Showing Up Always, Anyways
The first podcast episodes were rough. Script awkward, presentation stilted, logistics a mess. I'd record, realize halfway through that the audio quality was terrible, and have to start over. I'd finish an edit, listen back, and cringe at how unpolished it sounded. The work multiplied—fixing mistakes meant ten times the effort, endless retakes, hours spent on something that should have taken minutes.
I published them anyway.
Not because they were ready. Because the cause mattered more than my discomfort with imperfection. The Wild Middle was meant to debunk misunderstandings about neurodivergence, to amplify voices that are often silenced or misunderstood. Our lived experiences. Our challenges. Our dreams. If I waited until I'd perfected the craft—until my presentation was smooth, my editing was seamless, my confidence was unshakeable—I'd never start. And the conversations that needed to happen wouldn't.
So I showed up. Reached out to guests, scheduled meetings, published episodes that weren't as good as I wanted them to be. Some people listened. Some didn't. The fear of not being able to follow through surfaced regularly—what if I ran out of ideas? What if guests stopped responding? What if I couldn't sustain it? I acknowledged the fear and kept working anyway. I make mistakes. I always will. But I also always show up.
When I volunteered to teach at a government school, I felt deeply uncertain. The kids barely knew English. Their cultural context was entirely different from mine. I was the elite, naive American kid walking into an environment I didn't understand, trying to teach students whose lives I couldn't fully relate to. The first sessions were clumsy. I struggled to connect. They looked at me with polite confusion, unsure what to make of this outsider who thought he could help.
But I kept showing up. With patience and persistence, we bonded. I learned to build bridges—through gestures, through simplified language, through finding common ground in curiosity and humor. I failed many times. Lessons that flopped. Explanations that didn't land. Moments where I felt completely out of my depth. But over time, something shifted. They wanted to learn English, to understand computers, to explore ideas beyond their immediate world. And I wanted to help. We met in the middle, imperfectly, and it worked.
Teaching in my mother's classes was similar. I showed up as an enthusiastic helper, a role model who himself needed prompting to drive the class forward. I wasn't a trained teacher. I didn't have the answers. But I was there, willing to try, willing to fail in front of students and adjust in real time.
I also put my creative work out there—music videos, artwork, projects in various states of completion. Work-in-progress stuff. Imperfect drafts. Things I knew weren't finished but decided to share anyway. It takes a certain courage to do that. Not the loud, performative kind of courage, but the quiet kind that says: this is what I have right now, and I'm releasing myself from the expectation that it needs to be perfect before it can exist.
There's something freeing in that release. You stop holding your work hostage to an ideal version that may never materialize. You enjoy the work for what it is—messy, incomplete, alive. And the learning that comes from putting imperfect work into the world is invaluable. People respond. Some critically, some kindly, some not at all. But you learn what resonates, what falls flat, what needs rethinking. You iterate. You improve. Not in isolation, but in conversation with the world.
It builds a quiet confidence. Not the kind that says "I'm good at this," but the kind that says "I can handle not being good at this yet." It drives intrinsic motivation. You're not working for external validation or perfect execution. You're working because the process itself—the act of showing up, trying, failing, adjusting—is worth it.
I learned this first from coding and game development. It was always easier to code a little and test, rather than implement fully and face a debugging nightmare at the end. Small iterations. Constant feedback. Adjust as you go. The same principle applies to everything else. You're never fully ready. You can never anticipate how the other person will receive what you've made. But you can show up, put it out there, and see what happens.
The podcast is ongoing. The teaching continues when I have time. The creative projects pile up, some finished, some abandoned, some evolving in directions I didn't expect. The fear hasn't disappeared. It surfaces when I think about whether I can sustain this, whether I'm doing enough, whether anyone cares. But oblivity—that protective obliviousness—keeps the fear from having final say. It lets me acknowledge the uncertainty and keep moving anyway.
Showing up imperfectly and persisting is beautiful. Not because it leads to mastery or recognition, but because it keeps you in motion. You learn by doing. You grow by failing in public. You connect by being honest about what you don't know.
That's what I've learned. That's what I keep doing.