Tonight is my twenty-eighth birthday and it seems entirely fitting on this day I should take the time to reflect, at least a little, on my first twenty-seven years of existence. Perhaps it would be of more relevance to look at what I would consider the path that really lends itself to the my current re-mergence. As many of you who personally know me are well aware, my life has been going through a bit of an over haul in many ways. Anyone following what I have been doing in my life, you are observing a real personal transformation. Maybe not so much of a transformation, but a rediscovery as I branch out creatively, exercising every which form of self-expression god has given me. Never before have I felt so alive, so bristling with energy from the inside out. and after twenty-seven years of life, I am finally embracing the artist that I am and always have been. After a long road, down and back, I can honestly say, on this night, the eleventh of March, 2014, I feel I am on the verge a massive breakthrough in my life. One that has been clawing to come out for quite some time…
You see, for a long time I was repressed. Repressed by my own self-generated ideas about who I thought I was or who I thought I should be. With that I would draw people and experiences into my life that perpetuated that repression, that reinforced a very small, limited view I was allowing myself to be in reality. My family and friends will know from childhood I was creative and quite frankly, a nerd. Whenever my parents allowed me to dress myself I would usually end up with an awful mishmash of clothes that didn’t match or some array of eccentrically colored clothing. I loved video games, enjoyed mimicking cartoon voices, memorizing movie dialogue and creating my own cartoon characters with a pencil and paper. By the age of six I was already a working child actor, in reality on the verge of what appeared was going to be a very successful and potentially lucrative career as an actor. After a few years of being in the business really no child can ever understand, my incredible parents let me make the choice to do what most kids my age were doing; I left acting to go to school and I really fell into youth sports. So begins the slow degradation of the creative in me into a perfectly conformed robot…or so I would say these days.
Don’t get me wrong, I threw myself into athletics 100% and I absolutely loved the act of playing and competing. I enjoyed watching my dad play semi-pro football and I admired his athleticism, strength and agility. I too was gifted with his athleticism, so naturally I took to the sports thing very well. I would not trade my experience in athletics for the world because I not only enjoyed playing and learned some incredible life lessons (though trials and triumphs), but because so many irreplaceable moments were spent with my father out on a field, tossing a ball around or cooperatively working to hone my skills. For that simple fact I consider myself a phenomenally lucky guy to have that time shared with my dad. Yet there was a struggle in sports from early on that no doubt served up lessons that have and will impact me for the rest of my life.
You see, so much of my career in sports from youth up until college, always seemed to be an incredible up hill battle for me. Perhaps it was my stature or whatever, I don’t know, but besides being athletically gifted, there wasn’t one of the numerous MVP trophies I won that wasn’t earned with a lot of hard work and a shit load of personal frustrations, trials and triumphs. From odd-ball benchings in youth All-Star games, a freshman football coach who seemed hell bent on making sure I wasn’t going to be a starting quarterback (which I became and was voted MVP…dick) to an unbelievably disappointing college football experience, my athletic fate was always in someone else’s hands to some degree and to be honest it exhausted me. From early on I wanted to be the BEST and with that came a never say die mindset that, looking back, forced me to shelve my creative side, but only as effectively as one can when they attempt to deny their true nature.
During these years of fierce athletic competition, I stopped drawing, I stopped making little skater videos and I stopped impersonating the illusions I saw in movies. To the outside world I was a square, clean cut kid, good student, dedicated footballer, growing up to be a very responsible, controlled human being who made few waves unless a football helmet was strapped on. My junior year I broke my collar bone, another set back on my athletic journey. Looking back, the timing was impeccable as I found myself registering for art class, rediscovering my talent and enjoyment of creating images from nothing. It was during this year I learned that despite all the worrying I had done about the upcoming football season, it couldn’t save me from landing in sling for nine weeks and another four after I re-broke it upon my return to the gridiron. This time of let down and disappointment was quickly filled with one of my first loves: artistic expression.
