Once upon a time, a boy met a girl. She was perfect. She was more than perfect. She was everything he had dreamed he could ever want, but never dreamed could be real. But despite her “perfection” the situation was not perfect. In fact, it was nothing but uncertain. The uncertainty frightened him – paralyzed him. So, he did the only thing he was capable of doing, and the worst thing he could possibly do: He walked out on her.

Dear Meegan,

I know it has been a long time… over ten years in fact. We did not know each other long, so I would imagine that by now you may have forgotten me. But, I know what I did to you was so wrong and so hurtful that you can’t possibly have forgotten. I can only hope that you have forgotten the harm I caused you. And for that, I am deeply sorry.

I remember when I first met you – you checked my coat at the counter of… that fancy bar downtown, I forget the name. I was immediately enamored by your charm. My friends could tell I was smitten and they prodded me to do something I had never done before – and have never done since. So, I approached you, a complete stranger, and asked you for your number. And you gave it to me.

Over the weeks that followed every moment we spent together, every conversation we had, everything about you kept swimming in my head telling me you were “perfect.” It was probably very fanciful thinking on my part. After all, what is “perfect” really? Right from the start that was a sign things were not off to the right start.

I wanted us to be more than friends. I may have expressed this to you – you may have politely declined me. I probably don’t remember everything clearly, but I know I wasn’t thinking clearly. I knew you were busy finishing your degree and had so much on your plate that we couldn’t date. But I was convinced that once you finished school and were not as busy that you would have the time, the energy, and the interest to pursue something with me. It was what I dreamed for, and it was what I told myself was going to happen.

Of course, I could have simply been delusional. It all seemed like a perfect dream. But perfect dreams tend to be more in one’s head, right? Perfect dreams don’t happen in reality.

You asked me to act in a role for your final directing project. I knew how important it was to you and I wanted more than anything to do it for you, so I agreed. You were depending on me. But I was not mature enough to handle the pressure I had built up on myself… much less to handle the pressure of being there for you when you needed me.

As the day for our dress rehearsal began to approach, so did your graduation day. And so my “dream” of us having a chance to become more than friends. I was scheduled to enlist in the Air Force in just a few months after that and I began to question whether or not I would follow through on that commitment if my “perfect dream” came true and our relationship grew.

As the day for our dress rehearsal began to approach, I began to plan my big romantic gesture. I remembered a conversation we had about your name – your given name and your family name.  I designed a poster and had it printed and framed. It had your family crest on it and I wrote a few short paragraphs that explored the roots and meaning of your name. Meegan: Little pearl. Strong. Capable.

I had the poster printed and framed. I ordered flowers. I made a dinner reservation. I was going to take you out and give you this gift to celebrate your graduation, and hopefully win your heart – show you how much I cared.

As the day for our dress rehearsal began to approach, I began to question. I questioned whether or not you would reject me. I questioned whether or not things would work out if you didn’t. I questioned whether or not I would leave for the Air Force. I questioned how I could build a future for myself if I didn’t leave and how I could deserve you if I continued on my current path that seemed to be leading nowhere. My mind became plagued with doubts. I was afraid of being rejected. I was afraid of letting you down. I was afraid of my “perfect dream” turning out to not be so perfect after all. I was afraid I was going to throw everything away and for nothing.

My mind was weak. I was weak.

On the day of our dress rehearsal I sat in my room and stared at the door. “Time to go,” I thought to myself. But I couldn’t  move. I couldn’t get out of my chair. I couldn’t stop staring at your poster. I couldn’t stop turning all these doubts and questions over and over and over and over in my mind. I was paralyzed.

I was already late when you called me. I looked at my phone but couldn’t reach out and answer it. “Answer it!” I told myself. But I didn’t. I was ashamed for being late. I didn’t know what to say to you. I knew what I needed to do, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. You left a message – you were confused and concerned. I listened to it. I was already letting you down, and I didn’t know how to admit that I had screwed up.

You called again. Then, you called again. I listened to your messages: Concern melted into annoyance. Annoyance morphed into anger. Each message, worse than the last. Each message was like a nail pinning me down, making it harder and harder for me to suck it up, be a man, call you back, and show up for you. I was not a man that day. I was not a human that day. I was a lump of worthlessness. And I was letting you down.

What started out as a paralysis of indecisiveness laced with fear soon turned into a paralysis of guilt sharply punctuated by fear. I argued with myself in my mind over and over again. I knew the right thing to do. But something was stopping me. I was arguing with myself. And I was losing. In your last message, you said, “Don’t bother contacting me ever again.” It was all the excuse I needed. That is what weak people do: they look for excuses to do what they want – or not do what they feel they are incapable of doing.

I sat in my room for two days. I didn’t leave. I didn’t eat. I slept in fits. I listened to your messages over and over. I stared at the poster I made for you. I couldn’t even cry. I could barely feel anything. Just hurt and emptiness. But I knew that no matter how awful I felt, you had to feel worse.

After that I wanted to call you. So many times I tried to call you. But what could I say? How could I explain what I had been thinking? How could I explain why I did what I did? There was no excuse that came close to being good enough. Nothing I could say could undo what I did. And nothing I could tell you would make any sense to you anyway (it might not even make any sense now). So, I didn’t call you. I didn’t do the right thing. I let time pass and I let that awful day slip away. I was wrong.

Meegan, I am so sorry for letting you down. From the bottom of my heart, I am sorry.

I know that you are strong. I know that you are a pearl. I know that you didn’t let my indiscretion drag you down. You overcame that harm I caused you, and you have certainly gone on to achieve great things. Because that is the kind of person you are. Way too good of a person for me to have ever imagined – to have ever dreamed – that I could ever deserve you or win you over with romantic gestures.

I wrote a poem that expressed what happened – how I was feeling, and what I did. At the time, it was the only way I knew how to express myself. The poem is called Cold Feet. You can read it by clicking here.

After several years, I finally began to grow up a little. My problems with fear, with paralysis, and with being a disappointment to those I care most about continued to plague me though. One can only hope that as time passes they learn from their mistakes and get better. But, like so many fools before me, I have found myself making the same mistakes over and over, caught in a cycle of weakness. Imprisoned in a cell of my own design. But over time, things got better. One can do more than hope. One can take action. One can make changes. And that is what I have done. That is what I am doing. And that is what I will continue to do.

By the time I had the courage to reach out to you and apologize like you so deserved, it was already too late. I tried calling, but there was no answer. I tried emailing, but the message was returned. If I had another way of contacting you I had long forgotten. I searched for you in all the ways I knew how – for an address, number, an email… but I could never find you. So the guilt of what I did to you haunted me. Every time I found myself making another mistake in life that guilt came back upon me. It washed over me and it smothered me. It held me down and it tore me apart. It ate at me from the inside out.

But this isn’t about me. This isn’t about my guilt. This isn’t about the “suffering” I caused myself by being so foolish. No amount of guilt or suffering can ever make up for what I did to you. No amount of apology can make up for what I did. But it is the best I can give you. It is the most that I know how to offer: I’m sorry, Meegan. I wronged you. I put you in a terrible situation and I betrayed you as a friend. I hurt you. It was completely undeserved. You were nothing but perfect to me. And I was nothing but awful to you.

