The 2010s; also known as my 20s. It's been a long decade of pain, growth, and discovery. I hit many more milestones in this decade than the last. My social circle has exponentially grown and diversified.
My thinking has radically shifted as well. Earlier in the decade, I trusted more in order, rules, objectivity, and logic. Life was point A to point B. I was so focused on knowledge, debating, and proving myself right. It was my way of peacocking, and I thought I had everything figured out.
As the years went by, milestone after milestone, one failure after another, and heartache after heartache, it was clear that I, in fact, had absolutely nothing figured out. I had no earthly idea about work, love, friendship, money, family, politics, sexuality, and the list goes on. Throughout this decade, my understanding and thinking of life's meaning and pleasures slowly warped into this person today who is a little more improvisational, bold, and resilient. Life's complexities and secrets are truly unknowable. Shit is fucked up... so fucked up, that it's not worth debating or proving anything to anyone whatsoever. It's more worth getting as much out of it as you can until your time is up. Surround yourself with people and spaces who are truly for you. Regardless of how well you try to treat a person, they are going to interpret it based on their own internal experiences and you just gotta roll with it sometimes. People lie a lot. Casually, consecutively, subconsciously. The only people who will consistently be authentic are the same ones bold enough to take the damage that it requires. These are probably all the biggest themed lessons Iâve learned.
2010-2012 was a very chaotic period for me. It started off hot like fire and emotionally, I was at the highest peak I've ever been in my life. My college path was finally set, my grades were amazing, I had the money for school through being hired as a residential advisor, I felt confident in my beliefs and my long-distance relationship. I had my decade planned out; but then, the inevitable happened... I put so many resources into one individual and experienced a heartache so grand that my life outlook was never the same again. It feels like ever since it happened, I've been constantly fighting a downhill mudslide of depression and living my life is just trying not to slide down as fast. You never quite rise up anywhere near your original point, but you find ways to fall slower. Coming out of that graduated and emotionally intact is a feat I'm still shocked by to this day. Unfortunately, it took the hair off my head and never returned it.
Throughout my first major depression, I had counseling for a period of months while trying to be a resident advisor and take over 18 hours of classes. One of the things she suggested I do was write out my emotions. So, I made a Tumblr and got into writing. I wrote out my emotions for every month of 2011. I wrote it for myself. I felt through it all and spent long nights contemplating and reflecting. All just in order to get back to some form of... me. I really needed to remember what that pain felt like. I wanted to remember it for the rest of my life long after it was gone. Perhaps you could say, the source of all my excessive writing on social media dates back to this period. Over the course of the following year, I amassed a base of 3,000 followers who were attracted to my blogging style. Today, I only have one follower on my friendslist from that blog.
There wasn't anything quite like it at all. It felt like my entire being was broken into pieces. I forgot who I was, what I liked, what I did, and what I wanted to do. The healing process was begrudgingly slow-paced, but it was also largely discovering parts of myself that I had forgotten. One of those ways I thought was to take a trip through memory lane. I went through every single game I have ever played to try to get my hobby back to myself. It didn't quite work as fast as I would have liked, but it gave me something to do. It distracted me. I also put together a project for my bulletin board for one month that was dedicated to video game history. It required all-nighters with plenty of organization, research, and passion. When the curtains closed and it was finally over, my hall coordinator told me something I never would have expected her to say during the farewell ceremony publicly the entire staff. When she said it, I felt so validated and I will never forget that moment. She said I was one of the strongest people she has ever witnessed in her life, and not once throughout the whole ordeal did I see myself that way.
That experience of abrupt, steep decline was my first true humbling experience and my trust in people never quite healed. Going to my first convention at the end of 2012 and seeing loads of people like myself for the first time in my life was the only sliver of hope I had in making friends and experiencing an actual relationship within my 20s. I didnât leave college feeling exactly hopeful, but I at least left feeling neutral.
