What a wonderful past week I’ve had in NYC. I’ve really enjoyed this reiki class I took. It’s been great to have had a focus these past few days and I met so many wonderful people in the class. I got together with a couple of them before class today and we practiced on each other. I definitely can see myself keeping in touch with the two of them. And, when I do move out here in just a couple weeks, I’ve already made some fun friends in the city!

The past few days I’ve felt less like myself, but today I got my mojo back. I think it was just all the changes and then being back in the city from the perspective of someone who now resides on the East Coast. When I met my friend for the movie yesterday I felt totally boring. Both my sense of humor and my personality were muted. There’s nothing more that I hate than feeling boring – because I’m so not boring. It also reminds me of all those years I lost my sense of humor. I don’t ever want to lose it again. I’m very lucky to have it and I can’t imagine living life without it. It’s definitely a gift.

Gratitude List:
My sense of humor
Opportunities to improve
My higher power placing things in my path that I need.

I’m 30 years old. This is not my first time at the rodeo. As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten much better at trusting my intuition about men and different situations in regards to dating, even when it pains me to cut myself off from people. I know in the end I’ll be better off and avoid more heartbreak if I stop chatting with guys when I first get the impression they are jerking me around.

I’ve been chatting with quite a few different guys on scruff and grindr which are apps on my phone. Only one has really gotten under my skin and by that I mean someone I start to fantasize about meeting, how great they are and how great it would be to fall in love with them. We had plans to get together tonight after my reiki class, but I’d already gotten the impression it wasn’t going to work out yesterday. I was really looking forward to meeting him. He was cute, we seemed to have things in common, and unlike most gay men he also appeared to have a soul. How wrong I was.

We were texting back and forth yesterday in the early afternoon. I was really excited to meet him and go on a date tonight. It’s been quite a while since I went on a date. We didn’t send each other any texts throughout the evening and when I got back to my friends’ last night I went on scruff and saw he’d looked at my profile about 15 minutes earlier. I sent him a text asking him how the rest of his day was. No response. Now this was the first big, blazing neon sign proclaiming something was wrong. Since I have a habit of jumping to conclusions when it comes to men and dating, I decided I’d be best to wait it out and to start treading more cautiously. Around 2 pm this afternoon I sent a text asking if he was still available to get together tonight. Again, no response. A couple hours later I logged into scruff and saw that he’d checked my profile earlier that morning. This confused me. I mean really, if he had no interest in meeting me I couldn’t really figure out why he would be checking my profile (or looking at my picture). Now when I get excited about meeting a guy and he ultimately blows me off there is a pretty specific grieving process I go through. On the one hand I’m mad, but more than anything I’m usually just really disappointed that yet again a guy that looked pretty promising had fallen through. So throughout the day, or a few hours, I go through this whole grieving process and then get to the point where I’m usually over it. Not that it doesn’t still hurt when I think about it, but I’m not obsessed with it and the bulk of the emotions I’ve processed. Normally when this happens I just let it go. I don’t ever reach out again to the guy. If there is one thing I won’t do it’s come across as desperate. As I was in my reiki class tonight I realized I should really send him a message. Not a message to pick a fight, but rather that I should tell him that he really did hurt me so that he knows that although he may not have had any consequences of his actions I was affected by them. As jaded as I am about dating and the gay community, I have to believe that most gay men aren’t inherently evil. I also think most of them could probably use a reality check that the tactics they are using have consequences for some of us who don’t have as thick skin as others. The text message I decided to send while sitting in class was this: There’s a reason I don’t try to go on dates often and it’s guys like you. Guys who masquerade as something different. Something better. Something to remain hopeful for. Yet, it’s always the same.

I didn’t actually send the message. By the time I checked my phone after class he had sent me a message. The message said that work was a nightmare, his phone had died and could we get dinner tomorrow evening before my class instead. Now I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, but after I’ve gone through the entire grieving process it’s hard to open up more than a sliver of opportunity again. I didn’t have plans before my class, yet, but had decided to ask a couple people if they’d be interested in getting together before hand, which I ultimately did. I texted him back saying that after class might work, but not before. I haven’t heard back from him which really means that had I told him I could get dinner before class he would have just bailed on me (probably without even letting me know) and I would have wasted an opportunity to meet fun people from class outside of class. I opened up scruff an hour or two after sending him the text and saw that he’d been online since I sent it. I took the opportunity to block him on the app. I don’t need that bullshit in my life. And really, it’s this kind of thing that I can sort of let roll off me once or twice, but more than that and I’m cutting myself off from the opportunity to meet any new gay men for dating because I simply can’t handle having my heart jerked around like that anymore and need a break. It’s very disheartening.