I’m sorry.

I truly am.

~Z

Cold Feet

Written by Zachariah Wiedeman on December 15, 2002

I encountered perfection once
I did
I could almost swear it
At least,
My idea of perfection
I’m not really sure
That perfection can actually exist
I thought my standards to be impossible
But somehow
She met them
Perhaps I set the bar too high
Or just expect too much
I’m sure I’m not making the mistake
Of comparing the past
At any rate,
There she came
Much to my delight…
…or was it fear?
The feeling that I felt
Was joy mixed with dread
What a strong combination
Don’t you agree?
It was winter
It was freezing
Maybe that had something to do with it
My heart was literally reeling
With happiness and…
…was it contempt?
The strangest thing of all
Was when the evil took hold
Demanding me to punish this heavenly creature
Punishing myself
That’s what I was doing
I struck out
But not actively
Passively
By not showing up
Perhaps worse than anything else
I struck out with my own disappearance
Soon the angry calls went away
But the nagging in my brain never subsided
There was no pleasure in my punishment
Just bewilderment and disbelief
When the dust finally settled
I could hardly figure it out
Was that me who suicided my chances?
Or just someone on my behalf
While my soul took a vacation…
“Never let anyone get too close,”
The voice inside my brain keeps repeating
“Never let anyone get too close.
“Sacrifice all for the pleasure of being lonely,”
And this is where the real war is waged
Sadly the wrong side has almost won
Because the more I separate myself
The more numb I become
A hollow shell
Echoing a life that once was there
But buried beneath my defenses
Is a frightened and woeful heart
No one will guess it!
My secret is safe with me!

In honor of the late great Harvey Pekar, I have decided to (on occasion) do my own little stick figure comic strips about some of my outlook on life.

…HOWEVER, for those who know me, you know I already talk way too much… so I decided to try my hand at story telling using just simple images in the style of the old stick figure sketches I used to do when I was a weeeee kid.

The title of the strip is “My Life… Simplified.” and that also happens to be the title of the first story. To download the full strip in one piece, click here.

Not that anyone would notice (who notices when someone they aren’t listening to goes silent?), but I have been absent from the world of publicly recording my thoughts for a while now. I will give credit though: I have so many wonderful and caring friends around the country who have been there for me, rooted for me, supported me, and inspired me. Thank you all! In case you were wondering, here is a little update of what I’m up to…

Problems in the Land of Dreams

Dreams seem to have taken front and center in my life over this past year. Not just the kind you have when you are sleeping, but the aspiration sort as well. Actually, both, to be quite honest…

For years of my life – pretty much after my second year in the Air Force – I could not recall a single night’s dreams. This past year has pretty much made up for that. Every night I have intense, action-packed movie dreams. I wake up exhausted, physically and emotionally. Sometimes my dreams are so vivid and real and I feel trapped inside them – as if I can’t wake up. It is… well, like I said before: exhausting.

I can’t really say what it all means. Obviously I have a lot on my mind – in my subconscious – that I probably need to get off my shoulders. I just wish I knew what it all was so I could cast the burdens aside and rest.

As for the other kind of dreams, what is the problem with them you might ask? I suppose the problem is that I don’t know how to not dream too big. My head is filled with big ideas and big aspirations. I’m really not good for much else besides just coming up with ideas if I think about it… I wish there was a job where I could get paid to do that!

At any rate, my dreams are always too grand, too big, and too far out of my reach. That wouldn’t be a problem except it is because it couples with my other problem and that is a general listless lack of motivation…

Look, I know I’m depressed. There’s another thing I haven’t really dealt with in years: Deep and gut-wrenching depression. It isn’t the slash-your-wrists, oh I wanna die kind of dramatic depression. Its more of a voice in my head that won’t shut up – a voice that keeps telling me I’m worthless, I can’t do anything right, I shouldn’t even be trying. Anything seemingly good I accomplish is accompanied by that voice telling me I’m a fraud. Its like getting punched in the face during every waking hour of the day. And the trouble is that most of the time I find myself believing it.

Trapped in bed. With my dreams. The good ones and the bad ones. It generally takes every ounce of my being to pull myself out of bed in the morning… or afternoon depending on the day… Whenever I think I am going to get up a hand comes and presses me down. Sometimes I do get up, but I can’t seem to focus or concentrate on anything long enough to accomplish anything. By the time I get going at all, it is night time and time to go back to bed again. But I fight it. Not wanting to face the emotionally draining dreamworld and wanting to feel some sense of accomplishment, I fight to stay awake and doing something – anything that feels like an accomplishment – before I finally surrender to the Sandman.

But I think I was saying something before about dreaming too big and a general lack of motivation, right? You see, part of this depression – shoot, I can’t really even call it that anymore, its just normal life to me… Part of life for me is that I cannot seem to muster even an ounce of motivation for anything beyond basic survival… and even that is a feeling that registers when it wants to, which isn’t always.

However, what little capability for motivation I do have tends to find itself nestled in that part of my brain that thinks up outlandish ideas that seem to be beyond my capabilities – whether it be my monetary capabilities (basically nonexistent at this point), my talents, or just what is possible given where I am, who I know, and what I have time for. Someday, perhaps, I am going to dream of accomplishing something that I am actually physically capable of doing. Until then I only wonder what that might feel like.

This, of course, works wonders on the motivation engine of my brain. I generally find myself gazing off at vistas that are across unfordable rivers only to notice the nonexistence of a path to those plateaus and then come crashing down either with the mere realization of the impossibility of my dreams or the confrontation with the reality of being unable to move forward when I attempt to embark.

So what are a few of those dreams that have the rare ability to get me excited about living?

And big ideas, I’ve had a few…

Here are a few of the “too big dreams” that have been plaguing me of late…

KnowBeforeYouVote.com – For years now I have envisioned starting a not-for-profit online tool that provides simple, straightforward information about political candidates, their positions, their record, and their record on the positions. The “brilliant” idea of KBYV presents information in a way that satisfies the level of depth that any person wants to get into. On the surface, candidates and positions are put into a cross-reference chart – like the features list on products – that has simple quantifiable answers to questions and positions. This chart can be expanded by the user to look at issues more in depth and deal with more complicated and nuanced questions and any single issue can be expanded upon to get detailed quotes, and references about that particular candidate’s position on those issues.

Meanwhile, the site also has a series of short videos and articles that provide simple explanations on hot political issues – the facts, the history, and the various arguments. This, of course can all be cross-referenced and accessed through the candidate positions section of the website. Finally, the site provides simple, easy to understand information about how to register to vote, where to go to vote, and all of this will be customized by geographic region.

And everything is designed with a user interface that works like an app on a smartphone so you can, theoretically, pull up the site and get information from it while in a voting booth. Contributions for much of the information would come in through a form of crowdsourcing – with an editorial board and layers of vetted fact-checkers to provide quality control. And the the entire tool could be scaled to work in national elections in every country in the world, a mayoral election in a small town, or even a local student government election at a small high school or college.

What would be interesting is if this idea could work in conjunction with my next idea below.

