Stories

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When you spend most of your childhood in the same place, your comfort zone becomes real small. Same house, same neighborhood, same friends, same school. You know what to expect each day, every week, every month. The biggest changes are when your sibling gets married, and you have to learn how to accept a new person into your day to day life. Many people can live inside this comfort zone, thrive inside it even, but I knew pretty early on that this wasn’t for me.

Overlooking the small town I grew up in.

“Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.”

-Neale Donald Walsch

When I was 13 my brother and I were looking for for a way to make a little money in the summertime. My dad was a professor at a local college and one of his students had grown up on a farm. Turns out, the farm needed extra hands for the summer. So my brother and I packed some bags and were driven the 4 hours up into northeast Washington to work the hay fields. About 10 miles from the Canadian border on the banks of the Kettle River there was a little farm. We spent five weeks living in a caravan that got only two radio stations, learning how to drive any farm equipment necessary for the plowing, planting, fertilizing, harvesting, baling, and delivering. It was so long ago, I’ve forgotten much of what I learned in those fields, but I know this for sure; it was outside my comfort zone.

When I was 15, I was again looking for work for the summertime. This time, on the promise of becoming a ranch hand I packed my bags and headed to northeast Oregon. Upon arrival, I was told that I was not going to be able to work on the ranch, but instead I could wash dishes in a local restaurant. Already having come this far, and not wanting to return home, I took up the offer. The restaurant sat on the rim of Joseph Canyon, 35 miles from the nearest town. I was given a room in a farmhouse with a few college aged guys, about five miles away. Every morning, I would get up and walk the five miles to the restaurant. When it wasn’t busy, I spent the early afternoons scraping paint off the outside walls prepping for a new paint job. After climbing ladders in the sun for a few hours, I would spend the next 6-8 hours standing at a sink in the kitchen washing plate after plate. I have tons of stories and memories of that summer, but the one thing that stands out more than anything… It was outside my comfort zone.

The next summer, when I was 16, I bought a plane ticket and flew to the south for a month and a half. I visited friends and explored as much as I could around Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. I took a train - one of the only I’ve ever taken in the United States - from Atlanta to Birmingham. I spent weekends at basketball camps with people I had never met, and walked up and down the beach in Florida alone. It was a bit more comfortable because every week or so I’d see people that I knew, but it was still outside my comfort zone.

At 18, I packed my life into a couple suitcases and a few boxes, flew across the country, and got dropped off outside a dorm building on a college campus that I had seen one time in my entire life. Somewhere that I knew exactly four of the people on campus before arriving. To say it was outside my comfort zone would be an understatement.

At 21 years old I climbed onto a plane headed for South Africa for three months. I didn’t know anyone in the country, or even on the entire continent. At this point, what even was my comfort zone?

Overlooking Camps Bay, South Africa

At 22, I moved my entire life to a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific…

At 24, I quit my full-time job with salary and benefits in order to chase a dream I had…

At 26, I moved my entire life (AGAIN) to an unknown country in southeastern Europe…

A number of years ago, I came across a YouTube channel called Yes Theory. One of the things that drives the channel is the idea of seeking discomfort. Video after video they push themselves - and sometimes strangers - to push past their bubble of comfortability and see what kind of freedom lies on the other side.

“When we started Seek Discomfort, the lightning bolt quickly became a representation of the movement. It’s the spark that ignites when you dare to step outside your comfort zone. A sudden jolt of excitement within you when you move through fear. A flash of clarity when you realize that life is limitless.”

- Yes Theory

If life begins at the edge of our comfort zone, I want to be crossing that edge any chance I get. I’ve already been doing it for almost two decades without fully realizing it. Just looking for the next adventure has caused me to seek discomfort repeatedly. I don’t want to live a life that is too comfortable. By pushing that edge, my comfort zone grows and so do I.

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The Worst Trip I've Ever Taken

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It started as any other trip does, finding cheap tickets. I used to spend way too much time scouring the web for the cheapest plane tickets I could find so that I was able to afford traveling as much as possible. These particular tickets were from Nashville, Tennessee to Oranjestad, Aruba with an overnight layover in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

For those that are unfamiliar with Aruba - as I was at the time, having only heard of it in the Beach Boys song - it is a small desert island off the coast of Venezuela. Not part of Venezuela, mind you, but surprisingly part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. While it has its share of beautiful beaches and clear waters, most of Aruba is actually pretty desolate and barren with a good number of abandoned buildings scattered around its 180 square kilometers (69 square miles). And it was one of these abandoned structures that lead me to having the worst trip of my entire life…

I stayed with my friend, Eliot, during the stopover in Fort Lauderdale and he hopped on the plane with me the next morning to go experience this place that neither of us had ever been. We spent the first few days driving up and down the length of the entire island - which was only about 32 kilometers (20 miles) - and scoping out places we wanted to return to and explore in more depth. We found a number of cool places, including a cool abandoned tunnel, but there was another spot that caught our interest…

Eliot inside the tunnel we found.

