# From the Start

My name is Brennan Letkeman. I was born in the winter of 1993 in a small prairie town called Medicine Hat, in western Canada.

![look at this hairless monkey](https://1001113621-files.gitbook.io/~/files/v0/b/gitbook-legacy-files/o/assets%2F-LTsRfJoEkXZxnm4DrDh%2F-Lc8Iy2ireI5E_TM5k6j%2F-Lc8JKaXpcxaHClLugQW%2Fbrennan%20baby.jpg?alt=media\&token=f2544369-3040-473a-9741-39d1a5641451)

### Early Years

* I went to public school and was one grade ahead because of my birth date.
* I was raised evangelical protestant, the church was a big part of my community growing up.
* I had the two best parents in the world, really.
* In grade three the class had a field trip to my house because my dad was building a robot vehicle for the military and seeing the hydraulics move was the coolest thing ever.
* Growing up I had a ton of Lego and How It Works books, which informed the rest of my life building and creating mechanical things.
* Scholastic Book Fair was magic, I devoured books
* We rode bikes to school in the warm seasons, I've loved bikes my whole life

### Growing Up

* In junior high I was introduced to Photoshop, which at that time was very basic.
* In high school I was introduced to AutoCAD and later found Blender from the Gamemaker forums
* I was one of those kids who didn't really study and finished his homework the morning of, because the nights before were spent doing Blender stuff, which felt infinitely more useful.
* Somehow I accidentally graduated with first-class honours.
* My friend and I won gold in Skills Canada for video editing, went to provincials to compete.
* I had a paper route in the morning, a part-time job at Sears selling electronics and in the summers got my first more 'real' job doing web design with a local CMS startup / studio which I did for three years.

### Moving On

* in 2010 I moved to Calgary, Alberta to attend SAIT for mechanical design
* Had a lot of fun, met great friends and colleagues who are still more core network today
* Investigated deeply and eventually left Christianity
* Started and wrote the Acrylo Design Blog for a few years, wrote a *ton* every single day
* Graduated and was quickly hired designing police and emergency vehicle interior gear: the consoles and articulating arms and whatnot to mount laptops and siren controllers and guns etc.
* Worked there for 3.75 years, eventually becoming bored and - in hindsight - pretty depressed
* Lost the job, decided I wanted to freelance instead of looking for another desk to hold down
* As of this writing, this is my fourth year freelancing and it's going great

### The Future

It's taken me this long - honestly, shockingly recently - to realize that I'm allowed to just, like, *want* stuff?

I've never really wanted anything before, partly because the basics were all neatly provided for, and because I grew up knowing that "nothing could fill that happiness hole in all of our hearts" (besides Jesus, but I left him too) so I had just internalized a sort of nihilism about searching / finding anything.

Not wanting things is pretty zen, but having accomplished the lower Maslow things, I have discovered that without striving there's mostly just boredom and navel gazing which aren't super useful for either me nor the world / community around us.

So that's my next phase in life: find things to want, worth wanting, and then striving to get them.

Let's find harder problems and solve them together.