The Argus 2.0 – Learning from the struggles and mistakes of the original Argus newspaper that we started at UIC, this idea provides a content management and publishing platform that also works as an RSS feed reader (like Feedly.com) professional, open-source journalism and media studies curriculum (like Treehouse does for IT), a topic based wiki platform (like Wikia) and hyper-local news outlet (like Patch.com).

The basic idea is to launch Argus websites at colleges across the country (although this could be available for high schools as well) that start out as empty shells with a just few features. The site aggregates customized content feeds from web and news sources relevant to that institution (such as current newspapers, athletics websites, etc.), includes a customized local wiki and offers students and teachers an opportunity to publish their own blog on the site.

Rather than take a top down approach of traditional news media outlets in which you have an Editor in Chief, an Editorial board, department heads, etc. this idea organically grows its staff and fills positions on demand from the bottom up and uses gamification as a means of motivation. Users start out as simple bloggers who can write about anything they want. However, they can earn badges and feature space on the site by completing specific micro-tasks and completing professionally developed education modules broken down into small pieces that unlock new opportunities (and new education modules) upon completion. As a blogger progresses through their career, they eventually are faced with collaborative tasks, mentoring tasks, and other activities that, before they realize it, has them functioning as part of the well-oiled machine that is a professional news outlet with assignments, fact checking, and editorial review.

This deals with many of the problems that the original Argus faced relating to our staff’s sense of autonomy, self-motivation, and lack of a piecemeal reward system. The training aspect not only educates in the broader sense, but deals directly with the problems many blogs and media organizations face regarding professional standards of journalism, integrity, and accuracy.

The platform is designed to open up avenues of collaboration for individuals in various roles: From people who simply want to submit ideas for things to be reported on – or written about – to people who are good at copy editing, fact checking, photojournalism, video journalism, and writing. As the number of users – and ambitions of those users – grow, so does the capabilities of the platform for providing collaborative tools and the necessary training along the way to complete the desired task.

The wiki portion of the site would function in a similar way, although it would be slightly more open-sourced. This is designed to deal with the problems of finding information about a college department, program, professor, class, etc. that is faced by many universities around the country. Schools are using hundreds of fragmented, outdated, poorly designed websites that are built on multiple platforms, managed by dozens of different departments, and are bursting at the seams with information, but they almost require a PhD in data mining to find the information you want. The Argus 2.0 would provide a unified platform with a simple user interface, information taxonomy, and cross-referencing system, that makes finding the information you want as easy as looking up an article on Wikipedia or any other modern information website.

Each individual school’s site would be part of a larger family of sites that also provides opportunities for information sharing and collaboration between individuals at various schools around the country. Revenue would be largely based on advertising, and individual school sites could be “owned” like franchises by individuals (via a licensing and ad-revenue sharing agreement) who want to oversee and manage that particular school’s website – although many of the sites would be centrally owned by the parent company (much like McDonald’s and its 20/80 franchise model). This site would provide a robust advertising network for large national advertisers as well as tools for each individual site to set up simple and scalable advertising contracts with small local advertisers.

The other major source of revenue would come in the form of a physically published anthology that is comprised of the best work from a school’s site and in a way functions as a new kind of year book that is actually interesting to read and has collectible value. Think of it as an giant-sized special-edition annual magazine with a nice sturdy cover.

Oh, and in case I didn’t mention it, this idea would also be a not-for-profit. As the news should be! Although this idea would hopefully not rely on donations, all revenues would be put back into building the platform and increasing the educational opportunities for the users and participants. Its ultimately about slowly but surely replacing the current army of untrained bloggers that is beginning to replace traditional media with an army of “well educated and professionally trained bloggers who maintain high standards of integrity, ethics, and quality journalism.”

Your Music Your Life – This idea is based on a business plan project I did back in college for a finance class and could really be a subset of The Argus 2.0. This idea is designed to provide actors and AV students the opportunity to participate in a contest in which they produce custom made music videos. Although big-name, nationally recognized bands would be idea for collaborating with on this, it could just as easily be done with smaller, independent and local artists. Ultimately, the exposure and promotion from the contest would be enough to motivate just about any artists or forward-thinking record label to want to participate.

In a nutshell, students would be assigned a song and asked to film their own custom music video for it. Hey, kids are already doing this on YouTube without the artists’ blessing anyway, why not turn it into a regularly sanctioned contest? We would provide guidance with forming teams and designating roles – an education aspect, if you will – as well as special opportunities to access equipment and tools that students otherwise wouldn’t have access to or know they need in the first place, depending on their knowledge level.

Submissions could win in a variety of categories as well by popular vote, judges’ selection, and selection by the featured band. There would be various types of relevant prizes as well as a few big cash prizes and even an opportunity to compete nationally to bring one of the featured bands to their school for an exclusive end-of-year concert/party that honors the school, the contestants, and winners.

Crowd-source-it – This is just a sort of silly idea that I have that could be a huge flop or the next Instigram. The idea is a phone app that has two functions: You can either ask it a question or you can answer a question. Think of the “phone a friend” option on “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?” combined with the “poll the audience” option.

It is basically a way to poll all the other users on a decision you are making – ranging from the mundane, “Should I order a Carmel or Mocha latté at Starbucks?” to the serious, “Should I ask her on a second date?” Questions and responses would be generally anonymous and would come in almost immediately with the ability to break them down by categories such as overall, by demographics, people you know, and a list of “people who generally agree with you” that is created based on the similarity of your responses to other people’s questions.

To keep the questions and responses flowing, the app would work very much like a game and have limits on how many questions you can ask without providing your own responses to other people’s questions. It would have badges and rewards for levels of participation as well as other fun things like correctly predicting the answers that “the crowd” will give.

So what isn’t too big to fail?

Currently, I have a few “dreams” and ideas that I think (perhaps delusionaly) are achievable that I am working on or planning for. Here is what I am doing…

Writing a musical – A few years ago I was inspired to develop a story that is loosely based on a conversation that occurs between Ethan Hawke‘s and Julie Delpy‘s characters, Jesse & Celine, in Before Sunset. Originally this was supposed to be a 30 minute short in the format of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but once I started outlining the script I quickly realized that it was a full 90+ minute feature with a dozen or so songs in it.

The idea has been incubating for a couple of years now, but I decided to get serious about it over this past summer. Unfortunately, I became side-tracked and took an unplanned break from my writing process, so I am already behind the schedule I set for myself. However, I am happy to report that I am back at it and have made progress on a number of the songs for the musical and have also started to revisit my original script outline and begun writing it out as a full script.

Ideally, I would like to film this as a musical movie – but the budget for that would be huge – especially since I want to film in a few locations in California and Chicago – plus I might need a few other locations to film in to simulate the passing of seasons without stretching the shoot out over a full year… So, yeah the budget would be huge – at least to my impoverished self – so I am going to try and raise funds via Kickstarter. Before I can even do that, however, I would like to at least record the soundtrack and shoot a teaser reel – which is going to cost a lot of money again… Maybe I should do a Kickstarter or apply for a grant just for that!

