The One Who Tells

The One Who Tells

A

Personal Essay Based on Knowing Patterns: An

Epistemology for People Tired of Being Fixed

A few days ago, I published [an

article about being tired of reading self-help books](https://medium.com/@QNFO/im-done-reading-books-to-become-a-better-person-a8b5a3f7fcd3). Tired of the

vague concepts—“ego,” “shadow,” “inner child”—that promised

transformation and delivered jargon. Tired of running away from my own

life. I did not want to be a hypocrite writing another self-help book.

So I wrote something else: *[Knowing Patterns: An

Epistemology for People Tired of Being Fixed](https://rwnq8.github.io/knowing-patterns/)*. Zero advice. Just

descriptions of how patterns work.

But writing about patterns is not the same as seeing your own.

English has a language deficit: we lack the verbs to describe fluid,

relational processes, so we invent nouns instead. The noun sounds like a

verdict. A life sentence.

I am writing this in a country I did not grow up in, about a life I

am still learning to inhabit. Let me try describing it using the verbs

we are missing.

I. The Verbs

Born August 8, 1981, Bradley James Gudzinas, in Phillipsburg, New

Jersey—a week after the launch of MTV. Raised by my maternal

grandparents, Nanny Dianne Lalonde and Pappy Eugene Lalonde. My

grandfather’s family business—taxi company, limousine service, auto

repair garage, gas station—bankrupted when EPA regulations required him

to remove underground storage tanks he did not install. The tanks were

not his. The cost was. He ended up cleaning toilets at Sears. I worked

alongside him in high school. Constant shifting between Catholic

schools—Sts. Philip and James in Phillipsburg, St. Jane’s in Easton,

Pennsylvania, Notre Dame in Bethlehem—and constant scanning for threat.

Learning that systems are not reliable. Learning that you do not belong

where you are. My grandfather picked me up after school in his Dodge

Caravan with the “Phillipsburg Taxi” sign still on top.

Scanning was the verb for those years. Attention sweeping the

environment, highly tuned to friction, change, and ambiguity.

I became editor of the high school newspaper—“The Crusader,” same

name as the school mascot—my junior year. The advisor, Ed Koskey, a

photojournalist for the Allentown Morning Call, became a

mentor. Locking—the perceptual field collapsing to a single point, a

figure who provided stability in a world that had taught you nothing

stays solid for long.

Graduated 1999. My paternal grandfather, Raymond Gudzinas—Pop Pop—had

never finished high school and was proud to see me graduate. But I felt

adrift. Neither parent would sign the FAFSA forms. Retail jobs, then the

Easton Express-Times as a page designer and freelance

photojournalist. Summer 2000: a soul-searching trip to San Francisco, a

youth hostel near Union Square. I lacked the confidence to stay.

Drifting—moving toward a place that calls to you, then moving away

because you are not ready to lock.

In 2001, I met Jason. Twenty-one years together. He encouraged me to

enroll at Rutgers. A B.A. in Urban Studies and Community Planning from

Rutgers-Camden (2002–2004), an M.S. in City and Regional Studies from

Rutgers-New Brunswick (2005–2008). A professor named Natasha—born in

Germany—became a mentor; Jason and I visited her parents near Dortmund.

Merging—destabilizing your own baseline to match the shape of what you

are near. Learning what stability feels like, even when the stability

depends on the other person.

My career was thirteen years of applied systems analysis. An

internship at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission in

Philadelphia, then their systems modeling group—travel demand

simulations, four and a half years. A Contracting Officer’s

Representative at the Federal Highway Administration from 2011 to 2015,

managing a $1.5 million research portfolio. Deloitte in 2015–2016. Then,

from 2016 to 2021, leading the AARP Livability Index at the AARP Public

Policy Institute—integrating over 50 national data sources across seven

domains into a single policy tool. Cited in over 20 academic studies.

Architecting—identifying an opaque system, deconstructing it, building a

unified framework, democratizing access, and remaining outside. The

builder who never dwells.

Then I left. Impatience. A data broker in Chicago. Not a good fit.

Forced to resign. iManage in 2022. Forcing—linear pressure on a

situation that does not yield, exhausting the system, crashing.

