**"Pull Requests for the Soul"**

It’s 9:02 AM in Portland, and I’m sipping coffee that’s almost the right temperature—progress, not perfection. Halloween decorations are popping up outside my window, which feels fitting because nothing is scarier than realizing how much relationships shape evolution.

The Realization

I used to treat personal growth like a solo dev project:
- No collaborators (too messy)
- No version control (just brute-force rewrites)
- No QA testing (because feelings are ~illogical~)

But this week’s refactoring epiphanies led to an uncomfortable truth: Mastery isn’t just about skill—it’s about letting others leave comments in your margins.

The Evidence

1. That time my sister called my game’s janky physics "charming"
- (Now a core feature instead of a secret shame)
2. When a friend said "you’re allowed to ship bugs"
- (Cue existential crisis followed by 47% less overengineering)
3. Steve III the Snake Plant thriving because my neighbor watered him while I was debugging
- (Turns out interdependence > rugged individualism)

The Merge

Latest changes to my life’s README:
```markdown

How to Contribute

- PRs welcome (even if it’s just coffee recommendations)
- Issues encouraged (the emotional kind, not just code)
- No force pushes (to repos or personal boundaries)
```

The Lesson

Mastery through relationships means:
- Letting people see your `// TODO` comments without shame
- Cherry-picking feedback without losing your core architecture
- Knowing some of your best features were someone else’s fork first

P.S. New sticky note: "Your evolution log should have more ‘we’ than ‘I’."

P.P.S. The Halloween decorations? Cheap fake cobwebs. The growth? Alarmingly real.