ON TURNING 32, BEING REMINDED OF HOW SMALL WE ARE, AND DECIDING WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH THE TIME I HAVE.
I turn 32 today, which feels both completely ordinary and, for reasons I am still trying to understand, rather extraordinary.
Birthdays have always made me reflective, but this one has made me think less about age than about time: how much of it I have already been given, how carelessly I have sometimes assumed there would always be more of it, and how quickly our understanding of it changes when life interrupts the plans we have made. When I was younger, birthdays felt like markers of arrival. You counted toward something: toward adulthood, independence, a career, success, the imagined age at which you would finally become the person you had been promising yourself you would eventually be. I assumed that by my thirties there would be some great settling of the dust, that the uncertainties of youth would give way to the confidence of adulthood and that life, if I worked hard enough at it, would eventually begin behaving according to plan.
It has not.
Thirty-one was, in many respects, the year life reminded me that I am not in charge of nearly as much as I thought I was. It was a year of being knocked down, getting back up, being knocked down again and discovering that whatever strength I thought I had recovered would soon be tested once more. There were moments when the repetition of it became almost absurd. Just as I began to regain my footing, something else seemed to disappear beneath me. I lost people I loved to death. I lost friendships I genuinely believed would survive the inevitable changes of adulthood. I lost clients and, with them, a version of the future I had carefully projected for my business. I lost time when my health required me to retreat from parts of my day-to-day life. I lost confidence in boxing, a sport I love partly because it had always made me feel strong, disciplined and capable inside my own body. And somewhere along the way, after enough things had been taken away or changed beyond recognition, I began to lose sight of myself.
There is a dangerous arithmetic we perform during difficult periods of our lives. We begin adding up everything that has gone wrong, as though grief and disappointment can be placed into columns on a balance sheet. A person is gone. A friendship ends. A client leaves. A plan fails. Your body changes. Another month passes. Another thing you thought was certain turns out not to have been certain at all. Eventually, if you are not careful, you stop thinking, I have lost things, and begin thinking, I am losing. Stay there long enough and the sentence becomes even more frightening: I am lost.
I spent more time in that place this year than I would like to admit.
For most of my adult life, I have been very good at moving. I built much of my identity around momentum: the next client, the next project, the next company, the next trip, the next idea, the next challenge that could be solved if I worked a little later or thought a little harder. Ambition has been one of the great organizing forces of my life. It has also, at times, been a convenient way of avoiding stillness. There is always something seductive about the future because the future contains the version of ourselves who has finally figured everything out. He is healthier. More successful. More disciplined. More secure. His inbox is somehow under control. He has learned to sleep properly. He calls people back. He has solved the problems currently making us anxious. We spend so much time building toward him that we can forget there is a person living here, now, who deserves our attention too.
I have had an extraordinarily fortunate career. My ambitions have carried me into rooms, cities, industries and experiences that the kid I once was could never have imagined entering. I have been entrusted with teams, businesses, projects and ideas. I have met brilliant people. I have built things from nothing more than conversations and conviction. There have been moments when I have looked around a room and quietly wondered how I got there. And because I had experienced enough of those moments, I think I began to internalize a dangerous idea: that if I remained ambitious enough, useful enough and relentless enough, I could somehow negotiate with uncertainty.
Life has a wonderfully brutal way of correcting that assumption.
We are all, when viewed from a sufficient distance, almost impossibly small. We are specks on a planet circling one star in a universe whose scale the human mind can barely comprehend. Our calendars, ambitions, anxieties, job titles and five-year plans are enormously important to us and completely irrelevant to the mechanics of the cosmos. I do not find that depressing. Increasingly, I find it liberating. There is humility in remembering that the universe does not owe us the lives we planned. It does not consult our schedules before someone dies. It does not check whether business is going well before sending another problem. It does not wait for a convenient week to remind us that our bodies are mortal.
This year, mine reminded me.
But before I get there, there is something else I have had to acknowledge about loss: I was so busy counting what had disappeared that I nearly missed everything that had arrived.
