Twenty Years Early

I’m building, no wait, curating a collection of highly sought-after Pokémon cards. I started selling my childhood collection a few months ago, and once the easy sells were gone, I got more deliberate about squeezing the most from the rest. These cards were once priceless to me, loved and cared for, which means they’re in great condition and so sell at a premium. It also makes them a little harder to part with.

The kid who sleeved them straight into a binder is still here two decades later, better equipped: gloves to handle them, archival sleeves, a loupe and microscope for every mark on the surface. The tools came over from gemstone analysis, and they’ve continued to refine my understanding of what constitutes value—what’s worth something on name alone, where provenance adds a premium, and how a card is judged and graded purely as physical object.

Part of why the cards I kept are worth anything is that their first audience was children. They were played with, bent, traded, thrown out—like most children’s toys, used until destruction or boredom. Mine survived because the kid I was loved the art enough to protect it. I loved looking at them, watching the slots of my binder fill with the full roster of Pokémon. I never once thought I was doing it so I could sell them later. I did it for the joy of it.

A wave had swelled, and I only noticed when I looked at my collection again.

It’s the franchise’s thirtieth year, and vintage cards are at an all-time high—a younger coworker showed me an app that tracks them like stocks. I only bothered to sell once my side gig in gemstones and jewelry slowed and my primary wage started getting garnished for a debt I couldn’t repay. The wave was luck. The craft on it was mine: high-quality photographs lit to show the card honestly, close-ups on the corners a collector actually checks, the history of the set and why the card matters, the provenance, top-quality packaging ready for display right out of the box—a detail that earned glowing reviews for the presentation alone. Most sellers shoot a single front and a single back and list it, or send it off and let the graders do the selling. My ungraded cards sold well over fair market value—some rivaling the graded ones.

But I’m not here to teach you about that. My experience was never in the guides on how to sell Pokémon on eBay. It isn’t calculated in the aggregated fair market values. It won’t be found in my sales history, in this piece, or in any future reflection. I had this experience and now I’m using it to create a new experience I hope sells at a premium, because it takes time and expertise—and an alignment nobody schedules: luck.

Underneath the luck and the craft sat the part no child could have foreseen and no adult can recreate: the care came twenty years early, paid in time and attention, and it’s the only reason there’s anything here now. If I’d waited for the wave to start caring, it would have been too late—I’d have nothing to ride it with. I didn’t know that then.

I could document it. I could sell you the map right here and you might pay. I could post photos about it and build a brand through image, turn my days into content, curate myself the way I do the cards, and you’d see something complete, polished, compressed, and for the convenience you might pay. I could skip the build entirely—buy a finished collection and flip it. I’d learn only about reselling, nothing about building and assembling a thing. I’d learn how to flip something that holds none of me. Quick, easy, sometimes necessary. I’d be limited to what’s already been created, photographing it better maybe.

But no one is selling the one I’m making; it’s components are scattered across hundreds of listings now. I’d never learn how to build value when it didn’t arrive preassembled and preapproved.

Even if I wrote the manual and passed it on to you, and you followed it to a tee, we wouldn’t be building the same thing and we wouldn’t be building in the same way.

Let language be what it has always been, a map. The terrain reveals itself only underfoot, and only your own feet can carry you on your chosen path. The map can help you avoid a dangerous incline, it can help you plot your course, it cannot walk its lines for you. If it could, every movie you ever watched, book you’ve ever read, speech you’ve ever heard, would suffice. No need to travel—every destination a search away. You could fall in love and break your heart without ever looking into another’s eyes, or feeling their skin against yours, or its absence. You could read memoirs and histories and feel you’d lived a full life without leaving your chair…

I got distracted. Scanned the socials, habitual enough to feel mindless.

I logged onto Threads. In a year or so of consistent posting I grew from 126 followers to a little over 3.1k, and some posts pulled hundreds of thousands of views. It felt good. Then, just like that, they cut the drip off: same effort, same engagement with other profiles, crickets. Stranger still was watching posts hit every benchmark I’d been told leads to reach: quick early engagement, active comments and reposts—run 25% engagement, fifty times what a viral post pulls, and go nowhere. This is the place I went for connection, where many go for connection and promotion. I was raised to be productive, to feel guilty if I invested all this time and energy in something that wouldn’t make money.

Do I sound like I’m talking about people coming together as friends, in a community, as relationship?

I sound like I’m reading a damn PR report.

And what about what never made the screen? The metrics no app measures because it can’t be measured, like the felt quality of my life, the health of my children’s attachment and ongoing development, the degree my fiancée feels loved and seen by me. They don’t make the cut, they don’t even ask about it. It’s not their business, literally. It’s in direct competition with their business, because the more I engage with those in my direct presence, the less I’m pecking my fingers into a black mirror that shows me whatever keeps me staring at it.

I barely post on Threads anymore. To get the initial growth on that platform I followed the guide. I posted 8–16 times a day. I led with authority, “As a gemologist…” (I say that because it’s the only one I have a certificate for; every other experience earned no title—3/4 of a college degree and 5 years of off-the-books applied field study still don’t add up to one). A title can launder authority a man never earned. And the title that holds the most meaningful address of my life—Dad—counts for nothing there.

The certificate hangs on the wall. Dad doesn’t come with one. It’s the background that shapes the whole build, the frame I look through rather than at.

My daughter has been gone this week at an overnight camp for Girl Scouts. I miss her terribly. I’ve sent her notes every day. Every night this week midsummer storms have thundered down, and I’ve felt my heart ache for her. Wondering if she’s scared, if she’s ok, if the other girls are nice, if she knows I love her and am thinking of her and want to give anything to reassure her, especially if she’s scared or having a hard time. They are in cabins without climate control. I imagine the lightning filling the dark square through cracks in the planks, throwing shadows across the walls. And the thunder, nothing to soften it, shaking her small bed and body. And I wonder, in that fear, does she feel my love? Has it been enough for her to find the ground in herself?

That’s my only true job as a parent and fellow being—to provide the safety and structure for her own self to emerge, for her spirit to become embodied, so she may know what it’s like to build and that she has ground to build upon and create what she wishes. Which is the real question under all of it, under the cards and the sleeving and the lots: what am I building? A world, an environment where she is safe and secure and knows she is loved. And I keep asking whether I’m building it outward too, for her and for the world she’ll have to stand in.

I’ve read many of the manuals for that. From how to reparent yourself to how to raise healthy, happy children. Many people sell them. I’ve drowned in my thirst for it. Solid ground never arrived on the pages of a book, or in the calm voice of the recording. The building started on the ground, where I was.

The cards can’t be re-built. Twenty years of handling is set in the surface now. That build is finished—sealed, graded, priced. All I can do is what I’ve been doing: light them well, tell their history true, show them at their bes

That’s when I finally saw it. What made those cards worth anything is what makes anything worth anything. Time. Care. Attention. Meaning. Treating a thing as singular before anyone else agrees it is. Showing what you love in its best light. The reseller and I move the same cardboard; the difference is everything my hands did before the sale and everything they keep doing after. Strip that from the cards and they’re pulp with ink on it. Strip it from a life and see what’s left.

The collection is closed. Nothing else is. Every note I send my daughter, every hour at the bench, every evening the phone goes face-down and I turn toward the people in the room—all of it is a card sliding into a sleeve with care and attention, two decades before anyone calls it valuable. I was building after all. The collection was just where I learned the motion.

Tonight, when the thunder starts, I’ll write her another note. Send it into the storm. My hands have known this motion for twenty years.

Today is twenty years early.