By then, my relationship had run its course. My substance use had

escalated from coping to methamphetamine dependence. Circuit parties,

altered states. Merging into environments that demand you dissolve,

because dissolving is easier than holding a shape. Moved from DC to

Chicago during the pandemic. Remote work as a gilded cage. Drifting

again.

In the summer of 2023, I formed a 501(c)(3) nonprofit called

Empowering Change. Its initial focus was self-directed harm

reduction—echoing my own substance use at the time. I planned a 12-week

medical leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act. In October 2023,

after my physician certified me for leave, iManage terminated me.

Someone at the company had seen a LinkedIn post about taking care of my

mental health and starting a nonprofit. They assumed I was job-hopping.

When I challenged the termination, they sent a threatening letter from

their corporate attorney.

What followed was a cascade.

The Illinois Department of Employment Security denied my unemployment

claim. Then denied it again. Then again. *“Denied, denied,

denied!”* Spinning—high effort, zero distance traveled.

Most lawyers ignored my inquiries. One offered a gag-ordered

settlement. Another ended our relationship without explanation. Emails

to the Washington Post, to Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen—all

unanswered. Performing—directing your output at a jury that never

convenes.

In mid-2024, evicted from my San Francisco apartment. A dispute with

my landlord, Veritas, over a $132 fee. Accused of false claims,

countersued. Veritas’s attorney obtained a restraining order. I filed a

$50 million lawsuit. Forcing—maximum pressure on a situation that has

already decided it will not yield.

By then, Empowering Change had shifted from harm reduction to

AI-powered legal aid for pro se litigants—a direct outgrowth of

my own battles with the legal system.

In late 2024, the Social Security Administration denied my disability

benefits on contradictory grounds—acknowledging receipt of my documents

in the same letter that denied me for failing to submit them. More

spinning.

During this period—between the termination and my departure—I wrote.

Compulsively. Autobiographically. As if I could narrate my way out.

October 28, 2023: A story about a cat named Pavel, a Russian Blue

with two dads in two cities.

October 30: “The Blue Bikeshare Blues”—a Lyft bike that charged me

$25 for “incorrect locking” until I canceled my account and hailed a

yellow taxi.

October 31: “The Rowan Galvin Reckoning”—the story of how ChatGPT

told me “Rowan Galvin” meant “a guide in the darkness” when it actually

means “sparrow” in Gaelic.

March 17, 2024: A public letter about Proposition F, addressed from

“Ellis and Hyde corner (red tent), S.F. Cal.” *“As a drug addict

reliant on public welfare, I’ll now have access to counseling and

behavioral health services. Meanwhile, back in Chicago, I’m fighting for

unemployment benefits and basic medication after being illegally

terminated.”*

May 3, 2024: “Truth”—Parts 1 and 2. Parts 3 through 5: “Coming Soon.”

May 11: A satirical obituary. *“Rowan, Born to the MTV Generation,

Passes at 42 in Tragic Sling Accident.”*

May 15, 2024: “Enjoy the Silence”—about sending emails to nearly 200

individuals and organizations. No response.

Performing, all of it. Writing into an empty room. The

autobiographical pieces and the letters to journalists were the same

motion. Different audience. Same silence.

In the latter half of 2024, I decided to leave the United States. By

December, I had vacated my apartment. I stayed with a friend in San

Francisco for another month, gripped by self-doubt.

In January 2025, I arrived in Thailand. At an elephant sanctuary near

Chiang Mai, I began to breathe differently.

II. The Drift

I left Thailand after three months. I kept moving.

Nepal. Switzerland. Spain. Albania. Italy. Turkey.

Seven countries on tourist visas. Ninety days here, ninety days

there. Short-term stays in beautiful places. Drifting—attention refusing

to land because landing would require engaging, and engaging would

require staying, and staying had never been safe.

The hardest part was not the running. The hardest part was knowing,

with perfect clarity, that I was running—and doing it anyway.

This is also when the writing shifted. The autobiographical pieces

stopped. The scientific and technical work began. I founded QNFO and

QWAV. I authored over 270 scholarly preprints, books, and technical

reports—published through open-access platforms like CERN’s Zenodo and

ResearchGate. I developed the General Theory of Process, Quantum

Resonance Computing, Prime-Attentive Neural Networks. I proposed that

reality is composed of dynamic processes rather than static objects—a

universe of verbs, not nouns. That mass is identical to frequency. That

the measurement problem in quantum mechanics and the digitization of

analog signals are formally identical symmetry-breaking events.