I already have several roles tentatively cast – which makes even recording the soundtrack somewhat complicated since one of the main actors lives in Dallas and another lives in Washington, D.C. One of the main roles will be (hopefully) played by my little sister, Sabriah, and I would like my brother-in-law, Brantley, to be involved in the cinematography/directing/producing as well – if his schedule permits. Who knows, though? Almost everything really depends on when I complete my writing…

…which I forgot to mention involves me “hiring” a musician to help me arrange and score the songs I am writing. The one person I have received a tentative yes from (but again… schedules…) lives all the way out in Hawaii, and if he does fully sign on with the project, I would want him to be the musical director and to actually come out and be very heavily involved with the recording of the soundtrack.

So, its a complicated beast. But the first part is quite simple: Get the thing written. And I’m working on that right now. I’ll worry about the rest after I get through that.

Merry Christmas, George Bailey – Another project I would like to do is to produce and direct a staging of the live radio play of It’s A Wonderful Life. I have a somewhat unique method in mind for this, however…

Because the performance does not require extensive sets or costumes, I would like to book several performance locations throughout the Chicago and north-shore area – preferably in churches – for shows that run the three weekends leading up to Christmas. The performances would be on Friday nights, two on Saturday, and two on Sunday. I would like to partner with a not-for-profit, such as Solid Rock Carpenters, to donate ticket proceeds towards (although it would be nice to split proceeds between a partner organization and one of my incubating nonprofits listed above).

I really should be getting locations nailed down for this within the next month or two and by the summer have a budget and pre-funding goal set. I would cast the show in October and hold rehearsals in November. This show wouldn’t require a ton of rehearsals since it is essentially a staged reading. Then, it would just be a matter of marketing the show – which I would really be doing from the beginning before it is even cast (pre-marketing will hopefully help build interest and get more people to audition).

So that is another idea that I am trying to figure out how to bring to light. More than anything, though, I need a co-producer with experience who can collaborate with me on this to really get things moving. If you happen to know anyone who might be interested, send them my way.

B to Z Creative – This fall I decided to form my own “creative consulting” company and offer freelance design services to small businesses and individuals. I call it “B to Z” because the idea is “You provide the A. We provide the rest.” Right now, my work focuses mainly on doing small website design, print media design (such as posters, business cards, ads, etc.) and my brother-in-law has even come on board to do some video production for a client.

Things have been a mixture of good and bad – all of the bad, of course, coming from my side of things. While I do have a certain creative skill, I feel like my skills are very unpolished – I have received no formal training in graphic design, programming, anything really – and I would be much better at just going over the big picture on projects and developing creative/operations/business/marketing strategy and then outsourcing work to other individuals who can produce better work than I am able to produce. Part of the problem without having formal training is that I am able to produce a certain high caliber work but it takes me two, three, four, and five times longer to produce than someone who has training on the tools I am working with. Again, I would be a better creative director than designer/coder…

This puts me in a difficult place – I find myself taking on what at first are small, simple projects, but they quickly grow in scope and scale to a place I am not really able to efficiently produce at. Which has been extremely discouraging. I have found myself putting way too much time into tiny projects only to becoming overwhelmed and completely freaking out and become incapable of dealing with anything anymore.

All this, mixed with my lack of confidence, perfectionism, depression, and cronic health problems that I have had this year (along with everything else I mentioned earlier) have lead to me nearly running my my business off the road several times before it can even get anywhere. Even now, as I write this, things seems precariously balanced on the edge and I may soon find myself without any clients and insolvent.

Which is a real bummer, because not only is this pretty much the only thing I am capable of doing at all right now that could possibly earn me any income, it is something that I actually have somewhat of a predisposition for – if I could just figure out exactly how I myself fit into the business overall and how to get the right kind of clients/projects to work with. One thing for sure is that if this is going to be successful, I am going to have to bring in additional collaborators and position myself in more of a sales or creative direction role and less in a hands-on design role.

That’s the rub, though: I have to do a significant amount of work on my own where I wear all the hats first so that I can even be in a position to bring in others to outsource work to or hire on as part-time collaborators. So, its tricky. And frustrating. And considering my track-record over the past six months, probably not going to ever go anywhere substantial or at least grow into something I can provide for myself with.

Ultimately, coming full circle here, and pardon the expression, but my head has been way up my ass for the past six months and I sure as heck don’t have any idea how to dislodge it yet. Considering everything I have been going through – with both my mental and physical health – this is probably the worst time I could be starting my own one-man business. It is a wonder I have had what little success I have had with the business thus far. We’ll see how things continue to go. I sure as heck would kill to have a business partner on this though. I don’t do very well by myself…

Other than that, what have I been up to?

Moving Words – This fall, I taught in an enrichment program for K-2nd grade at an elementary school on the south side of Chicago. The program, called Moving Words, was a literacy program designed to assist kids with basic reading skills and enrich their interest in books and the arts. I got to play theater games with the kids, read books to them, and work with them on their reading.

It was one of the most rewarding and wonderful experiences of my life. I don’t know why, for the life of me, I didn’t go to school to become a teacher. Well, its too late for me to back to school now – or at least at this point in my life – so unfortunately that is something I will probably never have the chance to turn into a career. The most satisfying times in my life ever were when I was teaching: When I taught English in China, when I directed and taught in the Drug Education for Youth program in the Air Force, when I taught Sunday school at Lakeside and worked with the kids at the summer camp, when I taught journalism classes to  the staff of the Argus, and this fall when I taught in this enrichment program.

One thing about the teaching is that it was a regularly scheduled Monday-Friday morning program that gave me a purpose to get out of bed every day and commute to the city and be excited. The bad thing is that it wasn’t a lot of hours and so it didn’t pay very much which meant I had a hard time doing other income earning things and really just barely got by paying my bills and certainly didn’t have any money left over to do much of anything else.

In fact, it was about the time after the teaching stopped, and my schedule started to free up more that my depression and lack of motivation really started to kick in. Perhaps it was also partly due to the “winter blues” that starts to set in around November, but there certainly was a noticeable change in my motivation, productivity, and overall mood once this program ended. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe not.

Democracy Burlesque – Another project I became involved with this fall was a political sketch-comedy group called Democracy Burlesque. I originally volunteered to help MC one of their shows and before I knew it I was doing a few bit parts in some sketches here and there and even co-hosting their musical review show as a radio DJ character that did bits with my co-host between numbers.

DB was very fun – and it was a nice opportunity for me to get out and meet other interesting people. However, the amount of time necessary to do the shows and really be involved was very high and considering that my only source of income has been my business – and that isn’t a very reliable or efficient source of income – it turned out to be more time than I was able to commit in the long run to participating in as a regular cast member. I did have a minor interest in being involved in the writing, but I very quickly realized that the kind of sketches I wanted to write were not very well suited for this company’s particular sense of humor and format.

One thing I did do was work up a marketing plan for their 2013 season and I was even going to execute the marketing plan through my company, B to Z. However, things did not turn out very well with that at all. Part of the plan required redoing their website and adding some online ticketing capabilities which turned out to be much more difficult than it should have been. It turned into a nightmare where every time I fixed one problem with the programming three more would pop up and that goes back to the whole formal training issue and how I would have been much better off if I had just developed the plan and outsourced much of the work to others to do.

