I'm Fantastic. A Beautiful Mess.

At different times in my life, I have felt like I wasn’t good enough. Or rather that I was too much of something and/or too little of something else. It took me a long, long time to feel comfortable in my own skin. To feel comfortable with who I am. To be able to accept the fact that, hey, I’m not for everybody and I’m ok with that.

I'm fantastic, a beautiful mess. Fantastic is crazy my life. It has been crazy for sure. Mostly my own doing but hey, I can’t change the past right? I was talking to my buddy Xander today, who I would never even know if my life hadn’t played out exactly the way it went. Everything I’ve been through. All the madness you’ve read about here and will read about in my upcoming book “My Beautiful Nightmare”, it all had its purposes to comprise my life today.

Perhaps I would have never traveled if I hadn’t gotten so down bad. I have grown so much as a human, having traveled and been around living and seeing other countries and cultures. Taking the time to really experience and learn about the cultures too!! I have to be happy with my life today despite the pain and sadness of yesterday. If I had never gone through that stuff, I wouldn’t be here today.

I’ve had 5 knee surgeries and a fractured leg and if I never had the second of those surgeries while playing American football in University, maybe I would’ve continued. Maybe I would have been good enough to make it to the pros! Statistics show that it would’ve been HIGHLY unlikely lol but you never know! When sports ended, school ended. If I had been more academically driven, maybe I could have finished University as a UCLA graduate. I could be living in LA with some corporate job. Maybe I’d love it! Chances are I’d hate it lol. Again, you never know.

Going to another country for University wasn’t even something I saw as an option when I was in school. I wish I had known about it. The typical American majors that you could study just didn’t interest me. As you can see, I was only there for sports and once sports was over, I was over it. There’s a school up north in Norway that offers an “Arctic Adventure Tourism” degree followed by a “Tourism Studies” Master’s. That’s something I could get excited about and I plan to to achieve those degrees in the future. Maybe i’ll get there. Now I’m more hopeful than ever.

You find a path in life, good or bad, and you follow it. When you make a choice and choose that path, the other paths become obsolete. Either momentarily or permanently. Sometimes I wonder what different choices would have done in my life and the different outcomes that could’ve been. But I’m okay with all of that now. I've got wonderful friends all across the world. Life is good. I’ve got a few professional skill sets that allow for great possibilities ahead. This is my life. This is the life I dealt myself due to some poor choices, but now I make better choices. So you know, yeah, I'm a mess. My life has been a mess, beautiful though… and I'm STILL fantastic.

Santorini Island, Greece 🌟🇬🇷