I had built frameworks for everything except my own life.

The verb lexicon says: scanning, drifting, bracing—they will happen

for the rest of your life. The relief is not in stopping the motion. The

relief is in finally having the words to describe it. I spent a year

proving that to myself. Seeing the pattern does not stop the pattern. It

changes your relationship to it. The voice is pattern-maintaining, not

truth-telling. You stop believing the voice is telling the truth. But

you still buy the ticket. You still leave.

The difference—and it is a real difference, even if it looks the same

from the outside—is that this time I knew I was choosing to drift. Not

because the place was wrong. Not because the system betrayed me. Because

staying would require a verb I had never practiced.

III. The Nouns

I did something I am not sure I should have done. I gathered every

document I had written about my own life—seventeen files across two

directories, spanning autobiography, resume, professional profile,

fiction, satire, and a letter that read like a suicide note sent to

thirty strangers. I fed them to a language model and asked: *What

patterns do you see?*

The answer came back in seventeen pages. It named the attractor I had

been orbiting for forty-three years.

And it used nouns.

The Outsider-Architect: the builder who never

dwells.

The Betrayed Truth-Teller: the arc of trust,

betrayal, fight, silence, exile.

The Infinite Re-Inventor: Bradley, Brad, Rowan,

Quni, Quni-Gudzinas—each name an attempt, each one failing.

The Absent Audience: the performer without a

witness.

I cried. Not because I was sad. Because I was seen—and I had not

known how long I had been telling my story into an empty room. The nouns

were accurate. They described real patterns. But naming a pattern with a

noun is like naming a river and forgetting it flows.

What was the system actually doing, beneath the nouns?

Architecting. Not being an Architect. The

motion of building frameworks and refusing to dwell in them. Inhabiting

would require a different verb—receiving, resting, staying—and that verb

was never learned because the environment never taught it.

Truth-telling-into-silence. Not being a

Truth-Teller. The motion of speaking into a system that does not

respond. The Washington Post did not respond. Public Citizen

did not respond. The nearly 200 organizations did not respond. Each

silence confirmed the pattern, and each confirmation strengthened the

motion.

Re-inventing. Not being a Re-Inventor. The

motion of changing the packaging while the underlying attractor stays

the same. Bradley, Brad, Rowan, Quni, Quni-Gudzinas—each name an attempt

to outrun the pattern by renaming it.

Performing-without-a-witness. Not having an

Absent Audience. Performing. The motion of directing everything at a

jury that never convenes. The obituary. The lawsuit. The seventeen

files. All performed for someone who never arrived—because the

performing was the point. The performing maintained the pattern.

These are not identities. They are verbs. They are what the system

learned to do in response to real conditions—a grandfather bankrupted by

tanks he did not install, a childhood spent scanning for threat, a

lifetime of learning that the only way to be safe is to keep moving and

the only way to be seen is to perform.

Chapter 6 of Knowing Patterns describes this exact trap. It

does not use the noun labels the language model did. It describes the

pattern more carefully:

*“A story that knows it is a story is flexible. A story that

thinks it is reality is rigid. The difference is not in the content of

the story. The difference is in the relationship to the

content.”*

The same logic applies to nouns. The alternative is not to find

better nouns. The alternative is to see that the nouns are standing in

for verbs—and the verbs never stop.

IV. The Tilt

I met someone in my travels.

That is all I will write about them. The rest is not mine to tell

alone. But they are part of why I am stopping.

Chapter 8 of Knowing Patterns describes how other people

function as pattern-mirrors—the self you are in one relationship is not

a version of a true self but a different pattern that emerges from that

specific relational configuration. You are not the same set of verbs

with everyone. With this person, the system is doing something

different. I do not fully understand what verb that is. I know it is not

the same as the verbs I have been running. That is enough to pay

attention to.

I am choosing to settle in the Netherlands. Permanently.

The verb for this is tilting. The motion of

leverage. The subtle shift of context rather than the application of

force. Not fighting the pattern. Not spinning harder. Just changing the

conditions and letting the system reorganize.

Every other move was a drift—from a city, from a relationship, from a

country, from a name. This one is a tilt. A small change in a single

relation that the rest of the pattern might reorganize around. The

quietest verb.