Then, there was a scheduling issue with getting their poster and flyer designs in time from their designer to order on time to distribute before their first show. Rather than come in that Friday as was planned, everything came in the following Tuesday – the day the show was supposed to open. At this time I was already neck-deep in working on another show, Really Rosie, which I’ll discuss below and the weather was horrendous out making the other part of my marketing plan very difficult to execute as a one-man-team, and that was the poster and flyer distribution.

Over the fall, I scouted out over two hundred locations in various neighborhoods and college campuses near where Democracy Burlesque puts on their shows and my original plan was to hire a couple of assistants to distribute the posters and flyers at those locations. However, the entire project came upon me faster than I was ready for – and I was already spending an ungodly amount of time working on Really Rosie which I hadn’t at all planned for, and the website modifications which were problem after problem that was gobbling up all my time – so I never was able to hire anyone.

In the end, I went into full panic-shutdown mode and didn’t do anything. I know, its terrible, and I’m am embarrassed to admit it, but that’s what happened. This was a great opportunity to really accomplish something meaningful – for my business, for myself – and I completely screwed it up, got in way over my head and wasn’t able to figure out how to dig out or even reach out to anyone for help. The worst part is that I am completely confident that had I been able to execute this marketing plan that I spent so much time developing it would have had a tremendously positive impact on Democracy Burlesque’s attendance and ticket sales and really turned things around for them. They were certainly struggling with audience attendance during the fall when I was acting with them. Unfortunately, this one gets to go down as a giant red mark in my epic failure column rather than the epic win column.

The worst part is, this isn’t an entirely unique picture of how things are going for me and for my business. I honestly feel like I am at a point where no one is ever going to want to hire me to do anything… ANYthing… ever. It is a very crushing feeling that doesn’t really help with the motivation and depression problems…

Really Rosie – Another “doesn’t pay enough for the time spent” project I have become involved with is stage managing a children’s musical that is actually closing this weekend after a six-week run. I originally was asked to design the posters and flyers for the show and before I knew it I had volunteered to stage manage and even oversaw the design and building of the sets and managed lighting and sound for the show.

I must say that looking back I am extremely proud and happy to have worked on this show and wouldn’t undo the experience. But on a practical note it did take way too much of my time and distracted me from other things I should have been focused on. One week I did nothing but work on the set from morning to night, breaking only for rehearsals which ran five nights a week four weeks prior to opening. I also noticed that the marketing for the show wasn’t very well planned out or organized so I ended up getting involved in that pretty heavily and spend numerous days just traveling around distributing posters and flyers to libraries, schools, after-school programs.

What’s worse is that because I wasn’t involved in the marketing from the beginning, much of my efforts ended up being “too little too late” and as far as I can tell didn’t do a whole lot towards bringing in the kind of audience we needed for the show. I felt an obligation though – for one thing, I had designed their marketing materials and wanted to see them go to productive use – for another, I was stage managing the show and had a bit more of a vested interest in is succeeding. Eventually I hit a wall with that effort and had to forcable pull back from it – which felt like a defeat, but in all honestly I had stretched myself to the limits with the amount of time I was putting into this show.

Still, all that being said, despite my over commitment of time, it has been a wonderful experience and something I would like to do more in the future… provided that I am able to keep my time investment at an appropriate level and hopefully earn compensation that matches the time I am spending. Which, is probably too much to ask because unless you’re a professional, it is unlikely you can find much work on the amateur theater circuit that isn’t on a mostly volunteer basis. And I don’t have the background or resumé to work in theater professionally I suppose, so that’s just a dream. Here’s to dreaming anyway…

And that, my friends, is what’s up.

Once again, I set out with the best of intentions. Once again, I fell flat on my face. Allow me to explain…

I am currently in a process of re-organizing and de-cluttering my life. For starters, I’m trying to sell everything I own, piece-by-piece. I am also reassessing my friendships, most of which exist via long-distance, and figuring out how to re-invest in the people who care about me. My only real links to friends these days are through my Gmail address book and Facebook. However, due in part to a technical error a few years ago and in part to the overly ambitious “friending” of everyone I came into contact over the past few years my Facebook friend list was cluttered with about 1700 so-called “Friends” – many of whom I didn’t even know, and many of whom probably don’t give a shit about me.

Let me back track a bit and explain something…

Part 1: My Unbalanced Relationships

You know how some people describe dysfunctional relationships as one person being “more in love” with the other than is returned? Well, I have a real problem with that happening in my friendships. I foolishly think that I am friends with someone, or that we at least care about each other more than we actually do – and they don’t really even care one bit.

I had a rude awakening to this problem back in the Christmas of 2007. It was my first year out of the Air Force and my first year back in school at UIC. During the first fall semester I became very involved in a Christian fellowship called Asian American InterVarsity (AAIV).

Now, my history with AAIV stretched all the way back to 2000 when I first enrolled at UIC. A (Caucasian) girl I met over the summer invited me to her Christian fellowship called AAIV. Because my father was a pastor of a predominantly Asian American church, almost everyone I knew in Chicago at the time was Asian, and I was feeling a bit over-saturated by the Asian American subculture. So, because this girl was white and because I didn’t know what the AA stood for, I decided to attend the fellowship partially just to try break out of that subculture. When I showed up and realized that her and I were the only Caucasians there, I realized I had miserably failed.

The next week, I visited a Christian fellowship called Servants. There was no AA in the fellowship name, so I thought I was safe. The ethnic makeup of students in Servants turned out to be almost entirely Filipino and Korean. So, I had a good laugh at myself and decided to accept my fate and stick with AAIV. After all, everyone there was very warm and welcoming to me, how could I say no?

Over the next two years, when I was actually attending UIC, I attended AAIV meetings and became involved with a small group as well. I ended up joining a church upon one friend’s invitation (Bethel Presbyterian). Sure, it was a Korean church, but I was okay with that. Eventually, however, I dropped out of school and then I stopped attending church. Life was becoming increasingly disappointing and I made things harder on myself by losing touch with all the good friends I had made in AAIV.

That was a common unbalance in my relationships. I let other people invest in me and then I would disappear and not keep up my end of the relationship. Over the next several years, I was devastated that I had let so many of these positive relationships and good people out of my life. It was something I struggled to come to terms with while I was in the Air Force – a struggle that was made even more difficult by the fact that military life has a way of moving people around so much that you have very little time to make meaningful friendships, and it was even more difficult to keep in touch the people you did become close to.

So, back to 2007. I was out of the Air Force and I was determined to make a fresh start with making friends. At first, I thought things were going pretty well. I was super involved in AAIV and socializing almost exclusively with other students in the fellowship. At the end of the semester, I decided to thow a small private end-of-semester dinner and invite about twenty or so people whom I thought were good friends.

I planned this dinner in detail which was no small task considering I was hosting it at my parents house and accommodating the amount of people I was inviting was going to be difficult. But, I figured out how to arrange the house to set up two large tables and made plans to borrow an extra table from my father’s church.

Then, I designed custom invitation cards and taught myself calligraphy so I could hand-write personal invitations to everyone I wanted to come. I distributed the invitations to my “friends” about three weeks before the semester ended – personally inviting them of course, and telling them how much it would mean to me if they could come. And, I followed up with a private Facebook event and asked people to RSVP via Facebook. Only about six people RSVP’d.

