My blog keeps me in check. It keeps me honest with myself and what I want out of life. Today was rest day, which meant I didn’t have to workout. Since I didn’t have to workout, I took that as an excuse for me to relax. I lied in bed, watched TV, talked on the phone with my friend, watched some more TV, had dinner, and then I figured it was late enough for me to start some reading. I even took a tiny nap while watching TV. I really didn’t want to write tonight. I wanted to sleep instead. I didn’t, though, and I’m glad.

I’m reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and I’m only a few chapters into it, but it’s really good so far. In college, one of my professors had us read a chapter from this book, actually. It was the “Shitty First Drafts” chapter, and I re-read it again tonight and loved it. One of my big issues when writing is not allowing myself to write shitty first drafts. I limit myself to 300 words a day because any more than that will kick in my perfectionism, and then I’ll get no writing done. I’ll be too frustrated to write. She quotes E.L. Doctorow, and that quote is haunting me right now it’s really good. It goes:

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

I almost never start writing with an ending in mind. I’ll get to the end when I get there is my philosophy. We don’t live life with our ending in sight. At least I don’t. I’m aware of it, and I want to live life as fully as possible before it ends, but that’s as far as I’ll go. So why should I write my shitty first draft with that ending in sight? Shit, I have no idea how this entry is going to end. I’m just writing, and I’ll see where the words take me. Does that make for entertaining reading? I don’t know. This is an amateur blog after all.

Tomorrow I’ll be teaching all 15 of our senior high school students how to use Google Docs by writing a story together. I’m scared but also excited. Teaching them Google Docs will be easy; teaching them how to write a story won’t be. I’m thinking of writing a first line and have each student write a line in succession. I’m also thinking of coming up with a genre or a subject on the spot and starting fresh together rather than coming up with a line beforehand. All in all, I’m there to teach them to use something they might not be familiar with, and in the process, our story will be a very shitty first draft. But it will be our shitty first draft. And to be super honest, I have a tiny crush on one of the senior girls, and that makes me feel a little dirty since I’m ten years older and all.

I have the power to cut that last line out but I don’t want to. This is a shitty first draft after all. It’s also the final draft, so yeah. Eww, right?

I think winter has finally arrived here in Montana, and part of me is excited. I had to laugh at myself for writing that because I would not have said the same thing last year. What makes this year different from last year is that I have a great car now, where last year, I didn’t. Last year I had to walk to work, sometimes in single-digit to below zero temperatures, and I had to walk back home, too. Sometimes I would get a ride from a friend, but that wasn’t a reliable option. This year, though, this year I have a car. I bought my 2004 Dodge Durango because she has 4WD and a V8 Hemi engine. She roars through these icy roads, and I feel safe and warm in there. I didn’t like having to brush the snow off my car and scrape the ice from my windows this morning, but that just comes with the territory. The beauty, though. Amazing.

I don’t want to write about my routines today, because it seems like that’s all I’m writing about. They’re important, though. Today was no different. In other news, my frames finally arrived. My posters look great in these beautiful wood frames, and I can’t wait to hang them up. I’m not entirely sure where they’re going yet, since I have to nail them to the wall, thus making my decision of where to hang them up a bit more important. I have plans to buy furniture, which greatly affects where I can put these posters. I have an idea, and tomorrow I’m going to measure out the wall to space them all out evenly. I’m very anal.

Lets talk more about the stuff that’s been on my mind. By stuff, I mean actual stuff. These are all just things I’m thinking about getting, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get them. I started with that preface because what excited me this morning was the idea of buying a projector instead of a television. A television is big, clunky, and requires a whole other set of furniture to prop it up. I could mount it to the wall, but that’ll just ruin my wall and not save me much space. And don’t get me started on all the wires. A projector, though, is small. I can tuck it away in the corner somewhere and adjust the image to compensate. The image size will most definitely be bigger than a television, and the quality about the same, depending on the brand. There’s one projector I saw that has a wireless receiver that creates its own network, which means I can tuck that away somewhere and hook it up to any HDMI enabled devices I may want to get. I’ll have to buy a screen for the projector, too, which I’m totally okay with because of how minimal that’ll make my dream home entertainment setup. A small projector, a thin screen. That’s it. No big television, no clunky entertainment center. Minimal, practical, but expensive.