It was during the second semester of my junior year, the suffocating artist inside of me found another outlet: writing. Now, I did have an 8th grade teacher try to steer me towards creative writing, but at the time I clearly understood that football players don’t write stories and plays, that’s something for geeky, homo types, something I obviously wasn’t. In part, it was this skewed way of thinking (which I thankfully outgrew), the truly misguided view that art and creativity were girly, feminine and somehow much less cool than all the chest thumping, blood and sweat world of athletics, that contributed to the denial of my creative self. For the record, since embracing the writer, actor and artist in me, I have been tackled and groped by exactly zero sweaty men, which is essentially the fundamental activity in football, but hey, who’s keeping track of those sorts of things…I digress…
My junior year I had an English teacher that made us keep a journal. In this journal we were to write whatever we wanted several times a week. Wouldn’t you know it, that assignment was the beginnings of what all you poor souls now tune in to read on this blog. I found the act to be incredibly liberating, sharing thoughts and ideas about the world I felt I couldn’t discuss with my peers. In fact, I recently read some of these and I was kind of blown away by what I was writing and with such passion. I was ardently condemning the war in Iraq, vocalizing, on the page, a sort of very authoritative indictment of the way we as human beings conducted ourselves in society. All in all, it was some pretty heavy shit for a sixteen year old kid. The day I got the assignment back, I had a note from Ms. Lawson, “You NEED to keep writing. You are very insightful, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your entries.” That was it. This was a validation of my voice that cemented my connection to the written word to this day.
While I continued to write, I was still in sports mode 110% entering my senior year of football. There’s not a lot I’d like to write about here as the narrative here lends itself to my sudden itch to become a drummer during this time period, just another exploration in the creative’s tool box I had yet to explore. After researching the basics of drumming and tapping along to Metallica’s The Black Album for months, I convinced my dad to help me buy a drum set for Christmas. A few months before my eighteenth birthday, the new drum set would mark the beginning of a new form of creative expression and a major turning point in my life as I began to fall in love with the creative process on a new level. The cool part was this would become a new venture for my dad and I to collaborate on as we started a band together…pretty rad!
I think you’re getting the picture here. Despite pushing forward as hard as I could towards my dream of playing football at a higher level, little bursts of creativity would spring forth, rearing its head as a painless escape from whatever inner and outer turmoil I was experiencing. The six months I spent at Santa Barbara City College ensued, a disappointing football experience and a philosophical awakening transformed my life in a way I was very unsure of how to handle it. About a year later, I had walked away from football, injured and utterly exhausted by the competition, the uphill battle and seduced by the call of something greater in the world for me. I continued to write, I continued to play the drums, but for a long awhile I didn’t find what I was looking for.
After some years of floundering around from college to college, training at a few different gyms I did find some meaningful connection to the work I was doing as a personal trainer. After turning twenty-one in San Diego, I decided I was going to move back home and get back into acting, an idea that lasted a very short time as I was drawn into the cookie cutter world of corporate fitness. You see at this time I was craving to satisfy my creative desires, yet I was building a successful business as a trainer, learning to play the corporate game, talking about the future, salaries and 401k’s. Once again, I fell into the conventional path, not unlike the anti-creative culture I found in football, but now a more “adult” version of it.
My creative impulses quickly manifested themselves this time in the form of entrepreneurship as I left what looked to be a promising corporate career with 24 Hour Fitness to work on my own as an independent trainer. Although I broke free of convention with my own business, I can look back and say I quickly found a way to conventionally trap myself again by getting into a very serious relationship which would later result in a marriage. One thing I couldn’t see then and am just seeing more clearly now, is just how much my authentic self was fighting, scratching and clawing to get out in some way shape or form, yet as quickly as new opportunities opened up, I would make a choice to close it off based on what seemed like the socially sort of responsible thing to do. We all see where that got me…
In 2011 I decided to return to acting classes, the same year I was planning on getting married, two choices that don’t usually run parallel with each other. This was the beginning of the end of old Jeff, the obligated, paper mache social construct I had become, living the life I thought a man like me was supposed to be living, rather than truly living my life. Not only would this year be the beginning of my renewed acting career, it cemented the notion that I was not made for doing anything the “old fashion” way. Acting was fun, it cultivated a new comfortability on camera, something that immediately impacted the fitness segments I was doing on NBC. The drumming was still going, now at seven years in the making, I was journaling and writing, making more and more profound discoveries about my self, my voice and how to manifest it in reality. In retrospect, all of these things were surely signs of ruin for the relationship I was in, especially given the type of person I was with. My ever expanding creative, philosophical side truly was not a good match for her nor the world I found myself living in.
