This is a reflection on a favorite short story of mine titled The Way Home Is Not The Way Home Anymore, that wrote recently. The excerpt below has been engrained in my brain ever since I first read it:
“It’s not about burning bridges, but removing links,” John repeated to himself in sync with the train passing over the tracks. “The way home is not the way home anymore which should be good enough for now,” he thought as the lights of the Toronto skyline came into view.
After reading that line, I thought of a fence as a metaphor for whatever environment you surround yourself in at a specific period in your life and the boundaries (set by the fence) that come with that environment. And in addition to the fence lines, bridges are within those environment, providing a chance for us to explore a new side of the world that better suits us in that particular period of time and/or the long run.
Until we have to remove links and question the bridges we frequent.
In between these links and cracks, new and neglected worlds appear; exposing what was once out of sight, out of mind. These newfound worlds are now blooming out of the darkness. Those times in well-known environments served a purpose but eventually the pain and stagnation outgrew the comfort. Eventually, the road was no longer smooth. The concrete, eroding into dust. The fence, breaking apart at certain links. The dust and scarred links are speckled with hints of a past self; no longer weighing you down and blinding your view. The paths within this environment are now reshaped with new turns and routes; the links overgrown with introspection and honesty. You can see the old bridges and fence line from a distance now. It looks foreign. Unfamiliar. It’s odd knowing that it all was once well-traveled. Part of a routine.
This is about another self being shed. Reborn. And now the sun shines differently on these new routes of yours. These routes are ideally taken in solitude: with a pen, paper and your soul. With those tools, you are not truly alone. You are walking side by side with you and your revised self.
Ever-growing. Evolving.
Upon re-reading Matthew’s short story a few more times and also digging into some notes I made while reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act, I began to put three major stages of my life onto paper for the first time ever:
Youth: foundation // building of self - [ages 5-14]
My dad raised me and my brother on the 90s skate-punk culture from very early on (age 4 & 5) that instilled a “create and do what you want” attitude/mindset into our spongey little brains. A lot of my creative inspiration came from skateboarding brands like Thrasher Magazine, Slap Magazine, and Anti-Hero. Very early on, I knew I had a creative side that needed to be tapped into and tended. I was always doodling and writing short stories during class and inside my room when I wasn’t skating. In fact, I remember winning the best short story in my seventh grade English class. The wheels in my brain were always spinning.
As skating began to consume my life more and more, a new passion developed. I became the go-to filmer/photographer for the skate crews my buddies and I would form/be a part of. I was the one that always had some sort of small cam recorder on me and a lot of my friends were simply better at skating than I was. This was a significant time in my life where the urge to document what was happening around me became apparent.
During this same period (age 10-12) there was a huge emo/post-punk music scene in our small town of Yuba City (43 miles north of Sacramento) that my mom exposed me to. Our house quickly became the after-party spot for some of these musicians after they’d play a set at the Town Pump, the bar that my parents owned. In addition to the darkness of alcoholism that was apparent in this subset of people, it was an exciting and vibrant scene to immerse myself in at such a young age. Those years were undoubtedly formative in what truly interested me at the time and still continues to inspire me within the art world.
But during the last few years, my parents were in too deep in this party/bar-owning scene of theirs and naturally, they separated. On top of all of this, there was a significant boost of popularity and development within the world of social media . A “perfect” escape for now..
Teens: numbing // growing of the ego - [ages 14-18]
Once I entered high school, social media was evolving into a suffocating monster that caused everyone, including me, to compare ourselves to one another at an uncontrollable rate. In fact, Instagram was created in the same couple months I started my freshman year. I don’t mean to blame social media for this expansion of ego era of my life but it was definitely a significant factor in the rabbit hole of phone addiction and the perils that come with it.
Deep down, I had social anxiety and other anxieties at play that I didn’t truly acknowledge..even when I was younger. And as a freshman, many of my childhood friends–whom I was still close with–had older siblings who were in their senior year of high school. Having an "in” with the older crowd proved to be the ultimate path of growing up too fast, as if I hadn’t done so already in my earlier years. With anxiety, overall shyness, and too much phone usage, I soon gravitated towards smoking weed and experimenting with other drugs to numb this weird, out-of-place feeling I was quite unfamiliar with. In other words, I didn’t know how to deal with these emotions. As a result, skating and other creative corners of my life were placed on the back burner.
Intoxication on most levels felt like a normal/”cool” way to live out my high school years. I personally feel like exposure to these substances/lifestyles was going to happen one way or another. The people I surrounded myself with were just as lost as I was or it seemed as so. Maybe we were just too bored as well with no proper parental guidance. A lot of our parents were hardly home and a majority of us came from broken homes in one way or another. The cliche “what else is there to do here?” mentality was constantly reinforced with these thoughtless decisions we were making. Without us truly knowing in the moment, we were stuck in a perpetual cycle of mental numbing, brought on by drugs and social media.
With all of this going on, there was also a huge resurgence and transformation of streetwear culture that went hand-in-hand with the aforementioned pothead life(less)style. Before I was even fully aware, I was neck-deep in a world too focused on material objects and basing my own decisions over what was “liked” by others. Worrying about the self and spending time in introspection was not even in my world of thinking at this time.
Early Adulthood: rebuilding // refinements of self - [ages 18-19]
Amen my dude, amen. What a perfect photo for this piece of writing. What a pleasure it is to read your journey and share that vulnerability with you. Thank you for being so open and going over your past and how you dealt with removing links to better yourself and bring yourself to a better place. Never stop feeding that creative fire, just keep gently blowing on the embers, you're a talented artist, and it is a honour to get to share a creative journey with you in the form of friendship, and of course; thank you for sharing my work!