothing had changed.

It made me remember all the doodles I used to make. The Cool S, attaching the lines. Swirls and squiggles. Dots and concentric patterns. Sacred geometry.

I hadn’t really drawn anything since the teddy bear in sixth grade. If you read “I just stopped.” a few weeks back, you know that story.

This week I came across something on X that felt like incredible validation.

Jash Dholani calls it the “toys theory of greatness.” He looks at people who changed things and finds, near the start of their story, a toy. Einstein’s father showed him a compass when he was four or five. The Wright brothers got a toy helicopter as kids, played with it until it broke, then built their own.

His idea: if you want to find your work as an adult, go back to the toy that had you hooked as a kid. Sometimes literally. Sometimes symbolically.

I went back literally. Same house, same sun.

After the doodles came lists. My friend and I wrote down dreams & goals we had for the next year of our lives. We even both signed it.

Later, I added values I’d used at my previous companies. Trust. Grit. Growth. Collaboration. Passion.

Then I kept going. Last year was a lot of spiritual exploring for me, so I started writing down the belief systems I’d learned about. Hinduism. Shaivism. Buddhism. Christianity. The Red Road principles from Native American traditions. The Santo Daime.

What do I believe in? What do I stand for? What does it mean to be a good person?

And then, okay, who is that person?

Teacher.

I just like helping people. Almost everyone in my family is wired this way. And we don’t really talk about it, we just... do.

In tech, I was always good at taking complex things, simplifying them, and getting folks excited about them. I think I even have a LinkedIn rec (people still do those?) from almost 20 years ago saying that very thing. Getting people excited about them, helping them feel like the Kool-Aid Man, ready to bust through the door. I’m a projector in human design if you’re familiar with those things. Give me a clock to put around my neck, I’m the ultimate hype man. Yeah boi.

The time is now.

I think the teacher in me isn’t really about explaining things. It’s about getting people motivated to go after the knowledge, the dream, the idea on their own. Plant the seed. Help them find their own spark.

It led me to my purpose. Eleven Dunbar came shortly after that.

Last week I wrote that the journey inward leads upward, and eventually outward. Looking back, that’s exactly the order it went in.

I’ve had this conversation with a lot of people. The one about being ready for the next thing. The next phase. Idea. Location. Mountain. You get to one peak and the second mountain looms just ahead. It comes from members. People who apply. People who reach out that say the messages & vulnerability resonate. Friends. Former colleagues and even investors.

It keeps coming back to the same things. Listen to your own voice, not the should statement. Start with creativity and play. Be in nature. Meditate. Gratitude. Go be a kid.

Give yourself the gift of permission to be or do the thing. It should be called Pre-mission, because that’s what you go on once you grant it to yourself. Permission Impossible until you do.

The pencils went back in the box, though. It was just a rock causing a ripple in the pond. Besides, I have digital crayons now (the gift box).

I picked up a handpan shortly after and it became the creative toy to put me into open mode as John Cleese calls it, whenever I want.

So what was my childhood toy of greatness, really? I mean, it’s all of it, right? My room growing up, with my toys and my video games. It was smaller than a dorm room. Bunk beds for my brother and me. A big closet with two doors that connected on the inside. It was the corner of the house, so it had two small windows. A dresser, a mirror, and a TV with the NES and the Super Nintendo. I escaped to other worlds inside of books and to imaginary places in my mind with action figures.

My toy was my imagination.

A safe space to express and do the thing. What was missing was the ability to share it with others.

On Friday, I asked who your first online friend was. Mine came in high school, when I got a computer. Ultima Online... which was one of the first big online multiplayer worlds (before World of Warcraft). Suddenly, I could be deep in my imagination and play, and chat with people from all across the world while I did it.

That’s the room I keep coming back to. A safe space to make things and play. To learn and grow. With really special people operating with the same sense of awareness, motivation, and agency.

Reflection, Gratitude, Action.

Today I moved. Away from the place I think I’ve lived longer than any other since leaving home when I was 18. The walk through the park out front of my old place won’t happen again. But I’m finally moving to a beachfront place, a lifelong dream of mine. Why it took me five years in Miami to do this... perhaps it’s coming right when I need it. Perhaps future me knew it would come at the exact moment it needed to.

Let the waves wash away your worries, and build (sand) castles with your dreams.

The colored pencils are in storage with everything else. The house drawing too. What’s coming with me is a suitcase, my handpan, the digital crayons powered by my favorite childhood toy.