Gratitude list:
Reiki class
Making new friends
A good nights rest

I started a reiki class today. It’s 3 evenings in a row and it’s designed to teach me how to practice reiki on myself. I really enjoyed being in the class. It’s held at the instructor’s home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I like how she’s decorated the interior and she has all sorts of huge stones around. There were 11 of us in the class and everyone seemed interesting in their own way. I almost wish I could get to know them all individually on a one on one basis.

I was pondering things a little bit in class. I have been meditation for about 6 months now and that’s going well. I feel calmer and more in control of things. I’m hoping this reiki will give me a better connection to my body. The meditation is all very focused in my mind right now, but I’d like to work on bridging the gap between my mind and body.

Ok, I guess it’s story time.

When I went through my first and second manic episodes at 20 and 21 one of the things I remember about being manic was how my mind and body were connected. It almost felt like the two were one. The connection was nearly flawless and there were a number of things that attested to that fact. As I was driving to the Twin Cities one day that summer I stopped in at a random gas station. At the gas station they had one of those dunk tanks set up to raise money for charity. The guy in the dunk tank was cute (and shirtless) which immediately got my attention. I bought a couple balls to throw. Now I’ve never been very athletic, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t knock him into the water with 2 out of the first 3 balls I threw. I then got a few more balls and moved further back. Again and again I hit the target and he fell into the tank. I kept getting more balls and moving further and further back. It was uncanny the way I was able to look at the target and hit it with such accuracy. I’ve never been good at throwing balls of any kind, but my mind and my body worked together so well I was able to make it happen. I also grew up with a pool table in my basement. I’m ok at playing pool, but only because I grew up getting my ass kicked by my brothers who were always much better than me. When I was manic I could play pool way better than normal. I remember going to the bar and making shot after shot. I didn’t even really need to line them up very well. I would just look at the shot for a second and know where I had to hit the ball to make it go in – and then I would. It was creepy. It was also during that time that I realized I could take out my contacts (I’m pretty blind) and continue to shoot pool. Once I took them off everything turned into this fuzzy haze, but somehow I was still able to line the shots up and make them. I’m certain I would never be able to do that now.

The other aspect to the mind-body connection I remember was trying to figure out how the two worked together. I could tell that my body and mind were processing things differently than they had been only a couple months before, but I could never pin down what the exact changes were. I couldn’t tell if my mind was sped up and my body slowed down, or vice versa. Or perhaps my mind was slowed down so much it felt like it was really sped up. Or maybe my body had sped up so much my mind just felt like it had slowed down. Regardless, I could never come to a conclusion on it, but spent quite a bit of time trying to figure it out.

I’m hoping if I combine reiki with my meditation that I’ll be able to achieve a parity between my mind and my body. I’m sure it won’t feel the same way it did while I was manic because everything was concerted then, but it was also all on overdrive. I’m just hoping to get closer to that connection again where the two are working together. I don’t feel like they are working apart at this point, but I do still feel like they are disjointed. Wow, I’m glad I was able to bang this post out very quickly. Now I can lay down in bed and practice my reiki as I fall asleep.

Gratitude List:
Looking forward to dates with cute guys.
Learning new tools to help me become a better, more centered person.
Meeting new, interesting people.

I got a call from my dad today. My dad doesn’t call me very often so when he does I always try to answer or call him back right away. I have a good relationship with him, but my go-to parent is my mom. It’s just how it is.

So my dad called me because my older brother apparently, as my dad put it, ‘went off’ his medication. Now the problem with stating he ‘went off’ his medication is that it implies there is a need for him to be on it in the first place. I’m not so sure there is.

I get where my parents are coming from. I really do. They have had to watch 3 children fall down – sometimes over and over again, when it comes to this “bipolar” issue we have. We’ve had to be put in hospitals, we’ve spent tons of money we don’t have, acted recklessly and fought with them incessantly while doing these things. From their perspective, it’s much easier not to rock the boat. The manic episodes were as much a nightmare for them as they were for us. Nobody wants to live through another one. And it’s possible someone wouldn’t live through another one. Or would have such life changing consequences as a result that things would never be able to return to normal.

