Turning 30 - "Am I Where I Expected Myself to Be?"
30 is one of those milestone ages that makes us question every decision we’ve made in our lives. Trapped inside our own heads we look at our regrets under a microscope, taking stock of the growth and decay of our insecurities. 30 forces us to be honest with ourselves because between all the excuses we’ve made over the years, the time has kept on ticking. We finally ask ourselves: Am I where I expected myself to be at 30?
I think most of us would say, “hell no! I expected to have a stable job, a significant other, and maybe even a house that would soon become a home.” Turning 30 feels like a slap in the face to our youth and the mistakes we’ve made but in reality it’s a valuable signpost for the measure of our progress. We need reality checks like 30 because otherwise we could go on making excuses while nobody listens.
I personally stopped making excuses early, probably around 19 when I was academically suspended from my first university, SUNY Cortland. Ironically enough, I still consider this mistake one of the best things that happened to me because it gave me a reality check that I very much needed. For the next couple years, I proceeded to take time off from school, eventually enrolling back in a community college while taking on various jobs to identify my strengths and weaknesses. I would later get accepted into an Ivy League institution only to turn them down and finish my undergraduate studies at the top of my class at CUNY Hunter in New York City. The whole arc of those 11 years began with a reality check and now I’m taking stock of my choices.
The only promise I made to myself by 30 was to become an internationally known poet. Well, in November 2017, with the help of my fiancé, Heather, that became a reality when we published The Immeasurable Cookbook and sent copies to readers in Austria, Paraguay, and Portugal. It was a high bar to set but I cleared it because I chose a good partner in Heather and always used writing as a platform to express my thoughts and channel my creativity.
Despite this achievement, the thing I’m most proud of at the age of 30 is my peace of mind. Through my study of philosophy and my ten years of experience in hospitality I have recognized that mental health is our crown achievement given the complexity and perplexity of the human mind. I’ve made most of my decisions from a rational disposition, but I’ve always consulted my conscience as a valuable litmus test for my happiness. I believe that without our conscience, rationality can lead to cold, steely, logical conclusions; yet without our rationality, our emotions can steer us towards the volatile polarities in life. My peace of mind comes from a drive to strike a balance, harkening to the doctrine of the mean from Aristotle and remembering that a happy life depends on a steady ship in rough waters.
By 30 I have lived all around the United States, experienced love and heartbreak, success and failure, and the boring stuff in between. I’m getting married in October 2018 to a partner who helps me stay focused on long term goals while I keep the ship steady. With our eyes on the horizon we’re charting a course ready for a storm, yet carrying the reflection of the sunset in our eyes. A reality check doesn’t have to be a bad thing as long as you realize you have to adjust your sails.
Diversifying Your Set of Skills
2.23.18
I don’t know if the fort will ever come down at this point, it’s getting cozier by the day. Aside from that, I’ve been running around the past couple days, attending interviews, sending out resumes and trying to stay disciplined to a minimum amount of words per day.
My newly found ambition all stemmed from a conversation I had with Heather the first day I
decided to start this glorified journal.
For the past few months, I have been chasing full-time jobs like a drug addict chasing a high and each time I have gotten excited, thinking, “I’m going to get this one,” the job is pulled a little further, just out of reach. Heather has helped me see that this focus on one full-time job is too singular and because of that, the other things I devote my time to, i.e. writing, local politics, seem even more laborious. Rather than focusing on getting part-time work in all three fields I care about, I’ve been putting all my eggs in one basket, dividing my mind into a competition of my interests rather than developing each of them individually.
