📌 WHY I BUILT THIS: MARCH 2023
I'd like to take you through my mind for a moment. Imagine your mom gets the news we all pray for: if the next scan comes back clear, she's officially in remission. Cancer loses. You're already exhaling. You're already celebrating. Now imagine two weeks later, that same woman — the one on the verge of a clean bill of health — goes into a coma from a sudden heart attack. Now, imagine she passes away two weeks after that. For her, on March 1st, the world goes quiet. But life doesn't pause for grief. Four days after losing my mother, my daughter was born via C-section. March 5th. The highest high and the lowest low, colliding in a four-day window. I received new life while the earth was still fresh on the grave of the woman who gave me mine. March 2023 That was my March 2023. But it wasn't done. On March 19th, due to a simple miscommunication — the kind of trivial glitch that usually ends in a shrug — my mother-in-law walked away. She abandoned her only daughter, her only granddaughter, in the middle of recovery from major surgery and in the wake of my mother's funeral. I was thousands of miles away. Watching my world catch fire through a phone screen, unable to physically intervene. At that moment, most people's systems could have crashed. You'd expect despair. You'd expect a "why me?" spiral. You'd expect a man to buckle under the weight of grief, fatherhood, and abandonment — all at once. But here is the truth of the Mirror Path: Despair is a choice made by the Unaware. The Logic of the Mirror As hard as it was — and it was objectively, scientifically hard — there wasn't even a hint of despair. Not because I'm heartless. Because I was prepared. I had a choice. I could indulge in the High Emotional Output of the tragedy, or I could process that emotion as raw data and ask one question: What is the Highest Value Action right now? I wasn't scheduled to stay. I was supposed to be in the Philippines for three months. It has now been three years due to my mother-in-law's abandonment of her kin.