During one of the most destabilizing periods of my professional life, I started something new. I launched Rhetor, a PR firm, with one of my best friends. There is something beautifully irrational about entrepreneurship: occasionally, the response to having the ground disappear beneath your feet is to decide that this would be an excellent time to build a house. Yet building again reminded me why I had chosen this work in the first place. I gained new clients whose ambition and belief in what they are creating have restored some of my own. I have been reminded that the privilege of communications is not simply getting attention for something; it is being invited into another person's vision of what might be possible and helping them bring other people into it.
I also found my way back to Matte Equation, the skincare and self-care company I had built and, for a while, lost some clarity around. I used to think brands had to arrive in the world fully certain of themselves, polished enough that nobody could see the questions behind them. Perhaps I believed the same thing about people. This year, I stopped trying to make Matte Equation something capable of winning everyone over. I stopped worrying quite so much about whether every person would understand it, approve of it or see themselves reflected in it. I began putting more of myself into the company: more warmth, more colour, more humour, more optimism, more of the complicated belief I have always carried that joy can be serious and that taking care of yourself can be an act of defiance against a world very good at exhausting you.
For the first time in a long time, I am having fun with it.
That word, fun, might seem frivolous beside everything else I am writing about here, but I no longer think it is. We have a tendency, particularly when we are ambitious, to treat joy as something we will earn after the important work is finished. We will rest after the launch. We will travel after the promotion. We will see our friends after the deadline. We will take care of ourselves when business stabilizes. We will enjoy our lives once our lives finally resemble the lives we imagined having. The trouble is that the work is never finished. There is always another deadline. There is always another problem. And eventually you realize you have been postponing your own participation in your life.
Perhaps that is what this year has really been about for me: learning to participate again.
I do not want to romanticize what happened to get me here. There is a fashionable idea that every painful experience arrives carrying some hidden lesson, as though suffering is simply personal development wearing an unpleasant disguise. I don't believe that. Some things are simply awful. Death does not become good because grief teaches us to appreciate life. Betrayal does not become necessary because it teaches us discernment. Illness is not a gift because it rearranges our priorities. We do not need to turn every wound into wisdom in order for our suffering to have been legitimate.
What we can decide is what happens next.
That distinction has become one of the most important lessons of my thirty-second year. I cannot choose everything that happens to me, but I retain some authorship over what I build around it. I cannot decide whether everyone I love remains in my life, but I can be more deliberate about loving the people who do. I cannot guarantee that a client will stay, a company will succeed or a carefully constructed plan will survive contact with reality, but I can decide whether disappointment makes me cynical or more thoughtful. I cannot recover time I have already spent worrying about the future, but I can become more protective of the time that remains.
And I cannot change the fact that I have diabetes.
That is the part of this year I have been reluctant to discuss publicly.
I was diagnosed after my health forced me to pay attention in a way I had spent too long avoiding. The diagnosis introduced me to an entirely new relationship with my body and an entirely new vocabulary for thinking about my future: blood sugar, medication, appointments, numbers, risk, management. Things that had once been abstractions became daily considerations. Food became more complicated. Exercise became more complicated. My confidence became more complicated. Boxing, which had always given me a sense of command over my body, suddenly became entangled with the realization that I did not feel entirely in command of it anymore.
What surprised me almost as much as the diagnosis itself was the shame.
I was embarrassed to say that I had diabetes. Even now, that sentence is difficult to write, because diabetes is one of those illnesses onto which society has projected an enormous amount of judgment. People hear the word and believe they know the story that preceded it. They think they understand what someone ate, how someone lived, what someone weighs, what someone should have done differently. A complex chronic disease becomes a moral shorthand. Your body becomes evidence, and strangers imagine themselves qualified to deliver the verdict.
So I became quiet about it.
I continued working. I went to meetings. I answered messages. I talked about businesses and clients and ideas. I showed up where I could, retreated where I couldn't and privately tried to understand what this diagnosis meant for the rest of my life. There were moments when I was frightened by my own body. There were moments when I felt angry with it. There were moments when I thought about everything I wanted to accomplish and wondered, in a way I had never seriously wondered before, how much time I would have to accomplish it.
