DO YOU FEEL weird inside? We do. All the time. Sometimes we call it depression. Sometimes we call it anxiety. Sometimes we just call it “The Woog.” As in “I’m feelin’ Woogie today.” At the core of this weird feeling is a sense that there are, at minimum, two people inside of us at war. And we don’t know how to make them get along.

“I’m gonna stay up all night and write and put on my weird hat and two different socks and smoke weed and eat cereal and maybe pizza too and try to crack a new kind of story and make something fascinating and different and I don’t care if I never make any money because I’m an artist who is trying to represent the underrepresented and create empathy for all….”

And.

“I probably should go back to business school. And learn how to buy and sell companies and make millions and millions and maybe billions and use that money to start charities. This is the better way to live. For others. Not for myself and for my artistic vision. That’s…that’s kind of a load of selfish horseshit in the end….”

And then some other voices start to pop up. And it’s hard to tell if they are subsets of these two main people or if they are actually secondary characters that also live inside of us.

“I just want to live a quiet, simple life with my family. I want to stay home and be there at all times with my kids. Read to them. Cook for and with them. Play board games. Just be a good parent and husband and, in the end, just kinda be…

“TEACHERS! That’s what the world needs now. Leadership for young kids who don’t have positive role models. Give myself and everything I can to them. An innocent child needs a thoughtful role model, and even though I’m not perfect, I am likely willing to give more than what I hear the average burned-out public high school teacher can give, so I should get my teacher’s license and…

“The world is hard enough. Who am I to think I can help and save anyone? I’m just an average-intelligence person trying to get by. It’s enough just to make my own way in the world. I should just go inside myself. Stop talking and start listening. Get small and find a small sliver of happiness in the world and hang on to it for dear…”

You get the picture.

Do you ever feel this way? Hopefully not. And if you don’t, feel free to skip to the next chapter.

But if you do…we want to say sorry. Sorry you feel conflicted like we do. That you are uncertain as to what the right path is in life. Sorry that you want so badly to be useful but also happy. To be inspired but also at peace. To make change but also just get by.

But we also want to say…CONGRATULATIONS! Because, in our opinion, you may just be part of a dying breed. There will be fewer and fewer of you, and because of that and so much more, you are truly special.

Here’s our theory:

When our parents got married, it was a time when people mostly married young. And in many cases, they married without fully vetting whether they would be a good matrimonial fit. Let’s face it, they often got married because their religion said “no sex before marriage” and they really just wanted to start humping and not go to hell for it. They got married because they were sexually attracted to each other. And that attraction was often a result of the “opposites attract” theory. So when we were made, we were made from very different individuals who came together mostly because they liked the way the other smelled, as opposed to any long-lasting traits that made for a sustainable partnership. Hence, the two different people inside of us.

This new generation is different. They are taking longer and longer to find their mate. They are more thoughtful about finding the right partner, and they often don’t get married until age forty or later and have kids soon after. Because of this, they are truly dialing in the perfect mate for themselves. As a result, the people who join up in this generation tend to have many core elements aligned, such as hobbies, interests, family-work values, and personality type. And when this generation has kids, those kids will be a product of the somewhat homogenized personality aspects of their parents. Thus they will be more “of a piece” and suffer less of the frenetic, multiple-personality-esque weird Wooginess that we suffer.

As much as it is a somewhat painful existence to live with the Woog hovering over us, we also kind of love it. We feel that the combination of our goofy, creative, fun-loving mother and our incredibly efficient, intelligent, ass-kicking, type-A attorney father has made us…unique. Our silly, creative engine burns through our mom, and our ability to make it a practical, sustainable business for us and our friends comes directly from our dad.

There was a great bumper sticker in Austin when we lived there that celebrated a zip code of unique Austinites from a specific time and place. It said “78704, Keep Austin Weird.” We take comfort in that bumper sticker when the Woogieman comes to get us. We don’t fight him as much. In fact, we try to let him in now, and celebrate the emotional kaleidoscope in which we live.