Why is this happening to me? That question changed everything.

I was fifteen when I got sick with cancer.

The illness was only half of it. The other half was what happened around it: kids my age who didn't understand, didn't know what to do with it, and turned their confusion into bullying. I went through treatment and through that at the same time, and somewhere in the middle of both I landed on the only question that actually mattered: why is this happening to me? I'm a good kid. Why me?

Nobody around me had an answer. So at eighteen, I went looking for it myself.

What followed was years of digging: metaphysics, spirituality, ancient history, psychology, philosophy, quantum physics, numerology, angelology, tarot, hermeticism. Not as a hobby. As a search for something solid enough to actually stand on. I wasn't collecting interesting ideas. I was trying to understand how this works, and why, so what I'd been through could mean something instead of just having happened to me.

Somewhere in that search, I found it. whereitallbegins is what's left after I put it back together for myself, first.