“It wasn't always obvious. It was just this constant feeling that I was supposed to show up a certain way. Make the right decision. Handle things. Be available. And if I didn't, it somehow became a conversation about what I should have done differently….”

“I remember thinking, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. It is supposed to be easy, fun, light, bright, full. But I was feeling dread, heavy, scared, unsure. It was the first time I really felt let down by life. I was young and had some idealistic thoughts of what life was going to look like. Or at least what it should look like. I couldn’t imagine what could possibly come next, what with this bursting of the bubble that I thought was life?”

“For the umpteenth day in a row I woke up and thought about the truth and what I needed to do about it…”

“How did all of this time pass?” I asked myself. Youth is wasted on the young, I heard in a song a long time ago.

“I didn’t receive my copy. When they were giving them out, mine must have gotten dropped, given to someone else, or lost.  I didn’t get mine.  Did you get yours?”  

“Sometimes I felt like I was stuck in a hallway, waiting for doors to open…”

“As a child, he visited tobacco fields in his hometown in Canada and learned that the farmers quit watering the tobacco rather early in the season. ‘Why?’ He asked…”

I always thought I knew the path ahead of me. I always had goals and I thought that ahead of goals was achievement. No one told me it’s not that simple…