2013-2016 was where I hit many financial and work milestones while continuing to slowly grow into my eventual present self. After graduating from college, leaving what were essentially the first friendships I formed as an adult was tough. The friends I made in college were very different from the ones I made online and in grade school. A few of those friends understood me a bit more, were willing to hang out with me, and notice me in crowds. They sadly began to distance themselves due to the lack of proximity, and Kinston was nothing but a place of bad memories. I took a measly few hundred dollars and moved to Atlanta to try to start over.Â
I started driving and tried to upkeep a 20-year-old car for years. I had so many moments of being stranded in the dark or driving every 5 minutes and stopping due to an old engine. I drove with anxiety almost constantly and had to quickly figure out car maintenance. I swallowed my pride and worked Chick-Fil-A with a bachelor's. I was humbled dishwasher searching through the trash of customers and employees alike every day smelling like ass on the way home with soggy fingertips and a greasy face. It was the only job in the store absolutely no one was willing to do or help you with. It was the only job where you can go a whole shift of customers and employees not knowing you were even working. It was invisible, yet it was the most necessary. It was the most humbling experience anyone could probably experience after going to college and seeing themselves as hot-shit. I developed my working habits and established a work personality; A personality so impressive that a manager pushed me through the Marriott as a bellman to then continue working on that same personality. Moving outside my geographic area for the first time and then working for a living in a different culture opened my eyes up to much of the world's operations. I sweat, budgeted, and suffered. I suffered long enough to then get a tiny bit of luck and nepotism to get the job necessary to live on my own.. which was the City of Atlanta public sector. The kind of work personality I eventually developed was a guy who was consistent, dependable (despite a shitty car), dutiful, and always in the shadows gluing things together.
Iâve done some wild things. Iâve worked 32 hours within two days. Iâve pulled back-to-back 16-hour shifts. Iâve slept in my car overnight just to clock-in four hours later. Managers were perfectly fine knowing they had an employee doing this. This was a very rude awakening to how the working world was going to be like for me, but I did with no complaints or issues. I accrued my money for the future, and I honestly wouldnât have had it any other way. These experiences of always filling in and constant overtime made it easier for me to eventually become financially stable very early on.
This period also has a lot of my first dating experiences as an adult. Dating back to 2012, I struggled mightily to have any marginal success in dating. So many experiences leaving impactful lessons and embarrassments too plentiful to count. Being unable to understand nonverbal signs was difficult, so I always had interactions leaving me confused and hurt about women. I also went to as many gatherings as I could of similar-minded people, but I never made a single close friend from them which is disheartening. Over time, I became more depressed and cynical about dating. I eventually just kept doing one-night stands hoping it would give me some semblance of the intimacy I lacked and craved.
I was still new to conventions and naive about what could actually come out of them as far as meeting new people. Conventions used to wow me so much. Now, missing one wouldn't bother me one bit. I had yet another tough heartache in this period strong enough to lead me out of retiring Smash. These were by far my best Smash years. In my final year regularly attending tournaments, I could definitely feel my understanding of the game and skill level climbing to new levels. I was ready to try to make a serious impact, but the person I loved was also into Smash, and once I got hurt, I simply couldn't pick it up anymore. After a while, I just stopped. Trying to come back never quite felt the same, so I decided to leave it behind it and focus on developing social relationships outside of gaming culture.
2016-Present was all about what was eventually going to become of finally owning my own place and all aspects of my life. I now had my own space, bought my first car, and took my own vacations. Early on this was also the start of my true political awakening of finally connecting it all to my individual blackness as I became more aware of how many racists I was casually surrounded by. My perspective and activist style finally joined with my weird obsession with empirical political data. That is to say when you combine that with Bernie Sanders and a certain style of liberalism... It is not good. I've lost many friendships and have many rifts with the closest of people over my differences in these things. These losses and disagreements hurt, regardless of how much I act like they don't. I wish something as seemingly trivial as political paths and faith in systems didn't essentially end bonds with people I had, and sometimes I hope I can still be close with those who don't match my activist style. Unfortunately, that seems to be harder and harder the older I get as politics become the forefront of our lives and our values.
This period is also what feels like my fastest rate of change and growth mixed with chaos similar to 2010-2012. Yuna, my first consciously adopted pet, was a very important milestone. I finally get my taste of a relationship which developed in the most unorthodox of ways, and what came after was a plethora of experiences and questions I couldn't have predicted about life. My class consciousness hit a whole new level since college because it was only then I truly connected with someone from a different class. My understanding of love and sexuality flipped on its head and it certainly did not come without its own form of heartache. Just like college, my friend networks and groups expanded rapidly. New experiences and trips were finally happening.Â
I made significant discoveries about myself that change my identity and my perceived place in life. My class, family history, autism, sexuality, and gender all play a part in significantly altering my way of thinking especially about myself.
