The Map

Only Visible in Reverse

It is past midnight and I am at my desk in my childhood bedroom. The walls still have things on them I left there when I went to college. A photo from my bar mitzvah, a painting on my wall, a poster I haven’t looked at in five years, a shelf with books I read when I was a kid.

My laptop is open and my college transcript is on the screen. I have looked at this document more than a hundred times over the last four years. Every semester, every registration cycle, every meeting with an adviser where I needed to prove I was making progress. It was always a living thing. Half a page of finished classes and a long blank space underneath where the next few semesters were still being decided.

Now it is not blank. The last grade posted in December. I have looked at the finished version a few times since then but I have not really taken the time to sit with it. Tonight I did something small. I downloaded the PDF and renamed the file. I typed FINAL at the end of the filename in all caps. It was not dramatic in any sense. It was just true. The document is closed now.

I scroll through it slowly for what could be one of the last times. The first line is ASTR 1200, Stars and Galaxies, C minus. The last line is a B+ in Systems Neuroscience. In between is everything.

Two years ago I was a premed neuroscience student who wanted to be a doctor. I wanted a stethoscope and a hospital and a room with another human being in it. I hated computers. I avoided every class I could that put me in front of one. Tonight I am sitting at a desk in Atlanta writing software with an AI I built, in a company I started in higher education, in an industry I think is mostly broken. I would not send my kids to college if they were going for the same reasons most people go today.

The contradiction has been sitting on me for months. I have not had time to look at it directly until now. Tonight I do. I look at the document and for the first time I can see the whole thing. The dots are connecting. The lines are moving across the screen and forming a shape I could not see while I was inside of it. A map. My student journey, finally visible as one thing instead of a list of semesters. I can see how I got here. I can see how all of it turned me into who I am right now.

A couple of lines down on the document is NRSC 4841, Independent Study, three credits, S. That is the lab I worked at for two and a half years. I have written about it before so I am not going to repeat everything, but I want to talk about it a little here.

The lab studied cannabis and cognition in older adults. We had a van called the Cannavan that we drove around Boulder to participants’ homes. We would show up in the morning, set up our equipment, have them consume cannabis in whatever form we needed them to, wait for it to take effect, then run behavioral tests in the back of the van and draw blood. Then we would pack it all up, drive back to the lab, and do it again with the next participant a few weeks later for the next few months.

I did that protocol so many times I lost count. The work was the same work every single time. The same setup. The same wait. The same tests in the same order. The same blood draw. The same drive back. For two and a half years.

The only thing that changed was the people. That was the part that kept me going. New conversations with new adults who had lived entire lives I had not lived yet, who told me things that I will probably carry for the rest of my life. But even that got boring. Eventually you have had enough conversations that the next one is just the next one.

I got frustrated. I found things to automate so I would not lose my mind. I found little new corners of the work to make my own. Scripts to write, processes to clean up, anything that would keep my brain alive inside the repetition. But the protocol itself never changed. The work was the work. You did it carefully or your data did not mean anything, and if your data did not mean anything you had wasted years.

I did not understand at the time what I was actually learning. I thought I was learning research. I was learning something else. I was learning that the work that matters is mostly the same work, done correctly, a thousand times. Every shortcut shows up later in the data, and the data does not lie.

I am sitting at this desk in Atlanta tonight thinking about how much of what I do now is the same thing. The same outreach. The same pitch to the next administrator. The same call. The same email I have written four hundred times. The Cannavan taught me how to stay inside that.

Two lines further down is PHIL 1160, Introduction to Medical Ethics. I took it in the fall of my sophomore year while I was still premed, and I thought a medical ethics class would be relevant to becoming a doctor. The class itself was fine. It really was not the class that changed me. It was the class that pointed me somewhere I went on my own.

The thing I could not stop thinking about was medical decisions made on behalf of young people. Kids whose parents were withholding treatment because of values the kid did not share. Adolescents who were not legally allowed to make their own decisions about their own bodies. The whole apparatus of one set of human beings deciding what was good for another set of human beings based on a worldview the second set never agreed to.

I read about it outside of class. I thought about it on runs. I argued about it with friends. The class itself moved on to other topics and I kept circling back to that one. I did not know at the time why it had hooked me. I just knew that it had.

Looking at the transcript tonight, thinking about the full circle, I can see what was happening and how it connects. The question I could not put down was about whether institutions get to make decisions for the people inside of them, and what happens when their values stop matching. I was not thinking about higher education when I was reading those cases. I was thinking about children and parents and doctors. But the shape of the question is the same shape I am living inside of right now. I was building the frame for everything I think now and I did not know it yet.

