I was up at 4am and nothing was coming. No notes, no inspiration, no momentum. I laid on the sofa and eventually dozed off.

At 7:11 in the morning I was yanked awake by gunshots. Close ones. I live in Tower Grove South in St. Louis — good neighborhood, great park, real city. And gunshots happen often enough that we're not shocked. But this morning I was. Because it was 7am. And because something about the sound of it just cascaded into a whole set of questions I wasn't expecting to be sitting with before my coffee.

How much of my life have I spent trying to be who other people expected me to be? How much energy have I devoted to meeting everyone else's needs while losing the thread of my own? The job. The relationships. The city. The religion. The race. The gender. The nation. The whole list of things other people handed me as the definition of what my experience was supposed to be.

I almost didn't make this episode. My brain told me to stay away from the microphone when things aren't clear. I made it anyway. Because I know I'm not the only person who wakes up some mornings and thinks — what in the actual fuck are we doing?

This isn't despair. It's a question worth asking out loud.

We all know how this ends. What we get to decide is how we relate to the journey in between.