On Wednesday’s podcast there was a card in our game that we never got to: invent a ritual for the first night in a new home. I don’t know mine yet. I want to get into the space first. But tonight I’m going out to see the moon, take it all in, and give some gratitude.

When you move, the universe moves with you.

New home. Same little kid.

What’s your box of colored pencils? And if you had it now, what would you do with it first?

Share your toy AND greatness with others at Eleven Dunbar

handed me a gift box.

A magical Gerhard gift box, I call it now. At the time, it looked like a copy-and-paste kit. He had been pushing me for weeks, maybe months, in this particular area. To use Claude in different ways. Oh I noticed.

But I was resisting.

The classic battle between the me-now and the me-later. You know the one, the one that lives in your head but always seems just out of reach and the problem getting there lives entirely within yourself.

He had taught me how to use Claude back in December 2025. It made me realize then just how underutilized I was and how productive, creative, and expansive I could become.

This magical gift box he gave me was his way for pulling ideas out of me. Ideas for writing. Games for Elfen Town. App ideas. Experiences for our members. And more. We never talked about it, but I think he knew I was stuck and was trying to help.

We’ve also spent a lot of time together and I think he’s keenly aware of what I’m capable of... and sometimes you just need that friend, that mentor, it could even be a moment from a stranger to drop the rock in the pond of your imagination & motivation. Someone to see you. To give you that high five. To share the story and put into words the thing that helps you...

...remember.

There you are.

I actually had this magical box (a series of AI prompts) for a few days before I did anything with it. At the time, I was really going through it. I’ve tried to find words to describe it without actually saying it but I don’t think that helps me or anyone else reading this... it’s a lifelong battle with depression, anxiety, self doubt, feeling like you’re constantly in trouble, etc.

I could build a masterclass in nervous system regulation to overcome it. Play handpan. Meditate/pray. Go to the gym. Be in nature. Go for walks. Eat well. 8hrs of sleep. I’ve spent time with shamans. I’ve done the sound baths. I’m much better at teaching and guiding others in this area than I am at permanently fixing it for myself.

This isn’t about healing, it’s about alignment and purpose.

The journey inward is an infinite space by which you can expand.

This magical gift box... It didn’t write anything for me. It handed me a to-do list. Content ideas for the day, for X, for Substack, for LinkedIn. No drafts. Just ideas. They were ok I guess.

Then it started interviewing me.

Question after question. And then it asked for more of me. My old posts. The podcasts I’d been a guest on. The panels and talks I had given in my past. Levity Field, Unreasonable Art of Living, GO! Reboot Your Life (Lisa’s most viewed podcast), Rebellious Times with Chris. Anything that could capture me. My voice, my personality. Gerhard saw me, still does. And this gift didn’t just help Claude see me.

It helped me see myself.

“Create to see yourself.”

So I went on the hunt. Coffee, laptop, digging up old podcasts and interviews I’d done. It was fun, tracking all of that down, just to see how close it could get to how I think. And to remember.

And what got me, was just how much I’d already created. I’d never organized any of it.

And there I was, in old interviews, talking about Eleven Dunbar years before it was a thing.

That’s when I noticed it. This idea, this series of projects and ideas that I now work on with Gerhard, had been circling me. Waiting for me to be ready.

I didn’t find it. It found me. And when you notice that, you feel it.

Alive. Safe. Motivated.

Gerhard made it so easy, and it flipped a switch in me. He taught me, and I took it and ran.

If you’ve read the last two of these essays, you know what happened next. A teddy bear I drew in sixth grade. A children’s book I wrote in high school. And these Sunday pieces. New handpan songs. A cartoon.

I went from consuming to creating. And I haven’t really stopped. That was about a month ago now.

On Friday, I posted that I’d said no to something that was taking up my headspace.

It was dating. It felt great.

No more pressure to meet someone. No more pressure to go on dates. Just room. Room to focus on myself, on building, on helping people.

This week, I captured another idea (like Mr. Miyagi with his chopsticks) that has been swirling around me for some time. Broadcasting. Turning a camera on and letting people in while we make things. At some point you become keenly aware of it. “Wow. This keeps coming up. “

As a kid I loved the movie “The Wizard.” It was about kids running away from home, traveling across the country to play in a video game tournament. We didn’t have Twitch as kids, but I always thought I would’ve attempted to do Twitch streaming if I had been born maybe twenty years later than I had.

Combine my ability to hold space for people, be vulnerable, laugh, cry, and vent together while also playing a game or showing what I’m building/working on as I do it. So you’re there to learn, grow, laugh, and be inspired... not just watch video game TV.