This might be my tilt. Or it might not be. The only way to find out

is to try.

V. Verbs, Not Verdicts

Let me be honest about what the verb lexicon has and has not

done.

It has not stopped the verbs. The system is still scanning for

threat. Still architecting frameworks and refusing to dwell in them.

Still performing for an audience that may never arrive. The verbs will

not stop.

What has changed is the relationship to the nouns.

When the old motions start—scanning for betrayal, bracing against

connection, drifting toward the next escape—I can hear them as motions.

Not as the truth. Not as evidence of a fixed identity. As verbs. Verbs

that stabilized for good reasons, in response to real events. A

grandfather bankrupted by regulations he did not cause. A childhood

spent riding home in a taxi while classmates’ parents drove BMWs. An

uncle whose suicide was whispered about. A grandmother who coped with

barbiturates. A mother who took me to the mall with five dollars of tip

money for gas.

Those events happened. The verbs they created are real. But the verbs

are not the identity. They are what the system learned to do to survive.

And what can be learned can be reorganized—not by fighting, not by

forcing, but by tilting into a new context and letting the system find

its own shape.

The book says: *“A story that knows it is a story is

flexible.”*

A verb that knows it is a verb is also flexible. *My system is

currently spinning. That is just the weather. It will pass. My

system is currently tilting.* Let us see what happens when the

conditions shift.

The elephants at the sanctuary near Chiang Mai did not need an

audience. They just stood in the river, breathing, existing. Not

performing. Not scanning. Not architecting. Just being a system that

does what a system does when it is not trying to be anything else.

I am not an elephant. I spent forty-three years learning verbs that

kept me safe but kept me running. I am still running. But I am

describing the running differently now. Not as a verdict. As a verb.

The verbs are still running. But I am describing them differently

now. The relief is not in stopping them. The relief is in knowing that a

verb is just a verb. It describes the weather. And the weather

changes.

*This essay is based on Chapter 6 of [Knowing Patterns: An

Epistemology for People Tired of Being Fixed](https://rwnq8.github.io/knowing-patterns/), a free ebook

distributed without profit or capture. The full text of Chapter 6 is

included below.*

Appendix: Chapter 6—The

Stories We Tell

*[Complete text from Knowing Patterns: An Epistemology for People

Tired of Being Fixed]*

There is a pattern that deserves its own chapter, not because it is

more fundamental than attention or attractors, but because it is the one

we mistake for reality most often.

The story.

Human beings are narrative animals. We do not just experience the

world. We tell stories about it—to ourselves, to others, in our heads,

on paper. These stories are not optional extras. They are how we make

sense of raw experience. Without narrative, events are just one damn

thing after another. With narrative, there is a shape: beginning,

middle, end; cause and effect; protagonist and obstacle; meaning.

This is not a problem. The problem is that we forget we are telling

stories. The story becomes reality—the way things actually

are—and any alternative story feels like a lie.

The Story You Tell About

Yourself

You have a story about who you are. It goes something like this:

*I was born in [place] to [parents]. My childhood was

[description]. Something happened that shaped me: [significant event]. I

learned that I am [trait]. I struggled with [problem]. Then [turning

point]. Now I am [current identity].*

This story is not false. The events in it probably happened. The

emotions attached to them are real. The lessons you drew from them

shaped who you are.

But the story is also not true in the way you think. It is a

selection. It leaves out thousands of events that don’t fit the arc. It

assigns causality where correlation may be all there is. It gives a

coherent shape to a life that was, in the living, far more chaotic and

ambiguous than the story admits.

The story is a pattern—a way of organizing experience into a shape

that makes sense. And like all patterns, it is real without being

fixed.

Narrative Identity as

Attractor

In Chapter 4, we described the self as an attractor—a characteristic

shape of responding. The stories you tell about yourself are part of

that attractor. They stabilize it. They give it a past and a future.

They explain why the attractor is the way it is.

But the relationship runs both ways. The attractor also shapes the

stories you tell. A person with an attractor organized around scarcity

will tell stories about lack, betrayal, and disappointment. A person

with an attractor organized around curiosity will tell stories about

discovery, surprise, and learning. The attractor selects the

evidence.

This is why the self-help trope of “rewrite your story” is both right

and wrong.