From the road all we could see was a slight ramp over the guardrail next to the road, and a building that was falling apart on the other side, and then a large patch of trees.

The view from the road, Google Streetview 2021.

Through the trees was an abandoned, partially destroyed boardwalk surrounded by a mosquito infested mangrove forest that led to a pier that at this point was mostly just pieces of wood and concrete protruding out of the water. At the end of what was left of the pier there stood a concrete structure shaped a bit like a boat. In a past life it was probably a bar or restaurant of some sort, but now was far different. There was no glass in the windows, and the whole thing was slowly decaying, soon to become only a memory of what once stood there. After wandering around the structure for a bit, and watching the sunset, it was time to head back to the car.

The view from the bar back along the destroyed pier and mangroves.

As we approached the mangroves, the blood sucking hordes came out with a vengeance. In my haste to get back onto the boardwalk and to the car without being eaten alive I stepped on something in the water that punctured a hole in the bottom of my foot. I ran limping along the broken boardwalk slapping mosquitoes and trying to avoid stepping through giant holes in the structure. When I got back to the car I looked back and saw a trail of bloody footprints along the path that we had taken out. I wrapped my foot in my shirt, put pressure on it to stop the bleeding, and drove back to the Airbnb.

I slept that night with my foot propped up on a cardboard box. I woke up to a scabbed over wound, and lots of pain. When I got out of bed to take a shower I put the slightest bit of pressure of my foot and realized it could not support my weight. Hopping toward the bathroom, I felt blood rushing down my leg to my foot and within seconds my wound opened again and started gushing blood all over the floor. Quickly scrambling into the shower, I was able to get the bleeding to stop again, but just when I thought everything was under control I blacked out. I don’t think I was out very long, but I woke up in a heap on the floor of the shower and Eliot calling to me from outside the door. Rinsing off, I picked myself back up and pulled on some clothes. I opened the door to see Eliot putting on his shoes.

“Get in the car,” he said. “I’m driving you to an urgent care.”

An hour of intense and painful wound cleaning later, I hobbled back into the Airbnb only to collapse on my bed. I was unable to walk for the next few days and all of my plans for adventuring around Aruba came to a screeching halt. What was supposed to be a 10 day trip quickly turned into a 5 days of being bedridden and binge watching Breaking Bad. Thankfully, by the end of the trip I was able to manage the pain and get around a bit more, enough to get some wonderful drone photos of this island that I would not soon forget.

I don't regret going to Aruba, I don't regret going to that pier. If this injury taught me anything it was to fully appreciate every single day when I travel to a new place, because you never know when you're gonna have to spend half of your trip stuck in an apartment.

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Love = Sacrifice

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When I was growing up, my dad was a pastor. One thing we did consistently, almost every single night, was have a family worship night. Most often after dinner, all of the children that were home that evening would gather in the living room and sit around on the floor or the couch singing from a hymnal, listening to my dad give a lesson, and then do a prayer circle of whatever prayer requests we could remember from our family and community.

The format my dad used for his lessons changed and adapted a few times over the years meeting in the living room. My early memories are of him just discussing some Bible story, or biblical topic. A bit later - as most of us got older, probably - he started reading specific passages from the Bible and discussing them in more depth. But on a rare occasion, he would have something he wanted to talk about that wasn’t directly from the text. That is where this story starts.

I still remember this day clearly. He gathered us all together and didn’t open his Bible. He wanted to discuss something else. As it turned out, he was reprimanding us. I don’t know if he was speaking to one of his children specifically, but the message was clear to all of us and is still stuck in my head some 10+ years later. His message: we were selfish.

Despite not remembering the exact year this happened, it stuck with me. So much so that I thought about it constantly in college. No one ever wants to be thought of as selfish, so I decided to make a conscious effort to not be that way. I knew that when I went to college I could redefine myself. No one there knew me, so I could become whatever kind of person I wanted. I decided that I would try to base my life on one particular Bible verse:

“Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.”

- John 15:13 -

I was going to do anything I could to make sure no one could describe me as selfish anymore. Obviously I wasn’t going to be literally laying down my life but there were other ways to live that out. It became little things like valuing relationships with other people over whatever was at the top of my to-do list. Staying up all night with a friend so that they would stay awake to study - even though I didn’t have to study. Loaning a textbook to a classmate the night before a due date when I also hadn’t done the assignment, but knowing I could do it the next day before class. Simple things, but doing what I could to be selfless.