So, I made a point of reminding my “friends” about the dinner party and making sure they could come. Everyone gave me the same basic answer, “I probably can make it, but I’m not 100% sure what my schedule is that week, so I can’t say for sure.”

Since I planned for almost 24 people to attend and started to suspect that I was going to be slightly shy of that number, I decided to invite some more people at the last minuted whom I barely knew and considered only acquaintances.

Then, came the day of the dinner party. I called everyone who gave me a “yes” RSVP verbally or on Facebook to make sure they knew how to get to my parent’s house. Not one single person I called was planning on coming. Excuses ranged from “I have a last minute family dinner that came up” to “I live 45 minutes away and don’t feel like making the drive” to “I’m going to the mall with a friend.” Funny thing: that friend the person was going to the mall with was also someone I had invited to my dinner party.

In the end, only five people showed up to my dinner party and only one person was from AAIV and on the original guest list (Thanks, Josh! I love you, man!). The others were two guys I had recently met at a secular (somewhat atheist) campus club called RAFT (Rationalists And Free Thinkers), one of their girlfriends, and my friend Cori.

I learned a very important lesson that day. All those people from AAIV whom I thought were my friends weren’t really my friends. Just to be sure, when the Spring semester started up again I decided to stop attending AAIV meetings and see if anyone would notice. Only two people noticed: Josh, who was in my small group and Grace whom I knew from the larger fellowship. No one else from my small group bothered to contact me or even ask about me. I asked Josh if any other people had stopped attending our small group and he reported that it was the same people from the previous semester plus a few others.

It might seem silly to you if you are reading this, but that really destroyed me. I reflected on the friendships that I thought I had with these people and I recalled all of these people being super outgoing with me, inviting me to functions all the time, and acting interested in my life. However I quickly realized that the only functions I was ever invited to were AAIV functions. It would seem that I wasn’t a “friend” to any of these people: I was a duty: Someone to remind of fellowship functions and to pretend to care about in a pseudo-Christian empathy-hype after a prayer meeting or Bible study.

Ultimately, I learned a very important thing about myself and that is that I do not judge other people’s intentions very well at all and I all too often assume that there are something there that isn’t. I still am not very good at this and I still suffer frequent disappointments when friendships don’t pan out the way I expected them to.

The other lessons I learned is the importance of me keeping up my end of things when I do encounter people who truly care and are willing to embark upon a meaningful friendship. Looking back over my life I am painfully aware of friendships I let get away because I didn’t put in the effort or because I was, believe it or not, too timid to to pursue spending more time with people I recognized as kind, interesting, and potentially loyal friends.

Part 2: Re-Discovering Missed Connections

A few years after I graduated from high school I made a very interesting discovery: Some people I never dreamed of being friends with or having anything in common with actually would have made excellent friends if we had only run in the same circles or I had tried to get to know them better.

This discovery came by way of a girl named Nicole. When I attended College Heights Christian School I bounced around a few social circles, but I never really landed in any particular group long enough to make any lasting friendships or even network to other groups.

Nicole was the kind of girl that guys like me didn’t even bother talking to. For one thing, she was gorgeous. She hung out with other “beautiful people.” I didn’t see myself fitting into that group. For another thing, when you are a teenager and fancy yourself a nerdy intellectual, you tend to lump all the “beautiful people” into a stereotype of probably being shallow and uninteresting. The stereotype couldn’t have been more wrong, but what did I know?

I don’t mention this stereotype because it is a particular reason why I never spoke to Nicole. I never would have spoken to her anyway because we couldn’t have run in more distant circles. I mention the stereotype simply because I know there are people in the past whom I have neglected trying to become friends with because of poorly preconceived notions.

A few years after high school, I discovered the lovely website Classmates.com. Only a few people from my school had registered at the time, so I decided to just email all the ones whose names I recognized and ask them what they were up to in life. Nicole was one of those people, and to my surprise she no only responded to my email, she responded at length. Even more to my surprise, I discovered that Nicole was a very intelligent, interesting, and artistic person whom I had many things in common with.

Nicole and I exchanged a few more emails over the next few months, but she lived in Dallas and I lived in Chicago, so starting a long-distance friendship was pretty challenging considering there was never any history or context between us to be friends in the first place. Eventually, we stopped writing each other and lost touch again.

But, through that experience I learned another very important lesson: I have taken for granted many acquaintances from my past who actually would have made excellent friends and are, to this day, worth going out of my way to reconnect with and try to rekindle a friendship with.

Part 3: The Facebook Friendship Challenge

Putting these three lessons together and gazing over my Facebook friend list – sadly, my only point of contact to most of the people I know, I decided to experiment with something.

First, I went through my friend list and removed people whose names I didn’t recognize or didn’t particularly care for. This eliminated about 1,000 people. Most of those people were “accidental friends” whom I added when I gave Facebook access to my Gmail account, not realizing that my Gmail address book contained nearly two thousand email addresses of UIC students whom I had personally emailed and thanked for signing a petition I had circulated one semester.

Next, I eliminated people whom I just plain didn’t know well enough to have any justification to contact for any reason. Eventually, I winnowed the list down to people whom I either considered friends, or whom I felt like I knew well enough that it would be possible to and worth putting the effort to become friends with in the future.

However, I didn’t want to fall into the old trap of foolishly assuming that I was friends with anyone more than I really was. Some people mentally move on if you haven’t been in touch with them after a long while, and I have discovered react with great annoyance to you if you try to get in touch with them and rekindle a friendship after not having reached out to them for a few years. One thing I planned on doing was keeping track of all my friends birthdays and sending them a personal birthday card in the mail over the coming year. It can be pretty awkward asking someone for their address to send them a card when that person considers you barely an acquaintance or, worse yet, actually resents you for some unspoken reason.

So, I started a Facebook event called “stay friends with Zachariah on Facebook” and invited everyone I was still friends with to the event. My thinking was that all the people who would see my name and say, “Zachariah who?” or those who would think, “You had your chance years ago man, but it has just been too long,” would see this event and decline or ignore it.

I have discovered an interesting thing about people on Facebook. Few people really care much about who is on their friend list. Plenty of people have strangers and even people they dislike on their friend list for one reason or another. Usually it is either because they are too lazy to remove them, or because they find that person mildly interesting to keep tabs on but don’t really want to have any kind of real friendship with.

Well, Facebook recently introduced a very handy feature called “Follow” just for people who want to simply keep tabs on someone but not have an actual relationship with. I made my Facebook profile “Followable” and I figured that there were probably some people out there who didn’t want to invest in a friendship with me, but still would want to “keep tabs” on me and just follow me.

I quickly realized that one error in judgement I had made was that people weren’t actually reading the description on the event invite I sent out. Many people were declining the event off-hand because they decline all event invites, or they saw the time and date and thought, “Nope – I won’t be in Chicago during that time,” and didn’t look further.

Another problem was that some people just never pay close attention to Facebook. They don’t really investigate their news feed or invitations and were likely to wind up completely oblivious to my invitation.

I decided to mitigate this by sending out individual messages to the hundreds of people who did not respond to my invitation or had declined it just to make sure they knew about the event, and what I was doing. In general, this was somewhat of a success, but even those messages seem to have gone unnoticed or ignored by many people.