Diabetes has been the biggest knockout of my life to date.
I use that word deliberately. A knockout is different from an ordinary punch because, for a moment, the fight stops. Your body makes the decision before your pride can intervene. The illusion that you are in complete control disappears. And when you find yourself on the ground, the first task is not winning. The first task is getting up.
I am still getting up.
I am learning how to take care of myself without treating care as punishment. I am learning that health cannot perpetually remain the thing I promise to address once everything else becomes less busy. I am learning that strength is not demonstrated by pretending you are unaffected by something. Sometimes strength is taking the medication. Sometimes it is going to the appointment you are afraid of. Sometimes it is getting the blood work done and looking at numbers you do not want to see. Sometimes it is moving your body when you do not feel confident inside it. Sometimes it is admitting that you are frightened. Sometimes it is allowing other people to help you.
And sometimes it is saying publicly: I have diabetes, and I am not ashamed of it.
That sentence matters to me because I know I am not the only person who has struggled to say it. Too many people living with chronic illness become experts at appearing fine. We learn how to answer emails while frightened, how to attend meetings while processing medical news, how to smile for photographs while carrying questions about our bodies that nobody else in the room can see. Shame thrives in that silence. Stigma convinces us that illness should be private because illness somehow represents failure.
I don't want to contribute to that silence anymore.
And that decision has changed the way I understand Matte Equation.
The company has increasingly been built around a simple idea: bringing a little more sunshine into your life. On its surface, that can sound like the language of a skincare company—warmth, ritual, self-care, feeling good in your skin. I still believe in all of those things. But sunshine means something different to me now than it did when I first started using the word.
Sunshine is easy to celebrate when everything is going well.
It means considerably more when it isn't.
To bring sunshine into your life is not to pretend darkness does not exist. It is not toxic positivity dressed in beautiful packaging. It is the deliberate decision to seek warmth while acknowledging that some seasons are cold. It is taking care of yourself not because you have perfected your life, but because you haven't. It is understanding that a shower, a skincare ritual, a walk, a boxing session, a doctor's appointment, a conversation with someone you trust or ten minutes in the sun can all be expressions of the same fundamental belief: my life is worth showing up for.
That is the version of Matte Equation I want to build now.
And it is why, beginning with this next chapter, I want the company to have a deeper relationship with the diabetes community. A portion of proceeds from Matte Equation will be directed toward supporting Diabetes Canada, and I intend to develop additional ways for the company to support researchers and initiatives working to advance our understanding and treatment of diabetes. I want to approach those commitments carefully and transparently, and as specific partnerships and research initiatives are established, we will share where the support is going and the people and work behind it.
I don't want this to become a cause attached to a marketing calendar. I don't want to post about diabetes because it is my birthday and then quietly return to business as usual. My heart is in this because my life is in this. I want to learn from people who have been living with this disease far longer than I have. I want to listen to researchers and clinicians doing the work. I want to help make information more accessible. I want to challenge the casual cruelty and assumptions that surround diabetes. And if somebody newly diagnosed finds their way to something I have written and recognizes the fear I am describing, I want them to see somebody willing to say the thing I struggled to say myself: you do not have to disappear because your body has changed the terms of your life.
I have spent much of my career thinking about what it means to make an impact. I have led initiatives, teams, projects and companies. My work and ambitions have taken me to places throughout the world I never imagined I would see when I was growing up. I am enormously grateful for that life. I am still ambitious for it. There are companies I want to build, stories I want to tell, people I want to help, places I want to visit and absurdly large ideas I have no intention of abandoning.
But the ambition feels different now.
At 22, I think I wanted to prove that I could become somebody.
At 32, I am much more interested in what I can do for somebody else.
