The long way round
The first thing I ever had to leave was a bicycle. I was a child, third standard, the year we moved from one place to another, and the bicycle did not make the journey with us. Nobody asked me; that is simply how moving works when you are small.
I have been leaving things ever since, and after that first one most of them were my own idea. I have stopped almost everything I ever started. Not the things I was bad at; the things I loved. A teaching job I'd spent years fighting to make my own. A country. A research career I still want and still don't have. I am, if I am honest about it, a stack of unfinished projects wearing a single coat. From the outside that looks like one simple thing, a restlessness, a man who can't sit still, and I wore that description for years. Lately I've started to think it is only half of what is going on.
Here is the other half, and it took me a long time to say it without sounding like an excuse. Every choice happens in a room of some size. Stand at a door: a flat plate tells your hand to push, a bar tells it to pull, and you obey before you have thought about it. Designers have a word for that silent instruction, an affordance, and the part I love is where it lives. Not in your hand, not in the wood, but in the space between the two. A lot of what we call a person's character is really the room they were standing in when we happened to watch them choose. Some of my rooms were built small a long time before I walked into them. That does not make the leaving any less mine. It means the door out was always a little lighter in my hand than it should have been, and the one ordinary door I cannot make myself open now is heavier than it has any right to be.
These last few weeks have been a small museum of the habit. There is research that only I can finish, and I have quietly let a machine do the reading so I never have to sit alone with the hard pages. There is a move I keep not making, a raise I wanted and didn't argue for, a row of good intentions blinking their empty boxes at me. And yes, there is a website I poured two weeks of evenings into instead of writing this, every page a different person, none of them quite me. The urge to make never arrives one thing at a time. It comes as a crowd, all of it loud, all of it unfinished.
Here is the smallest and most honest version of it. There is an ordinary skill that almost every adult I know simply has, and I never learned it. I won't say which; it is the kind of thing that is only embarrassing in the particular. Not having it has made my life quietly harder for longer than I'd like to admit. This February I finally sat the first small exam toward fixing it and felt a pride out of all proportion to the size of the thing. Then I reached the part where I would have to ask someone, and I have not asked. Weeks of not asking. It is the whole problem in miniature: I will build an elaborate room sooner than knock on an ordinary door. And here the affordance runs out. That door is not heavy, and no one narrowed this room but me.
None of this is new to me. I have never managed to pick one thing. For years I called that being interdisciplinary, which is the word you reach for when you want "can't focus" to sound like a philosophy. I did an engineering degree and then walked straight past every engineering job into design, which I knew less about. The sensible road looked airless; the truer reason, I think, was a maths idea I'd started in 2008 and couldn't place anywhere, and design felt like the nearest door to it. I missed the merit list in the design entrance exam. Sat it again. Got in. Then, at design school, I signed up for an astrophysics course I had no reason to take, and a project about memory and old age that taught me more than the astrophysics did.
I was like this from the start. In my second year of engineering I walked into the final electrical practical genuinely scared, because I'd skipped most of the lab classes, and I passed only because I happened to draw the one experiment I knew was cold. The parts of those years I actually remember fondly are the ones nobody graded. A freelance gig. A design competition I entered twice, under two different ideas, and somehow came first and second in. I was always more alive in the margin of the syllabus than the middle of it.
I've kept a short written reflection at the end of every year since 2009. Reading them back, they're mostly the same argument with myself in that year's clothes. By 2014 I'd already written the complaint down plainly: too much range, not enough depth. I just kept not listening to it. If you refuse to pick a lane, after a while nobody can read you. Years later a form would say it with no tact at all. I applied to go back into research full time, and the answer came back rejected, not for the work but for a missing number: a real degree, a real thesis, and no GPA attached to a box that demanded one. On paper, a master's in everything except a number. I am doing a version of it right now, in a new country, watching a points system add me up, translating myself line by line into something the counter will accept.
When a room stopped fitting, I left it. I'm not proud of how easily, but it's true, and you may as well know it about me early. I left that first job with nothing lined up. Years later I left teaching, which I loved, which is a stupid thing to leave, resigned with no next step at all, and I remember it precisely, because the freedom and the free-fall turned out to be the same feeling. Around then our dog was badly hurt, and for a while his getting better was simply more important than any plan of mine, so the plans sat. I don't recommend it as a productivity method, but there is a strange mercy in being stopped by something you love more than your own ambition.
Then I left the country. Getting there took more help than I'm comfortable having taken, the kind that never shows up on a statement and never really gets paid back. I landed on the other side of the world and started over as a student, back at the bottom of something on purpose, where I've always done my best work. From the outside, leaving like this looks like nerves. People have told me it's brave. Both are guesses made from outside the room. It never felt like courage from the inside, more like stepping off and trusting a floor I couldn't see to be there when I landed. For a long time, somehow, it was.
There's one thing in all of this I'll defend, though. Every time I walked out of a room, I tried to build a better one. I found out almost by accident that I loved teaching. Not the standing-and-lecturing part. The sitting-next-to-someone-while-they-make-a-thing part. What I actually wanted, it turned out, was to build the kind of room I'd only ever had in pieces. I went back to the same design school I'd graduated from, this time on the staff side of the room, partly to work on a wearable that read how a motorcyclist sat, sensors against the spine. I watched students fold flat paper into illusions with no plan at all, just fixing each other's mistakes as they went, and I learned more from that than from anything I'd prepared. I started building courses around a line of Paul Graham's, that a programming language should sit as close to your hand as a pencil.
I kept pulling that thread for years. I tried teaching algorithms as a thing you take apart and argue with instead of memorise. I kept meaning to write a piece asking whether we even need classrooms, and never got to it; then a pandemic walked in and took the room away entirely, as if to answer the question without me. And then, finally, I got to build the room itself. A small, odd space called the Experimental Maths Lab, inside a design school, run the way I wanted it run. We argued about whether you should copyleft your work. We chased little patterns that copy themselves across a grid. We took apart real leaves and grew them back from a handful of rules, as grammar. Almost nobody came at first. Then a few people came who liked that, and kept coming, and several of them ended up helping me run it.
It worked. And that it worked is the thing that told me to go. The better the lab got, the more obvious it became that the way I did things had quietly drifted from the place around it. So the same year I finally built the room I'd wanted my whole life, I walked out of it to become a student again. Mathscapes, that same idea from 2008, is the itch under all of it, the one that pulled me into design and, years later, pulled me back out. Build the place you wish had existed, then hand it to whoever needs it next.
The last couple of years have been quieter, and I think the most honest. I'm on the Gold Coast now. I write software in the daytime and chase research at night: quantum machine learning, materials that fold in ways that shouldn't be possible, the full-time research I've had to set down for now and haven't stopped wanting. Lately it's Paul Davies' Quantum 2.0 keeping me up past sense, a century-old strangeness he insists is only getting started. And this year my personal life is taking a shape I'd rather tend than flee. For the first time the leaving has slowed, and I'm trying to learn the one skill I never had, which is staying somewhere long enough to actually look at it.
Which brings me here. That website was a row of rooms with no one living in any of them, one more set I'd built and left. I don't want this letter to be another. I want it to be the one room I actually stay in, the single appointment I keep. Once a week, one thing I made or noticed, and an honest account of the week it landed in. Some weeks a piece of math I've found a way to show you. Some weeks a thing I built, or broke, or couldn't finish. Some weeks just what a slightly off-the-map life feels like from the inside.
I've kept these notes to myself for the better part of two decades. I think it's time I read them out loud. If the long way round is a road you know, I'm glad you're here. See you next week.