I want to buy a bookcase from Ikea when I drive down to California¹ because of all the books I’ve left behind. I want to buy a rug (maybe two) to decorate my home with, and I want to buy a couch. Those are the major furniture purchases I want to make. I want to buy a floor lamp, maybe some small wall lamps for ambient lighting, some plants, and frames for the pictures I want hang up once I buy the new camera I want. Yeah, there’s a camera, too. On my way to California, I want to take lots of pictures. Not just any type of picture, though, a good, high-quality one, one I would be proud to display on my walls. And since it’ll be my first road trip, I want to document that journey in a beautiful way. I won’t buy all this stuff at once; hell, some of this stuff may not enter my life for months, but they’re stuff I’ve been thinking about getting for a long time, and I think they’ll make me happier.

Even though I don’t consider myself a minimalist anymore, I do consider myself someone who doesn’t buy things just to buy things. I have a purpose for every item I allow to enter my life. I used to be so concerned about the quantity of my possessions and never about the lack of quality that brought to my life. Things, even though they’re just things, are the little details that make life more pleasant to live.

When I come home from work, I want to just melt into my couch, grab a book from my bookcase, turn on that floor lamp, and just drift off into a world of words.

Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing. During those times, I feel like none of what I’m doing is worth doing anymore. That I should just quit and stop pretending I’m someone I’m not. Nobody cares about your journey, that voice in my head says. Why should anybody care? Your life is one of billions. I’m not doing it for anybody, though. I agree, nobody cares how I live my life. Nobody cares if I had a good day or a bad day, a productive day or a mediocre day. I’m going to write it down anyway because that’s what I do. I write. I have to understand my life and what it is I’m doing every day. Every little moment I live through adds up to the entirety of my life, and I want to know I lived it as best as I could.

Just like that artisan who’s spent his entire life learning how to perfect his craft , I’m learning how to perfect my life by working at living it as best as I can. Part of it is learning how to deal with the negative. Negativity, when it comes to our lives, is a relative term. What I consider negative, someone else might consider a positive. Some people might consider my ceaseless loneliness as a negative. I live alone, but I don’t feel lonely. I miss the touch of a woman, but I’m not dying over it. I’ll find someone eventually; I’m not too worried about it. Some people might think my relentless commitment to my tasks and schedules is a negative. Some might see it as a positive. I’m in the middle. I know I can’t sustain this forever. I don’t much want to, either. Whenever I find someone, I want to spend every waking minute I can with her, with limits of course. And soon I’ll be driving down to California to pick up the rest of my stuff, and to visit my family and friends. That time won’t be my time. Some people might hate my blog. Maybe hate’s a strong word. Bored by it? Annoyed by it? Either way, they might not enjoy reading my blog. That’s okay. I’m not writing it for them. I’m writing it for myself.

I started this blog sixty-three days ago because I hated who I had become. I hurt my best friend in the entire world with my raw stupidity. That raw stupidity was exacerbated by my continuous desire to drown myself in alcohol. I had gained weight and felt terrible. I wasn’t writing, reading, or doing anything I loved because I just wanted to drink and watch TV. I had quit my job because it reminded me of my best friend, and I didn’t want to work there anymore if she wasn’t going to be there. I was actually super sad when I imagined walking to work and not seeing her car parked in the parking lot. That thought alone drove me to quit. All these things added up to a life that brought me nothing but pain. So I started this blog. Partly because I wanted her to find it and read it. I wanted her to miss me and want to get back in touch with me. I gave her too much credit, though. Even if she did find this blog and read every entry, I don’t think she would appreciate the work I’ve done and am doing, even when part of it was driven by her. I’ve moved on, and I’m happy with where I am. Hell, I’m better than I’ve ever been.

One day, I’m going to look back at all these entries. I’m going to read them one by one, from the oldest one to the newest, and I’m going to read the story of my life as written by me. I hope to see progress. I hope I’m not the red queen, always running in place and getting nowhere. That’s how I feel right now, actually, like I’m running in place and getting nowhere. Part of me knows that’s not true. Progress, by its very definition, is relative. As long as I’m heading toward a destination, I’m making progress. And I’m definitely moving forward. That’s all I hope to do.

”How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives," is probably one of my favorite quotes of all time. It’s by Annie Dillard, and I’m currently reading her book, The Writing Life, where this quote appears. The context for the quote involves schedules where, in roughly her words, a day spent reading books isn’t a good day, but a life spent reading books is a good life. She went into many examples of routines from writers she admired, and how many of them had the same routine every day. Some read for hours in the morning before they wrote; others had to walk for a few hours before they were ready to write; and Annie’s, where she had to walk to a small cabin with no windows and only the essential tools needed to write before she could write. Yesterday I wrote briefly about routines, so I was nodding my head and agreeing with everything she had to write about this topic.