Further down the document the neuroscience starts to deepen. Clinical Neuroscience. Neuropharmacology. Human Physiology. Systems Neuroscience.

I was running marathons and training at high volume during those semesters. I was sleeping carefully and eating carefully and learning what my body could do when I treated it correctly. And I was sitting in lectures learning the cellular mechanism for every single thing that was happening to me. Why a hard run produces the feeling it produces. What is actually happening in the brain when you push past what you thought your limit was. Why sleep does what it does. How pain works. How memory works. How the nervous system decides what it wants you to feel.

The classes were not changing me by themselves. The training was not changing me by itself. The two together were doing something I could not have planned. I was learning what was happening inside me while I was inside me. Every concept I learned in a lecture I felt in my body within a week. Every sensation I had on a run I went back and looked up later in the textbook. The line between studying and living disappeared. They became the same thing.

Systems Neuroscience was the hardest of all of them. The concepts stacked on top of each other and if you missed one layer the next became fog. I sat in that class for weeks too embarrassed to raise my hand when I did not understand something. The B+ on the transcript is the cost of staying quiet. I learned more from that grade than from any A I got in college. Not about the brain. About what it costs to stay silent when you should ask.

I did not realize while I was inside those classes that I was being built for a specific kind of work. The work of paying close attention to humans. The work of trusting the body as a source of information. The work of understanding that you cannot separate the system from the person living inside of it. I was learning a frame for thinking about people that I am using right now.

A few rows further down is the summer of 2025. Music in the Rock Era. History of Jazz. Human Emotion. Psychology of Personality. Twelve credits I took because they sounded good.

They counted toward my degree. I had checked enough boxes by that point that I could afford a semester of pure curiosity without falling behind, and I had stayed intentional enough across the previous two years that I had built myself the room to do it. I took them because I wanted to study cool things with cool people and the summer in Boulder is the best season of the year.

It was the best semester I had in college. The classes were all online which meant I could do the work from anywhere. I read about Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin and the way a single song can change what a country is allowed to feel. I learned the difference between an emotion and a mood, which sounds like nothing until you start paying attention to how often you confuse them. I read about personality as a system of patterns instead of a fixed thing, which gave me language for changes in myself I had been watching for years without being able to name. I did the reading on porches and at the kitchen table and on the trail and the work felt like something I was doing because I wanted to.

Looking at the transcript tonight I can see that those four classes were all studying the same thing from different angles. How humans express themselves. How the inner life turns into the outer one. They pulled at me from the same direction. That is the part I could only see from here.

I keep scrolling and the philosophy starts to show up everywhere. Ethics and Information Tech in the fall of 2024. Bioethics the same semester. Philosophy of International Order in the spring. History of Ancient Philosophy. Introduction to Philosophy. I was a neuroscience major with a philosophy minor and by my junior year the philosophy was carrying as much weight as the science.

Ethics and Information Tech was the first class I took that asked me to think carefully about AI. I had been using ChatGPT since the week it launched. I had been reading about the technology for a year and a half. The class made me sit with the harder questions underneath the technology. Who decides what these systems are allowed to do. What happens to the people the systems are built to serve. How power moves through code the way it used to move through institutions. I knew the questions felt urgent.

Bioethics deepened the same instinct. Medical decisions on behalf of other people. Consent in places where consent is hard to give. The body as a site of competing values. I was already obsessed with the question from sophomore year and the class gave me more language for it.

And then there is one line on the document I want to sit with.

Fall 2024. EDUC 3013, School and Society, three credits, A.

I took a class about how education systems work and what they do to the people inside them. I took it a full year before I started building Ardvarq. I thought the topic sounded interesting when I signed up. I read the assigned material and I wrote the papers and I went to class and I left with an A and a head full of ideas I did not yet have a use for.

Looking at the document tonight I want to laugh. I was studying the broken thing before I knew I was going to try to build the replacement. The pen was in my hand the whole time and I did not realize I was drawing the map.

None of this happened alone. The transcript shows the classes, but it does not show the people who made the classes possible. They are the part that does not get printed on the paper.

There was an older brother in my fraternity, an MCDB major two years ahead of me, who sat with me one afternoon during a registration week and pulled up my degree audit next to his. He had taken most of the classes I was trying to figure out, and he went down the catalog with me pointing at the ones that mattered and the ones that did not, the professors who would change how I thought and the professors who would just keep me busy. The whole thing took less than half an hour, and I came out of it knowing where to spend the next two years of my education. He was not paid to do that, he just knew and he gave it to me. Most students do not have anyone in their life who can do that for them.

