Hello. I'm Hannah.

As I write this, I am in my late thirties. I have curly hair (a surprisingly big part of my identity) and I work as a senior business analyst. I work hard and take life fairly seriously.

The curly hair part matters because when I was young (like, teenager young) I wanted curly hair. Desparately. I even permed my hair once.

It looked terrible.

Shortly afterwards, I settled for dreads, which I kept until my twenties.

This was followed by a period of shaved/very short/dyed madness. As it grew out eventually, I was surprised to discover that my hair had a wave in it. Really, more than a wave, some actual curls.

But it was sensitive: brush it and you got kinked insanity. Not conditioned enough? Kinked insanity. Look at it wrong? Kinked insanity.

I eventually learned to wrestle my hair to where I wanted it (take that, hair!), located a hair dresser that wanted to work with me, and, finally, found products that actually worked with it.

Now, my curly hair is rocking. I even get ringlets sometimes. It's perfect. Exactly the way I always wanted it!

The reason I bring this up is that the most important thing I know is that the things you believe — especially about yourself — are often bullshit.

---

But I digress.

Charles asked me to write about myself for this site.

I'm a homo sapien of the female variety. I grew up on a farm on a smallish island in a big ocean.

We didn't have a TV in the house until I was ten years old, at which point I promptly became addicted to Gargoyles (I can still recite the intro: it is one of my many talents).

I didn't know anything about how the world worked. I don't recall my parents ever talking about money, or politics, or anything serious. Not really.

But my memories of childhood are pretty vague. I think that's because of what happened later,

Over the summer between my first year at university and my second, I had a psychotic break. The depression that had been brewing since I was a teenager took complete control of me.

I was a mess.

I quickly found myself back at my parents' farm, hopped up on a variety of pills. For years I bounced around, the fuzziness brought on by the meds making everything a bit distant and numb. I was static.

I suspect that it is impossible to grow when you can't really feel anything.

I still have little actual recollection of it all, and what I do remember just makes me sad. I carry the scars from that time all down my arms, across my stomach and upper legs. I have I HATE ME carved into my left thigh.

The handy thing about a severe break-down is that you clear the decks: Nothing is real. Nothing matters. It is all nothing, nothing, nothing.

It's a bit like getting the opportunity to green-field your life — to get a fresh start. You aren't renovating an existing structure because there isn't a structure there to renovate; rather, you're building from scratch.

I took an incremental approach. I did a bit of training in this and that, got an entry level job, learned enough about how normal stuff — such as work attire — helps one to get by, and slowly grew from there.

And that would probably be my whole story — established my business analysis career, blah blah blah, began consulting, blah blah blah, bought a house, blah blah blah — if it weren't for what happened next.

---

I met Charles at an event. We were sitting around a table, I was facilitating the discussion, and he asked a shrewd question. It seems that he was already three steps ahead of me. That doesn't happen much.

WHO THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THIS GUY?

Later, after the event wrapped up for the evening, he sought me out to tell me that he thought that I was quite charming. I melted.

The amusing thing is that when I met Charles there was this other dude in the picture. A smart, kind, gentle giant with a big beard, far closer to my age. (I'm big on beards.)

If you were to picture who Hannah was going to end up with, it would be the younger guy, right? And we had a thing. We hadn't done anything about the thing just yet — no more than a coffee and numbers exchanged — but it was definitely the start of a thing.

There were two paths. And I chose the one less traveled. I chose Charles.

---

Charles and I both should — and shouldn't — work.

He is without a doubt the most annoying person I've ever met.

Among his more annoying traits is that he's always claiming superior knowledge about stuff because he has two-plus decades more life experience than I do, and other irrelevant facts. What? People mature?

And most annoyingly, he's often right.

But he's always talking about shit that is big. Too big to grasp immediately. I need to mull. I'm a big muller.

Often the things that just spill out of him in a torrent are simply too big to fit into a typically-sized head all at once. He has entire essays just filed away ready to go when the opportunity presents itself.

You push the wrong button (or is it the right one?) and suddenly a twenty-minute dissertation on the topic just pops out. And do not interrupt him!

And his pontifications [editor's note, cough, cough: polemics] have digressions that are sort of the point, but also supplementary to the point, and wait! What were we talking about? My brain struggles to grok.

He's written heaps of stuff. Emails so long you age noticeably before reaching the end. If you're the kind who shaves and you shaved before you began reading, well, it's time to shave again when you finish.

Oh, look! It's dark out. When did that happen?

We've tried getting him to blog, but blogging for no-one-knows-who (anyone at all?) is boring, and he soon loses steam and gets distracted. I think it's because he doesn't know who he's writing for.

So last week I suggested that he write to me.

If it works, then I'll have the textbook, and I can pass the CHARLES LIFE PROFICIENCY TEST™️ that I've always suspected is coming.

I might even learn a thing or two.

Either way, I'm the Hannah of Hannah and Charles. Nice to meet you.

Notes

Frieda Rich was a friend of Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts cartoon. She was also a character in the Peanuts strip who was always bragging about her naturally curly hair. Mysteriously, she disappeared from the comic — never to appear again — the same year that Hannah was born. You do the math.