Today is my birthday! A whopping 35! I remember when I turned 34 as it felt like I was truly leaving the world of being associated with the energy of being connected to my 20s as the numeric symbolism felt somewhat awkward. Now that I’m 35 it is completely all gone and I’ve had to learn to accept that I am really not connected to that energy any more and more appropriately am definitely in my mid 30s and definitely relate to people and am more comfortable around those who have left their 20s behind and are diving deeper into their true confidences and life passions and sense of purpose and meaning in the world, along with relating with those who are interested in looking at themselves for self-improvement.
I don’t pose too many direct stated self-reflections. The reason this age has a special significance is because it is the age I used to always use when I was younger regarding when I would be on the verge of feeling old or already established with things, etc. “When I’m 35 and I have kids. When I’m 35 and am married. When I’m 35 and have a house. When I’m 35 and have a lot of money. When I’m 35 and have my dream job. When I’m 35 I’ll get a dog again. When I’m 35 and have traveled the world. When I’m 35 and will have knee problems.” It’s funny because of the people I know who have accomplished many of these things and been so focused, avidly goal oriented, and persistent in their approach to be where they want to be by say 35, or whatever age, largely many of them are some of the most unhappy, stressed out, anxious people I know! When I was 20, probably one of the most important decisions in my life came thinking about what I would be like when I was 35. When I had gotten a scholarship to play baseball at UC Santa Barbara, I looked around and realized that I didn’t want to be 35 and have invested so much in a physical sport. I didn’t want to be a professional at see ball, hit ball, catch ball. I didn’t want to end up like 95% of the jocko dudes I was around. So, I quit and took a step in a totally different direction, one that was far less focused on my physicality, and little did I know but that slight change of overall trajectory made the hugest and eventual positive difference in my life.
I had a very one dimensional childhood. It was play all day long with the kids outside. We mostly played sports and were competitive. It was very fun and I excelled at sports and was usually the best or one of the best on my team. I built up an expectation for that being the norm, which was hard to adjust to later in life. My parents had raised three other kids before me and it was easy for me to just be outside, excelling at sports, not to mention getting good grades as well. How could parents not be more than happy with what was going on? Everything else was a very minor detail in my life other than the pursuit of sports and especially baseball as I ventured into high school and early college. It all culminated into huge successes for me as I got a full scholarship to play at the highest college level possible! Life couldn’t have been better. It was like being a mini celebrity.
It’s funny to think that if I had kept on the athletic track that at 35 I would be contemplating retirement! At the age of 20 I stopped playing sports from a professionally minded perspective and, as a result, had zero identify. I had a yearning to do something else and go in a totally opposite direction and so I picked up books and starting reading like mad from there on out. One of the first books I picked up was the “Doors of Perception” by Aldous Huxley and a philosophy book by Aristotle about the virtues and vices we all live by in our lives. Pretty telling for where I am now I’d say. Before that time, I think the only book I had truly read with intention and absorbed was “Lord of the Rings.” I considered myself way behind mentally, and have always had trouble processing mental information for most of my life. When one’s childhood is all physicality related, it is hard to then catch up later as the brain has developed. I’ve spent most of the last 15 years trying to, in essence, play ‘catch up.’
As I think back to my 20s now it was a very fun time. I thought I wanted to be a teacher. It sounded appealing because I could have time off and I wanted to have kids so that would be great for being able to spend time with them. Plus, I could be a baseball coach as I loved the balance between the sport/life balance of high school sports. While I was in school to accomplish these things, I lived in San Francisco, and believed it to be the greatest city in the world. I made a bunch of friends through playing intermural soccer at San Francisco State on a team called the “Fat Tires.” This social group led to my best friends for this era. It led to the girls I would date and share love with. It led to feeling as awesome and as free and having as much fun as possible in a city that people from all over the world dream about living in. I drank a lot of alcohol, watched a lot of sports, smoked a lot of pot, and went on U.S. road trips with friends, and did a few teaching abroad/traveling adventures in China, Guatemala, and Australia. My life in SF was an awesomely lived bubble of city life. My social life was a bustling number of people that would be between 10 to 20 that would be at any bar or show or outdoor event that was going on. I felt great to be so connected to such a thriving group of people in a thriving city. I became a writer during this time and experimented with Veganism for the first time. I really felt that I was definitive of San Francisco liberal culture and stood for something amazing. I hung around and lived with amazing friends, musicians and didn’t think my life could possibly be moving in any better direction as this was what life was about and I never really thought too long about my ex life as an athlete.
