It’s been a while.

Or why we should all be like goats.

During these last few months, when people asked me how I was doing, I used to say, “Well, a year ago, I had an apartment, a wife, and a job. Now I am divorced, unemployed, and searching for a place to live.”

“Oh shit,” people would reply in various forms. Then they’d add something condescending, like, “It’s going to be alright.”

When all else fails, I joke. But really, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

This year has been a year of realizations. Not in the sense that I discovered some hidden Big Truth about the world — more like a few little truths — but in the sense that I met myself. Like that meme of a parrot staring into a mirror, with a caption, “You are the source of all my troubles.”

People seek to travel as a way to escape themselves, but then the opposite happens. Lying on a beach in Thailand, you end up even more with yourself. In the absence of a familiar context, you have nobody but you.

The same happens when you lose things you held onto for so long. When you hit rock bottom, there’s nobody but you. And that’s an opportunity to reflect and understand what it all meant. If it meant anything at all.

The job? Well, it wasn’t really a job. More like a pretend job. I was working for my dad, full-time, for three years. Which meant I was working 3–4 hours a day, max. Which also meant I was ridiculously overpaid. I thought I had made it. I hadn’t. I was monetizing my…