Most of my life I have been a very disorganized person… my mother would come into my room and sweep my piles of mess off of my dressers and bookshelves in order for me to go through and clean it about once per month. My teachers would go around and dump our desks onto the ground to get us to clean them out… and invevitably I would be one of the lucky ones who had to do that once every quarter or so. 

That being said… I probably have some level of ADHD, but really do not care to treat it with any kind of professional help… but wife on the other hand is in the process of getting her more severe case evaluated and properly medicated. I am working through my issues myself… which includes an attempt at organization in an attempt to calm some of the chaos of my life. 

There will be videos… there will be TikToks… there will be Reels… hopefully I can make a few of them funny. Honestly, organization is the farthest thing from funny… it is hard… it is stressful… and it is never ending. Once something is put away, you inevitably are forced to use it again… so… it is back on the counter, or back out of whatever tidy order that you found for it. This is life. And it is ok. If everything was always “neat and in its place” it would mean that you never do anything… sitting in the center of a perfectly neat room with vacuum lines is not living… 

That being said though, calming some chaos is also important. It is good to have some semblence of organization, and a way to find your way back to that semblance after tearing through it each day. 

I am excited to downsize, declutter, and remake myself in ways that are constructive this year. I am going to therapy, I am spending more time doing yoga (which I love), I am going to the gym regularly, I am writing, I am finally making videos that I have been talking about for a long time, and I am getting decluttering as much as humanly possibly with two unorganized adults and two terror-monster-little-boys running around our house 🙂 

Enjoy the ride!!!

I did it… I finally did it. I left the job that I started in 2009 and began a new career! It was so incredibly freeing to leave those four walls behind me. 

I sat in a literal closet (where the servers were) for 7 years of my life while I worked there. I spent 50+ hours per week of my life at work, and another 10-20 hours of my life thinking about work. Shaking off that toxic life is something that will take some time to fully recover from, but it is truly life changing. 

I took that job a week before my father died by suicide, and I truly beleive that I was stockholmed to the place this entire time. I have been using The Black Pearl as an analogy… I had become part of the ship until whatever duty I had to pay to it was paid in full. It was the constant that allowed me to remain grounded through that terrible time in my life. I was able to go back there to the last place that I was at the moment my father pulled the trigger and ended his life. It was as though I was able to mentally go back in time and revisit that moment, hold onto it, keep it cherished and sacred, and never let it go. 

When I left for the final time, walked out of those doors, I let go of all of the pain, burden, and weight that I have held onto for the past decade and a half. I let it go, pulled myself from the ship’s walls, and have never felt lighter. There is not one single ounce of regret in my mind.

My wife has been telling me that I do not seem happy… I do not sing in the car anymore. I do not smile or joke like I used to. It is true. She appreciates what I have done to take care of our family, working all of these years, but I do not think she understands how heavy it has been. 

Being able to have a life during work that is also outside of work, being able to have time before and after work… these are necessities that I have deemed “luxuries” for the past 14 years or more. Now all of the sudden I have these things… and although I am new to it, and will need to grow accustomed to it, I can already feel that I will find my joy again. The topic of “work-life balance” comes up a lot, and I do not think that people really know what that even means. The book One-Dimensional Man by Marcuse is a great resource that discusses the phenomena that we are experiencing in today’s labor society very clearly. “The function of Reason is to promote the art of life”. I do suggest reading this book if you want to hear a great foreshadowing of automation and the changing labor landscape of the 21st century as told by someone who was alive during WWII. 

That being said… onward and upward. Here is to having a life, hobbies, and the ability to pursue my talents again!