On Wednesday, I posted a card that said “Someday is the excuse.” My caption was “Might as well be ‘never’... So LFG.”

Two days later I set up a Twitch account.

It’s a shift from thinking about something to actually doing something about it.

And who cares if it fails. If no one shows up to watch our live podcast shows. I love the idea of building in public & attempting something unique to reach more people. To inspire, motivate, and help them.

Gamers are incredibly smart, talented, creative people...and many of them just need that spark. That moment from a friend or a stranger that helps them just take the first step on getting started in whatever it is they intend to create.

When you move, the universe moves with you.

We’re going to play around with live streaming our weekly Levity Field recording. And other sessions through the week too: building in public, talking with whoever shows up, maybe playing some games. I know one thing, we’re definitely going to have fun and laugh. We’ll learn, play, and I’m sure something will come out of it. A person or conversation, another idea, a learning...

A spark for someone.

And you know what? That’s where I want to be. In moments exactly like that.

On Friday, I also shared a question a student (11D members are involved in an entrepreneurship program at a high school in Asia) asked us: what do you do when someone else already has your idea? TL;DR: I gave a long answer that was ok, but there are books on this already.

Elizabeth Gilbert has a version of this in Big Magic. Ideas go looking for someone to bring them to life, and if you don’t say yes, they eventually move on to someone else.

So maybe someone else does have your idea. Ideas get broadcast to everyone. But some of them really are meant for you. Those are the ones that won’t leave you alone.

The spark finds you.

I can’t tell you what your magical gift box will be that sets the wheels in motion. Lights you up. That part’s yours. But your chances go up when you’re around people who motivate you and inspire you, and make it feel safe to start.

Two weeks ago, when I wrote about that teddy bear, I described how drawing it felt. Alive. Expansive.

Funny thing. The gift box started me off with a to-do list. Since 2019, with my employees and even some friends, I actively maintain a to-feel list: three things I want to feel this year, instead of three things I want to get done. The first list back then contained Joy, Love, and Peace.

I like things in threes and fives, so there’s just three.

This year’s list? Connected. Freedom. Expansive.

I don’t think I actually wrote expansive in my essay two weeks ago because of my list. It just happened. That’s the power of that list. Sensations, feelings, thoughts are important to separate. More on that another time.

The last few weeks, since that gift arrived, I’ve felt all three.

Connected to our members, to Gerhard, to myself. To the work of helping people.

Freedom. Saying no gave me room, and the creativity is flowing. I can live & work anywhere and I feel like my authentic voice is just starting to shed its teenage crackling.

And expansive. On Thursday, I wrote that I’m finally becoming. This week I could feel it. I’m not there yet. I’m JustinTheMaking not JustinTheMade. I never will be. And JustinTheMaid… I think my halloween costume idea just found me, oh boy.

The beautiful thing about the journey inward being an infinite space to expand... is that if you go deep enough, it will ultimately lead you upward, whatever that even means to you. Uppercase G. Lowercase g. Sweet baby Jesus in the manger. Shiva. Source. Highest Self. Pachamama. Gaia. Sophia.

...And eventually, that journey will lead you outward.

Where you’re connected to yourself and your voice, free to use it, and expanding what you experience and the people you reach.

Those thoughts and feelings that I struggled with just a month ago? Gone. Like a distant memory.

Maybe inward is the awareness. Upward is the healing. And outward is the…

Real you.

Let’s explore our spark(s) together, shall we?

(Thanks, G <3)

***

What’s the idea that keeps finding you? Even if someone else already has it. And what would you say no to, to make room for it? Put it in the comments. It all starts with giving it a name.

That’s how someday stops being the excuse.

Last week I wrote about a bear I drew in sixth grade and then never really drew anything again. I ended that essay with a question: what did you stop?

People answered, and I loved hearing folks’ stories. Because the conversation wasn’t really about stopping… it was about starting.

And then it hit me: I hadn’t answered it for myself. I’d asked a question I thought was for other people. It wasn’t really about drawing for me.

Create to see yourself.

So here’s my answer.

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In tenth or eleventh grade I wrote a children’s book called “Playing Chess with Dragons”. I made one copy. I never really showed it to anyone, and that was never the point of writing it.

The physical copy is gone. Lost somewhere along the way, a long time ago.

But I remember it vividly. The premise, the characters, how it looked, the message I wanted to convey. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. Usually when someone told me they were trying to write a book, or opened up about a creative project of their own. I’d listen and I’d remember.