So my dad calls and we talk. He tells me that my older brother ‘went off’ his medication, but didn’t give me much insight into how my older brother is doing. With my dad it’s an alarmist thing. He sees the future filled with hospitals, more fights and more problems. My mom sees the same thing. And really, why shouldn’t they? He went off his medication a couple years ago around Christmas time and things got really ugly for them. My mom apparently had to take a week off work to babysit him before my brother went into the hospital. I was in the cities then, but it wasn’t a fun time around my house. So all in all, for my parents sanity, it’s definitely best to keep us medicated.

The problem with staying medicated, especially if you don’t absolutely have to, is that it keeps you sick. Swallowing those pills every day as a constant reminder that there is something wrong with you. Feeling like you are nothing more than a construct of the medication you are taking. That’s really no way to live. In my opinion, psychiatry is basically voodoo, but much more expensive. Although I’ve never tried voodoo. I’m just guessing it’s cheaper.

I ended up texting my brother tonight. We don’t text or talk that often. I see him for Christmas, but we’re not close. Though he is still my brother and I care about him very much. Apparently he’s been off his medication for about 3 months. That’s quite a long time. And I’m guessing, in my not-a-psychiatrist opinion, that if he quit cold turkey and was going to experience a jolt from going off his medication it would have already happened. I just saw my brother a couple weeks ago for Christmas and he seems alright. Maybe even a little better than normal. I do remember seeing him smile, so that was good. And to be honest, I was kind of surprised that he even answered my text.

I’m going back to Minnesota on Saturday and am hoping to stop by my brother’s house and talk to him for a little while. It’s not something I’ve ever done in my entire life, but I really want to have this conversation. I’d love to learn what his experience has been going off the medication, but also with the bipolar thing in general. After my second manic episode I crashed and was so depressed. I thought about killing myself non-stop for 8 months and could barely leave my parents’ house. My older brother had done the same thing a few years earlier. Basically holed up in the basement for an entire winter. Well, more than the entire winter.

I’m also completely convinced the reason I experienced any manic episodes was because I was smoking marijuana. Lots and lots of marijuana, to be exact. From my perspective it seems like the same is true with my brothers. Once you take away the marijuana, the manic episodes seem to stop. I’m not sure my brother has that figured out. I also know my parents are worried about it. I’ll definitely need to drop that into the conversation.

So my brother is now medication free, but he doesn’t seem to really be that happy. He decided to go off his, from what I understand, because he felt depressed on it. I did it the other way around – worked super hard to get myself to a happy, comfortable place and then went off my medication, but if he can make it work good for him. I’ll have to see if I can help my brother in any way get out of the rut he’s in. Lord knows it took me forever to deal with my problems and get myself to a place where I was happy. Hopefully he can chip away at it and get there himself.

One brother down, one to go. What an unexpected, but totally lovely surprise.

Gratitude List:
The ability, ambition and drive to improve.
Cute guys who seem to be swirling all around me. I will be catching one….even if only to release some time later.
Meetings. I’m really grateful to have meetings to go to out here.

I liked the meditation I went to yesterday. It was a guided meditation which was nice. I don’t normally do meditations that are guided. The woman teaches a class on the Upper West Side that is free. I plan on going more often when I live in the city.

After the meditation I wandered around the Upper West Side for a while. I ate soup at a vegan restaurant that was suggested. It was pretty good. The soup was suggested to me by the meditation teacher, but when I got to the restaurant I did what I always do and started scanning the menu for meat options. Yep, not happening there. And although I enjoyed the soup, I don’t plan on becoming a vegan anytime soon. I’m happy with the food camp I’m currently in. Basically the ‘eat as much meat as possible’ camp. Yum.

I’m updating this in the morning as opposed to my usual nightly ritual of doing it right before bed. Right after I’d thrown away my contacts last night I remembered that I still had to update this. I was tired and decided it could wait until morning. Today could be pretty fun. I’m meeting this guy I met at a meeting a few days ago. We might go to a movie and we’ll probably get something to eat. He was really nice.

A new opportunity has come on my radar the last few days. A woman gave me a book, which I read. The book was written by this guy who helped found this spiritual community in Scotland. I’d like to go live there for a few months or years. It could maybe even take the place of Thailand, but we’ll see about that. I still really like the Thailand idea. This other opportunity could be a before or after Thailand adventure. We’ll see how that unfolds. Hopefully the next few days will provide some clarity into where I should focus my efforts.
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We went to a play tonight and then karaoke. Both were really fun. If it wasn’t so late I’d share a lot about both of those experiences.

