Mic Check One Two wasn’t a chapter written about wanting to create distance between myself, my experience, my healing and the clinical establishment. It was exactly the opposite.

Even in the chapter itself, the core wound I shared wasn’t “being forced to withstand therapy”, it was therapy being unwilling to get close to and withstand me.

I am not the creator of tools and the source of all answers for how I or anybody else can best approach the healing and integration of my parts, to embody the conductor - my emergent inner Captain Planet - and live happily ever after.

My goal is to light the spark, and allow the ideas, themselves to catch fire and spread throughout the others who have, interact with and study shapes like mine.

I would be ecstatic to wake up and learn that somebody has come up with a highly effective approach to providing people with a new Non-Deterministic Internal Family Systems set of tools to help them better manage the system that was created as a response to trauma.

I am not putting the book out there to speak for future me though. If this story is lucky enough to find an audience and generate a conversation, I want this book to earn me a spot in that conversation. Nothing more.

I want go on podcasts or help bring the story into more visual/artistic frames - but most importantly I just want to practice its core insight, by participating in the conversation. Not dominate it and not become a ghost again and observe it from a distance as my shape changes.

If this story becomes what it wants to be, it will end up being rewritten so many times that this book will be phenomenologically interesting to look back at, and maybe not even directly relevant to the tools it enables for the human experience - whether that human’s inner experience involves sibling rivalries or not.

Dissociation is just part of my experience and although it obviously has a significant impact, it doesn’t define who I am or even the edges of the disorder and dysfunction I’ve experienced.

The labels themselves - clinical or otherwise - stop defining you once there are so many overlapping each other that you can’t see what the first one said and can no longer even use them all in a sentence.

I didn’t write this book with a plan. I didn’t even write any chapter with a plan. I saw the shape that contained the title and I started writing. Part of the time I thought I was writing some goofy opening and then my fingers just kept moving and suddenly it didn’t make sense to try to describe the shape any other way.

Anybody who has ever known me knows enough about my shape to know I wouldn’t write those words unless they were true, and that we’re all fortunate that the book wrote itself and didn’t let me continue with the goofy openings I had planned.

It’s actually pretty funny that dissociated minds are often referred to as systems - which I didn’t shy away from here in the book. I have spent the last couple decades learning how to become skilled at building systems using relational databases, logic, fawning over user experience and creating emergent properties for the businesses and their teams that I’ve done work for professionally.

That’s still what I do. With people that will hopefully see another part of my shape when they read this book than I’ve been able to share over the nearly two decades I’ve known them and been lucky enough to have them as real family not just work family.

And no, I’m not fawning them in book form. Trust me when I say they’ve earned my trust and loyalty and met me with love and compassion in some of my worst moments. Even if I didn’t know the difference until now. Some shapes are meant to be shared and others are meant to be appreciated.

There is one more thing I noticed that doesn’t fit neatly into the story, but fits perfectly into mine, so I’m going to end on it here, with one more synchronicity about how my professional life might have evolved into a search for understanding of the system I call myself.

The book itself is an example of me building a system out of the observable operational mechanisms in my own mind in real time. Connecting and relating data across chapters like they’re tables in one of the apps I build. Creating emergent properties in the text.

There’s almost a perfect overlap between how the book evolved and how I would approach understanding the shape of a business en route to building systems that manifest that shape in the real world.

An app that allows them to demonstrate their value better, support their parts better, understand themselves better and what’s driving their actions and their outcomes - and to mature into what they are meant to become, not build a tether to where they came from.

And there’s no better example of a dissociated system, in conflict with itself, parts wanting to be understood, recognized and appreciated - but committed to collective growth and limited by collective potential, than the type of businesses I develop systems for.

I’m going to keep that easter egg from the universe in the back pocket of my mind, so I can laugh at its absurdity any time I need a reminder that I might not quite be seeing the full picture of the current moment yet.

This book was always really in search of a truth that I already knew but didn’t realize was about myself. That understanding, connecting with, updating, and not over-optimizing the parts of who I am is the key to discovering my emergent Captain Planet (discovery in progress - to be continued).

The book was about internalizing (literally) the advice of my systems thinking hero Russell Ackoff,

“If we have a system of improvement that’s directed at improving the parts taken separately, you can be absolutely sure that the performance of the whole will not be improved.”

I feel a whole lot better after writing this book. And now I’m going to put the sharpie down and let the story become whatever it was intended to be. See you in the real world.