Oh yeah I should really go do that, too.

So I’m not restoring it. I can’t. I’m rebuilding it from memory, and right now I’m just getting the story back down the way I remember it, before I touch anything else.

It was always meant to be a series, too. Playing “blank” with “blank.” A game and a creature, and the game has to actually matter to the story. It can’t just sit there in the title. Chess with dragons was the only one I ever wrote. I have a feeling the next one involves a handpan.

Perhaps the version in my head is better than the one that existed. And that’s ok.

It’s funny how “playing” has always been there for me, given that it’s in the title and that’s what I focus on now with Eleven Dunbar, Levity Field, and other projects.

And it’s in my family too. We grew up making games on the fly with different balls, socks, people, boards, whatever and whoever was around was part of it. We had a family card game, beach games, and my great aunt made board games.

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Here’s the part I didn’t expect. Once I started making things again, I started making a lot of them.

New patterns on the handpan. The book. Game ideas for Elfen Town, the town and social network we're building inside Eleven Dunbar. Poetry on here. Long pieces like this one. Art, cards, and anything to leverage AI as digital crayons.

None of it has to be for anything. None of it has to make money. That’s the whole point and it’s the only reason any of it is happening. I’m making things because of how it feels, and to see what I’m capable of.

Create to see yourself.

And then, within about a week, the voice came back.

Is the book any good? Would anyone read it? Is it worth the hours? Same thing with the handpan.

When I sit down and just play, something magical comes out. The second I hit record, the second I try to make a pattern loop cleanly enough to become a track inside our town, I can tell I’m playing from my mind. It’s the clearest way I’ve found to see the difference between making something from your head and making it from your body. talks about this a lot, and for a long time I would kind of nod along. Uh huh. Oh yeah. I get what that means.

Now I feel it. What it feels like to create something from a place that’s not in my head.

That’s the third layer arriving early. Creating for other people, before I’ve let myself create for me. It’s the exact thing I wrote about last week as the problem.

Knowing the trap doesn’t stop you walking into it. It just means you notice your foot going in.

So now I hit record and forget it’s on. I play the same pattern for twenty minutes and keep the fifteen or so seconds that I like.

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The thing that actually helped wasn’t discipline. It was Gerhard.

This week one of us would make something, the other would see it, go off and make his own version, and come back to show it. My Substack header. Then his new cards for his podcast, Unreasonable Art of Living. Then my storybook cards. Then new ones for Eleven Dunbar and . Which led to an animated cartoon for Levity Field as well.

None of it was planned. It’s not competition, it’s creative inspiration.

And it was really fun.

It’s like kids in art class who keep making things and huddling around to see what everyone else made. Except we’re adults with digital crayons.

I called us the first two test members of Eleven Dunbar. Gerhard put it better: “We’re just kids inviting other kids to play.”

Last week I wrote that all of this is easier somewhere nobody is grading. This is what that looks like in practice. It’s easier to keep making things when the people around you are making things too. And pushing you to go further. Go deeper.

It’s not about being left behind.

It’s about seeing what’s been right in front of you all along.

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On this week’s episode I told Gerhard I want a journal for my birthday, so I can start writing by hand again. I don’t write with my hands much anymore, and my handwriting shows it.

Somewhere in that same conversation I had a shower thought out loud. We’ve all already made our own font. It’s our handwriting. Nobody had to be good at it for it to become yours. You just kept writing, and it turned into you.

We exist to create.

A while back I picked justinthemaking as my handle. This week it stopped being a handle and started being a description. Making things. Myself. The most out of what life has given, provided, and left waiting for me to step into.

I thought I had burned the boats on my old life in tech a couple of years ago, and for a while I talked about the reinvention like a project with an end date. It isn’t. It’s still going, and I don’t think it’s supposed to finish.

And funny enough, I’m building tech again. Art. Using AI. Building a community. A virtual world. A social network. An app. Children’s book. Music.

The boats I thought I had burned was a personal Ship of Theseus. I’m still here. There are no burns, no scars, just gratitude and the wind in my sails.

The bear got one turn. The book is getting a second. The handpan gets a new one most mornings.

I will get another. And another. Refusing to be finished.

Still in the making.

Floppy ears, sitting in the corner of a room. I did the whole thing by hand, shading and all, and then I went back over it with paint and spent a long time trying to work out how to get it just right and how I saw it in my mind. I have no idea why I got so obsessed with it. Nobody asked for it.