The tattoo wasn’t a reality for awhile after that, though. 

You see, I went to school about 2500 miles away from where my family lived. So this inspired self-development was happening far away from them. It happens anytime you no longer live around certain people, but those college years are even more impactful - especially when you’re surrounded by people that are vastly different than those you grew up with. Despite the progress I thought I had made, the people that knew before from before college didn’t seem to notice. It didn’t matter to me that they didn’t notice, but what began to sting was that most people just assumed I was the same person I had been as a teenager.

I specifically remember the day I got the tattoo done. It was in early 2017 and I was coming home from a rough day. I had been feeling the itch to get a new tattoo and knew exactly what I wanted done, but just wasn’t feeling like driving to a studio to actually do it. I walked into my house to find a couple of my siblings hanging out and within ten minutes of being inside, a comment was made about me and about what kind of person I was. Except, the comment wasn’t true. It may have been true seven years prior, but not anymore. The sibling that made it didn’t think much of it, but it stung knowing that for years I had been trying to shape myself into a new and better person and my family couldn’t see it. They saw me as the 17 year old James.

It didn’t matter that I knew I wasn’t that person anymore. Someone - that is supposed to know me well - still thought it and it threw me into a spiral of downward thinking that maybe I hadn’t changed at all. Maybe it was just in my mind. But I knew that wasn’t the case, and I wanted to have a constant reminder of that.

I almost immediately walked out of the house and drove to a shop. The artist didn’t have anyone else there so we jumped right into my piece. As he repeatedly scratched a needle of ink over my skin, our conversation wandered. He was interested in this story and as we spoke, I could see his mood shifting. He was kind and welcoming when I arrived, and over the hours sitting in the chair I noticed a new emotion coming over him. Still kind, but now pensive. Pondering.

After finishing the tattoo, he looked at me and thanked me. I was taken slightly aback due to the fact that all I had done was sit there and take pain. If anything, I should be thanking him for his artwork. But then he proceeded to open up and explain that he had stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings a few months prior. He wasn’t on good terms with his family, especially his son. He told me that after our conversation, and hearing the story behind my tattoo, he felt inspired to return to AA. Not only that, he was planning on reaching out to his son who he had not spoken to in almost a year.

Love equals sacrifice. And what better representation of self-sacrificial love than to give up one’s own life, as Christ did. So, in an effort to represent Jesus’ sacrifice I chose to make this tattoo a tree - a dead tree - placed right over my heart.

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Exposure

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In the grand scheme of things, I haven’t been taking photos for very long. I can remember one specific photo I took back in high school with a borrowed camera. It was relatively early in the morning, the sun was still low in the sky, and I was walking out to my Jeep at the end of our driveway as a car sped down our gravel road, leaving clouds of dust in its wake… but other than that I didn’t give photography a thought until college. 

My freshman year of university is when Instagram was created. I remember starting to share photos of what was happening in my daily life, but I never thought of it as “photography” as much as just sharing snippets of life. I had the slightest bit of OCD which led to me looking for symmetry in my photos whenever I could. But I really didn’t give it much thought.

Years went by and I traveled around the United States a bit. Taking buses to different states or planes to different coasts, I still only shared bits and pieces on my Instagram of what I was doing and seeing. A photo of my niece in Louisville, a tree covered in hoar frost in Georgia, a photo taken by my brother of me sitting in Coach K’s spot on the bench in Cameron Indoor Stadium. Again, still not giving the “photography” side of things any thought.

That is, until, a phone call in June of 2014. I was back on campus at my school a month after graduating just to see some friends. I don’t remember the exact conversation of the phone but it had one major message; “We want you to come be an intern in Maui.” I started giving photography a thought.

After seeing so many videos and photos of Hawaii over the years, I knew that if I moved there I’d need to invest in something more than my iPhone 4S. So I bought a GoPro Hero 3+ Silver. I began practicing as soon as it arrived taking photos of the youth sports team that I was working with. I was hooked.

It took me awhile but I slowly started upgrading my cameras. My year in Hawaii was mostly documented with my phone and GoPro, and towards the end of my time there I was able to purchase a secondhand DSLR from someone I knew. Not only was I now giving it a thought, photography was my main thought.

That’s where this journey began. That’s where my Instagram changed and it was no longer just a fun way to document my daily life. I started looking at it as a business prospect, I was able to convince brands to send me products in exchange for photos. Photography took me around the world; Indonesia, Aruba, New Zealand, Nicaragua, and more. 

