Maybe by the time you’re reading this, the second season of The Winstocks will have already premiered. Or maybe you’ll know what Mandy ended up majoring in in college. Or maybe you’ll know what ended up happening to Oddvar and the seed vault. Or maybe I’ll already be dead or in rehab or living off in the mountains somewhere. I don’t know.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is what it would be like to read this book if you’d never heard of me before. I mean, obviously, most people who pick it up are gonna be fans of me or at least interested in my story, but I’ve been fantasizing about someone coming across it sometime way in the future, or someone just picking it up randomly at the library or in the airport when they’re in a hurry and wanting something to read. I keep asking myself what it would be like to approach my life totally fresh like that, you know? If the entirety of my being were contained in these pages.

How would that person want the book to end?

What would they be curious about?

I guess I almost wish that person would think this was a piece of fiction—like, I guess I almost wish they’d think someone made me up—because then they could imagine whatever they wanted about me for the rest of their lives. They’d be relieved of the burden of caring about what happens to me, relieved of the stress of keeping tabs.

Sometimes, I just walk around my house or I’m just eating dinner, and I can feel all this stress coming in from all these people I’ve never met, all these people I don’t know. It’s like I can feel it seeping in through the walls—these people grinding their teeth and holding their breath because they can sense that it’s not gonna turn out well for me. Their whole body is telling them that, whether they like it or not, they’re a part of this story, and there’s no way it has a happy ending.

And for a lot of them, I think that makes them resent me, you know, because they never asked for this. I never asked if I could come into their lives, and they never asked for the responsibility. I just sort of opened the door one day and said: Hi! I’m here now. And a lot of them have their own methods of coping: Like, a lot of them are already sort of ironically predicting my downfall, and a lot of them are being really intense all the time about how meaningless I am and how little I matter to them, and a lot of them are sort of hedging their bets with as many people like me as possible so that whenever one of us falls or disappoints them or goes crazy in some predictable way, they can be like: That’s okay. I’ve got so many of these guys in my cupboard that I don’t have to mourn the loss of one of them for more than a second. And even the ones who love me, you know, like even the ones who’ve “chosen” to make me a part of their lives, even they sometimes feel like people who are just trying to make sense of this intrusion, just trying to take ownership over the trauma.