What I do remember is how it felt. Alive. Expansive. Like something I had no other way of saying was finally getting out.

It’s still at my childhood home and it’s probably the best thing I’ve ever made.

And I never drew anything again.

That’s the part I’ve been reflecting on recently. Not that I stopped.. people stop doing things all the time, but that there was no moment. No teacher told me I wasn’t good at it. Nobody laughed. I didn’t decide, on some specific Tuesday, that I was done with drawing. I just look up now, thirty-odd years later, and there’s a painted teddy bear in my childhood home and nothing after it.

So what happened? Where does a thing like that go? Does it leave, or do you put it down somewhere and forget which room?

I just stopped.

I only noticed the next part recently, and it’s the reason I’m writing this down at all.

Something else stopped that same year.

I sang. Properly, out loud, in front of people. Solos at church, solos at school, all the way through elementary. I wasn’t nervous about it, which is the detail that gets me now. I genuinely wasn’t nervous, because nobody had yet told me whether I was any good. That information simply hadn’t arrived. So I sang.

And then my voice changed, the way everybody’s does. You wait, and a new one shows up, and you learn to sing with the new one.

For years that was the whole explanation I had. My voice broke, so the singing stopped.

It’s a nice story to tell myself and it isn’t true. The voice changing is just a timestamp. Sixth grade is when all of it arrives at once: comparing yourself to the people around you, working out what the room thinks of you, shame, ego, the first bully, the first real embarrassment. The voice changing handed me a reason to stop singing in front of people. Everything else made the reason stick, and then quietly applied itself to the drawing too.

That’s why they went together. It was never about talent, or about puberty. It was the year I worked out that I could be judged. Not the drawing - me. How I talked. Who I sat with. How I did in school, whether I was any good at sports, where I landed in whatever order middle school had settled on that week. And the things I made were not separate from that. They were a core part of me, so they went in with everything else.

For a long time I filed both of these under “things I used to be able to do.” Like they were talents with expiry dates. The drawing went, the singing went, and then I got on with a career in software and stopped thinking about either of them for two decades.

But that’s not what happened. I didn’t lose the drawing. My hands work. I didn’t lose the singing as I still sing in the car like everyone else, badly and with total commitment.

What I lost was the part where it didn’t have to be good. And with it the feeling, because the feeling only ever turned up when the thing didn’t have to be good.

The drawing didn’t leave. The permission did.

I’ve been thinking about this because I play the handpan now. And I’m trying to write more.

Nine months in. I write a new pattern most days, and honestly that undersells it - every single time I sit down, something comes out that wasn’t there before. I don’t plan any of it. I get into the flow and it arrives. That is the whole reason I play.

If you go and watch the handpan players I learn from on YouTube, they’re somewhere I’m not yet, and I’m aware of it every time I sit down.

And I couldn’t be more excited to close that gap. Not so I can be them. Because of what I know it will let me give, and do, once I’m there. And funny enough, I’ve already started.

For a while I thought of the handpan as a new thing. Something I picked up late and bolted onto a life that already had a shape.

It isn’t new. It’s the teddy bear.

I’ve described creativity before as an onion. The first layer is creating just to create - no purpose, no outcome, no practical use, it just comes from somewhere inside you. The second is creating for yourself with intention, which arrives once the first layer has reminded you how good that feels and you go back in reaching for something specific. The third is creating for other people, once you’ve built the rituals and the confidence to show it.

In sixth grade I did the first two without knowing they had names. I drew that bear because I wanted to draw it. All that shading, for nothing. And then I went back over the whole thing with paint, and that was a different act entirely. That was intention. By then I knew what I wanted it to be.

I did it again in tenth or eleventh grade, when I wrote a children’s book. Playing Chess with Dragons. I never really showed it to anyone, and that was never the point of writing it.

And that is exactly what the handpan is. Something arrives that wasn’t there before, and then I go back in and shape it. The same two layers, thirty years later, on a piece of metal instead of paper.

But the layers aren’t really what connects them. What connects them is how it feels, and that part hasn’t changed at all. Alive. Expressive. Connected to something. Expansive. In flow, and full of a purpose that has nothing to do with being useful.

That feeling is the thread. The same one in sixth grade with a pencil, in high school writing about dragons, and now on a piece of steel. I never had a word for it. I just knew I wanted to be in it.

There is one thing the bear never got, though, and it’s the part I didn’t see coming.