As time went by, the positive energy stream of my SF life started to wane. Spending so much time drinking booze and smoking pot in bars or out with friends and watching sports proved to be not doing it for me anymore. All social outings would go the same and it became clear that people were not hanging out with each other to do things but, rather, hanging out to just become stimulated and numbed through booze or pot or TV or sports or whatever else. I yearned to go deeper. It was hard to develop friends beyond this and the thought that, there must be something else out there, always rang in my head as my later twenties came into fruition and I’d be doing the same old thing day after day. During this time, I had also gotten a teaching credential but after spending five years in the public-school system and them laying off teachers every year or hiring me and bringing me back for less pay and benefits the following year, was proving disappointing for the career I had chosen. Not to mention that what the schools make you teach is mind numbing and catered to standards, which is an ultimate disappointment in itself. The image in my mind of teaching was not panning out in my life. I was in search of more meaning and my old way of doing things, yet again, was falling up short for who I wanted to be. I didn’t want to be 35 and doing the same old thing in the same old place with the same old people. It was a good run in SF but a lot of my friends changed, or they moved away, and so I took the plunge and decided to move away too and go in search of something new and more meaningful.
The next few years from about 28 to 33 led to me really bouncing around all over the place. I ventured to the East Coast in Philadelphia for an opportunity to be in love with a girl I had dated earlier in my life whom instilled a wonderful connective passion in me. The east coast adventure was something new and grand and involved a lot of exploring in a new culture, in new cities, and was the first time in my life where I felt like I was becoming a different person than who I had always been. My time in Northern California, until I had moved to Philly, involved me being a super social person focused on sports, going out with friends, organizing social gatherings, and basing a whole lot on being extroverted. Philadelphia was an interestingly different time. I tried to engage there in the same way I did in SF and largely failed as my heart and mind was not in it. I didn’t want to have the same life there but all I knew were the ways I had acted before. I started to pay more attention to my social anxiety. I spent a lot of time being lonely and catering to introversion for once, however, I still smoked good amounts of pot and watched large amounts of sports. I think I had been mentally exhausted from my time in SF and allowed Philly to be for me a time where I tried to do things different but obviously didn’t really know how, and Philly being very true to the stereotype of the city, is not the friendliest of places, so that made it a bit more difficult to come out of my own closet of sorts for how I wanted to change but only knowing how I’d acted before made it difficult. This gave incredible insight for me on why it is hard for people to change.
Eventually, I went in the direction of wellness in massage education, then personal training school, then nutrition school. The schools were not the greatest but I didn’t have much else of meaning going on in my life other than my relationship so I gritted my teeth and kept at it. I still remember most mornings being a total grind for picking myself up and getting out the door and trying to “accomplish” something. I am not generally a depressed person but it was becoming more a part of my life as I felt like my search for meaning and purpose weren’t producing what I felt they should have been.
At 30 I decided that I was going to move to Denver because I didn’t want to get stuck in Philly with the gritty, bitter, asshole vibe of the city, and pot had just become legal so why not! In my mind, I knew this was something I wanted to do on my own but I was in a relationship. I couldn’t pull myself to leave it and my girlfriend followed me out there and we lived in an upscale type of place which I hated. Needless to say, it was a very depressing year for me. Moving to Denver for the marijuana business did not produce any of the opportunity I thought it would have and the Denver pot culture is WAY different than the San Francisco pot culture which I loved and was used to. Not that I was looking for that either as I had moved away from that but it was what I had known and there was connection there so the draw was a reality. I could hardly get up in the mornings to go about my day. I hated giving massage and working in wellness. I was burnt out on going to school. I was in a relationship and living situation that I knew that didn’t define me. I was running apartments through my airbandb business and I was a little disgusted at myself in my life that my means of income and what I “was” was a rental manager. Those were some very numbing, dark days. There had to be more, god dammit! Fuck, I was unwilling to consider that life was not really anything you really wanted it to be.
I left Denver and came upon a new word in my life; authenticity. My friend and I were going through breakups of sorts and we decided to go to Burning Man together. This couldn’t have gone better as the Burner culture embraced things I believed in like radical self-reliance, radical expression, radical participating/inclusion, decommodification, civic responsibility, leave no trace, etc. It really taught me how to take care of myself in a harsh environment as it’s held in the extreme elements of the desert. It taught me how to flow in life, how to accept myself, how to be mindful, and that there was a huge community of people who believed the same. The first year was an explosion in my mind, as I encountered seventy thousand people at the event, for how this whole community was possible and happening and how I had never been a part of it or really taken it seriously, thinking it was just a festival rather than a way of life. Attending the following two years were very deep dives into really embracing the culture of burning man and feeling great at the person I was allowing myself to be. I am proud to say that being a “burner” is one of the things I identify with.
