Professional Overthinker. Semi-Professional Pizza Enthusiast.
/At some point I started signing my emails that way and nobody said anything, so I kept doing it.
It started as a joke. Or at least that's what I told myself. But jokes have a way of being more honest than the stuff you actually mean to say. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a bit.
Professional overthinker is the polite version of what happens in my head on any given Wednesday. It's not anxiety, exactly. It's more like... I take the long route on everything. Decisions, conversations, ideas I had three years ago that I'm still turning over. There's a version of this that's exhausting, and yes, I've met that version. But there's also a version where you notice things other people skip past, where you catch the thread that everyone else dropped. I've made peace with the fact that my brain doesn't really have an idle mode. The "professional" part just means I've learned to use it.
Semi-professional pizza enthusiast is doing something different. That one's a deflation. On purpose. Because if the first half of the tagline takes itself a little seriously, the second half has to remind you and me not to. Pizza isn't a metaphor. I just genuinely love pizza. The comfort of it, the lack of pretense. Nobody overthinks a good slice. You just eat it. There's something almost meditative about that for a person like me.
The gap between "professional" and "semi-professional" is where I actually live. Fully committed to the thinking, loosely committed to the pizza credentials. One foot in, one foot out. Committed to the thinking, casual about the crust.
Probably overthought this post a little, but the pizza I had while writing it was excellent.
Man, I love eating The P.