I believe that good routines can add up to a good life, a life of one’s own design. We all want something great from our lives, but many of us don’t know how to get that. I’m not saying I have the answers for everyone, but I think I’m close to finding that for myself. A life where I write every morning, where I examine myself every night, and where I push my fitness to the extreme every day, is, in my opinion, a life worth living. As long as these basic routines are accomplished every day, I’m happy. Of course I want to do more than this, and most of the time, I do. But if for some reason I can’t do any of them, I hope to at least accomplish these three routines.

If there’s one point that I disagree with Annie Dillard on is the environment a writer surrounds himself in. She believes that all a writer needs is a basic environment where there really isn’t any stimuli present that could distract the writer from writing. I live in a studio. My apartment is my writing environment. But it’s also my home, and I want it to feel like one. I’ve been very focused these past few weeks on decorating my home as beautifully as I can, and today I began to see the fruits of my labor come into fruition. My desk, for the most part, is finished. I have everything I need and want on there, and I feel so much better and more productive with these new tools. I’ve been thinking about the rest of my house, and I’ve come up with a few ideas that have excited me tremendously. By the end — if I ever get there — my home will have many visual stimuli’s, but that’s by my own choosing. I’ve never been distracted by what’s surrounding me; instead, my biggest distraction is the internet. And that just involves willpower, which I tend to be pretty good with in the morning. Especially since I’m writing first thing in the morning, so I’m too tired to even care about the internet.

Montana is my home, and this place inspires me every day. I love my home, but it doesn’t feel like a home yet. It’s close, but there’s still so much more work to be done. I’m planning to drive to California to pick up about nine boxes of books. I’m also planning to stop by Ikea and other stores to buy some much needed furniture and decorations. I’m planning to do this soon, but I’m not too sure when. Once I do, though, once I come back with more stuff, not only will I be poorer, but also be happy with the place I’m now calling home.

I like to be organized. Whenever I have an idea for a task, I have a trusted place where I can put that so I won’t forget it. Whenever I feel frustrated or angry or sad and need to expel some energy, I know that I will workout later in the day, giving me that outlet to satisfy those emotions. My wallet always goes in my left side back pocket, my pocket notebook goes in my right side back pocket, my phone goes in my left front pocket, and my pen and keys go in my right front pocket. Before I leave my house, I grab my keys from the same place I always put them, I grab my phone from the same place I put it, and if I need a sweater, I grab that from the same place I always put them. Whenever I come home, I take off my shoes and put them underneath my bed, I toss my keys on the surface beside my bed, and I charge my phone on my newly acquired dock, placed on the same surface I’ve always use to place my phone. I have many more of these habits and ways I like to do things, but these are just a few.

Some people may think I have ADD; I just like to think things through once and never have to think about it again. I don’t want to spend precious time looking for my keys because I didn’t have a designated place for them in my home. I don’t want to keep a dozen tasks in my head because I don’t have a trusted system to put them in so I can free up my mind to think about other things. I don’t want to leave my house without a charged phone or without my keys, something that has happened before. I keep a notebook and pen with me because I don’t want to enter a situation where not having these tools negatively affects me in some way.

My life is built on routines. That’s the only way I know how to better myself. At the moment, this is my current routine: I write and meditate every morning, on weekdays I go to work, on weekends I don’t, after work, I workout and then I read, and after that I do some todo list maintenance, and finish my night writing an entry on this blog. This is my daily routine and this is the exact order these things occur in my day. They’re not always done at the exact same hour every day, but they’re pretty close. I use time to gauge how much time and effort I need to accomplish these tasks at a reasonable time. There’s so much more I could do, and there are gaps in my days where I could efficiently add a new habit into but I haven’t yet.

My days seem busy but my progress looks slow. I won’t be done with my novel until well into next year, maybe later. I look a bit stronger, but I’m definitely not where I want to be. I still have so many more books to read and so many more blog entries to write. Sixty-one entries is nowhere near three hundred and sixty-five. And my home is nowhere near where I want it to be. That excitement I had before my purchases arrived in the mail and up till the first few days with these possessions has waned. These products are now a part of my life, and since they fit me and my lifestyle very seamlessly, they’ve disappeared into the background of my life. That’s amazing, actually. That was the whole point when I bought them, and I’m happy to see it play out that way.

