My life has changed a lot in the last 7 months. Since I checked my phone, set it on the bedside table, closed my eyes, opened my eyes, and saw I was in an ambulance. 

The easy thing to call out is the neurosurgery. The titanium plate in my head. The inability to legally drive. The decision to stop drinking. The weight loss. 

The harder thing to call out is how my time has felt. Back at work. Sober. Still not really leaving the house.

At 5:45pm on a Sunday, I feel like I have nothing left to do. No one to call. Nothing to engage but getting into bed long before my wife. Closing my eyes not really to sleep but to see if I’m relaxed.

Why don’t I feel more comfortable opening and responding to emails?

When I get a message professionally or personally, I have a problem moving forward and opening it let alone responding to it, if it’s someone that I know. This problem is even worse, if we’re talking about a response to a message of mine.

We’ve been talking in therapy about recording and attempting to better understand when we receive physical signs of anxiety.

For the most part, unless I’m having a full blown panic attack, I don’t really find many situations where I feel like I have physical reaction to my stress or my anxiety. 

At least not consciously.

But when I have a message that I have to respond to someone who knows me or I have to back-up a pointed comment that I’ve made, I don’t know. 

Maybe it’s the same fear that I get around writing in general. Maybe it’s about opening the door wider and letting someone get to know me better.

Why does it feel more comfortable to let it sit rather than respond and engage? What am I afraid of? 

Additional responsibility?

What might be behind Door Number 2?

In college, What did you think that you would be doing professionally , post-graduation?

Well I went to the college that I went to because they paid me to come and because my high school dean had told me that past fall to not even bother applying.

So I arrived having wanted to go the best school that I could get into and stay in the arts residential college and write stories and take photos and hang out and make out and figure out my life. I wanted to grow and create and find happiness and I wanted to be able to tell everyone back home ‘not only did I get in but they’re paying me to go here so fuck each and every one of you…’

As far as a quote-unquote ‘profession,’ How do you make money doing something besides law or medicine? I didn’t know.

And I took some pre-law courses but, to your question, I thought that I would be able to make some amount of money doing something creative having found myself. 

Would that creative thing be grad school? Possibly. 

Could it be at an Independent Weekly? I certainly hoped-so. Maybe that’s it, actually. I came into school as a journalism major – I probably hoped to be writing for The Boston Phoenix or The Chicago Reader or something. Maybe bartend a little bit for some extra cash…  

Have your dreams changed?

Dreams? I suppose that they have and they haven’t. 

They have in the sense that I’ve tried to shift away from the hollow and somewhat vague dream of being an ‘art kid/ cool kid’ out in the scene – known at all the right parties and attached to the right people and just, like, making it happen

My dreams haven’t changed in the sense that I want to do what feels comfortable 

Once I figure that out. 

I suppose that my dream is still to figure out that I’d like to be doing – what the best fit is.

Are you where you want to be? Are you closer to your dreams or further away?

Well, after graduation when I was in sales training, one of the questions that we were asked was 

‘How much money would you like make?’

I came up with a number that I thought was high but reachable and 10 years later (and not that less than 10 jobs later) I make that number.

That means that I’m comfortable: I own a house; I have a lovely and supportive partner; I’m sober; my crippling depression is medicated. 

I could tell you that I’m farther away from where I want to be because Weekly Independents are a shell of themselves. 

But I don’t think that I’m farther away from getting where I want to go. I think I’m probably in a more stable and clear position to move forward and actively figure that out. 

Hopefully, this will help me travel farther down the path of self-discovery, now that I’m out of the muck.