I want to be here for as long as I can. That may be the simplest and most vulnerable ambition I have ever written down. I want more birthdays. I want more dinners with my family. I want more stupid jokes with my friends. I want more mornings with ideas that make me reach for my phone before I have even gotten out of bed. I want more clients who tell me about something they believe could change their industry. I want to watch the companies I am building become things I cannot yet imagine. I want to get back into a boxing gym and feel like myself again. I want to travel to places I have not seen. I want to grow older. I want the lines on my face that prove I did.
Most of all, I want whatever time I am given to be useful.
This is where thinking about the scale of the universe has strangely given me comfort. I know I am a speck. So are you. So is everyone who has ever broken our hearts or changed our lives. Our victories are small. Our catastrophes are small. The businesses we obsess over, the emails that ruin our afternoons, the failures that temporarily convince us our lives are over—all of them become almost invisible when placed against the incomprehensible scale of existence.
But small does not mean meaningless.
Perhaps meaning has never depended on scale.
Perhaps a meaningful life is simply the radius of warmth we create around ourselves while we are here: the person who felt less alone because we told the truth, the employee who became more confident because somebody believed in them, the friend whose call we answered, the parent we made time for, the stranger helped by research we contributed to, the person living with an illness who saw someone else speak about it without shame and decided that perhaps they could step out of the shadows too.
Maybe changing the world was always too grand an ambition.
Maybe changing someone's world is enough.
I turn 32 today without the certainty I once assumed adulthood would provide. My businesses are works in progress. My health is a work in progress. I am a work in progress. I am still processing, still thinking, still being, still trying. There are things I need to repair and habits I need to change. There are losses I am still grieving. There are fears I have not conquered. There are mornings when anxiety arrives before confidence does, and days when the distance between the person I am and the person I want to become feels enormous.
But for perhaps the first time, I do not see being unfinished as evidence that I have failed.
I see it as evidence that I am alive.
That is what 31 gave me after taking so much away. It stripped away some of my certainty. It humbled my ambition. It exposed the limits of control. It made me confront my body, my mortality and the uncomfortable truth that there will never be a perfectly convenient moment to begin living the life I keep promising myself I will eventually live.
And somehow, underneath all of that loss, I found gratitude.
Not the polished kind. Not the gratitude we perform because we believe difficult experiences require inspirational conclusions. I mean the almost primitive gratitude of waking up and realizing: I am still here.
There are people to love while I am here. There is work worth doing while I am here. There are people living with diabetes whom I can stand beside while I am here. There are companies to build, mistakes to make, apologies to give, dinners to linger over, flights to catch, punches to throw, doctors to listen to, ideas to chase and ordinary mornings I hope I never again mistake for something guaranteed.
I know now that life will knock me down again. There is no courageous ending to this essay in which I announce that I have finally defeated uncertainty. There will be another loss. Another disappointment. Another frightening phone call. Another plan that does not work. Another version of myself I will eventually have to leave behind.
I cannot promise that I will always handle those moments gracefully. But I know something at 32 that I wasn't certain I knew at 31.
I know how to get back up.
Sometimes slowly. Sometimes angrily. Sometimes with considerably less dignity than I would prefer. Sometimes only because somebody I love reaches down and reminds me that I don't have to do it alone.
But I get up. And then I try again.
Thirty-two years into this strange, tiny existence of mine, I am no longer asking life to guarantee that I won't get knocked down. I am asking for the courage to keep participating anyway: to love people knowing I may lose them, to build things knowing they may fail, to trust people knowing they may leave, to take care of a body knowing it is vulnerable, and to pursue a future knowing none of us has been promised one.
Life has a way of reminding you that you are just a small speck in a very grand universe.
I am aware of that now. Maybe more than I have ever been. But I am still here. Still processing. Still thinking. Still being. Still trying. Still building. Still loving. Still getting back up.
And if I am fortunate enough to have another 32 years—or many more than that—I hope I spend less of them trying to prove that my life matters and more of them making my life matter to someone else.
There is still work to do. There are people to love. There is change worth fighting for. There is a community I want to show up for. There is sunshine left to find, and, when I am fortunate enough to have some, sunshine left to give away.
Today, that is enough. More than enough, actually. I am 32. I am alive.
And what an extraordinary gift it is to still be here.
