I'm drawn to edge cases in cartography — the places where maps struggle or fail. Terra incognita regions, where uncertainty was named rather than disguised. Disputed territories shown differently by different governments. The places where the same geographic space carries multiple incompatible names and stories. These edges tell you more about how knowledge actually works than any confident center does. I've started thinking about other forms of knowledge this way too: where are the edges, what's being left blank, whose projection is this?

This space is a map I'm making as I go — neither complete nor objective, shaped by what I choose to include and what I leave at the edges. I'm not claiming to represent reality accurately. I'm representing my particular perspective on it, with all the choices and distortions that implies. If you're someone who finds that honesty interesting rather than alarming, who understands that all maps are partial and are still useful — then I think you'll find something worth orienting toward here.

The thing that changed how I see maps — and eventually everything — was learning that the Mercator projection, the one most of us grew up with, makes Europe look almost twice as large relative to Africa as it actually is. Europe at roughly ten million square kilometers is shown comparable in size to Africa at thirty million. The math was done for navigational reasons, but the psychological effect has been enormous: generations of people with a distorted intuition about relative scale, about what's large and what's small in the world. Maps don't describe reality. They participate in constructing it.

Every cartographic choice embeds a value judgment: what gets a name and what doesn't, what's at the center and what's at the edges, what level of detail a region receives, what's considered worth mapping at all. Medieval maps put Jerusalem at the center not because the mapmakers were confused about geometry but because they were mapping meaning rather than space. Modern maps claim objectivity while making equally loaded choices. Understanding this hasn't made me trust maps less — it's made me read them more carefully, the way learning about rhetoric makes you a better reader of any persuasive text.

What I look for in people is spatial awareness of a different kind — the ability to understand where they are in a conversation, in a relationship, in their own emotional geography. Those who can locate themselves accurately rather than just asserting positions without reference points. Tell me something you used to be certain about that turned out to require re-mapping. Tell me where you are right now, not geographically but actually — what territory you're in, what's charted and what isn't. These are the questions I find most alive.