Work culture was never a positive thing even when I started at Chick-Fil-A, but the corruption, politics, nepotism, and other truths I've learned throughout this period about how the workplace works have turned me into a cynic about the idea of careers and capitalism in general. The Marriott and the City both play major parts in this. The Marriott, who I am still with, started off as what seemed to be a company promising to prioritize employees and a family work environment. It seemed that way at the airport property early on, and the place did have an established hierarchy of seniority. Attempting to get along with Boomers wasn't that difficult, but once I changed to a property that had a higher turnover, more nepotism, and worse management, work-life deteriorated for me significantly. My job security was threatened. I've had a toxic co-worker who was never held accountable. I was given long hours with little recognition and my body has taken its physical toll throughout the years. There are years where I literally worked 90% of the 365 days in the year, and there were months where I may have had just one day off in a single period when combining both jobs. My attempts to change my role or learn other departments were constantly waved off for months. I never thought an environment where everybody puts on fake smiles and friendships in the midst of misery and exploitation would exist, but it does. Thankfully, as we close this decade out, I finally took control of my situation with the Marriott and got my life back by choosing when to work for them as opposed to the other way around. I will say one thing that hits me every now and again are two dead co-workers who worked themselves to their death after being with Chick-Fil-A and Marriott for over a decade. Neither company went out of their way to award them or acknowledge the time and loyalty put in them. They just died. One guy literally couldnât make it to work one morning because he was dead. I think about conditions and situations like this a lot and how companies at the end of the day look at us like commodities regardless of how well of a job you can do.
Speaking of boomers from before, working around a majority boomer environment (and some Xers) for the latter half of the decade was not fun at all. They are a very strange generation to try to relate with. They tended to be very stubborn, holier than thou, toxic, and you simply couldn't tell them anything. There are a few Silent Generation folks who actually were willing to learn things from me even politically, but Boomers? Good luck. Those people preach until it's time to clock out... and they always act like it's Doomsday for some reason.
The City, on the other hand, was worse. It had to be the most surprising firing ever. The cowardice and shadiness I've seen in that manager were so unexpected and crude that I refuse to put my full trust in a manager ever again. The reasoning behind it and the process they chose to exercise was so ridiculously corrupt and sloppy that it still hurts to even look back at how it mostly succeeded based on my own naivety. They took advantage of that fact and even admitted that the reason was bullshit. The manager couldn't even look me in the eye during and after the fact. The very last time I saw and spoke to her was her essentially letting me know that I was a great employee, so she wasn't even in the dismissal meeting. She couldnât face the consequence she helped carry out. I fought tooth-and-nail on ways I could get some form of justice, but alas. At a certain point, I had to move on and create a plan in which I did. Then, that plan had to be slightly altered to something else. I have successfully bounced back financially without missing a beat before yearâs end.
The planets somehow aligned and the love gods finally decided that it was time for me to actually be involved in a relationship that actually has the person within a 30-mile radius. I am probably one of the latest bloomers you will ever meet in the topics of love and sex, but I have to say, Iâve done quite all right. I never would have predicted that Iâd be polyamorous in a million years, and what an experience itâs been. The amount of self-discovery in oneâs insecurities, love style, and unpacked trauma is enough to scare the average person off. Not to mention that the people you are essentially forced to be surrounded by in what is a small local community even if you donât exactly like them. The art of compromise and communication is so crucial, but still very valuable lessons to take with you in any other area of life. I did once ask myself if I had what it took to be a great partner or understand how to actually date someone, but it turns out there actually isnât much to learn⌠and that I already mostly knew. I didnât have any more to learn about it than folks Iâve seen do it much longer before I started.
Envy, one of my worst emotions and weaknesses, is something Iâve had to confront every day at a time. It is a fight that still continues to this day with no clear winner, but there is plenty of progress. Despite being such a bloomer who is also autistic and insecure all his life, Iâve managed for myself. My ability to see my tendencies both good and bad, compromise, communicate, and break practically every subconscious social teaching that no longer serves me is merely a testament to what my coordinator meant earlier in the decade by my strength.
And so here I am on the final day of this decade. I don't really know how to rate my 20s in terms of how good they were; perhaps it's better to get more distance from them in order to accurately judge them. I will say that I couldn't have possibly predicted to be in my current place. I couldn't have possibly predicted to have my current beliefs. I didn't know I was capable of certain things I've accomplished and endured. I am quite proud to be in the place I am financially, emotionally, and socially. All of it took ten years of work and being brave enough to take some risks. There are still more changes to come, but the changes I've gone through from 20 to 29 were significant. My first decade as an adult... I don't think my 20-year-old self and 29-year-old self would recognize each other as the same person, and maybe that's a good thing.