Despite this awakening through going to Burning Man and feeling so “at home”, nothing absorbs itself that quickly into your life no matter how much you want it. It took about 2 more years to actually implement these changes in a way that I really felt confident with where it was my reaction at being rather than something I was trying to learn. I moved to Salt Lake City as I felt like the city had a relaxing nature to it, my brother lived there, and there was amazing outdoors to play in all around. Investing in nature is never a bad thing. I also started to explore psychedelic processing more with magic mushrooms, lsd, and mdma, again, never a bad thing when done with positive intention and in a balanced way. I bought a house somewhat reluctantly but with hope, with the partner I had still had from Philly and we decided we were going to give it one more shot. The age of 35 was quickly approaching and instead of it being a far-off age of, ‘yeah I’ll have my shit squared away by then,’ it was now more like ‘well if it’s not squared away as soon as possible I’m going to lose my mind.’ The Bernie Sanders campaign came and that gave me and my partner a wonderful, positive purpose in life but we all know how that eventually ended. As soon as it ended in horrible and evil Democratic Party corruption and takeover, my life went back to normal with all the anxieties and depressions I had been previously experiencing. It was still crazy hard to get up in the morning. I didn’t like my life. I didn’t want to be living with my loving partner already settled into a relationship routine with a home. This wasn’t supposed to be happening yet in my life, if at all. I always felt so numb and like I was going to explode from it. I felt like there was something else and enough time had gone by now that I guess you can say I was narrowing it becoming depleted for how I was handling it and something big was about to happen whether I liked it or not.
My authentic being was too much to ignore somewhere in about halfway through my 33rd year. For the previous year or so I had experimented more with psychedelics and emotional processing. I started to go to festivals more. I started to become attracted to different types of women. I started to become attracted to different types of lifestyles. Upon coming home from a festival, I ended things with my lover even though we had a house together. It took a very emotionally trying year before we finally sold the place and officially both moved on. In that time, I took on another girlfriend which was the recipient of a lot of my pent-up energy that I had wanted to come out for so long. I loved her full bore, even though I was in an emotional unhealthy place of wanting to dish out my love before it was appropriate. I wanted to love her and did before we even started dating. I was in love with Utah. I was in love with her family. I thought she was the most wonderful, artistic, crafty, earthy hippy ever! It was all so different than what I had experienced before, which was exactly what I wanted. The physical attraction was out of this world and I really felt like I was with someone I could have a deep spiritual connection with. I wanted to FEEL again in my life, after feeling so numb for so long for what it felt like to love and yearn for someone and something. I hadn’t had meaning in my life for loving what I was doing for a while which made this energy, love surge especially intense. I just tried to let go and go with the flow. I was as accommodating as possible. It was easy to love really hard and with deep intention. I was spiritually and emotionally connected to her and for a short time this really satisfied me and gave me hope that perhaps I had found something that really was in alignment with my authentic self for who I was and what I was morphing into and what I could move forward in my life with.
This relationship was utterly amazing for about the first six months. As the emotional surge, love blinders gradually eased up and a more balanced reality settled in with the passing months, it became clear that I was participating in a relationship that defined an older version of myself that merely was a mirage for it being different. My love surge produced in me things I didn’t’ see and pay attention to and in this way, I wasn’t being honest with myself and just wanted to feel good being in a loving connection with someone else. I didn’t speak my truth and my accommodating nature just led the way. The relationship was very reliant on pot and shallow in many aspects that defined more of what my life was like in my 20s and why I left SF and that whole lifestyle. My eventual insistence to implement emotional maturity and communicate and going deeper, brought only rage and defensiveness from my partner as she was unwilling to process and think differently about things. I tried so hard to make things better and keep what we had but the more effort I put in the more it was made worse. You can’t create change with a person who doesn’t want to explore themselves or communicate or be vulnerable. Eventually I felt like my vulnerabilities were being used against me and a weird control game where my love was the innocent bystander was being played out. Who could feel less was the game and who controlled power and I lost every time and as a result was demeaned and degraded for feeling the way I did for trying to emotionally process and connect. I always felt so confused and as dejected and horrible as possible but became obsessed at how I could help improve things. There must be a way! Nothing ever worked as the game was rigged from the beginning as that’s how certain people operate as feeling and processing and going deep are enemies to be avoided at all costs! I eventually sacrificed most of myself, felt embarrassed at what I had become but for some reason couldn’t figure out how to get out of it. I was frozen and fell hard to being addicted to a narcissist who used vulnerabilities and manipulation and low conscious thinking to keep me from going to places that I had learned over the years through therapy and witnessing and talking to others were elements of healthy relationships. The relationship lasted for too long as I continued to think less and less of myself until I realized yet again, that there had to be something more. The only difference with this situation was that I really had the issues of what it felt like to be an addict to something and how I couldn’t even trust myself to make a decision to be with someone that was constantly leading to negative consequences and outcomes for me. With not being able to trust myself, I had to trust others, my therapist, and the writings of professionals on the subject, of how victims are when in psychopathic, narcissistic relationships. It was a learning experience and I will never downplay the affects of how powerless we can be when the values and professionalism of a psychopath, sociopath, and narcissist is at work. The insight gained through this has been tremendous and I experienced one part of life that I didn’t even know existed and will never again degrade myself to such a degree and have given permission to others to step in if they see me delving into such negative behavior.
