10 years ago I took a fork in the road. How it changed my perspective on forks forever.

Ten years ago I got on a plane in rural Idaho and made my way towards Ploiesti, Romania for service in the United States Peace Corps.  Not only was that a big step but many before it and after have led me down such an amazing road in life.  Looking back at such a monumental anniversary it's nice to remind myself there are no regrets!

Leading up to this I had a shift in my thinking.  "I have the rest of my life to work this office job, do the things 'expected' of me by society" and live up to whatever expectations I had built in my head of what life would be.  Here I was living and working as a professional in the career I had set out to start since day one of college 7 years before, but what was missing.  I had been working professionally for a few years and found my work exciting.  I was a coming of age gay man in the early 2000's Capital Hill neighborhood of Seattle.  A very exciting time to be there with protests, a budding design community and an ever growing and inclusive pride.

For somebody 23 making decent money fresh out of college I had succumb to the social norm of living on my own and spending it all and then some.  Evenings were filled with happy hours and shows, acquaintances and colleagues.  It was a really exciting time for me.  I felt like an adult for the first time in my life.  Then I started thinking "I guess I need to buy a condo and get a dog?" in a very unsure back of your mind kinda way.  I started down that road, got a financial planner, did all the things... then it hit me, I make NOTHING near the level I would need to for investing in this city.  Even in the early 2000's it was a booming place.  Something around that time shifted inside of me.  I had been applying to the United States Antarctic Program every season since college.  Something about that was still tempting me.  I had been very lucky to have a dutch step father which afforded me the opportunity to spend some time living and working in the Netherlands right after high school so I already had a bit of the travel bug instilled in me.

A switch flipped, it may not have been over night but it was pretty quick.  I decided to make some changes, start paying every debt and save some money as well as apply to the Peace Corps..  Very quickly I realized how much money I was wasting living at and beyond my income level.  I moved into a friends apt and slept on the floor, got rid of all my larger belongings and rekindled a friendship all in one solid move.  The Peace Corps. application moved along swiftly and I realized that was what was going to be my fork in the road.  Things all started happening really fast and before I knew it I had saved 1000's and enjoy my last 6 months immensely.  Just before leaving I even got my first offer of a job with the Antarctic program and turned it down knowing I was already on an epic journey.

The next two years were an intense, exciting, challenging and amazingly large growth period in my life.  I may not have known it right then but I was changing how I viewed the world, cultural understanding, the gay community, materialistic goods, social expectations and norms and what happiness was defined as.  My organization dissolved halfway through my service and I learned just how hard it is to find an NGO in a second world country that is doing honest and positive moves to help their country.  The answer in this search was actually two fold, I invested my full attention to helping any other volunteer who needed help with a project, summer camp, organizing training curriculum, whatever they needed and the other mission formed naturally through the connections I had made.  I started working with the Romanian LGBTQ+ community out of Bucharesti.  This was one of the most rewarding opportunities I ever had.  Great people in a community that took a lot of time to build trust in your commitment and sincerity.  This was what I was meant to come here to understand, just exactly HOW hard the fight was that my older gay brothers and sisters fought to get us to where we were back home.  

I ended up getting another job offer from "The Ice" towards the end of my service and decided now it was time.  Why  not continue this adventure!?!  It was not an easy decision to leave my service a few months early as I felt I was just barely getting started with the true work I was meant to be doing there, but what I really needed was years more to get into that work, not just months.  So I wrapped up my work and headed home for 1 week to switch my pack job of suitcases and head to the great unknown, Antarctica!

I was actually thankful early on that Peace Corps. is what happened first.  The Antarctic program was an amazing change but learning the cultural sensitivity and hard life lessons of volunteer service first served me well in this much more comfortable position.  I was stationed at McMurdo Station which has been dubbed many times over as something feeling similar to an old mining community out in the boonies with seasonal workers.  It is in fact an old naval base now used exclusively for science in accordance with the Antarctic Treaty.


