Tackling Life

Life is all about adaptation. It’s learning to adjust your attitude, perspective, and strategy in order to keep moving forward. It’s about toughening up and refusing to give in or give up. It’s about smearing the blood from your wounds so all the world sees is the fierceness of your war paint when you start over. It’s about tackling the motherfucking shit out of life until your dreams are realized and your heart finally burns with a passion that fuels your days.  

On January 23, I celebrated the third anniversary of this blog. It was a rather hollow victory for me this year and the day left me pummeled by feelings of doubt and failure. I couldn’t help but think, “What has been the point?”

After nearly seven years since graduating from college, I still wake up each day and drive to a job that fails in every way possible to challenge me, inspire me, or encourage me to flourish into all of the things I could become. The only thing that sustains me is spending my lunch hours, nights, and weekends cranking out blog posts and articles and editing student newspapers. Because that’s the work I truly love. But it is utterly exhausting juggling so many jobs. Most days, I feel like life is tackling the shit out of me rather than the other way around. 

Today, despite my best efforts, I still don’t write enough to even make a part time living out of it. And most days when I meet new people and they ask what I do for a living, I still lack the confidence to proclaim that writing is my profession and everything else is just filler…..because it feels a little more the other way around.

So what indeed has been the point of all the persistence and multi-tasking? The picture below is my new answer to that question. 

 

My debut story in Montana Magazine, which just so happened to steal their winter cover and a six page spread, was really four years in the making. It started the night I fearlessly stepped onto the ice for my very first game of hockey. I ended the night exhausted but empowered and with a new found love for the sport. My love continued to grow each season along with my speed and stick handling on the ice. When I first learned about the Pond Hockey Classic in Kalispell, my initial instinct was to throw together a team to participate in it. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I seriously began pondering the notion of writing a story about it. But once I did, I couldn’t withhold my excitement over it.

My cover story on the Pond Hockey Classic evolved from dozens of seemingly useless nights of ricocheting pucks across the ice during my novice hockey games. I knew right from the beginning that I would never have a career in hockey. What I didn’t know was that my passion for the sport would eventually translate into one of my proudest pieces of writing to date. 

I’ve come to realize that the point of all my writing efforts is that they demonstrate how I’ve continued to “tackle the motherfucking shit out of life”…all areas of life...from the very beginning. No shortage of articles or large pay checks has ever deterred me. I’ve kept writing no matter what. And that is what truly makes me worthy of calling myself a writer. I do believe that many of the seemingly useless days of my life will eventually lead me to fulfilling my writing dreams. I don’t need to worry so much about whether I have a career. Because I have a life. And by living that life each day, and tackling everything that comes my way, I will eventually achieve that career I’ve always dreamed of.