One year ago Monday (that’s June 30th, 2014 for those reading in the distant future), I wrote a blog post called Alone in the Night – A Prayer. It was a series of short prayers about the direction my life seemed to be going in. It came at the end of close to six months of unemployment. My savings had been drained. My prospects were non-existent. I was sitting at the bottom of an emo-spiral and starting to sink down even further. I was rotting on the inside, and I needed help.
It was a catharsis, but it was also a call to action. It was me telling myself that I wouldn’t squander the next opportunity that came along, and I don’t think I did.
When my dad called me a couple of weeks later and asked me if I wanted to move to Helena, Montana, I knew that it was a chance. I’m a Kansas City boy at heart, and I always will be, but I was a festering corpse in Missouri. I was enabling myself, and I had friends that were along for the ride. I needed to get out of there, if only to re-evaluate what I wanted.
A lot has happened in the last year, and now, I feel it’s time for a new prayer.
God,
It’s me, Matt, again. It’s been awhile, at least publically, but I felt it was time to really take a look at what has happened to me and where I’m driving myself. I want to start by saying, “Thank you.” The last year of my life has been a real turn around, and I know that if I’d just kept struggling on my own I would never have made the changes I needed. I’m still trying to play catch up. I’m still broke. I’m still fat. I’m still prone to bursts of emotional overload, but, in general, life has been better.
Thank you for the parents I have. Thank you for giving me a family with a genuine interest in seeing me succeed. I’ve taken them for granted from time-to-time in the past, but I do appreciate everything they’ve done for me. If it wasn’t for the people in my life constantly helping to lift me up, I’d probably be living in a dumpster somewhere. Thank You for guiding them into my life.
Thank you for words. It seems to me that the last year of my life has been all about words. I’ve always tried, struggled, to make those words have value, but it took a metric-butt-ton of serendipity for me to get to the place where I could acknowledge the value they had for themselves. Life guided me to this place, where I am somewhat isolated, but not alone. It struck me off on a path to accept stories and just let myself write. Something clicked for me this year, and it was that thing, that thing I was desperate for. One word followed another. One idea chased another.
Thank you for opportunities. The life I was living before was stagnate, and I was swimming in my own filth, so-to-speak. I needed a fresh start, and one came. My parents gave me the hand-up, but it wouldn’t have meant much if it wasn’t for the explosion of possibilities that came along with it. My current job, something that spent months eluding me, sprang up almost immediately upon making the decision to change. It is almost unfathomable how many of the changes in my life came from that one thing alone.
Thank you for mountains. It is hard, truly hard, to not want to explore the majesty of the Rockies. If it weren’t for the mountains, I’d probably still be a 400-pound gorilla. Everything about this place, the lakes, the horizon. I don’t know. I just feel the need to move. Thank you for that.
Thank you for the fortuitous happenstance. Everything from a random stumbling upon a book promotion that gave me endless inspiration to jokes turning into stories.
Thank you for letting me see the great things that I could accomplish, that I will accomplish, and Thank you for showing me that I can afford to be patient.
-Matt