I was an only child in Florida, and my first best friend was a computer.

That's not a sad thing. Or maybe it is. But it's the truth. The other kids were out there somewhere; I was in front of a screen, and behind that screen was everyone. The internet was the one place I wasn't alone. I made friends there. The friends I had in real life, we found each other over games, hunched around PCs until somebody's mom killed the lights. And the whole time, I couldn't stop pulling at the same thread: how did the words I typed become a place other people could stand in?

Ninth grade, a web design class handed me the thread's end, and I was gone. MySpace showed up right on time.

Then college gave me my second love: music. I threw events — chased that exact moment when a room full of people loses it to a song. Too many events, honestly. And then I graduated, and all of it — the stage, the crowd, the reason — walked out the door with the cap and gown.

I took a job at Bank of America. Not a branch. A corporate office, fluorescent and silent, the kind of place that measures your life in quarters. I have never hated anything the way I hated being there. I still had the computer. I still had the internet. But the music was gone, and something in me was going quiet.

So I went to shows. Too many shows. It wasn't enough. I wanted back in.

So I started a zine — an actual mid-2010s music zine — and nobody was reading it. To get people there, I had to learn how to be found. That's how SEO walked into my life: not as a career, as a lifeline. And nobody warned me about the part that mattered — it was a puzzle, and I loved it, the exact way I'd loved taking a website apart in ninth grade. The traffic came. Then it flooded. Suddenly I had press passes, a staff of writers, and I was running social for a music YouTube channel three million people followed.

Then it fell apart — creative differences, the way these things always do. But by then I'd spent enough nights backstage that people knew me for my photos, and I started shooting the artists themselves: NGHTMRE, Slander, TOKiMONSTA, Mako, The Chainsmokers. I was 26, standing in the wings with a camera while the bass came up through the floor. It was the best life I could picture.

It also wasn't paying rent.

So I did the grown-up thing. Social for a publisher. Then Fractl, doing SEO and digital PR for real. Then Take 5 poached me, and the career I'm still building started to take shape.

Here's what took me years to see: I never actually gave anything up. People think SEO is the coldest corner of marketing — spreadsheets and algorithms, where the soul goes to die. I look at it and see everything I've ever chased. It's a puzzle, like the zine. It's a stage, like the events. It's an image you build so people can find their way to it, like a photograph. There's real safety in the numbers — but it is so much more art than science.

The lonely kid in Florida never left the keyboard. He just figured out that the machine that kept him company and the music that made him feel alive were the same door the whole time. I walked through it. I'm still walking through it.

I really do love my computer.