It is interesting to note that since the above situation was a recent phenomenon in my life it takes up more attention and space. I could have written about a slew of different scenarios I had experienced with women in my twenties but they have since become less intense in memory. Even though, this one situation is probably something I’ll remember for the rest of my life in how I completely lost control, became an addict, and was experiencing a very harsh partner, it is also fair to say that life keeps moving on. What we think is insane at one point in our lives eventually become but a memory that we learned from. We keep on at it and it’s good to know that certain intense emotions and ‘cataclysmic events’ are just that in the short term and are merely a part of us and do not embody us or define us whole in the long run. They need outlets for healthy processing and that’s the most important thing. Everything experienced becomes just like everything else, parts that make up the whole and that is something important to remember as we often think in the short term that nothing else defines us than what is currently emotionally happening. Developing emotional intelligence and balance is an interesting process wrought with extreme growing pains.
And again, I sit here as a 35-year-old and think to myself, ‘There’s got to be something different!’ For some reason, now I believe it more than I ever have. Not because I think there is something magically different out there that will bring me blissful happiness, but just that I have faith in the life process of the gradual change that needs to come about to bring you closer to your true authentic self. All we can do is be communicative and honest with ourselves and others about who we are and what we’re striving for. For so many years I was defined by certain things that got tore down. I’ve struggled a lot regarding the role I let love with a partner play in my life and I’m now going to give that a break for a few years and see where that energy takes me and what fills that void. If you really want to make things different than you really have to somehow get to a point where you rely on different things and develop processes for obtaining it. I no longer want to rely on the love with a partner to be what completes me as I haven’t had much other than short term success with that in the past. If anything, it has brought criticizing thoughts and comments to myself regarding selling myself short, not being honest, and not really pushing to my authentic self. I need to work on self-love. I need to actually fill my life with things that bring me joy. The joy that lives in your gut that tells you to try and take things on. I need to fill myself with people that are positive, people who I admire. I need to fill my life with accepting who I am and not abiding by what society or a social group of others wants me to be. I’ve spent too much time faking it, or thinking I’m acting authentically, only to experience anxiety and pressures related to whatever avatar I am creating for people to believe in about me. It’s taken me a long time to get to this point. At any point along the way, I could have ended up with a partner or a job that just would have increased the dread in my life. I really am a fortunate person to have made it through these times and not giving in to what I felt like I had to do.
Now that I’m 35, I sit here and realize that I’ve never felt so free and full of potential. It has not been too long since completely ending the last narcissistic based relation I was in that I mentioned above but it has been enough time that I feel that I have turned the corner for knowing how to proceed forward in a positive way, investing in what makes me a positive person again. I am learning how to really trust myself and how to listen to my truthful voice again. It feels like a total re-birthing after so many years of taking on different thing after different thing that just compounded similar problems in me. We all evolve how we are supposed to evolve but, fuck, it just seems like I haven’t had mental peace about really confidently being in flow about what I’m doing for a very long time. My life experiences up to this point have led all to this. Thirty-five was supposed to be the year that I took on different things and I totally am as I’ve decided to take on being a ski instructor in the winter months in Park City, UT half the year and then in April travel for the other half of the year down in Peru and make my way up to spending a lot of time in Mexico. I don’t know how this will ultimately pan out but the point is that I feel absolutely wonderful about it and I have the necessary resources and time to make it happen. I want to learn Spanish! I want to volunteer and work on permaculture farms and wellness centers. I want to engage with the world in a different way, one that’s based on my true confident spirit about what and where I see my life going. I want to have deeper connection with people, which, isn’t physicality related. I want a whole lot of things. In one sense, I think I’m getting at 35 what I said I wanted at 18. I wanted to be smarter. I wanted to live more outside of my physical body of performance, whims, and desires. I really wanted things to be different and after SO many years, and short term stints here and there, they really have been, and I feel like now I can see the horizon of a new level of existence that’s more honed around the deeper, more authentic aspects of life that I feel drawn to and want to incorporate. It has been an interesting ride and I’m sure heading forward will produce different peaks and valleys of emotional processing but somehow I think it will involve different things than what I’ve experienced in the past. Thirty-five couldn’t feel better for what it represents! I’m glad I’m not retiring from playing sports, but rather just revving my mind and mental and emotional processing up to get going for the truth that I see and want to experience in the world! After all, things have got to be different right! Keep believing in yourself and it manifests gradually and eventually!
The Avid Fan 
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