Today marks the start of the MIT Mystery Hunt, an event I haven’t played in for five years but that I helped run last year since my team won in 2023. That January 2023, after six months at a job that was not going to work out and where other societal changes had me very hypomanic again, I escaped to Pasadena, California to gather thoughts and maybe play remotely. While walking the streets late at night, sensing the homeless problem and my own poor mental health, I wondered again about a particular set of messages I wrote to my ex-girlfriend in the days, week, and month after my mother’s death from cancer.

Considering my life like a Mystery Hunt puzzle, I wondered if James Joyce the fifteenth and ChatGPT21 came together to try to answer this prompt: “A complicated and solitary man, ‘TS’, trained at {schools} in {subjects} who enjoyed {books/authors}, {movies}, …, struggled with {moral/scientific questions}, has just lost his mother ‘suddenly’ to cancer after about a 15-year battle with the disease. During this time, certain aspects of his relationship to his parents and friends had changed but he hadn’t fully processed them. Present three works TS wrote and sent to ‘his X’, an important relationship from his past, to represent his grieving process. The works are in the style of a lost ‘child’ looking for solace, a scientist trying to analyze the unexplainable, and a friend that has contained (perhaps without processing) the events and returned to an individualistic communication style shared by TS and X. Bonus points for sharing the kind of message X might send to TS to help the transition back to normality.”

Now the prompting needs some work, but maybe there are points when people identify a reference I must know because of a particular sentence or word I use a certain way. Maybe the darker parts aren’t original to me, just subconsciously plagiarized and even that would be interesting as my brain is an aggregator far more than a creator but people ascribe me a huge level of intelligence because I sound like I know what a thousand people think. However it went, I did get checked into a hospital that January over Mystery Hunt weekend as I needed to be sleeping, had not brought the proper medication, and also didn’t understand my condition in anything like the ways I think I do now. There’s a lot more to it than this letter exchange, but so much of my last seven years has been reengaging with the emotions of these three letters and the good and bad they reveal about me. My own struggles and successes have advanced a far bit past this most important event in my life in my last 30s, but there is no doubt this is the most important writing for someone studying my life to consider as I still do.

None of you are probably studying Thomas Snyder in that way, so you should probably not read this deeply sad and possibly profound missive. You could start with tmsnyder FAQ or really just go solve some sudoku. But I need these words to be public and I didn’t start this series without knowing today might be an important conclusion to my oversharing.