There is an object somewhere that you used to carry.

A notebook, a journal, a planner, a set of letters, a tape, a photograph, a book. It contained, when you were twenty-two or twenty-three, sentences you had written about how you wanted to live. Not goals. Not plans. Disposition sentences, the kind that begin I want to be the kind of person who. You stopped carrying the object somewhere in your late twenties. You do not remember exactly when. You remember, faintly, that you opened it once on a Sunday and read your own twenty-three-year-old voice and felt embarrassed. You put the object somewhere, a drawer, a shelf, a box at your parents' house, and you did not look at it again.

You had been carrying your own compass, and you had been embarrassed enough by what it pointed at that you had buried it.

I went looking for a charger one afternoon, decades later, and I found mine. I read it from the first page to the last. There were a hundred and forty pages and a few were blank. I was not exactly crying, I was doing the thing right before crying that men of my age and culture have spent their lives mastering as a substitute, which involves looking up at the ceiling and breathing carefully through the nose.

What I had thrown into that drawer was not a journal. A journal is a record. What I had thrown into that drawer was a list of what I valued, written by the version of me who still had access to the question.

I had spent the better part of three decades building a life around values I had stopped consulting, on the grounds that consulting them embarrassed me.

The thing I got wrong, when I had thrown that object away, was that I had thought I was throwing away a youth. What I had thrown away was a compass.

The question I still cannot answer is how many people are walking around right now with the same drawer.