Nobody reads my blog anymore, but I don’t care that much. I have big plans for this place, but they won’t come into fruition for a long time. All I know is that I have to keep moving forward, little by little, every day until all these little pieces add up to something amazing. And I can’t wait until that day. In the meantime, I’m going to keep focusing on my life and how I can live it as best as I can.

I feel good. Actually, I feel great. That’s not something I could’ve said sixty days ago. I can’t believe it’s been sixty days. Sixty days. Two months ago I had my heart broken, my actions disappointed me, and my life seemed to be in shambles. Now? Now I’m in a good place. I have hope for my future, and I can’t wait to live my damn life the way I want to. I’m in charge, and that’s something I’ve never fully internalized until I started this blog. This blog has been up and running for sixty days, and each one of those sixty days has an entry. Sixty straight entries. Holy shit.

Sixty.

I’m not sure why I’m putting so much significance on this number. My goal has always been three hundred and sixty-five. So… three hundred and five more entries to go! I can do it. Three hundred more entries? Piece of cake.

Writing is my life

The struggle with writing a daily blog is having something to say every day. I admit, I usually don’t have something of significance to say every day, but if I didn’t write every day, those entries that actually mean something to me would never have been written. If anything, this blog has chronicled my journey to become a more disciplined writer. All I’m doing and all I’m hoping to do revolves around the fact that I’m a writer, and that’s a role I no longer want to take for granted.

I’ve been having this nagging urge to write more every day. Some professional writers write for hours every day. I write for maybe forty-five minutes every morning and about the same every night. I don’t write more because I have so much to do already. I have to eat breakfast, I have to meditate, I have to go to work, I have to workout, I have to read, I have to eat dinner, I have to shower, and I have to sleep. There’s only so many hours in the day. And I have to have some fun or else I’ll burn out much more quickly.

Ideas for the future

Thirty days ago I gave myself three goals to try and accomplish by the end of the next thirty days. Today I finished a book — The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp — but I don’t think I read that much more. I was also supposed to measure my body fat to determine if my whey protein powder made me gain any fat and not muscle. Earlier this week, I ran out of my protein powder, and I decided to quit using that. I think it helped me gain muscle, which was my goal for adding it to my diet, but I’m now more interested in fueling my body with healthier and more nutritious options. Today my package of Primal Fuel came and that’s something I’ll be using from now on. I tried a shake today, and it tasted delicious. Here’s hoping it helps me out. My third and final goal was to develop some sort of framework to develop my personal philosophy. I believe this blog has been my vehicle for that. I wrote about this a few days ago.

Am I going to create some goals for me for the next thirty days? No, not really. I hope to keep up with my current routine. I hope to maybe add a few more things to my routine to make me better than I am today. I also hope to stretch myself a bit and maybe develop some new hobbies. Eventually I hope to be more serious about my coffee by actually grinding my own beans and experimenting with different brew methods. I’m also really eager to explore photography by buying a very good camera and lens and taking more pictures of the beautiful state of Montana I’ve called home for almost three years. Finally, I hope to finish furnishing my home with everything I need and want and decorate it with my own style and design sensibilities.

Creating

All these hopes are endeavors that improve and expand my creativity. I love creating. I really fucking love creating. If this blog is any indication, I love creating the type of life I want to live. It’s hard work. It can get slow, tough, and seeming hopeless sometimes, but it can also be so much fun and pleasurable.

Focusing on designing a life I want to live and actually living that life is one of those things I’m always going to enjoy. And like any artist, I’ll never be satisfied. I’ll always be tinkering with it, but unlike art, I’m not going to decide when it’s all done. That’ll be left up to Nature herself.

I want to keep her waiting for a long time, though.

I don’t know what to write about today. My weekdays are really busy. I’ve never really appreciated my free time before until just recently. I don’t have time to think, which sounds weird to me. I’m always moving, always doing something. My schedule feels tight (at least during the weekdays), and that makes me feel robotic, in a sense. Since the weekends are the only days in the week where I can actually slow down and reclaim some of my free time, I’ve been trying to use them as my days to think and to explore my curiosity.

One thing I’m always curious about is how I can improve how I do things. I’m always asking myself how I can be more efficient, or how I can reduce friction between starting something beneficial and not. For the past few days, I’ve been thinking about my todo list app of choice, OmniFocus. I’ve been trying to simplify it for months, and I thought I developed a good system right around the time I got my job. It still felt too complicated. So at the beginning of the week, during my Weekly Review actually, I began to make some changes. I combined many projects into one, deleted dozens of contexts and focused them on just seven: Focus, Routines, Home, Tech, Errands, Work, and Waiting. I’m currently not using the Routines context, butt that’s because I’m not done tinkering yet. I’m actually not sure if I even need that context, but I won’t know until I dive back into this app.

