Walking To The Beat Of My Own Drum

I have never moved through the world the way other people do. I have always walked a little off‑kilter — not rebellious, not dramatic, just tuned to a different frequency. While everyone else seemed busy performing their part, which I did too, I was always observing. Listening. Taking things in. That has always been my rhythm.

One thing about me: I remember everything. Not in a nostalgic, rose‑tinted way, but in a forensic way. Conversations. Tone. The exact phrasing someone used. The way they held themselves. The tiny detail most people forget before they have even walked out the door. I can meet someone once and remember their name, their energy, and one small thing about them that tells me more than their whole life story would.

I did not realise that was unusual growing up. I thought everyone’s mind worked like that. It turns out it was survival. When your early life teaches you to pay attention, you learn quickly. You learn to clock people — quietly, accurately, without making a show of it. You learn to trust the feeling in your gut long before you have the language to explain why.

For years, I gave people the benefit of the doubt until they proved me wrong. Sobriety sharpened that instinct into something cleaner, almost surgical. Now I usually know within minutes who someone is, what they are about, and whether they are safe to let in. It is not magic. It is not ego. It is pattern recognition. It is lived experience. It is paying attention.

I do not pretend to have the answers for everything — I am not that man. But I do have opinions. Clear ones. Grey, white and black. Opinions I have finally learned to trust.

There is another part of me I have only recently started admitting aloud: I spent years masking. Not in a dramatic, tortured way, but in the way many of us do to get through life. Playing the version of myself that kept the peace, kept things smooth, kept me safe, being a people pleaser. The older I get, the more I realise that performance is for actors, not for people trying to live honestly. We all wear masks, but at some point, we have to put them down. Sobriety made that impossible to avoid. Without the blur, my instincts became sharper, my perception cleaner. I do not miss much — tone, energy, intention — and I do not pretend to see what I see. It is not about being right. It is about being real.

There is also the larger context — the parts of my life that shaped the way I see the world long before I had any say in it. Being adopted. Growing up with a parent whose mental illness left marks you cannot see but you definitely feel. Moving from place to place as an army child, learning early that stability was something other people seemed to have. Realising that every family has secrets, but mine had a few that rearranged the ground under my feet when I finally uncovered them.

Finding my natural parents taught me something I wish I had learned earlier: the grass is not always greener. Sometimes it is simply grass of a different variety. My sexuality was another layer — not a journey, just a reality I had to grow into while navigating men who taught me things I did not always want to learn. Some good. Some not. All of it shaping how I understand connection, intimacy, and myself.

My friendships have been the real anchors — the people who saw me clearly even when I was busy blurring the edges with alcohol. Drinking was my poison of choice, my self‑regulation, my mask, my way of smoothing the sharp corners of my own mind. It worked until it did not. Sobriety did not just clear my head; it stripped away the excuses. It forced me to meet myself without the buffer. The alcohol was never really the problem. I eventually realised it was the regulator.

All of this — the adoption, the instability, the secrets, the sexuality, the relationships, the drinking, the demons — is not my identity, but it is my context. It is the scaffolding around the man I became. It is why I see what I see. It is why I write the way I write. And it is why legacy matters to me: not in a grand, dramatic sense, but in the simple hope that I leave something behind that is honest.

This space — this website, this blog — is the first time I am putting that way of seeing into words publicly. Not to perform. Not to impress. Just to be honest. I am not here to reinvent myself or present some polished “author persona.” I am here to write the way I have always lived: directly, with detail, with intuition, and without pretending to be anything I am not.

I am close to finishing my debut book, a body of work shaped by the early experiences that left their fingerprints on me long before I understood what they meant. I am taking the raw material of my life — the good, the strange, the heavy, the formative — and turning it into something deliberate. Not art for art’s sake. Not trauma packaged for consumption. Just truth, shaped with intention.

The deadline for my literary agent submission is getting close — fingers crossed — but whether this book lands on a desk or not, I am already doing the work I was meant to do. This is the start of something I should have begun years ago: a creative life on my own terms.

If you are here, welcome. This is me Léon — finally writing aloud, still walking to the beat of my own drum, and I am not planning to change tempo anytime soon, I have only just begun. xo