This created another problem for me: I stated that if someone didn’t want to keep up a friendship with me but were too polite to decline my invitation, say “no” or proactively unfriend me, then I would just unfriend those people myself after one month of no response. Believe me, those people DO exist: People who are too passive or polite to “unfriend” someone but are put out every time they hear from you directly or by seeing something from you pop up in their news feed. Sure, these people might be a little behind the curve on all the features that Facebook has to offer to help you politely ignore someone, but that’s just how they are I wanted to do my best to be sensitive to them and proactively help them ignore me.

In short, I was over thinking this entire thing way too much and trying way too hard.

What I failed to think of was how to tell the difference between passive/polite people who wanted me to unfriend them and disengaged people who just didn’t pay close attention to Facebook.

I think I accidentally offended a few people along the way as well. One person responded to my message with a very angry email and accused me of asking people to inflate my ego by reaffirming friendships. While this wasn’t the case, I completely see this person’s point.

Part 4: Picking Up The Pieces of Failure

The entire exercise turned out to be a bust. I probably offended more people in the long run. And the entire purpose of the exercise was to avoid offending people. I really am an idiot, sometimes, aren’t I?

To the hundreds of people who decided to actually “inflate my ego” and reaffirmed me as a friend on Facebook, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. It doesn’t really make my ego any bigger than it already is, but just like it is nice to hear “I love you” from time to time from family and loved ones, it is very comforting to hear, “We’re still friends,” from friends both close and distant.

To the people who unfriended me or declined my invitation, I am deeply sorry if I somehow offended you by this invite. I know many people who unfriended/declined legitimately didn’t want to keep in touch and weren’t offended at all – but I also suspect that many more people misunderstood my intentions for inviting you to the event I did.

And to everyone out there: Not everyone uses Facebook the same way you do. You may use it as a simple time-wasting fad, but other people use it as an important Rollodex and essential communication tool. You may use friending as a way of keeping tabs on people you are mildly interested in, but other people use friending as a way of declaring who is really important in their life and who they want to keep in touch with. With that in mind, please be patient with those who take Facebook “too seriously” for your tastes. We all have our reasons.

And please, out of kindness for idiots like me who have trouble distinguishing who their real friends are and use Facebook as a way to keep track of and communicate with people, please, learn to use the Follow button instead of the Friend button.

I have been in hibernation for the past two weeks. It started when I nearly lost my eye to a bacterial ulcer which I was about 24 hours away from being beyond help and getting fitted for a glass eye. So that was a great way to start my “new page” in life.

Here’s the funny part. My doctor told me the bacteria was probably incubating for a week or two and didn’t flare up or start to cause pain (excruciating pain) until the Saturday I made an emergency appointment. Which means I very possibly became infected during the few days in the last week of April that I was living on the streets.

Why is that funny? Well, on Wednesday, April 25th, I had a dream that eyeballs were growing out of my face like spokes. One even grew out of the top of my head on a stalk – it was very bizarre. In my dream, I was desperately trying to dig them out with my bare hands in a mirror. And at one point I realized that I had accidentally taken out my own right eye, but I kept going on in this nightmarish scenario thinking, “Better to be blind in one eye than to be covered with these things!” That was the same eye that got infected, and it is possible it became infected that day. Strange coincidence, right?

Falling off track

The other reason I was in hibernation was the pending event that occurred on May 15th. I can’t really talk about it much here, but lets just put it this way: It was the most devastating day of my life. As of May 15th, all I feel, all I see is darkness. I’m dead inside. This poem was a response to that day…

Like Father, Like Daughter

Taking flack

There are basically two things I can’t stand on this blog: Anonymous commenting/posting, and ignorant smack talk. Well, last week, I received two anonymous comments to my Let The Journey Begin blog post. One was an actual good suggestion – kind of.

“V” wrote:

You should take MB’s name from these blog posts, unless she gave you permission.

Fair enough. I took her last name down. However, I responded with a somewhat lengthy explanation of Adam Smith’s concept of the Teatre of Approval which is worth reading.

Another commented under the anonymous name “p9244” wrote:

I feel sorry for you. In addition, I hope your friend Brianna is out there with her head held high without you. This was a disappointingly sad blog to come across. Especially in this day & age with internet bullying as bad as it is.

This was quite obviously written by someone who didn’t just “come across” this blog – their IP address traced to Des Plaines. This person also obviously didn’t read the blog, because the only mention I made of Brianna was that I asked people to pray for her to heal from the hurt I have unfairly caused her.

I wrote a lovely little response to this individual’s post which I recommend you checking out.

And finally, I received another response to a different blog post, but this one was not anonymously. Melyssa Donaghy identified herself as the “Melanie” referred to in my previous post Surviving the ravings of a mad woman in an attempt to defend her not-at-risk honor it would seem. Rather, all she was really doing was coming here to further abuse me because she recently found out I quit working at Angie’s List and she wouldn’t be receiving a bonus check for recruiting me.

I highly recommend that you check out her comments. In the context of everything I disclose about her in the blog, her comments are very true to nature and only further reinforce her character. Except, the particular timing of this comment takes things to a new level entirely seeing as I had just gone through one of the darkest and hardest times of my life, having attempted twice to kill myself, and was still recovering mentally and emotionally.

It takes a certain kind of cruelty to go out of your way to try and kick someone when they’re down. You can check out her comment and my response here.

What’s next?

Well, after Tuesday’s punch in the gut I haven’t been much use to anyone or anything. I can’t eat. I can’t really stay awake or go to sleep – I’m in a half daze all the time.  I’m pretty much good for nothing, and there seems to be no end in sight. I am experiencing the strangest cocktail of conflicting and painful emotions and I am so overwhelmed and confused that I think my body has just completely short circuited and shut down.

In an attempt to try and jump start my system and move on with my life, I have decided to rent a car and drive to Joplin for the weekend to see my friend Erica Tremblay’s documentary Heartland – The Joplin Tornado Documentary. If I can survive the drive down and back, maybe I’ll be able to see a few old friends and that will lift my spirits.

Maybe.

When I last wrote, I noted that I was very confused and had a lot to think about. Now, several days, prayers, and calories burned exercising my noodle, I would like to write about what I have processed. I will attempt to be more brief than before, but I am not making any promises!

For those of you offering to help and saying to me, “Is there anything I can do?” then this blog post is your answer. If you meant what you said, then please read what I have to say and respond as you feel led.

A quick recap

If you are reading this for the first time, it is important to know that on Sunday, at midnight on April 22nd, 2012, I made a very weak attempt to end my life. This was followed, twenty-four hours later, by a more carefully planned out attempt that would have easily succeeded had I not been, at the last second, confronted with something very thought provoking and compelling that persuaded me to delay the deed another twenty-four hours. And at that point, I backed down and changed my mind altogether. This entire process was bookended by two blog posts, one in which I announced my intent to kill myself, and the other in which I explained my reasons for not doing it.

April 22, 2012: The Cask of Zachariah

April 24, 2012: Hints, Allegations, and Things That Need to be Said

During this time, I spent about 60 hours wandering the streets of Chicago and sleeping where I could find a safe place to sleep, and eating… well, nothing. Now that I have come back from the edge, had a few good nights sleep, and put some food back in me, I have processed what I have gone through and received a calling, or an action plan, of what to do next.