The play was about high school students. The two main characters were these guys who fall in love. One is the jock type and can’t come to terms with the fact that he’s gay. It was good. I’m very grateful to be alive today. Just like the jock in the play, growing up gay took a huge emotional toll on me and I’m lucky to have survived that. I was depressed a lot growing up and well into my 20s so it’s really miracle that I survived.

I remember thinking at times growing up, especially when I couldn’t really face my own problems, how much better my life would be if I had had to survive some type of adversity. If I heard about a story of someone overcoming some huge obstacle or situation, I found myself wishing I’d had to do the same. That if only I had to survive something I’d have a reason to stand up and be strong. The funny thing is, I did have a reason – many of them, I just never recognized them as such. I do now. I’m grateful to have had obstacles to overcome so that I have a depth to myself today I otherwise wouldn’t have.

I had hoped to state all of that in a much more eloquent, thought out matter. Unfortunately it’s 4 am here and I want to get up and go to a meditation tomorrow. It’s not very early, but I haven’t had to set an alarm in quite a while and tomorrow I’ll have to (for 11 am….) to make sure I make it there on time. I’m really looking forward to the meditation, but I also don’t want to be super tired for it. I should get about 7 hours of sleep so I’ll be ok. The meditation is about setting your intentions for 2013 and “to listen to the voice of your soul which is always directing our lives if we stop to listen.” I can’t wait!

Gratitude List:
Processing emotions through karaoke!
Wonderful opportunities to meditate.
Breaking free of old habits that are no longer working.

I’m tired and don’t think I’m making any sense right now. I just want to sleep.

MoMA —> Meeting —> Fellowship —> Guided tour of Manhattan

Gratitude List:
Meeting fun new people
Ability to push myself into uncomfortable situations to grow as a person (fellowship)
Walking tour of Manhattan

I think today marks 3 years of being nicotine free. I’m so glad I quit smoking. I remember a time when I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to quit.

I grew up about 90 miles West of the Twin Cities in a small town of around 20,000 people. My parents would take my brothers and me to the Cities pretty often. I will never forget the feeling I’d get as soon as the skyscrapers and lights of downtown came into view. I could feel the energy of the city pulsating within me and I loved it. I felt so drawn to that energy and knew someday I’d have to live in Minneapolis.

I’m now 30 years old and I lived in Minneapolis for the past 4 years. I love the city, but the energy I once felt has dissipated. It’s no longer this big, wondrous place I can’t wait to explore. It’s changed. It’s become much more comfortable and has a rhythm that really resonates with me, but it doesn’t hold the allure it once did.

New York has that excitement. It’s got the energy of Minneapolis I craved as a young boy, but on a much grander scale. I really want to take some time to explore this city. To find an array of interesting opportunities to learn from the city and the people who inhabit it. I’m really hoping to be able to do that over the next few months. I don’t have a long time I can devote to it, but I can definitely come back. I will call this city my home and the experience will change me.

I went to two meetings tonight. I took the Path train to the World Trade Center and as soon as I got off the train consulted the app on my phone that tells me where nearby meetings are. As luck would have it, there was a meeting really close to where I was that started in just a few minutes. I walked in and immediately thought “Hmm, hopefully I can make it through this entire meeting.” Talk about some immediate judgment. So it turned out to be a speaker meeting and I really enjoyed listening to Bob share his story. It was also great to be at a meeting again. I’m not sure how long it’s been since I was at a meeting. I think just a little over a week. The first meeting I went to was at 5:30 pm so when it ended at 6:30 I didn’t have anything planned for the rest of the night. I decided to check and see what other meetings might be going on. I found one that started in the West Village at 7:15 pm. Perfect, since my GPS told me it would take about 40 minutes to walk there. I assume the GPS calculates walking time based on little people legs. My super long, fast walking giant legs got me to the meeting much faster. This also happened to be a speaker meeting, but it was entirely different. The first meeting had 9 people there, including myself. This meeting probably had at least 50. It was also filled with a lot of the pretty gays. All the ones who have less than 3% body fat. I used to go to meetings like that in Mpls, but often times prefer to stay away from that crowd.

