A Little Help From My Friends

I can’t do it alone.

Seriously. Every time I’ve tried to do anything by myself, I usually fall flat on my big dumb face. And if there’s anything I’ve learned about my particular brand of ADHD, it’s that I need someone else there to hold me to my word. Accountability is a necessity for me.

My wife and I have been trying to get back in shape, which isn’t a new thing. Years of heavy drinking and treating our bodies like dive bars instead of temples has turned us into bloated, chonky, weak shells of our former selves.

The problem is whenever we tried to commit to working out or eating better, we let ourselves make tiny excuses until eventually those tiny excuses rolled into bigger excuses, and soon enough, we were right back at the start. Maybe we could stop drinking and smoking cold turkey, but starting a new habit was going to take a lot more effort. And help!

When we joined our local gym, we were invited to try working with a personal trainer. And just having someone to show us the ropes and cheer us on helped so much, so we signed on to have him train us weekly. (Even though we’re going to have to hustle hard to pay for it, ick.) And having someone hold us to our word is helping immensely. We’ve been training three days a week now and I’m already seeing results. It’s amazing what happens when you’re nice to your body for once.

But even if you can’t afford a trainer, just having someone else around to help you stay motivated works as well. Find a friend who wants to get in shape as much as you do. When you don’t want to work out, there’s a chance they do. And they’ll be the one push you to get in the gym and do the damn thing. There’s a saying in Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books of the Bible for good reason (and not just because it’s an entire chapter of emo ramblings).

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor:
If either of them falls down, one can help the other up.
Ecclesiastes 4: 9-10

Sometimes you need a little help, and there’s no shame in that! Think about a goal you want to accomplish, and find some folks to rally around you and fight alongside you. Maybe it’s working out and getting healthy, or maybe you’re trying to stay accountable for finishing a project. Just find your team and get moving!

Get Out of That Box!

I feel bad for leaving everyone on a sad note with my last post, so this one is more optimistic, I swear!

My wife and I stopped drinking earlier this year. Officially, for real this time. We haven’t had as much as a drop in the last several months. And frankly, I’m pretty okay with that. Sure, there’s some FOMO when my friends are sipping on a nice craft beer or mixed drink, but for the most part, I don’t miss it. I’ve lost weight, I don’t have no-reason hives nearly as often, and I’m not constantly in a daze from being drunk or hungover almost every day.

We were paying money to have a bad time.

Something peculiar happened when we stopped drinking though. We found ourselves unable to relate to a lot of our friends who did drink a lot or rely on drugs to have fun. Suddenly, sobriety was lonely as hell. I call these growing pains, though. As in, we’re finally growing up, but the people around us are stagnating. It’s a good problem, although it doesn’t feel good in the moment.

My old church and pastor are problematic for a lot of reasons, and if you’ve snooped long enough through my blog, you’d know why. But my former pastor did have a lot of wisdom I still love by to this day. One of his sayings was “show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future.” As 90s sitcom “special episode” as it is to admit, the people you surround yourself with influence you more than you think.

Think of it this way. If someone’s standing on a table for some ungodly reason, it would be hard for them to pull another person up onto the table with them. It would be much easier for someone on the ground to pull the person on the table down to their level. It’s best to climb onto the table alone. That doesn’t mean you can’t have any friends when you’re working on yourself, though. Maybe people will see that what you’re doing is weird and different and better, and they might even climb onto a table as well.

The point is, the road to getting better is lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. Instead of hanging out at bars and partying your life away, meet new people at gyms or church. Learn a new hobby and join a local group for it. Even online groups like r/decidingtobebetter on Reddit can be helpful. It sucks distancing yourself from old friends, but holding onto habits that hurt you in order to still relate to them is not worth it. You can’t keep breaking your own bones to fit into someone else’s box.

Get out of that box!

Why Anchors?

It’s a question I get asked a lot, especially during sandal season, when my little anchor tattoo is clearly visible on my left foot. It’s the symbol I chose to represent my blog, my business, and my spirituality as a whole. But where did my obsession with anchors originate, and why are they so special — dare I say, sacred — to me?

It helps to know a little about the traditional symbolism. In sailor culture, tattoos were popular long before they made their way onto the lower backs of even the most demure housewife. To these seafarers, the anchor represented stability. A sailor often got an anchor tattoo for a special lady, typically a lover or his mother, to remind him of the love and security he has waiting for him back home.

