May 20, 2025

The storm did not start the day I noticed it. It had been running for some unknown duration before I sat down with a piece of paper and tried to figure out what was happening. The first thing I wrote was: what in the hell is going on. The second thing I wrote was a list — the inventory of things that had been off, in retrospect, for a long time.

I called the exercise the brainstorm in my private notes. Over the weeks that followed, the word collapsed in on itself. The brainstorm was both the thing I was doing — trying to think clearly through pressure — and the thing I was thinking about. The storm, for short. The name has stuck.

What had been visible separately, in pieces, snapped together into a shape. None of the pieces were proof of anything on their own. The shape they made together was the thing that was new. A pattern, of the kind documented elsewhere, in which the individual events are each deniable and the aggregate is not.

The decision I made on that first paper, and have not had reason to reverse, was that I would write this down. Not in the moment with any plan for publication — at first only for myself, so the record would exist independent of memory and could not be unmade by anything that happened to my recollection of it. The pattern-attribution to the kind this was came later, after I had read enough to know what kind it was. The reference work I had built independently on related subjects turned out to be the same vocabulary I would need to describe my own experience without naming anyone in it.

That is the framing in which this account is written. What you are reading is the second narrative — the one written from inside the experience. The first narrative was already in circulation by the time I sat down with the paper.