Everything is in OmniFocus. It helps me build my routines, get things done, and it makes me feel less burdened to remember all those nagging little tasks. It helps me keep on top of my finances, with routine home and car maintenance tasks, and it even reminds me to take my vitamins every morning. It’s such an amazing feeling knowing I don’t have to worry about these things. But I am cursed with that constant feeling of having to tinker with my system because I’m never satisfied with it. There’s more I can be doing, and until I know I’m packing every minute of every hour of every day with tasks to improve myself in some way, then I’ll never feel satisfied.

Is that obsessive? Maybe. Crazy? Most definitely. But it’s a system and a mentality that works for me. I’m doing great on so many things right now, and I have to stop sometimes and appreciate that. From writing to working out to my job, I’m doing okay. This is what I wanted a few months ago.

Why can’t I be satisfied, though? Why do I have to keep pushing myself? Because I want to be great. Not for anyone else, but for myself. I know I can get there, but knowing my tinkering-obsessive personality, I’m most likely never going to allow myself to get there. I’ll never allow myself to just be, and that will either be a blessing or a curse. Maybe a little bit of both?

I just bought Ariana Grande’s new album from iTunes, and that’s what I’m listening to right now while I’m writing this. I like her voice, and she’s so adorably cute. I’ve been buying a lot of music lately, and I’ve been playing each new album I get on repeat until I get the next newest album. I actually pre-ordered Taylor Swift’s newest album, and when the full album dropped last week, I played it on repeat for days. That’s all I listened to while at work, while writing, and while lounging around my home. Last week I discovered Run the Jewels, a hip hop duo comprised of Killer Mike and El-P. They released their second album last week, and that’s been on repeat all the way up to today. And a few days ago I bought another Sigur Rós album, and I love listening to them when writing my novel. All these albums are just so good. I love music.

When I decided to write my first novel, I made a few decisions that I don’t think I’ll ever do again. One of them was writing the entire thing by hand. I thought I’d get a better feel for the story by doing it that way, but once I started my second draft, I realized I needed to throw that whole first draft away. That decision was a good one. Another decision I made was to write without any music. Before that decision, I rarely wrote anything without music playing in the background. I say rarely because I’m sure there were a few times in my life where I wrote without any music (not counting classroom settings). I guess I wanted to experiment and see what it would be like doing these things. Turns out, I don’t like it. Now I know, though, so that’s good.

One thing I love about Insanity is the music that plays in the background during every workout. If you’ve never experienced an Insanity workout, you might have a tough time understanding what I’m trying to say. The music varies between workouts, but it’s all a variation on some high tempo, instrumental track that relates to the context of the workout. During the warmup, the track is upbeat but a bit slow. As the warmup speeds up, so does the music, but you never notice it, really. Then later, during other high energy workouts, the music might speed up and increase its energy. There’s a moment during the Game Day workout where we’re sprinting as fast as we can after already doing a variety of running exercises for five or so minutes. The music feels inspirational. There’s a track of cheering fans layered underneath the music, and I could really feel myself sprinting down the track in a packed stadium. The music helps me push harder. There’s an option to turn off the music, but I never do. The music plus Shaun T’s magnificent training style equals a passion for Insanity that I don’t have with anything else.

Love Me Harder by Arianna Grande and the Weeknd just started playing, and I’m dancing to the beat in bed. I love the Weeknd. A few years ago he released a trio of albums for free, and I gobbled them up because his voice is so sexy and smooth. I love it. That coupled with Ariana Grande’s beautiful voice makes this track one of my favorites.

I’ve never really written about music before. I was just tired today, and all I wanted to do was close my laptop and go to bed. But I wanted to write something tonight. And I’m glad I did. I had fun.

The Insanity hybrid workout is kicking my ass. I think I sprained my left shoulder and right foot during my workout today. I, maybe unwisely, workout barefoot, and Insanity demands a lot from my feet. From running in place to jumps to more jumps to even more jumps, my feet have taken a pounding for the past two months and during that time, I’ve only taken a handful of days off to recover. I don’t want to take any days off unless I have to, and if I have to fight through the pain, I will. What does that say about me?

