between huricane and harbor.

i feel sad more than i feel happy.

i feel stuck more than i feel free.
i feel defeated more than i feel accomplished.
i feel i should have found love by now.
i think about it every single day.
i confuse girls with God.
Because it seems easier to know a girl than a God.
Seems easier to hand everything to a girl.
And we see ourselves as whatever we believe the most important person in our life believes about us.
So of course it fucks with you if they walk away.
i feel stuck in the best and worst moments that i’ve known.
The million bucks and the silence that followed.

But what is true?
What do i know?

i have a lot to be thankful for.
Mom and Dad and Jessica and Emily and Baby Landon.
They’re healthy and they love each other and they love me.
i have amazing friends. Old friends and new.
Mark. Ian. CJ. Phillip. Josh. David. Kyle. Steven. Byron. Chris. Chad. Tyson. Gord.
Jason. Jon. Dustin. Don. Gabe. Eric.
Friends who want to know me and want me to know them.
i get to do a job that i believe in. Most people don’t.
i have the opportunity to make a difference.
A lot of people would give anything for that.


i am healthy and i am young and there is air in my lungs and a shining sun outside and a sea as well and a story still going. And i’m allowed to be honest.

So do not despair.
For there is more than what we feel.
There are things missing in every single room.
But there is even more not missing.
So don’t be blinded by the ghosts.
Don’t let them glow brighter than your friends.
Don’t let them glow brighter than your family.
Be present.
Fight to be present.
Don’t live only in your head.
It’s lonely and it’s dangerous.
Put your phone down for a few hours every day.
Talk to people. Look someone in the eyes and be honest and invite them to do the same.
Read a good book and watch a great film and put a song on repeat and remember who you are. Keep dreaming all your dreams. And perhaps as well some new ones.
Go to counseling if you need to go to counseling.
Take your own advice.
Take care of yourself.
Take care of the people that you love.
Tell them that you love them.

There is much to be thankful for.

“So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together.
In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page:

I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me.

Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand from
me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment, my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost dog-like confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page.

Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a FRIEND…

I fell asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy loneliness beat it, too.”