I picked up the handpan because I’d finally found an instrument that could make the sounds and the emotions I was holding come out sounding the way they actually felt. That was the whole reason. And because that was the reason, I practiced - not out of discipline, but because I wanted more of it.

The practice gave me range. The range meant more of what I actually meant started making it out intact. Which made me want to play more. Which gave me more range.

It’s recursive. Every turn of it makes the next one easier, and nine months in it hasn’t stopped.

The bear only ever got one turn.

So nothing was ever missing. What I lost was not the ability to do the first two. It’s that somewhere in there I started demanding the third one up front. That a thing be worth showing before I’d let myself make it at all.

You can’t run it in that order. Nothing survives it.

What changed isn’t that I got braver. It’s that I stopped asking the third layer for permission to do the first.

That is easier somewhere nobody is grading. I didn’t have anywhere like that for a long time, and I want to be honest that I had a lot of sophisticated language for what I thought was wrong with me before I worked out that it was that simple. I could talk fluently about burnout and identity and nervous system regulation. The actual problem was that every room I was in was grading. Nothing is wrong with me.

A room where the thing you make doesn’t have to be good yet.

Most adults don’t have one.

I shared a clip of Gabor Maté on regret this week, and what I wrote underneath it was that play is core to who we are. It sparks creativity and healing, and connects you better to yourself and to other people.

I believe that. And I’d add the uncomfortable half of it, which is what this whole essay is really about.

Almost nobody stops playing. We reclassify it.

It becomes output. And output gets a grade.

Two things I want to say carefully, because this is where these essays usually go wrong.

The first is that I don’t think anything is broken in you, or me. That’s the standard move in this genre… to find the wound, name it, sell the repair or heal it. I don’t think your creativity is injured or locked away or in need of healing. I think it’s sitting in there perfectly content and the door has been open the entire time. What’s missing isn’t repair. It’s permission. Not from me…but from yourself. It’s a reason to come out, and someone on the other side of the door who isn’t holding a scorecard. You.

The second is that I’m not telling you to draw. Genuinely. If you have no interest in drawing, don’t draw. That’s not the question.

The question is what else you stopped.

Because the teddy bear is not really about art. Almost everyone I talk to has a version of it. Somebody was obsessed with something at eleven, and did it constantly, and then didn’t. Model airplanes, writing terrible fantasy novels, taking radios apart, making up games with rules that made no sense. And when I ask about it, something happens to their face. There’s a half-second where they’re eleven again and then they say “oh god, I haven’t thought about that in years,” and laugh, and they light up like a tacky Southern Christmas tree.

I’ve started paying attention to that half-second. It’s the most reliable thing I know.

It’s the feeling, still in there, with nothing to do…just WAITING for the opportunity to come out and play.

Three from the episode that didn’t make a post.

I once wrote a computer virus and sent it to my brother at NC State. This was 1999, over 28.8K dial-up. He double-clicked a picture, nothing appeared to happen, and then a few moments later his printer - in another city - printed the words BROWNIES ARE DONE and his CD tray slid open. Still the coolest thing I’ve ever done from a technical standpoint. He was not impressed. He was furious, because it was really wrong and we both knew it, and I never did work out how to remove it.

I also used to draw tournament brackets for fun. Not fill them in… draw them. Sixty-four team March Madness fields, World Cup groups, and crucially the losers’ bracket, which are their own geometry problem because eventually they have to feed back into the winners bracket. I’d run the simulations in my head and sketch out who ended up where. Which, now that I write it down, is obviously the same activity as building an imaginary world and populating it with people. I just didn’t have a word for it at eleven. I did the same thing with my action figures, spread out all across my room. Left from one day to the next as I played out intricate storylines with my imagination.

And I made Pong. My first ever game, for a school project. Which is why the first thing I made with AI at Eleven Dunbar was Pong again, thirty years later. I didn’t plan that either.

I still think it’s the best thing I ever made.

Not because of how it looks. Because of how it felt to make it.

And because I can feel exactly that, right now, with my hands on something else entirely - my handpan.

This week on Levity Field, Gerhard and I talked about what we each made as kids before anyone told us whether we were any good at it and what we’re each curious about now that has no obvious use. It’s one of my favorite conversations we’ve had.

Justin Davis. 20+ years in tech and AI, six exits and one failed startup. In my early 40s, I finally took a year off and that’s when the actual work began. I co-host Levity Field with Gerhard Molin - a podcast about lightness, for moments that feel heavy. We also built Eleven Dunbar, a community for people who want to make things again.