At the start of this year my power supply PCI-E connector decided to have a 12VHPWR moment and melt. Not in a dramatic, house-on-fire way. Just… quietly gave up. And suddenly I had no PC. No games. No projects. No background noise.

Just me and my thoughts. And that’s dangerous, because for the first time in a long time, I had what I now call a Big Think. Not just a passing thought. A real, sitting-in-silence, nowhere-to-hide kind of reckoning.

What I found wasn’t some grand epiphany. It was simpler than that. I’d been floating. Just… drifting through life without really going anywhere. Comfortable enough to not notice, not comfortable enough to call it living. A lot of loose thoughts came up. Things I’d never really looked at about myself. But one thing was clear. I’d been floating long enough.

The Why

Three months went by. My birthday came around, and I found myself in another Big Think. I already knew I’d been floating. This one was more about why. I didn’t get there that night though. It took a couple more days. And then out of nowhere, while looking into something completely unrelated, it just clicked.

I am chronically slow.

Not slow like I can’t keep up. Slow like… the realization hits me three years after everyone else already got it. And it’s how I’ve always been. Fitting that even that one took a while to land.

Slow with people

It took me an embarrassing amount of time to understand that connections matter. That the whole point of school wasn’t the curriculum, it was the people sitting next to you. That learning how to actually talk to someone is a skill, not something you’re just born with.

That women are, in fact, just people. Not some separate species you need a strategy guide for. That the girl who literally said “I want you” was, in fact, into me.

Yeah. I caught that one late.

Slow with myself

I spent most of my life overweight and just… accepted it as who I was, like it was a character trait and not something I could change. I didn’t learn how to cook until way later than I should have.

I didn’t fully understand how my own brain works. What I need, how I think, how to actually get myself to follow through on things. I didn’t recognize stress until I was already deep in it, wondering why everything felt heavy and nothing felt fun.

Slow with everything else

Slow to look at something I built and admit it needed to be better.

Slow to follow the things I actually cared about.

Slow to realize that the content creators I watched for years were performers, entertainers and that what looked effortless was actually a craft.

Standing Still

And for a second all of that feels bad. Like I wasted time. Like I’m behind. But here’s the thing I keep coming back to.

My power supply had to literally melt for me to sit still long enough to see any of this. And maybe that’s the part I was slowest on: that to move forward, sometimes you have to stop.

That the standing still isn’t wasted time. It’s the only time you’re actually paying attention.

I don’t have advice. I’m not here to tell you what to do. I’m just a guy whose computer broke and accidentally had a thought. I’m still slow. But at least now I know I’m slow. That’s gotta count for something.