On not knowing

I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing in 2026.

Last year, I left my job as an interactive journalist at a reputable newspaper for a host of reasons, not least of which is I knew I didn’t want to do that anymore in this administration.

Plus, I’ve had this big dream for nearly five years now: Futurefull. It’s supposed to be a multicultural home for storytellers, using techniques old and new, telling weird, beautiful, honest, hopeful stories about better futures and the roads we take to get there. A dream of exploring the limits of interactive storytelling in every meaning of that. I have games I’ve been working on, interviews I’d love to have, people I’d love to play with, an entire universe of my own called People of Sol that I hope someday to turn into a sourcebook. 

And I've been making progress! I have so many Pinterest boards! I have a team! We even ran our first event last November!

Yet I still feel like I don’t know the best way to get started.

I don’t think I’ve ever known the best way to get started. I know that when I started my first game company, Cipher Prime Studios, we started as an interactive design studio, because that seemed like the best way to use our skills. We fell backwards into making games and kept slinky-ing our way through the indie game scene for most of the 2010s until we finally ran out of stairs to bounce down. But man, we got really far on not knowing! 

I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I went to college, either. It seemed like a good idea to study mechanical engineering, but it never really took. I ended up spending a lot of my time hanging out with the music nerds at Berklee instead, wondering if I should have been doing that instead. But I didn’t know how to read sheet music, so I didn’t know if they would accept me, and I didn’t know how music would pay the bills, so I never applied. 

When I did finally concentrate during school, it was never on what I was “supposed” to concentrate on. I stayed up late ignoring my coursework to teach myself programming and graphic design and making cool weird things in Flash. I didn’t know that would lead to my careers in both games and journalism, and there’s no way I could have known it. I just knew that it seemed really exciting, and I followed that excitement. 

And I think there’s some part of me that feels like I can’t afford to do that anymore; that it’s really only when you’re young and naïve that you can afford to chase something without knowing how it’s going to turn out. And that feels like a lie I tell myself simply because I have more responsibilities now than I did then. 

So I don’t know where this is going, and the stakes feel too high to not know, and that fear is paralyzing. 

I do know I shot awake an hour before my alarm full of anxiety and dread, but also ideas and creativity. And I know I don’t always get to choose when that happens; I know I’m ADHD, and I know I have medication that can help the ol’ brain ghosts calm down and let me concentrate on something, but I don’t always know what the something should be. 

I’ve heard a lot that life is supposed to be a Choose Your Own Adventure. But in those books, you can always kind of flip to the back and cheat and see how your choices are going to turn out. There aren’t any real stakes. If life is a choose your own adventure, it’s one where every time you choose to flip to page 240 instead of 120 all the pages between 120 and 240 are burned forever, not just for you, but for anyone who would have read your book.

(Note for later: the idea of a Choose Your Own Adventure book where you have to physically destroy pages in order to get to the one you chose absolutely fucks.) 

Around ten years ago, I had a friend who had worked a job he hated for years and years. He finally applied for a different job, who gave him a tentative acceptance, but was super clear: “Hey, this isn’t final. The ink isn’t dry. Do not quit your job until we have this signed.”

So of course, he quit immediately. 

In the limbo between leaving one job and not quite starting the next, we had a conversation over lunch where he expressed all of the same fears and anxieties that I’m experiencing now. I remember trying to be helpful, saying:

Man, you don’t know! Think about it: for the last however many years, you’ve known exactly what’s gonna happen next. You’ve known what every single day would be like. You’ve known how much money you will have in the bank at the end of the year, and how much time you have off, and where you’ll probably spend your PTO. Now, you don’t know. When is the last time you didn’t know? What a gift it is to not know!

He did not find this soothing. 

When I look back, the only success I have ever had has started by not knowing, and doing shit anyway

And I totally understand, neck deep as I am in my own anxiety right now. But I stand by it: it can be a gift to not know. It can be a gift to not have a written path. 

Plus, when I look back, the only success I have ever had has started by not knowing, and doing shit anyway. I have to embrace the not-knowing, and I have to trust the process of showing up, not as an expert, not as someone who’s “mid-career,” but as someone who truly has no idea what’s going on. 

(I especially don’t know how I should show up in a time of naked imperialism and fascism, but that’s probably another essay.) 

With all I don’t know, I do know getting out of bed and writing this put a smile on my face. I hope it resonates with you! I hope you’ll join me here on whatever this writing situation is going to be. And I hope you don’t mind if I figure it out with you. 

This year, I'll be sharing assorted thoughts about interactive storytelling. This might include weird little bits of programming and design. This might include some TTRPG tools, like roll tables you can use at your next game night. This might be partially a dev blog for my live storytelling game Olamina.

I might tell little story excerpts, share poetry, or show off fashion as my wardrobe becomes more and more androgynous. I’ll definitely include misadventures in building Futurefull. And yeah, I might offer a course at some point, because I really do need to make some money. 

I truly don’t know yet. But if not knowing is a gift, then I am excited to share this gift of not knowing with you.