Today marks the last day of my 28th year. A year from now my 20’s will be taken out back and shot in the head. Then in an act of awakening I will rise from my bed with a whiskey headache and I will drink a gallon of water, realizing that I had made it to my 30’s…..However, we are still a year away and currently I am still 28, heading into 29 which is my 20’s on their last crippled leg.
The first half of my 20’s were wild. This second half has been quiet on the front. A quiet filled with dismay, despair, and just the shadows of depression. Also a lack of sleep comes and goes one week of every month. I watch from the outside as my friends run off with their plans and I sit or stand where I should at wedding tables. They run away with their ‘plan’ and I watch the sun go down, then I watch it rise again, all the while typing on my phone or laptop with a voice echoing in the deep cave that is my brain and it yells “Why have you forsaken me?”
Of course I am talking to myself (I think) and only Yours Truly is to blame, but am I really? I chose a path and a ‘plan’ that has been scribbled down in a notebook, surrounded by outlines, stories, notes, interviews, quotes, drawings, poems, songs, and Fantasy Football draft boards. I had a beer or two with an old friend recently and this person said to me, “You always wanted to run off and leave everything behind you, become someone. I believed you, but here you still sit.”
Could I really get mad at that? Yeah, I suppose, but that is logic that is not good for the soul, but the fire it burns is substantial. My distorted thoughts and emotions feed off that better than anything, so thank you, I love you.
I once believed that I have always lived for the moment, but that was never true. The truth is my fears, doubts, dreams, goals, and choices have always haunted me, stunting my choices. All of the choices I have made in the last 10 years have been wrong. I was never living in that moment. I am going to try though. I want 29 to be it.
Happy Birthday Tyler
“If you want to conquer fear, do not sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy. You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror.’ ” -Dale Carnegie
In The Spider's Web 