At the start of the decade, I was in college with low self-esteem, bad eyebrows, and still in the grips of my awkward phase (which lasted from age 13-27.) I was afraid to be myself because I didn’t think that I could be.
FLASH FORWARD. It’s 2017, we waved goodbye to the Obama era, Kenan Thompson was his 105th year on SNL, and that white blinking guy meme dominated the internet. Best of times, meh of times as I worked for a groovy grant project that was about to get defunded. Maybe it was the political climate, maybe it was all the hardwon realizations of my mid-20s, but I was ready for a quarter-life crisis.
I finally made good on a promise to my teen self – I got the hell out of Tucson. In the last 3 years, I have been like David Carradine in Kung Fu if he wrote resumes and talked a lot about LinkedIn. Living in a dozen countries and growing freelance business, I finally got the confidence to wear hats despite my nagging fear that my head is oddly shaped. I also got the confidence to write fiction again.
It has been a crazy journey these last few years. And I am not letting up. The biggest ‘aha’ of the decade is that there are no standards, no one knows what they are doing, and the universe is random so hell, just chase your dreams.
HELLO 2020, let’s get weird.