Come to Jesus
When I was a kid I had no idea who I wanted to be.
Well, I take that back. There’s actually a video of my mother asking me:
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“An astronaut, a doctor, and a bug scientist,” I responded with a big toothy grin.
“All three?”
“I’ll be the first.”
Spoiler alert: I am none of those things.
Instead, I’ve been many other things, often all at once. I’ve been a gigging musician, an alcoholic, and a delivery driver. I’ve been a music teacher with diagnosed ADHD and GAD. Now, I’m a personal trainer, photographer, and college student. (Suffice to say, this grouping has been the best one so far.) Life doesn’t unfold in a straight line. It’s more like a sketchbook filled with half-finished doodles, scribbles in the margins, and the occasional beautifully constructed portrait of a version of yourself. It throws lemons at your head and if you manage to think quick enough, you can tote a black eye while drinking your hard-earned lemonade.
“ Life doesn’t unfold in a straight line.”
I never had the chance to attend Space Bug Surgeon School, but who knows—maybe one day.
One of my first real glasses of lemonade in my adult life was music. (Yes, I know the metaphor is a stretch, but humor me a bit.) I started playing guitar when I was ten years old and never really looked back. It was something I prided myself on. I brought my guitar everywhere—campfires, school, family get-togethers. I would listen to classic rock that my dad had shown me and pretend I was Jimmy Page.
It was my first creative endeavor. And it made me feel whole. It made me feel like God. I could create something from nothing—melodies out of thin air, lyrics from pain, harmonies from joy. It made me feel unstoppable. Unflappable. Insufferable. I became a massive snob about music. Never listened to pop. Trashed anything that didn’t sound like it came from a record pressed before 1980. I argued with friends over every single album brought up in conversation, even the ones I hadn't listened to. Especially those ones.
My second glass of lemonade was art. Naturally. A perfect transition for a teenage hipster. Why be a snob about just auditory media when you could be a visual art elitist too? One trip to The Met and MoMA at 13 years old, and that was it. Game over. You could’ve hired me on the spot as a junior curator. I’d walk around the museum halls like I owned them. I asked other kids who their favorite artist was and scoffed if they said Picasso or Van Gogh instead of Rothko, Basquiat, or Lichtenstein.
I was obnoxious. But I’m proud of that kid.
Without that trip to New York and that overly confident, pseudo-intellectual version of myself, I would never have discovered so many beautiful works that I admire so much today. I would never have given myself permission to slow down and appreciate the nuances of color, line, shape, and form. I wouldn’t have found my third, and maybe most important, glass of lemonade.
Film Photography.
All hail the most high. Every hipster kid’s favorite pastime. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit of composition: 35mm.
We’re now in high school. Picture a chubby, sarcastic, music-snob teenager walking into an after-school art program and walking out with a nicotine addiction, a Minolta, and a fresh pack of Kodak Portra 400. That was me. And I thought I was the coolest person to ever exist. The next Ansel Adams. The reincarnation of Henri Cartier-Bresson. The film kid with the camera around his neck and a whole lot of teenage angst to burn through every roll.
“The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit of composition: 35mm.”
There was something intoxicating about photography. Not just the image-making itself, but the ritual of it all—the sound of the shutter, the winding of film, the nervous excitement of waiting for your negatives to develop. It demanded patience, intention, and trust in your own eye. It made me see the world in frames, made me notice shadows and symmetry and human moments that I’d otherwise walk right past.
Even now, years later, photography is still the thing that centers me. It’s my permission slip to be present. To wander. To explore beauty in broken places. It taught me to sit with silence. To listen. To observe.
There’s a kind of magic in capturing something just as it is, without filters or edits—just light, film, and timing. I still get goosebumps when I nail a shot.
What’s funny is how all of these parts of me—the music, the art, the photos, even the chaos—never really disappeared. They’ve layered on top of each other like a collage. Even the things that seemed like detours—the heartbreak, the mental health diagnoses, the addiction—all of that somehow became compost for growth. It all fed into the version of myself I’ve been building, slowly and awkwardly, over the years.
The hardest part was learning to let go of the pressure to be one thing. That’s what messed with me the most. I kept thinking I needed to find a title that explained everything. A box I could check. But the truth is, some people are made to live in-between definitions. Some of us are just trying to keep learning, keep growing, and keep drinking lemonade even when life throws the whole damn tree at us.
Now I’m in a chapter that feels right. Not perfect. Not complete. But honest.
I’m a personal trainer who understands what it means to feel weak and lost in your body. I’m a photographer who still shoots film because it slows me down enough to remember the world is worth looking at. I’m a college student learning how to be curious again. I’m a recovering perfectionist trying not to cringe at old versions of myself. I’m a work in progress. Still am.
I don’t know if I’ll ever grow up to be an astronaut, a doctor, or a bug scientist. But I do know this—I’m finally becoming someone I like. Someone who survived. Someone who makes cool shit and cares deeply and tries really hard to be better than he was yesterday.
And that, to me, is more than enough.
So yeah, I didn’t become the first Space Bug Surgeon. But I did become something else entirely.
And I think that kid with the big toothy grin would be proud.