There was a best friend I trained with almost every morning for three and a half years. He met me at the gym before the sun was up, every day, without negotiation, and we were the kind of friends who did not need to talk during a workout. Over time the silence became its own form of trust. Showing up was the language. Discipline does not feel like discipline when someone is doing it with you, it feels like a friendship that takes a specific shape, which is the shape of two bodies trying to become better than they were the day before, in the same room at the same time, without making a thing of it.

There was a professor in the neuroscience department who knew how I thought because she had watched me think in her classroom for two semesters. I went to her in the middle of my junior year, premed and stuck, and she told me something I could not have heard from anyone else, which was that the degree did not have to mean what I thought it meant. I walked out of her office and ran out my front door into the mountains and disappeared for hours. I was a different person when I got back. I could not have told you that afternoon what had changed, but I can tell you now.

There was a fraternity full of people who pushed me, a research lab full of people who taught me how to work, a town in Colorado that put me at the foot of mountains for four years, and parents in Atlanta who trusted me with decisions most parents do not trust their kids with at eighteen.

I was lucky. I had people. The intentionality was mine, but the conditions that made the intentionality possible were not something I built alone. Most students do not have what I had, and that is the part of this story I will not pretend around.

I have been telling this story like the path was deliberate, but that is not how it felt while I was on it. I was deeply intentional about not wasting credits, about choosing classes I actually wanted to take, about not letting the system pick for me when I could pick for myself. That part was real, and it was hard, and it cost me time I could have spent doing other things. Registration weeks were full weekends. I sat with the catalog the way other students sat with their phones, going through the options the way you go through a menu when you have decided that what you eat actually matters.

Intentionality is one thing. A plan is something else. I did not know in my sophomore year that I was going to take a class called School and Society and find a question I would build a company around. I did not know that the Cannavan would teach me how to stay inside repetitive work that nobody sees. I did not know that the philosophy minor would give me a frame for thinking about AI before I knew I would build with AI. I did not know that an online jazz class in the summer would teach me something I could use a year later about how humans become themselves. None of it was planned. All of it connected.

The dots only connect looking backward. I held the pen, but I could not see the picture I was drawing until I was done. I was following what pulled at me and trusting that following what pulled at me was a reasonable thing to do, and the reasonableness of that trust is only obvious now that the picture is on the page.

The conditions that made the picture possible came from outside me. I had the older brother who pulled up his degree audit next to mine. I had the professor who told me the degree was not a sentence. I had the lab that taught me how to work. I had the friend who met me at the gym every morning. I had the town that put me near the mountains. I had the parents who trusted me. Those are gifts. Most students get fewer of them, or none of them, and the picture they end up drawing is constrained by what they were given to draw with.

But the gifts were not the work. The work was mine. The hours sitting with the catalog were mine. The choice to follow philosophy instead of staying premed was mine. The decision to take a class about education systems in the middle of a neuroscience degree was mine. The five years of writing in private before I ever wrote in public were mine. The luck made the work possible. The work was still the work.

That is the part of this I have been circling for months without saying out loud. You can be lucky and still earn what you have. You can have advantages and still do the thing. The two facts do not cancel each other. I will not flatten this into “I worked for it” because that erases the people who held me up, and I will not flatten it into “I got lucky” because that erases the years of choosing. Both things are real and both things go on the page.

I close the laptop. The document is still on the screen behind it but I am not reading it anymore. The room is the same room. The walls still have the things on them from a version of me that lived here before any of this happened.

I came home to Atlanta a week ago. I did not know I was going to spend tonight sitting with the transcript. I did not plan to write any of this. The piece started because I went to download my degree six months after graduating and I saw the document again and the shape of it caught me in a way it had not caught me before.

I think most of what happens in a life is exactly like that. You do the work in front of you. You follow what pulls at you. You stay intentional enough to not drift, and you trust the people around you when they tell you something true. The shape is not visible while you are inside of it. The shape shows up later when you have the quiet to look.

I have spent the last six months building a company that is trying to give other students access to the kind of intentionality I had. I will not pretend I have it figured out. I will not pretend the company is going to work. I do not know what tomorrow looks like. I know what tonight looks like, which is a laptop on a desk in a childhood bedroom and a transcript with the word FINAL at the end of the filename, and a twenty-two-year-old who can finally see the picture he was drawing the whole time.

The map is on the page now. I get to draw the next one.