I feel like I spent my late teens and early twenties collecting afflictions, while my late twenties were spent divesting myself of them. It was a tremendous amount of work.

I had an absolutely fantastic day. I couldn’t have asked, or planned, for a better day. I seem to be having a lot of good days lately. Not ‘wow it feels like I just won the lottery’ kind of days, but rather ones in which I feel a contentment reaching down to my soul. It’s been wonderful. I’ve never felt like I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing and that my life is headed exactly where I want it to go before now. All I need to do is keep doing what I’m doing – which requires quite a bit of work, but if I do I’ll get to where I want to be. Unlike the insidious afflictions I spent so much time collecting and solidifying as part of my life, I now actively seek out things to better myself and my situation. I’ve been able to break the self-destructive cycle that had me completely entrenched and kept me sick. I’m staring down some major changes in my life and I’m ready for them. I’m ready to see what the next phase is going to be and where it takes me. I’m excited to discover what the universe and my higher power have in store for me. I have a feeling it’s going to be an unforgettable ride.

I’ve been updating this site for just under 4 weeks now. The updates didn’t get the focus I’d have liked to give them while I was out East since I was tired and writing them on my phone. Now that I’m going to be spending a lot of time laid up, my goal is to start reflecting more on the past and projecting out to the future.

I think I was about 23 when I decided to start meeting with a therapist again. Previous experiences with them had always been short lived, but my life was beyond unmanageable so I needed to try something. I’d definitely say I was living in crisis mode and simply trying to make it through the day. From past experiences with therapists I knew I was best off walking in and laying it all on the table from the start, which is exactly what I did. In the very first session I admitted I was an active alcoholic, that I’d been suffering from bulimia for the past ten years and was currently binging and purging on copious amounts of food up to 5 times a day, and that I’d been diagnosed as bipolar just a few years earlier and the experience had basically destroyed me. I also told her I am gay.

In that first session she asked me to imagine life a year in the future. If I could be doing anything I wanted with my life what would that look like? If I wrote her a postcard in a year to let her know how things were going, what would it say? I couldn’t answer the question. I had no hope for the future and it wasn’t just that I couldn’t verbalize hopes and dreams I had, it was that I wasn’t able to even have them. Looking back at that now I realize how utterly devastated I was at that point. At the time it didn’t seem like it was a big deal.

I have hopes and dreams now. Things I want to accomplish in this lifetime and that I’m working towards. Many of them are still taking shape and changing as I learn more about myself and where I want my life to go, but the forward momentum continues to push me towards that end.