Between 2011 and 2012 I had to overcome two major hurdles, both of which required me to finally assert my true self and walk away from some pretty heavy stuff. The first was a deal with an old-school, once powerful TV producer. This one time major power player in Hollywood discovered me hosting a fitness show on a pilot internet project of his. What looked like a promising opportunity for me to put both my fitness knowledge and on camera skills to the ultimate use, turned into a real gut check for me. At the end of the day, this crazy old man wanted to own me for the rest of my life and I wouldn’t have it, not even at the prospect of making shit loads of money and doing something I really, REALLY wanted to do. He cursed at me over the phone, threatened me and sent angry emails as I pushed back for what I thought was fair, finally finding my voice and standing up to someone who held the keys to my future. Look I did the sports thing, my fate in someone else’s hands and I was not about to sell my soul to this greedy devil all for a shot at being “famous”. Major hurdle number one overcome, what felt like my first real middle finger to the establishment.
Major hurdle number two was finally acknowledging the person I chose to marry was not serving my highest good, nor was I serving hers. Our energy, our personalities were not compatible as I could not be what she wanted or needed in a partner, despite my many deep and genuine efforts. Where I was going and where she was going were two very different places that would not and will not ever be compatible. It was like oil and water, we just didn’t mix. Removing myself from this situation was an act of self preservation in many senses of the word. No longer could I be in a relationship where I was not free to be myself, free to speak my mind, to express myself creatively or pursue my passions without some sort of back handed attempt to suffocate my voice. I could no longer survive in the world I had created as my self, so I got out.
Clearing that hurdle paved the way for the liberation that has been the last couple years of my life. Thankfully I am truly, truly fortunate to have a support group of family and friends whose unyielding unconditional love have given me the opportunity rebound from such dreary times. What I have been through, what you have witnessed, in my eyes, has been a remarkable awakening. While it may have little consequence on you directly, I have to say that it has been the most incredible journey to be embarked on. I find myself eyeballs deep in self-expression; acting, writing, blogging, drumming, painting, filmmaking and communicating in all ways possible, I simply cannot get enough! Perhaps it is just years and years of pent up self-expression expelling itself, but I also think it is simply who I am. I live, I observe and am compelled to create, share and express those experiences through my own unique filter.
It has been the most delightful rediscovery, the journey back to myself that has been here all along, waiting not so silently over the last twenty-some odd years, calling for me to just be! JUST BE ME! The process of getting past all of the bull shit, sifting through the dream society imposed on my mind, breaking down the contracts I made with the world in every single sense and ultimately chipping away at the foundation of what it means to be alive, what it means to be me in this world…my god what a beautiful process it has been! I can’t help but be invigorated by the possibilities out there! I can’t help but be inspired by the potential I now see in myself, by the potentials I see in others and the art I see all around me in this world. There is such a grand experience to be had, such a wonderful life to be lived, I must, you must, we must grab ahold of it and embrace it! The renewal is like being stuck under water for decades and then finally coming up for air, ah the sweet taste of air! But this comes not before death, not before a passing away of many things, most things, including my old self.
What you are witnessing my friends, what I have been through in my first twenty-seven years of existence is a death and resurrection. It feels so good to be alive again, walking in the shoes I was meant to be in, living the life that’s mine, one I’m free in. This is our journey and our calling, to know ourselves and walk our path; not the path of our mother, father, brothers, sisters, priests, preachers, politicians, ancestors, gurus or teachers. I’d love to say this is it! Quite a journey and process it has been, but no, no my friends, this is only the beginning! Twenty-seven was by far my best year, my most conscious year, my most free, most authentic year and I have no intention of ever going backwards, no, no, no. Here’s to the lifelong expedition, the path of truth and the journey into the unknown and what it may hold for us. Thank you for being a part of this experience, whoever you are and whatever your path is here!
With Great Love,
-JB
