My head is an animal

The last two-ish years have been some of the most difficult but most necessary years of my life.

2016

-Graduated college: BA in English Lit with minors in Journalism and Writing.

-Got a big boy job @ the government: In the Public Information Office of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

-Bought a house: Minutes from work, safe distance from toxic family, and at an unbelievable bargain.

-Leveled up freelancing: Finally stopped prospecting and Jeff asked me to take the lead on a podcast project AND a video series project at CAC.

-Leveled up at DNR: I was asked to design, illustrate, and compile an entire annual report for the Michigan Legislature.

2017

-Choked on work: Quickly realized I had bit off way more than I could chew and started pounding natty daddies and staying up for days at a time trying to keep up. 

-Family infected me anyway: Showing up unannounced at my house, dragging me into drama, guilting me for not spending all my time with them–the usual toxic narcissism.

-Choked personally: Drinking a bunch, becoming hostile, impatient, and mean; eating garbage, not exercising, berating my relationship, acting out, growling at my partner and projecting all my frustration into my environment.

-Lost my big boy job: The Trump administration took office and slashed our federal funding at the DNR, so I was obviously among the first to get laid off having only worked there for a year. Goodbye 401k.

-Lost love: Let my partner down big time and drove away the only person who ever loved me as much as I loved them, the woman I wanted so badly to marry and do life with with, and who is–to this day and without question–the only person I know I had the real thing with. And yet I don’t blame her one bit for leaving (which if you’re curious, I handled desperately and pathetically).

-Got an DUI: Equipped with the most profoundly broken heart I could have imagined, an empty house I no longer knew what to do with, a steady job on it’s way out the door, and a family of (really great and loyal) alcoholic quasi-narcissists, I started caring less and less about pretty much anything I still had going for me and got busted with an Operating While Visibly Impaired (OWVI) charge–which is like a DUI that hasn’t gone through puberty.

2018

-Took care of the DUI (16-weeks of counseling, probo period, and a fuckload of fines and fees). 

-Decided to fast from alcohol for the whole year to assure myself that I won’t literally drink myself to death someday like my Mom did.

-Started full-time with Jeff and the team (he even offered health benefits!)

-Rented out the Lansing house (which is totally paid off now!) to a young family of five and moved in with my cousin back in Grand Rapids to be closer to Jeff and co., and further from my family (with the exception of my baby sister Betsy who started attending my alma mater).

-Started part-time at a hotel I worked at in college

-Started part-time in the marketing department at AQ

-Made a really good friend who wanted more, and I at least tried to get back into the dating scene for a number of months, but we are still great friends and I’m proud that I did the terrifying thing and put myself out there.

-Got an nice, affordable, and oversized 1 bedroom apartment that came with a free gym membership :-)

Goals for 2019

-Quit the hotel where I’m not really doing any growing, and focus solely on creative and the vision Jeff and I have for CAC.

-Do some general counseling on my own to work through some stuff, like still having dreams about my ex who I think about a lot (but who literally disdains me to hell and has cut me out completely) and just making sure I’m letting go of all that and the fact that I’ll literally never see her again or get any kind of closure and being at real honest peace with that, and everything else of the last few years I might need to revisit.

-Maybe get a pet?

-Update the house so it’s ready to sell in 2020 if I decide to go that route.

-Take at least one trip to Texas to see my friends.

-Ask for help more often than I need to and not isolate myself socially like I tend to when things get busy.

-Pay off my remaining student debt.

-Maintain the steady progress I’ve made in my relationship with Jesus as a stronger practitioner of love, patience, mercy, and kindness, and basically just continue to grow every day in my faith and as a man.

-Get a new tattoo

-Get Elon Musk to retweet me

-Definitely get that pet

jpegjohn:

“Sitting across from him in the library, I catch his eyes lingering on the rim of my coffee cup, and my quizzical look nudges him to explain himself. “Does leaving lipstick marks on stuff feel good? It seems like it would.” My mind wanders backward to watching my mother put her terracotta lipstick on in the rear view mirror of her Jeep on the way to church, late as usual. To sitting under the table at my aunt’s Mary Kay parties that were held at my house when her apartment was barely big enough for her to live in. To seeing the stains left on my grandmother’s milk glasses at dinner and her beer bottles on the front porch. To people I’m connected to without knowing, to whomever else wears Euphoria 308 by Covergirl, to rites of passage that pass unnoticed, to the first boy who wore my smudges on his cheek, and the first girl. To showing my cousin which shades look best with his skin tone in the downstairs bathroom at Christmas. “Yeah, it does,” I say. “It feels pretty good.””

—

Marking My Territory
Yours, Darcy (via wide-openpoetry)

Best friend Darcy got me feeling shit when she pays this close attention to me.

Their name is Ezra now. Still loving me but from way too far away.

nitrons:

me flirting: u make me feel less dead

(via jpegjohn)

jpegjohn:

“Please don’t make fun when I tell you something true.”

— Ernest Hemingway,  Across the River and into the Trees (via wordsnquotes)

(Source: wordsnquotes.com)

theclassicsreader:

“I woke up in the morning and I didn’t want anything, didn’t do anything, couldn’t do it anyway, just lay there listening to the blood rush through me and it never made any sense, anything.”

— Richard Siken from “Straw House, Straw Dog”

un-blessed:

““Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake and dress them in warm clothes again. How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running until they forget that they are horses. It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio, how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces. Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means we’re inconsolable. Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us. These, our bodies, possessed by light. Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”

—

 Richard Siken, Crush

(via un-blessed)