Baskets.

I’ll lead with this, thanks for the reminder to create.

To write, to express, to say the things.

Knowing that you’ve checked this site, MY site, looking for a new post meant the world to me.

I appreciated that more than you know.

Now that I’ve said that piece, I’ll say this one. None of you mf’s ever thought to tell me “hey bro we can’t see shit in your blogs“ because the font colors are all out of sorts. Ya’ll suck.

Ok now I’m on task, kinda but not really. It’s been 3 years since I’ve thought to toss one up and it’s been a very full few years if I have to say. Currently, I’m in the middle of a very humbling bathroom remodel (I’m a bad mf but I’m not HIM when it comes to contractor work), considering a career pivot from Collision to HR (it makes sense I know), anddd overall just spending a lot of time further settling into myself - more on that later.

Beginning with the pivot out of Collision. For those that don’t know. Along the way of “Staying Adventurous Forever” - I decided to jump off the porch and into finally seeing my Bachelor’s degree through in Psychology. Yay me or whatever. Truly humbling experience and as I find a LOT of my experiences now are filled with gratitude and grief. The constant crossroad of being entirely grateful for the opportunity that I’ve found myself in and grieving sometimes just the path I took to get there, or what it actually cost me. (Side note - I find myself understanding the Dad in the show at every turn.)

Aight, so after the Bachelor’s I says to myself, “Danovan” and of course I go “what’s up twin?” - and I think it’s a good idea to jump directly into the Master’s Program of Industrial/Organizational Psychology - because what’s a break and why you need that? So here I am, 2 more terms away from a Master’s and slightly considering the most TRIVIAL doctorate degree I can obtain in 6 weeks or less. A doctorate of Fat-Tailed Gerbil studies or something.

Needless to say, another crossroad.

To tie some of this together, if you’ve gotten to know me you know I’m a fairly “n-clecta” individual (eclectic). How I show up, or don’t - is fairly authentic. I came to understand a lot about who I’ve been and who I will be in two separate moments and this is the first. I had a reading done, and within the reading the priestess just sat back and said “I’ve never seen this combination before”. It may have been Ogun/Obba. The combination was essentially you’re either in deep love or deep work, and something about that clicked. I either find myself completely wound in Love and all the things possible within it or some form of deep work which is more than likely always going to be car related. So it’s interesting to see that now in my career I’m at a place of pivoting from deep work, to deep love. I still have no particular path forward with how all this ties together, I just know it does and there’s an amount of work, and love, I have to offer to people, my people. That’s the difference that I learned with the second thing I came across.

“The only man that can ride the fence is a nigga with no nuts” - that one caught me way off guard. It made me think of my older homies (50+) who when I first got to know them, I could not understand for the life of me why they were so rigid compared to my innate optimism. Their No meant hell No and their Yes meant yes but hurry up before it becomes a hell no. Then I got older and lived through a few more experiences that put me face to face with what that costs. Even having to be shoulder to shoulder with people that literally knew no boundaries. Whomever had their ear had their attention, and I got to see it in real time that that was not the way to be. So here I am, knocking at 40 and rigid as shit lol. I understand it now.

Somewhere in these two lessons though, I realized it all stems back to childhood - where I didn’t have the autonomy or even the courage to make choices for myself. It was just take this or don’t take anything. A lot of decisions weren’t even for me to make. I think the biggest decision I got to make as a kid was being able to pick out 3 shirts for back to school in the JC Penny catalog. I picked a black, red, and yellow shirt - and they were all the same.

So here I am, at the trampoline park with the kids at 8:40 on a school night because I let them choose, actually I think I got bullied into this.

But either way I wanted to get one posted, I needed to.

For Joy, thank you.