Additionally, the anchor is associated with bodies of water, to which I’ve always felt a connection to. I’ve lived near the same river for a majority of my life, and being a Pisces, the element holds a spiritual importance to me. The shape of the anchor resembles a cross, which is significant to me as well, as my Christian-rooted beliefs play no small part in my personal spiritual practices.

But believe it or not, it goes even deeper than that.

I remember briefly dating a fellow musician my freshman year of college. He was someone I admired greatly, and still do, for his musicianship as well as his humility. He would tell me about how he made music for other people, simply because he loved the way it made them happy. Music was more than just his hobby or his job. It was the way he connected with others, and he viewed it as something of a sacred duty to use his talents to spread joy. His band used a lot of anchors in their symbolism as well, representing humility and groundedness. He never wanted to lose sight of why he did what he did. He never wanted music to become a selfish act.

That philosophy really resonated with me, especially as a music therapist-in-training, and despite the relationship ending, I held fast to the wisdom he had shared. Music — and all my creative endeavours for that matter — now held a deeper meaning to me, and I adopted the anchor as a symbol of staying humble and remembering why I do what I do. Getting that tattoo, my first tattoo for that matter, was my way of making sure I always had that reminder to put others first in all things. Music and life in general shouldn’t be about getting famous or hitting it big. It should be about leaving the world a brighter place than how you found it.

No matter how far I sail in this life, I won’t forget or forsake the people and places I hold dear. May everything I do reflect a heart of humility and love.

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

Scrolling through Instagram as I tend to do on a lazy Sunday evening, I found this infographic:

I could write an entire doctoral thesis on how this relates to my own life. Like, how I’m glad I didn’t end up a journalist, because I can’t handle that kind of pressure. Or how I’m glad I never reached Taylor Swift levels of fame, because, well, I can’t handle that kind of pressure.

I’d like to think I’m the fancy bejeweled Russian kind, though.

Young Jess wanted a lot of things that, in retrospect, adult Jess would have considered a nightmare. None more so than my middle school crush, who I absolutely believed was my soulmate.

Ah yes, the face of a woman who knew exactly what she wanted.

I remember crying myself to sleep over this kid, who will remain unnamed, but we’ll just call him Kyle. The way his floppy auburn hair jostled in the wind at youth group meetups, the way his blue-green eyes shone like sea glass at Cedar Point. I was obsessed with this guy in a way I’d never been obsessed with anyone ever. I didn’t think I was capable of having a crush. The closest I’d come before was strange thoughts about Ann Wilson from the band Heart and this dude from an American Idol knockoff no one remembers. I wasn’t supposed to have crushes on people I actually knew. That was preposterous.

But there he was. I was so enamored with him, I couldn’t imagine a single flaw in him. And young me thought this is what love is. I would have done anything for him. I would have let him walk all over me if he wanted. I would have readily given up everything that made me, well, me, if it meant a chance to have him. And I did. I changed the way I dressed to be more like his then-girlfriend. I started trying to be someone I wasn’t. And surprisingly, it worked! A few years later, I ended up dating him. And…it was anticlimactic. We kissed once, and there were no sparks. I had this boy of my dreams, but something wasn’t right. Shortly after, we broke up. it was mutual.

I had many crushes since, but none were as intense as Kyle. I think everyone needs a Kyle, just to show them what love isn’t. Love isn’t obsession. Love isn’t being a doormat. Love isn’t losing yourself to someone else. Kyle wasn’t a bad person. In fact, he was a great person! Just not my person.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like had I ended up with him. Before writing this article, I looked him up on Twitter, my last connection to the boy that changed my life. It was…mostly hockey. Some stuff about Bitcoin. A retweet of Ben Shapiro, which is probably not a good sign. But mostly just hockey. Even if middle school me got her way, she’d be miserable today. I’d be miserable today. I don’t give a shit about hockey or Bitcoin, and Ben Shapiro kind of sucks. And he’d be just as miserable with some eccentric artsy chick who likes Bernie Sanders and blogs for fun.

Sometimes we don’t get what we want, and that’s okay. I’ll let the Rolling Stones take it from here.