I’ve never been more focused with anything like I am now with my life and how I want to live it. Pain is part of the game¹, and I just have to fight through it. What I want out of life will never be given to me, and I genuinely believe that I have to fight for every little bit of it. I want to be healthy, but I want to look and feel the best I’ve ever felt, too. I finally lost some weight this past week², and I really think I’ve never looked this good before. But I can be better.

I want to be a professional writer, which means making my living writing. I have to write more every day, though. I’m over 17,000 words into my novel, and I really enjoy what I have now, but part of me feels like most of it is crap. I want to be a better writer, and I’ve had that desire for a long time. That’s why I started to transcribe the Great Gatsby by hand, just to know what it’s like to write a good novel³. That desire is also partly why I started this blog. I just know the best way to get better at writing is by writing.

Finally, I want to know how to live the best life I possibly can. To do that, I have to study philosophy. Back in college, I wanted so much to minor — maybe even major — in philosophy, but the curriculum for the minor required that I stay another year in school, and that was something I couldn’t and didn’t want to do. So I didn’t satisfy that desire then. Now that I’m older, though, I learned that I can get a better education outside of college than in it by simply pushing myself to read tough books and think critically about subjects that interest me. There’s so much I still don’t know, but I’m super eager to learn more. That means reading so many books and stopping to think about them deeply and critically. In this area, I can definitely be better.

I need to be better at so many things, and I’m so happy that I’m working at it everyday. So much joy is coursing through my body right now that I wish I could share it with everyone. It feels great, and I want to be great.

On Day 30 I gave myself three goals to focus on for the following thirty days. They all revolved around my personal three pillars toward a good life, which involved the mind, the body, and the spirit. I’ve always felt confident about what I needed to do to develop both my mind and my body, but it’s been developing my spirit where I’ve been the least confident in. To be clear, I know that everything flows into one another: a healthy body helps strengthen the mind, a strong mind helps push the body to new heights, both the mind and body contribute tremendously to the spirit, and of course the spirit flows back into the other two in a very harmonious way. But what I’ve been struggling with is the feeling of aimlessness when it came to effectively developing and nurturing my spirit beyond my mind and body. My goal back then was to develop a framework toward what my own personal philosophy could be, and for twenty-six days I’ve felt like I’ve been neglecting this goal the most.

Except, I think this blog has shown me exactly everything I need to know to develop my own philosophy. In essence, philosophy is simply a love of wisdom. The more attuned and sensitive I am toward myself, the more knowledge of myself I know, which in turn helps me grow into a better person. What I consider a better person is most definitely different from what you or someone else considers a better person, but that’s not where I’m going with this. This blog has been my attempt toward an honest examination of myself, both my actions and my thoughts, and not anyone else’s.

I’ve learned that I’m concerned with finding ways to not only improve but maintain my happiness. Being happy is important to me because I’ve been depressed for a long time, and I don’t like who I am when I’m blue for no discernible reason. Working out, eating right, writing, reading, working, and keeping myself busy have all contributed greatly toward that. I still feel empty, but I think — I hope — by developing my philosophy, I can find meaning and satisfaction that’ll fill me up with all that life has to offer me.

I’ve also learned that I’m concerned deeply with quality. I wrote a lot about this yesterday, so I won’t go too much into that right now. I will say that I’ve been deeply concerned with everything I’m allowing myself to enter my life. In short, I’m being ruthless with everything that has entered and that could be entering my life. I think the word allow is important here. Sometimes I’ve allowed things to enter my life without truly acknowledging the effects that thing would have on me. I hesitate to use the word thing because I’m referring to both physical objects and people. Quitting my job all those months ago was the best decision I’ve made in a long time, and a big reason why was eliminating my toxic co-workers from invading my life. And again, there’s her, that girl I thought I wanted but find I’m so better off without. By understanding the effects all these things have on my life, I have a better understanding of what is making my life worse and what is making it better. This distinction is super important to help me live a life of quality.

Finally, I’ve barely written about this here but it’s something that’s constantly on my mind, and that’s the idea of taking risks. We only live one life, and I hate the thought of wasting it. But with some things, I feel like I am. Mostly that revolves around my dating life, or my lack thereof. To truly live, I have to take risks. I have to. I don’t want to live a life of what ifs, but a life of I did. I did ask that girl out. I did jump out of that airplane. I did live my life the way I wanted to. I don’t know how to take more risks other than just taking more risks, so I don’t know how to plan for that.

I guess I just have to be who I am. Simple, right?