Please subscribe to my newsletter to get writing news and updates. Writers all have those nights, don’t we? I know I do. It starts out innocently enough. I get up to go to the bathroom. I quickly check my phone. Then something happens in my brain… and I can’t seem to turn it off. I’m writing this at 4 in the morning because I haven’t been able to fall asleep again since somewhere around 2:30am. I’m starting to realize that these nights happen to me once every couple of months. They come, and they go, and then they disappear again. But they always come back. It wasn’t always like this, however. In…
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Here’s what I learned about partying sober since I gave up alcohol
Please subscribe to my newsletter to get writing news and updates. When I first gave up alcohol and went into recovery in July 2015, I didn’t know all of the changes that it would bring to my life. However, one of the more obvious changes are socializing sober. When I was in New Orleans last September for my baby brother’s birthday (and having fun in the cute restaurant bathroom in the picture above), I realized just how different my life had become in the last year. I’ve learned a lot about maintaining a happy and alcohol-free life in this time, but it hasn’t always been easy. For one, I had a few…
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A year ago, I was single, unemployed, homeless, broke, fat and drunk
Please subscribe to my newsletter to get writing news and updates. Exactly a year ago, I had just arrived in my hometown of Fort Myers, FL. After 11 and a half happy years as a resident of New York City, I had decided to move back to Southwest Florida with my tail between my legs. Unknown to my friends at the time, I had just come out of the darkest place of my life and decided that what I needed was to restart. So in early April 2016, I accepted my parent’s invitation to move back home for a little while and set about changing my life. I packed up my apartment, sold as…
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How to choose to be happier in our crappy world (VIDEO)
Please subscribe to my newsletter to get writing news and updates. Happiness is something that humans think about a lot. At least I do. For years now, I have been saying that “happiness is a choice and it’s a choice that I make (almost) every day.” That’s still true, of course, but sometimes that kind of thinking gets away from me. Look, there’s no two ways about it: The world is currently not a happy place. There’s untold chaos, which isn’t exactly anything new, but now that chaos is complemented by a particularly hairy situation in the country which I call home: the United States of America. In case you are living…
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Thoughts on turning 31… and the
future of Map Your 30s blogPlease subscribe to my newsletter to get writing news and updates. When I first started writing about turning 30 years old and decided to create the Map Your 30s Blog, my idea was simple: I wanted to write about all of the changes happening in my life and I wanted to make the point that life doesn’t end when you’re 30. In fact, in my very first post after turning the big 3-0, I said that “my goal with the Map Your 30s blog is to prove that turning this momentous decade doesn’t have to be the end of your journey.” I wanted to write about how it’s okay not to have everything…