I started as a laborer working on everything from dryers and furnaces to changing and inventorying all of the light bulbs on station in the utilities shop, then I committed to stay for the winter on another project.  This lead to volunteering in the field center department which led to another winter there and then a deep field season fueling planes in West Antarctica.  Then I somehow landed the job I wanted from the beginning which was an expedition outfitter in the field center.  I trained and grew in that position for the next 4 seasons skipping one here and there.  Saving money all season and then not working all off season.  It even lead to a couple seasons as a carpenter in Greenland with an amazing company to discover.  I dove head first into flight school, learned guitar... really whatever I wanted to do in that time off, which was mostly travel.  It was a magical time in my life.  Learning how to exist in the real world without fitting into the box.  I had spent many birthdays in the national parks of America, Christmases with my chosen family and seasons backwards in other hemispheres, making friends all over the world, adventuring and eventually deciding my next adventure was how to stay in one place and figure out something I could do that in the long run could balance the best of both of these worlds.

For a long time I struggled with the fact that this existence defined me in many people's eyes, now it is just a part of me.  A part of my journey and who I am, but people seem to build an expectation of the type of person you must be to be an outfitter on the most remote continent in the world.  I am actually a pretty normal guy and my friends can attest to the fact that I'm kind of an old man at heart :P  I look at friends who are guides or outfitters in the real world and they are SO badass in my eyes!  I could never keep up!  But I do enjoy trying every now and again.  I am a very 'Goldilocks' kind of person, I like to try this and that but in the end find a place for me that is juuuust right.

This led to some fun and random jobs including a tiny homes company, dancing at the local gay strip bar, pattern tooling and even an engineering position drafting cabinets and mill work.  I lived in my car, in friends' guest bedrooms, closets, in a van at a fellow Antarctican's driveway, running an Airbnb and eventually bought a house with one of my best friends.  A total fluke really!  It was the only house we even looked at and we didn't really know that was a thing we were doing!  That was over two years ago now so the 'finding a home base' part worked out.  And what still blows my mind is how many amazing humans I have been lucky enough to connect with over these years and just how many of those are still holding a very large role in my life.  I can't even begin to express how fortunate I feel for the love I have in my life both in person and across digital lines.

Next was to find the job direction.  After lots of tutorials and trying on my own I settled on saving for a code school boot camp and trying to bust into the industry.  This took up most of my 2017 and was one of the more challenging mental exercises I've done.  Being out of school for over a decade made learning something so intensely and fast very difficult.  What I realized was that I was learning more than anything how to understand different languages in code and finding similarities more than learning any one thing in depth.  I landed my top choice internship and had a blast at that company and then somehow got a contract right out of school working for a great company with high employee satisfaction.  I'm excited for this next step!

And here I am at this tipping point of a new adventure 10 years later!

My long term goals with it are to keep learning and building a few skills now, instead of so many at surface level.  I hope to find great companies that value me as an employee and teams that are supportive, fun and have a lot to teach me!  Someday I desire to be a remote worker and exist in all of the places I have attached my heart to over the years and home base right here in Portland.  I have no grand picture of what this journey looks like or how long I may be here or somewhere else but I'm excited for the journey wherever it takes me.  I have loved ones here and always will so now I hope to build the balance between the adventurous life I've led this past decade and a bit of the security promised by the expected path.  I think there is a hybrid in there that's perfect for me and I plan to find it!

I have found a different self of sense.  Self confident at times but generally humbled by the expansiveness the world has to offer.  A person who cares less now about what the world thinks, or what car he drives or how money is made and spent.  I hope to set my future up to be more financially secure, mentally stimulating and emotionally fulfilling.  

I still have a long road ahead of me and an amazing partner by my side, but on this, the 10 year anniversary of my Peace Corps deployment I can look back in a healthy perspective and say this is just another step in an ever evolving adventure!

Here's to not only the future, or the past, but the NOW!