It wasn't even light out yet, but somehow we'd fully opened this can of worms. In a rare role revers...
Becoming Unobstructed
Field notes for navigating daily life.
Let me say up front that this feels silly, but I'm doing it anyway... giving myself a performance re...
I've gone back and forth with how I feel about novelty. Variety can be a good thing when it's an add...
I don't particularly like Thanksgiving. It's not so much that I dislike it, it's that it just always...
Today, while sitting in a coffee shop with rain splattering the windows, I thought back on this past...
I'm tired, but invigorated, by a string of life-shifts lately. So today, I'm switching things up.
Things feel lighter today than they have in a while. My mom and I were sitting in my living room, ca...
Avoidance caught up with me today, but not quite how I'd expected.
Something's changing. I don't fully know what it is yet but maybe that's my problem; always trying t...
I'm usually very aware of my surroundings, but I'm not even sure if that's helpful anymore.
81 days in a row of writing these (126 including the pre-MAP Year test phase) and I almost skipped t...
I think my life is just a growth spiral. It wasn't always, but it is now. I'm moving forward, while ...
Something you should know about me is that I wasn't always like this.
Choice of perspective. That's what I'm thinking about today.
All I could think about was acceptance while driving home from Friendsgiving weekend in Massachusett...
The start and stop of the sink was nothing compared to the clinking and clanking of the dishes. I'd ...
It's not like I needed a reminder. I was well aware I'd been spreading myself thin again. That reali...
Today marks a whole month without the Substack app. In its absence, one thing has become supremely c...
I wrote my morning pages on my typewriter for the first (and maybe last) time. I've been typing shor...
I'd felt it as soon as I woke up. The snow outside made things warm and cozy rather than dark and dr...
It snowed the first real snow of the season today. There's been spits and spurts, but today it's rig...
You don't realize how much your environment influences you until it changes. Mine's shifting pretty ...
I'm a tangled ball of tension today with nowhere to let it come undone. My nervous system is fried. ...
I keep seeing blue and white VW buses. Over the summer I'd been stuck enough to ask the universe for...
Waiting for the red light of the live video-feed, all I could think of was the intro to The Christma...
I've started to realize the medium matters more than words ever will. I find it both frustrating and...
They're probably thinking "he looks ridiculous! What's he doing anyway?"
I'm tired. Writing and publishing daily is hard. I love it, but that doesn't mean it's always shiny ...
Things rarely fall into place, but they always come together.
It looked like someone took the world's largest can opener to the top of the truck. I hadn't seen th...
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Hey, I'm Derek.
Writer, thinker, coffee drinker. Sharing reflections, essays, and podcast episodes on navigating agency, grief, and creativity in daily life.
I started Becoming Unobstructed after 15+ years in marketing, software systems, outdoor education, and leadership development to share all I've learned with others.
You can find out more here.
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