Ok, so I have a problem with the pretty gay crowd. I’ve always felt rejected by them. As a result, I’ve always done my best to reject them before they get the chance to do it to me. Honestly, this isn’t serving me well anymore. It’s totally fucked up my dating life. Actually, it hasn’t fucked up my dating life as much as make it completely non existent. And really, when I think about it, I was not even close to being rejected by those people. From a completely logical standpoint, although I wasn’t the best looking guy in the room, as far as physical attractiveness goes I can hold my own with those boys. Aside from the hard body I’m not sporting , they really don’t have anything on me. I’m also quite certain as soon as I open my mouth and start talking they’ll most likely laugh at whatever I say and like me. Not only that, but a few of the pretty ones were actually quite friendly. As I was walking in and trying to figure out where I was going, one asked me if I was looking for the meeting. We chatted for a minute. He didn’t try to light me on fire or anything, so that was good at least. And they (surprisingly?) didn’t have a machine to calculate body fat percentage outside the door to deny entrance to the non gym rats.

I guess the moral of this story, as I see it, is to stop trying to change my physical appearance to feel like I fit in with the pretty gay crowd and start changing my perception of them. Some of the pretty gays have good hearts. I’ll have to be careful, but really they aren’t out to get me. I’m out to get me. And I do. Goal for the next 10 days: Give the pretty gays a chance. Quit writing them off as vile. Grow up and be an adult about this situation. You’ve been allowing this to hold you back for too long. Be done with it.

Gratitude List:
Being able to go to a meeting.
Being able to walk.
Pretty gays.

Wow, first day of the new year. And what a great day it was! I didn’t leave M and M’s condo for the entire day. It was fantastic! We played Monopoly and laughed our asses off with the other A playing catchphrase. I can’t remember the last time I laughed that much at one time. We made this great salmon we bought at Costco a couple days ago for dinner. All in all, I can’t imagine a better way to start the new year than laughing and enjoying a relaxing day with great friends.

I started this blog for a very specific reason. I needed to get in the habit of writing. Especially writing on a daily basis without judgment on my part. When I sit down to write, which is generally the last thing I do before I go to bed, I don’t proof read or labor over sentences, word choices, or any of the things that used to trip me up in the past. I sit down, I write and then I’m done with it. It’s great. It’s also helped me get much better at verbalizing how I feel about things and provided a clarity I needed regarding the past and the future. Without making a point of writing every day I wouldn’t have that clarity. Things would still be swirling around inside my head without an agenda or a structured way to express them and move on. I’ve been doing this for 4 months now and the benefits I’ve gotten from it are really more than I’d hoped for. There are a lot of memories I’ve gone into and a lot of soul searching I’ve been able to do because of this writing experiment. I haven’t held back much, but there are still some things I’ve not touched on. Mostly things related to the heights of my addiction or past mental health concerns. I’m hoping to get them addressed in a more concrete way over the next month or two. It really shouldn’t take longer than that as long as I stay focused and dig a little deeper, so to speak. So that’s going to be the focus. I’m hoping by the end of February (and my 31st birthday) to have addressed all I wanted to address and start looking at the next steps.

The major reason I started writing so much is because I really would like to pursue a career writing in some capacity. Honestly, my ultimate goal is to write a book. I haven’t thought too much about the outline of it at this point, but that’s probably something I should start doing. I’ve had some thoughts swirling around in my head lately regarding it all, so here goes: I’d like to blend past experiences with my current reality – basically a what it was like versus what it’s like now type of thing. I don’t want to run through the past in a chronological way, but rather use stories from the past followed with an accurate picture of life today. Not necessarily every story from the past, but ones that are relevant. I have a memoir of sorts pictured in my head, but a very uplifting, inspirational story. A story about surviving and overcoming obstacles in life. The one obstacle I keep thinking about, which is maybe not even an obstacle, is that I’d like to feel more settled in my current situation. Especially in regards to a job or what I’m doing. I really think the trip to Norway and/or Thailand would really give me the perspective I need for that. I definitely feel like I could use a different lens with which to go through all of this – or a higher reality to compare the past to. I’m sure that will fall into place over the coming months. One other idea with how I could structure it that just popped into my head would be to have chapters, or sections of the book, that are feelings or levels of helplessness/hopelessness. I’m not sure exactly how I’d do it, but I could label a section something like “We’ll get through this, just like we always have” and then use different stories related to different struggles, eg bipolar, disordered eating, addiction to go through that. Hmm, I’ll have to mull that over. Oh, I also want it to be funny. I haven’t put much humor into my writing on this blog because that’s not what I wanted out of it. I wanted something serious, but when i actually get down to writing this book I want my whole personality to shine through and that will have to include humor since it’s such an integral part of who I am.

Gratitude List:
Laughing my ass off while playing games.
Spending all day inside.
Going to bed with no alarm clocks set.