This week I took a chance. I stepped out on a limb and decided to write these words without any obligation for editing. No editing makes me cringe. The incorrect grammar and secret emotions that might slip out through the ink of my pen, the type of my hands, worries me. But lately I’ve been so focused on being edited, that I haven’t allowed myself to be free, to be open, to be wrong, and to still be okay.
In a last ditch effort to save any real chance at a love life, I’ve resorted to picking up guys on the subway. Most recently I’ve decided to let tall, dark-eyed men know whenever they accidentally drop something out of their pockets. Pockets which they awkwardly never have. [Excerpt]
Whatever you believe about gay people (or black people or Jewish people or poor people or whoever is different from yourself), I don’t give one singular damn. Regardless of your personal views, I am asking you to accept and help everyone now. This is the only way to lighten our darkened world. [Excerpt]
I found out the hard way, receiving awards and impressive remarks often becomes an addiction, an enslavement of the mind. The more you do, the more you feel the need to do, to stay ahead of others and your past self. And when you're not doing, you feel worthless to the world. It's one thing to be build a resume to get into college or to get a good job, it's another thing to believe that resume gives you self-worth. We live as social profiles unable or unwilling to admit that Saturday night we did nothing. Looking back, tennis was trying to free me from those future expectations. [Excerpt]
When the dust settles and all the background noise fades into silence, and you're left sitting there by yourself, what do you say?
It's the thoughts that you have in these moments that decide where you will go in this new year. So, tell yourself a good story. Say to yourself that you've got gifts worth sharing with the world. [Excerpt]
This is a story.
Charcoal clouds circled in the valley from high above the city’s center. A man, a little older than the both of us, stood on his doorstep in a town miles away and watched the black veil stretch from the infinite sky down to the ground below and violently swirl east to west and west to east, but always being brought back towards the center by some unseen force. The clouds moved so quickly he wasn’t sure they were moving at all.
Squinting his eyes, he witnessed the clouds pass over far away buildings, and when they had moved on, there was no sight of the previously familiar buildings. No steeples, no towers blocking his view through the valley now. [Excerpt]
I have an unhealthy obsession with seeing average people win needless crap. The more
average the person and the more needless the crap, the higher my brain’s serotonin spikes. [Excerpt]
I’d already been to hell twice in my life by my 18th birthday. My first trip was near the end of high school, back when gas prices averaged a buck thirty-five and Kelly Clarkson was busy being crowned the first American Idol. These factors coupled together would eventually equal my escape from childhood: my first car on the wide open road, me inside belting ballads.
But not before I first paid one hell of a visit to American Legion Boys State in The Sticks, Tennessee. If inside my car was a place I could reinvent myself, then Boys State was the place where I could try just being ‘one of the guys’. And that’s all I secretly wanted for my sixteen-year-old wretched self. [Excerpt]
Growing up I never knew quarter-life crises were a legit thing. I’d only ever heard of the mid-life variety that gifted men with new red sports cars. Recently I’ve learned that the quarter-life strain of crises are far less shiny, except for the shine of prematurely balding heads. The quarter-life crisis isn’t a secret because it’s uncommon. It’s a secret because we’re not ready to admit that we’re breakable.
Every now and then I still have horrific flashbacks to the seven seconds that set off my own quarter life crisis a few years ago.... [Excerpt]
The Negativity Cleanse is a 30-day manifesto for attracting positivity into your life. It signifies getting rid of the junk that’s been collecting in your mind. It’s not about other people and what “they” do to you or in your presence. It’s not about controlling their actions; it’s about having self-control in order to improve yourself. It’s much easier to point fingers towards other people and blame them for the negative in your life. But at the end of the day, you are the only one in control of your mindset, so it’s up to you (and only you) what you will focus on. [Excerpt]
There’s something about the quiet stillness on Sunday nights that forces us to look within. If we are wanting to reach a higher potential, we must make room for better than the present. We must sink into the uncomfortable stillness and let it open up doors. It’s easy to get too busy to ever feel this stillness, to ever feel the discomfort that comes from wrestling with our dreams, and that’s exactly why we must. Living in the middle of New York City, I’ll attest to the fact that the world’s noise is unending. Too often we give up on hearing our inner voice and follow everyone else’s instead. [Excerpt]
Secretly I like to think that the hope of the gift and what it represents is really what we’re after. To know that we are loved. When we feel loved, we want to become the best versions of ourselves. And Jess makes me want to be my better version. [Excerpt]
I never expected to be the gay one. In between all the Sunday school, youth group and Fellowship of Christian Athletes’ events, being gay wasn’t quite outlined in my plans. [Excerpt]
We feared getting the same diseases, sometimes talking ourselves into panic attacks, not realizing that we already had the worst of them. The disease that is fear. Now pictured as the fear of growing older, or the lesser fear of dying. The fear of being alone. The fear that decisions that we made yesterday, or last week, or last year have somehow led us to a place that isn’t quite what we expected. That they now haunt us as we’re running out of time. [Excerpt]
There’s more to it than subway maps and spiritual cycling. My first year in New York has been quite the whirlwind. But in between the heights of steel and emotions, I’ve had a good amount of space to sink down deep into my own awareness and think about my journey. If we turned back time 365 days, here are the five lessons that I would aim to teach myself at the start of this adventure. [Excerpt]
Three-hundred and sixty five days - and I’d like to underline each one of them. One year in many ways feels like one month, feels like a decade. It’s been nothing like the expectations I had laid out in my head, but much more. Coming home makes for good reflecting time away from the city. The past one year has been a rollercoaster of courage, fear, faith, loneliness, meditation, gratitude, joy and pure freedom embedded within new experiences, friends, job, home, and a new mindset. [Excerpt]
There’s a tree outside my apartment window in New York. I have no idea what kind of tree it is, but it looks like a million tiny ferns crawled up onto its branches and planted themselves into its bark. A million tiny ferns that were now bright yellow, as if they were protesting the summer sunshine to return to our street. [Excerpt]
It's up here, between bushes and bricks, that I've been able to see more clearly during this somewhat morning ritual of mine. Runners fly past, and I can tell. Some of them are running towards something - they have this vision in their eyes, hopes for something up ahead. Others, I can tell, are running from something. From the person they are, or were. I guess that's really how we all ended up here. One or the other. [Excerpt]
October is my favorite year, err month, for a million different reasons. Mostly involving the saturation of colors and football, of friends and food. My first October in the city was certainly no exception. I felt like the luckiest boy in the world to have 8 friends visit in October. If you visited, please don't let that number diminish the fact that you were here. After all, you are my favorite. I'm ever thankful for the memories we were able to share. [Excerpt]
Fall. Everyone's favorite culture. Even the textiles seem softer and smoother and more gentle on the skin. As if the air itself tastes like grace. Cathartic clouds -- turquoise sheets draped behind gray piles of cumulonimbus lace. A cool breeze blowing through, carrying us back to high school football games and bonfires on beaches where we've never been, but we always imagined that we did. The feeling of a thousand memories inhaled in one whiff, the taste of sweet nostalgia and college meal plans. [Excerpt]