Diversifying your career path is a skill that comes easy to Heather as she has been doing it since she was a teenager. For her, it made a lot of sense to develop photography alongside her equestrian training because she couldn’t see herself risking her body day-in- and-day-out for an entire career. Thus, she came across photography, which is now the main source of income—but she kindly reminds me that it wasn’t always this way
At the beginning of Heather’s photography career, she was willing to work for free or for peanuts and accepted jobs that others in the industry did not want to take. It was difficult because she still needed to make a living wage, but she was willing to do what she had to do to in order to gain experience. Jim Carrey has a quote something along the lines of, “you can fail at something you don’t like, so why not try and fail at something you do like?” It would’ve been easier for Heather to stay as an equestrian, but she thought about her life 20 years from then and had deduced that while it may’ve been easier in the short term, it would’ve been crippling in the long run to rely on one source of income. Ironically, failure for Heather meant limiting herself to one full-time position.
Now as I chase several jobs in each of my respective fields I feel more whole, engaging in conversations that cover an array of my interests rather than constraining myself to one. As I commit further to the development of my writing, political, and hospitality careers I also envision it all under one unifying umbrella in the future that Heather had the foresight to see at a much younger age. Framing my future in the context of an attaining elusive single goal has been a paralyzing approach of mine for years, but thanks to Heather, I may just be breaking free. Instead of looking at what I need, I’ve begun to look at how I can develop my interests in the diversification of my time, personality, and ideally, the stability of my financial future.
Apollo Fields Wedding Photographers
3.12.18 - Bean Fosters – Golden, CO ~ 11:06 AM MT
It’s weird how a letter on a typewriter feels more real than a note typed into a word processor. Something about the tangible ink slapped onto the page one neat character at a time that delivers finality to your words. Typing on a typewriter forces you to arrange your thoughts in real time, creating a sense of emergency that nudges your mind to move forward rather than laterally.
Once you organize the first few words of a sentence and you like them enough you put them down and you figure the rest out as you go. Before you know it your fingers are splashing all over the keyboard and little tiny metallic pangs are echoing throughout the room until a delicate chime rings to delay the creative symphony for a few seconds.
There is definitely something more present about typing on a typewriter. On a computer with WiFi your mind is being torn to the sides, “come hang out in the periphery of the Internet where you won’t have to work so hard,” it calls to us. But being lucid enough to arrange your thoughts with a focus where you can’t believe your fingers are actually moving with purposeful conviction feels like a submission to the magical creative element that eludes the amateur artist. It’s funny that returning to a more primitive, real technology can trigger the magic that lives inside of us.
As I type this in Word Processor, I am constantly fumbling my thoughts, going back into my sentences and reworking them, never allowing my mind to uninhibitedly flow forward. Real time editing grants me the godlike power to alter the creative process and assure that I don’t make any silly or clunky mistakes. The problem with that is that it interferes with the free flowing creativity that is necessary to any worthy piece of work. It would seem unnatural to see a painter go back over their work and erase a stroke of the brush. When a painter dips their brush into a palate and splash it onto a canvas they mean it; when I write on a typewriter, plucking at the keys, I mean it.
A real element is lost in the creative process when it lives in the electrons of a screen, separating our hands from our creation. It is a similar transition in social media where we immerse ourselves in a world of appearances, a world that feels real, but isn’t. It gives us this sense of partial familiarity because the importance of the real is lost in the robotic 1’s and 0’s of binary code.
There’s nothing wrong with waiting for creativity to circle back around, sitting in discomfort as it orbits your mental grasp, just like there’s nothing wrong with admitting to something painful that’s happened in your life on social media. But the electronic cursor that prods your mind, blinking in your face like a cruel mockery of your stagnant creativity is akin to the way that the world of positive appearances mocks your negative experiences. A refusal to accept the real thrusts your existence into a world of appearances that seeks only to satisfy surface level gratification, ignoring the deeper concepts of our lives that wind up plaguing our minds into a cycle of consumptive passivity.
Allow pain to enter your mind and let seeds of creativity take on some water before you abandon their growth. Simpler times seem nostalgic because our minds were more engaged, more responsible when we didn’t have crutches to carry us along in our lives. It’s hard to argue for the welcoming of pain into one’s life, so think of it as an invitation to the real; a return to experience rather than appearance, because experience is where we derive meaning from and in the end we all want to lead meaningful lives. Don’t let the electrons mock you into a passive life. Move forward, not laterally.