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Well here is the follow-up to the most depressing series of posts I had ever written—I’m still alive!

It turns out my body was just physically rejecting that new reality in which I lived for those couple of months. Looking back, it was just not really a good fit in any sense of the word.

I don’t like waking up early, I didn’t know anything about the company that I was working for, I was unfairly thrusted into a role in which I had no training and was woefully unprepared for and it overall just did not fit with the principles and values I hold most intensely. I thought I was ready for a big-boy job. I was going to make my name in the corporate construction world but that simply wasn’t the case. It turns out I actually despise office culture and the weird unwritten laws and mores that dictate the everyday life of a worker.

Nothing against people who enjoy that type of living, but it felt too oppressive and stagnant. I don’t want my life dictated by the results of my NYT wordle every morning; I want creative freedom and diversity. I like talking to new people every day and seeing something new. I didn’t know just how strongly I believed in these things until my body and mind raged against the life into which it was being forced.

So I quit.

I knew it had to happen but still the thought of quitting a high-paying future career weighed heavily on me. I think looking back on it, this was the most pivotal choice I’ve made in my entire life. While this might sound extremist, I believe in the veracity of it. Many reasons for this.

My life for 26 years felt like it was being led without my control. I felt like a passenger to my own fate and I was just riding but irresponsible for the decisions I made because they had already been predestined. Go to school, make good grades, go to college, take a gap year, get down to work and find a corporate job that paid a lot and prepared for a wife and a family. This was the established path I had always been led to believe was the correct one and I had followed this tradition like the good soldier for my entire life. But two months ago, I think something snapped in me. It was the lowest I had ever been and I couldn’t figure out why. My job was one with a lot of potential to make money very quickly and I had more authority already in a month and a half than I had had an entire lifetime at previous jobs.

Yet, I couldn’t have been any more unhappy. It was a month of heavy deliberation in which I searched myself for answers. I was writing, reading, meditating, anything I could do to figure out why I would be so miserable in a job for which my entire family and friends lauded me.

Finally it struck me, I had stopped living according to myself. I was doing what others expected of me but it wasn’t what I necessarily valued. I was time-poor and had no time to do the things I wanted to do besides drag my tired ass to the gym every day. I had no interest in what I was doing, which made it hard to buckle down and consider long-term possibilities within that company. But more than anything, it just made me realize that I want life to feel bright and diverse and unique to anyone else.

I don’t want to be average. I don’t want to be a drone for someone else’s dream. I don’t want to exist to make someone else money. I want to live for me and start working on MY ventures and make money for MY dreams. I was born with a talent that you’ll be hard pressed to ever really see me acknowledge or recognize but it is is there and it is not ever going to be exploited and abused by others furthermore. I want to travel, I want to write, I want to play guitar in beautiful places, I want to inspire hope and freedom in others and be someone that is remembered long after I’m gone. My dream, since I can remember, has been to open my own bar so now I have begun to put together an actionable plan as to how to actually accomplish this.

After quitting, I went to decompress in Florida for a while and reconnect with family and friends to touch roots with things that used to inspire me. I noticed that in the weeks after leaving my job, a calm, quiet confidence began to slowly build in intensity. It is a feeling which I’ve never experienced before but has slowly cured me of that crushing impostor syndrome that has plagued my entire personal life. Going over my life as a talent acquisition specialist looks at a resume, I realize that I have lived more lives in 26 years than many live in a lifetime. I have more experience in more areas of my life than many ever hope for and it has inspired me. If I can survive so many difficult periods of my life and still come out standing, genuinely what can ever stop me.

It’s a unique feeling, one that I hope everyone gets to experience at some point. Maybe I’m just late to the game, admittedly I’ve spent most of my life in denial of who I am. But still, I enjoy this.

After leaving Florida, I accepted a position with the bar I used to work at as Pool Supervisor. Normally, I wouldn’t want anything to do with the pool because it is so mismanaged by my boss promised me carte blanche with it to fix it and do whatever I see fit. He pitched it as “this could be your project, you wouldn’t necessarily have to stop being a project manager” which shows he knew exactly how to appeal to my big, fat ego. Luckily, he wasn’t bluffing this time around and I truly have been able to build the bar program from the ground up. It couldn’t have been more relevant experience for a future bar owner. I was able to design SOPs, create an entire new drink recipe menu, train the new servers and bartenders, curate the liquor, wine and beer stock and overall just make the place mine. Don’t get me wrong, I still viscerally hate the pool. It’s where good bartending goes to die typically. But I think I Stockholm syndrome’d myself into really caring about it. I find that I still goof around but I’ve also become the first one to tell people when to stop messing around or how to improve certain processes or actions. It is wild, I never thought I would grow up to be someone who actually has some authority. I don’t know how to feel about it.

As to my future, I feel like Troy Bolton in High School Musical 3. I’m torn between two conflicting desires. What I want most in this world is just to travel long-term. Be an ex-pat in as many countries as possible. I have been reading travel books like Snow Leopard and In Patagonia which are inspiring me to do something similar. I want to explore the forgotten areas of the world and write about the nature of the life I find there. Most Americans don’t even own a passport and I would love to asseverate unto them how diverse and interesting the rest of the world can be. I’ve always said that I like the idea of dedicating my life to something and, to me, this feels like a worthy cause. In September when my lease ends, I would enjoy the possibility of traveling for a short-term again to remind myself of the life outside the borders of Tennessee.

I reckon I still aim to move to NYC after this too. I believe that dream is still strong enough to justify trying it out. There is nowhere on earth to get such an intensive, comprehensive training into owning a bar as in the great city of New York and I think I just need to rob a couple banks to finance these dreams of mine. Easy.

Anyway, that’s my life update for right now. I think I will be focusing on writing now, specifically more descriptive prose that is typical in travel and nonfiction work. Things are better and I am doing well and I’ll end with this. Prioritize your health and goals over anything else and find the path that is meant for you, don’t just follow what you believe others to want for you. Each human has a unique fingerprint; their key to a unique path meant only for them. You just have to learn to read it.