Please allow me to share with you some of my thoughts.

Why did I want to do it?

Just to be clear, my motivations to kill myself were not what I could consider typical “depression” symptoms or a “lost the girl, life can’t go on” moment. I understand how it could appear that way. Rather, I very calmly and rationally came to the (mis)realization that although I had managed to keep my head above water in the past, despite my very best efforts to do the right thing, I had fallen into an inescapable pattern of hurting people around me.

I had hurt the person whom I loved most in this world while very intentionally trying to do the exact opposite and I didn’t understand why, how to undo it, or how to make it better. I was convinced that my continued “existence” was nothing but torture for this person, a torture that I carried the pain of as well, and that if I was unable to figure out how to unwind that situation, then I was forever doomed to continue in that pattern towards everyone else I came into contact with for the rest of my life.

What changed my mind?

As I explained in my second blog post, I came to a realization that my self awareness of my brokenness as a human being was something that all humans are destined to face. We are all broken. But we are intentionally put on this earth broken to be used as vessels of God’s love, not to be discarded once we outlive our usefulness.

In fact, it is when we reach our most broken state that we are most “useful” as an instrument of God, thus serving as a true testament to God’s ability to heal and a transparent conduit of God’s ability to do good in this world. I say transparent, because when something truly “worthless” and “broken” manages to bring something good into the life of someone else, it is crystal clear that the source of that goodness is not the vessel, but rather God miraculously intervening in this world.

The power of prayer

As best as I can understand, hundreds of people across the country and around the world have been praying for me: For my survival, for a peace of mind, and for God to reveal a path and direction to me. To me, payer is less of a supplication for God to accomplish something and more of a conversation with God that benefits the one praying more than anything. I am certain that at a minimum, all of you praying for me have had a chance to commune with God and hopefully catch a glimpse of the universe through his eyes. And that is good.

I cannot say with certitude whether these supplications on my behalf had a direct influence over my change of heart, my peace of mind, and the quickness with which I have been able to develop a plan (a crazy plan, but a plan nonetheless) to move forward. However, I am willing to accept on faith that this also has played a role, and if it has, then it has played a major role, because the transformation I have experienced in the last few days from “walking dead zombie about to end it all” to where I am now is nothing short of a miracle.

My first request from you

That is why I would like to make one very important request to all of you out there who have felt lead to pray for me. Please pray for Brianna. My life and my happiness is no more or less valuable in God’s eyes than hers. Don’t for a second think of praying for me without also praying for her. For one, I have caused her a tremendous amount of pain if for no other reason than the fact that I announced on Facebook that I was going to kill myself if I did not have a chance to speak with her.

Bri has suffered tremendously in her own life and is very much in her own process of healing. She also needs to reach a place of peace and reconciliation with her pain and the sources of that pain. She is a beautiful child of God and is in as bad of or worse of a place than I am right now thanks in no part to my own actions. Pray for Bri. She deserves no less prayer than I do, and if your prayers for me exacted such a transformation on my heart which was hardened and nearly dead, then I have no doubt that the same can happen for Bri.

My crazy plan: The Journey

I have taken stock of where I am and where God is calling me to go. I have realized that I should not be living in Indianapolis, and I am currently incapable of performing satisfactorily at my job at Angie’s List. Therefore, I have resigned my position at Angie’s List, and this weekend I am packing up all my things in Indianapolis and moving back to Chicago. I am leaving for Indy to fetch my things as soon as I post this blog.

I have realized that I am not in a place where I can even commit to a permanent job at all right now. But this leaves me having to figure out how to “earn my keep” so to speak. Furthermore, I am sensing an overwhelming urge to not even sit still, but to travel across the country with a very intentional purpose in mind.

I would like to journey across the country and visit each and every one of you. I want to reconnect in person with all of the wonderful people who have been pouring out love for me. I want to, no matter how briefly, share in your lives and hopefully bring a little of the light God has shined into mine back into yours. I want to see what is happening in various parts of the country where you all reside, and do everything in my power to volunteer to help.

And along the way, I want to document my journey and share your stories as part of the fabric of the large narrative that God is trying to tell by this journey. I want to post videos, pictures, and write first hand accounts of what God is doing in your lives and how God is working in my own.

Making The Journey possible

I usually don’t have confidence about plans that seem to be so based in a fantasy as this one, but there are many very real barriers to my embarking on, much less getting very far on this journey. For one thing, I don’t own the necessary minivan which I would need to take this trip (I’ll explain why a van or minivan later). I don’t have a video camera or even a still camera. I also don’t have a job. I am about $20,000 in debt. I don’t even know how I’m going to pay my cell phone bill next month. I certainly can’t imagine how I’m going to acquire all these things in my current state, much less be able to afford gas and food along the way!

However, I am in possession of a few things. I have many worldly possessions which I no longer want or need which I am attempting to sell (any buyers out there for a 3,500 book comic book collection?). I also have the excellent work ethic my Grandpa Bob instilled in me, and the character my father has helped me develop. I have experience and know-how to design websites, design print/marketing materials, solve small business problems, and perform a variety of short-term business/marketing/operations consulting functions. I have experience as a nanny, doing hard physical labor and even a bit of carpentry.

Here is how you can help

1. First and foremost, keep praying for me.

2. Reach out to me and let me know if I am welcome to visit you so that I can factor your location into my ever evolving map of stops across the country.

3. Subscribe to my newsletter for updates. Feel free to follow my other social media links (in the sidebar) well, but the email newsletters will be the best way to get updates that you can easily ignore when you’re not in the mood.

4. Buy my stuff! I’m putting up a Buy My Stuff page on this blog soon (as soon as I get my stuff organized) that will link to all the things I’m selling.

5. Hire me! I’m primarily focused on making websites, but as you saw in the last big paragraph above, I can do just about anything.

6. Refer me to someone to hire me. Or just share this blog with people you think might be interested.

7. Donate some funds. Any donations received in excess of necessary equipment (I’m trying to buy a van) and basic necessities (food, gas, etc.) will be re-donated to others in need whom I encounter along the way. If I use any donations early on, but find myself earning excess income later, I will still pay all donations forward out of excess income. And of course, this will all be documented and posted on my blog.

There are plenty of other people out there who need financial help more than I do. I am just stuck right now and figuring out how to get started. My entire purpose of this journey is to pay-it-forward and to be a conduit of God’s love and support for others, so please don’t think for one second I am expecting to be subsidized. I’m just in a hole right now and need help crawling out so I can continue to walk on my own.

To donate, go here: http://www.gofundme.com/the-journey – active now

Thank you for the love

Again, I cannot say enough how grateful I am to the outpouring of love and support and prayers from the hundreds of people who have already made the effort to reach me. I am still in the process of digesting everything and returning correspondence. It is quite overwhelming, and it is quite humbling.

I hope you can learn from my mistakes: Be intentional and proactive with your relationships and don’t let the important people in your life drift into the past without a fight. And remember, someone else is still hurting. People matter more than any idea more than any dream and more than any personal sorrow.