Introduction
During the fall of 2016, I began to question my position in life and what I was doing, where I was going, and if I was fulfilling my purpose. Unfortunately, I didn’t have answers to these questions and what’s worse is I had no clue how I would ever find answers in the first place. At the time, I had recently quit a job where I felt like I was “just there.” I had no emotional attachment to the position and knew I was only working there to provide for myself. At the same time, I was also living in a townhome in Durham, North Carolina, with a college friend and had been there for nearly three years. And while I had fun, threw great house parties, met interesting women, traveled a bit, and was outwardly satisfied with life, internally I couldn’t help but feel like there was something desperately lacking.
I am originally from Charlotte, North Carolina and given that Durham is only a couple hours away, help was never too far out of reach. My friends and family were always there when I needed them; so much so that I began to resent myself for habitually having to reach out to them for assistance. They always supported me and while I am eternally indebted to them, I realized that if I kept this cycle going, I’d never become anything more. I’ve always been someone who liked to do for himself and I knew I couldn’t do that while simultaneously surrounded by those who helped me so much along the way.
Also while living in Durham, I had written two books that I considered to be groundbreaking, creative, and increasingly relevant, but for reasons beyond my understanding, they simply did not reach the people most in need. After spending years honing my craft and working tirelessly towards becoming a better writer than the day before, it felt as if my efforts were ignored and discarded, and I felt something drastic needed to happen.
I needed to hit the reset button on my life somehow. I had been having these thoughts for quite some time, and they became all the more exacerbated by seeing myself in this perpetual state of lateral movement—not really going backwards, yet not moving forward either. Over time the voice in the back of my head became louder and louder as it told me that I’d have to make a life-changing decision to get what I thought I deserved. There’s a saying, “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.” Knowing this, I began ruminating about the possibilities of how best to work my way out of this devastating lull.
I needed to get away from everything I knew, everything that would be a reminder of all my failures and shortcomings, and everything that would catch me if I fell. So I began to look for work outside of North Carolina—from California, Chicago, D.C., Atlanta, and everywhere in between. Included in that “in between” was a job in Lafayette, Indiana, in which I applied for and heard back from relatively soon. After an exhaustive application process, I was officially hired and scheduled to begin work on November 28, 2016.
As I made plans to leave North Carolina, I called a few apartment complexes in Lafayette and got the rates of what it would cost to move within a few weeks. Having not worked full-time in over four months, I saved what little money I had in preparation for the move and planned on having housing as soon as I got there but between moving expenses, car maintenance, job application costs, bills, and two new tires for the trip, very little was left.
So, once again I ended up at a crossroad—travel to Indiana and maybe stay at a cheap motel until I get paid from my job and then move into a place, or remain in North Carolina and continue to get what I knew I didn’t want any longer. Needless to say, if I had chosen to stay, this wouldn’t be much of a story. Leading up to my departure, I had saved a couple hundred dollars and convinced myself I would simply figure it out once I got to Indiana. I threw one last house party the weekend before I was set to leave. The following week I packed up as much as my car could carry and drove away.