It is right in recognizing that stories are not fixed. The story you

tell about your childhood can change without changing the facts of your

childhood. New meanings can emerge. New arcs can be drawn.

It is wrong in treating the story as a *thing to be

replaced*—as if you can simply decide to tell a different story and

the old one will vanish. The old story is not a mistake. It is a pattern

that stabilized for a reason. It organized experience in a way that was

adaptive. If you try to overwrite it with a “better” story, the old

pattern will persist underneath, and you will feel like a fraud.

The alternative is not to rewrite the story. The alternative is to

see that you are telling a story at all.

The Voice in Your Head

The voice that narrates your experience—the one that says “now I’m

walking to the kitchen,” “why did I say that,” “I should really get

started on that project”—that voice is not you. It is a pattern of inner

speech that your brain generates to keep experience organized.

This voice is extremely useful. Without it, you would lose temporal

coherence—the sense of being the same person across time. It is also

extremely misleading, because it presents a running commentary as if it

were objective truth.

The voice says: “I always mess things up.” That is not a fact. That

is a narrative pattern that has become habitual. The voice says: “Nobody

understands me.” That is not a description of reality. That is a story

the attractor tells to maintain its shape.

The voice is not lying. It is pattern-maintaining. It is doing its

job.

Seeing the voice as a pattern—rather than as the truth—is one of the

most freeing shifts available to a human being. Because once you see it,

you stop having to believe everything it says. Not because you label it

“negative thinking” and try to replace it with “positive thinking.”

That’s just trading one story for another. But because you recognize it

for what it is: a pattern of narration, not a window onto reality.

The Problem with “Finding

Your Story”

The self-help industry has commercialized narrative identity. “Find

your story.” “Own your narrative.” “Rewrite your past to change your

future.”

These commands assume that there is a true story hiding

somewhere—the real story of who you are—and that your job is to discover

it or construct it. This is the noun trap applied to identity. It turns

“story” into a thing you possess, rather than a process you participate

in.

There is no true story. There are only more or less useful patterns

of meaning-making—patterns that help you navigate experience or patterns

that keep you stuck. And “stuck” is itself a kind of story: the story

that the pattern cannot change.

The freedom is not in finding the right story. The freedom is in

knowing that you are always telling a story, and that the

telling can shift. Not because you decide to tell a better one, but

because the conditions that sustain the current story—the attractor, the

environment, the relations—have changed.

The Flexible Story

A story that knows it is a story is flexible. A story that thinks it

is reality is rigid.

The difference is not in the content of the story. Two people can

tell similar stories about their childhoods—one rigidly attached to the

narrative, the other aware that it’s one version among many. The content

is the same. The relationship to the content is different.

That difference is everything.

When you know you are telling a story, you can hold it lightly. You

can entertain alternative interpretations without feeling like you’re

betraying the truth. You can notice when the story is keeping you stuck

without having to fight it. Because it’s just a story. It’s a pattern.

Patterns shift.

When you think the story is reality, any challenge to it feels like

an attack on your very existence. You defend it. You recruit evidence

for it. You surround yourself with people who confirm it. The pattern

hardens.

Pattern literacy, applied to narrative, is the ability to hear

yourself telling your story—and to know, in the hearing, that you are

not the story. You are the one telling it.

Letting the Story Breathe

This chapter has no conclusion in the sense of a resolution. There is

no “right” way to tell your story. There is no method for finding your

true narrative. There is only the ongoing act of noticing that you are

narrating—and that the narration, not the events, is what shapes the

pattern of your life.

You can let the story breathe. You can hold it loosely. You can

observe it shift when you’re tired, when you’re with different people,

when you’re in a new place. You can notice that the story of “I’m not

good at relationships” doesn’t appear when you’re laughing with a friend

who gets you—which means it was never the whole truth. It was a pattern

that activated in certain contexts and not others.

The story is not the problem. The forgetting that it is a story—that

is the trap.

Summary. Humans are narrative animals. The stories

we tell about ourselves are real patterns of meaning-making, but they

are not fixed truths. They are selections, shaped by the attractor that

constitutes the self. The self-help industry’s command to “rewrite your

story” mistakes the pattern for a thing to be replaced. The alternative

is not to find the right story but to see that you are always

telling one—and that the telling can shift when the conditions that

sustain it change. The pattern is not the problem. Forgetting it is a

pattern is.