For the last five years I have been in flux. It began when, after 30 years around Jehovah’s Witnesses, my faith shattered and I became a freethinker, humanist and secular Buddhist. I reprogrammed myself, or more accurately, re-educated myself. I studied more broad than deep. My goal wasn’t to become an expert in any one area, but rather to survey the big questions, learn the leading thoughts and major thinkers, the proofs, the evidence, the questions answered and those which were not answered yet. I studied biology, history, theology, philosophy, ethics, logic, politics, linguistics, and more. Eventually I reached a point where I was encountering less and less brand new information and instead finding more refinement of things I had already learned. It’s been a pretty intense five years and I’ve completely overhauled my understanding of where I came from, the meaning of life, and how things got to be as they are and what it means to me. As there have come to be fewer and fewer surprises in my broad survey I’ve felt more and more secure in my positions and where they are today. I feel well supported by the evidence. No, I am not done learning, how could I be, but I am aware that I’ve got the outlines down in many important area and will be filling in details for years to come.

At the same time I have been pursuing my re-education project, I have also been attempting to rectify other major problems I my life. An unstable personal life, trust issues and fear in relationships, trouble maintaining friendships and reltionships, some depression, financial problems, and a lot of disorder pretty much personified me for most of the decade prior to the big sea-change five years ago. In these past few years I’ve done all I can to fix as many of these areas and issues as I can and have made great strides. I own a home, I’m remarried, I have some stability and I’ve made many more steps towards being happier, healthier and more stable. Again, as with the re-education project, I’m not done. Everything is not sunshine and light. But I have made some big breakthroughs. I have a better life in most respects than I’ve ever had. Hell, I even have a boat.

Throughout all of this I have maintained a creative pulse most of the time. I recorded The Context, Songs of Bo Redoubt, The Legendary Adventures of Prosciutto Pig and (with Trumpet Marine) Louder, Longer, Lobster. I wrote a novel called Trajectory for NaNoWriMo and also kept up a fairly popular blog for a few years and condensed it into a book called Hira-Hira which I am currently looking to find a publisher for. On the technical creativity front I developed a Mac application and released it as shareware, designed and started development on a couple iPhone applications and have started the XJWNet social network. I’ve even made a few media appearances on Atheist Talk, Humanist Views, and The Infidel Guy show. That’s actually not a bad list of projects to get into in five short years. A couple books, a couple pieces of software, four albums, and more. When I typed this paragraph I was surprised to find that I’ve done that much stuff because, well, I feel like I’ve been sort of aimless, stagnant, and uninterested in what I’ve been doing, which seems like a silly thing to think on the surface but really is true. I’ve been active, yes, but it’s all been an example of “fake it till you make it”. In all honesty, I’ve been faking it.

I’ve been doing the things I think I want to do without any major sense that I do, in fact, want to do them. I put together a band because I had been in a band continuously since I was 12 until I was 30. I wrote and recorded music because it was something I had done for a very long time. The problem for me has been, though, that I really have felt like I’ve been doing this things more because I think I should want to do them than because I genuinely do wish to do them. I have been half-hearted about most of my pursuits. I’ve sought long and hard for the source of this half-heartedness. Finally I asked myself what was the first thing I ever wanted to be? Was it a musician or a computer programmer or anything like that? No. If Rhett hadn’t pulled me into music, I probably never would have done it. If life hadn’t required that I learn a trade to earn a living I wouldn’t have become a software developer. What I’ve always dreamed of being, from as far back as I ever dreamed of being anything, was a writer. Not running a record label, not performing music and recording albums, not running an innovative software company… Writing.

Ever since I read The Invisible Man in elementary school it is what I’ve wanted to be. It was the first dream I had that was mine and mine alone and I’ve held on to it in one form or another ever since but I’ve always buried it in other causes. I buried my words in music, I became a published author by writing about technology, I have treated writing like a skill that was simply one component of a larger discipline instead of making it a stand-alone discipline of it’s own. That has been a mistake. As much as I have gotten out of my creative pursuits, they have always been only partially mine. As much as I’ve enjoyed being part of Rhetts dream, I now realize that I have missed out on my own. I get it now. It all makes sense to me for the first time. I was right when I decided to be a writer, when I started to self-identify as one as a kid, and I was wrong to let that identity get buried.

A writer is what I wanted to be when I grew up and now I’ve grown up and that’s what I am going to be. What a relief to have that figured out.

– Post From My iPhone

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