Wake up call

It’s hard enough to realize your own faults / weaknesses / character flaws, let alone have other people point them out. Since last weekend certain events have catapulted me to seriously consider the path that I am on and the path that I would like to be traveling.

Throughout the past 29 years of my life, I feel that I have had to constantly renew myself. With each new or improved self, I’ve been able to retain the things that worked as well as cast to the wayside things that needed to change.

For example, the transition from being a fully active Mormon: retaining from sex, drugs and alcohol, all things unwholesome (not saying I was a saint but I most definitely was in a different mindset) to colliding, head-on, with a world completely the opposite has taken its toll. I took everything that I was (as a member of the LDS church) and cast it away as though it were a piece of rank meat. I wanted nothing to do with it. It had become unsavory to me and anything that would remind me, made me cringe.
The nightlife became a sort of refuge, a place to forget what I left behind knowing that I would never be able to return. For about three years now I have been lost in this electric wilderness where beckoning lights, embracing beats, and mischievous drinks happily take your hand and guide you on the path of forgetfulness. Blindly wondering through the ruse of Happy-hours and Go-go boys, I was blindsided by reality… like a fuckin’ truck straight out of a Hole!
Like anyone who’s wandered off on some random thought or daydream, as soon as I realized where I was I thought ‘What the fuck? How did I get here?’.

Now, as the beginning of another reinvention ensues I am starting to take inventory of the things I have learned and must retain, while also identifying what needs to be left behind. There is too much at stake to continue wading in the gilded nightlife and realize the true worth of what stands in front of me… and I look forward to what lay ahead.