This little symbol is a representation of that journey. It’s an exposure meter of a camera, and every time I see it, I will think about photography and the wild journey it’s taken me on.

PS - I would be remiss if I failed to mention that I got this piece done in a little tattoo shop in Korçë, Albania. My friend Collin had come to visit and one of the stops on our adventure around Albania was to get tattoos. Funny enough, and bringing this whole experience full circle, we did not pay for either tattoo. The reason? Through my photography - and social media accounts - I promoted the shop in exchange for two free small tattoos.

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Tafelberg

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Life is never easy. This is not a revolutionary thought. But as young children we often forget that things don’t get easier as we age. Maybe it was just me, but when I was younger I just assumed that once I got to the point where I was accomplishing goals and living dreams that my life would become easy. This couldn’t have been further from the truth.

The truth is that I found myself actively living out one of my dreams and yet I was in one of the darkest mental states I had ever been. The reason is not the point of this particular story so I won’t get into it, but what is important is the bigger story. How I got out of that state, and what helped pull me from those depths.

I had just finished up a five week trip to one of my favorite places on earth, Hawaii, and was set to have yet another epic adventure roadtripping through New Zealand for the next month. For a variety of reasons I was not feeling myself, I was in a dark place and going through some of the most severe depression I’ve felt in my life to this point. Luckily for me, one of my favorite artists, Jeremy Loops, released a new album in the middle of my road trip. Jeremy Loops is a South African musician from Cape Town that I had discovered during my many hours spent watching YouTube videos and he didn’t have much music released at the time. This album, Critical as Water, was only his second album.

For whatever reason, Jeremy Loops’ music was always able to be a mood booster for me. Every time I listened to his first album I couldn’t help but to sing along with all the words that I knew. So when I was driving the backroads of New Zealand I would take every chance I could to put on Critical as Water. It pulled my mind out of the dark corners I would so often find myself in, and help lift me up.

In some small effort to pay tribute for what Jeremy and his music has done for me, I had the outline of Cape Town’s most iconic landmark put onto my wrist.

“A semicolon is used when an author could’ve chosen to end their sentence, but chose not to. The author is you, and the sentence is your life.”

Project Semicolon

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August 9, 2016

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August 9, 2016.

I still remember that day vividly. It was one of my first days back from Indonesia. A trip I had taken to create a video for a local business that was being funded from the US. I spend 10 days there, making YouTube videos as well as filming for the bigger project. Now I was back, in Birmingham, going back to the same office I had been going to for almost a year. Same job, same place, same people. Every day.

I knew I couldn’t handle it. The job was interesting and fun. The people were fantastic and I loved working with them. I had a comfortable office to myself with a big floor to ceiling window, and a salary higher than I knew what to do with. But I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t want the daily 9-5. The work was right along the lines of what I’d spent so much of my life doing, but it wasn’t rewarding for me anymore. I needed to find something new. I needed to find something else to work towards. I was getting too comfortable, so it was time to get uncomfortable.

That day, August 9, 2016, was the day that I was sitting in a team meeting and announced suddenly (to the others as well as to myself) that I would be leaving that job. I offered to stay on for a bit part time to help them transition to someone else, but by the end of the month I would no longer come to the office every day.

I remember the feeling I had when I walked out of the office that day and got into my Subaru for the short drive home. Sure, it wasn’t my last full time day, but that’s the moment that marked my next leap into the discomfort of the unknown.

I decided then, on the drive home, that I would never take another full-time job again unless I knew it was exactly what I wanted to be doing. I was no longer going to have a comfortable office job just because that’s what society told me I should be doing after graduating college. I knew things wouldn’t be easy, I knew it would be stressful at times, but I felt at peace. I knew I was going in the right direction.

So, I got it permanently marked on me. No turning back, only go forward. A short, simple, minimalistic reminder that I chose this life no matter what came at me. I could only move forward.

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Opacarophile

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I guess it really started when I was in college in Georgia. Living at one of the highest points around, I consistently saw some of the most dramatic and awe-inspiring sunsets. On a regular basis the sky would complete clear and I would watch the orange orb as it sun behind the horizon. It often coincided with when I was finishing dinner so I typically didn’t have to plan to see the sun setting, it just happened that way.

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Sunset chasing became part of my college life. Even to the point that after those four years I would still do it. Any time I’m back on that mountain in north Georgia I make a conscious effort to find a spot before the sun goes down so I can enjoy those moments. It often results in randomly running in to other people doing the same thing, and when I frequented those overlooks more often the people I ran in to were frequently people that I already knew.

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Unbeknownst to my college self, I would leave those mountain-side sunsets for the same experience, in a very different environment. And it was that new environment that really solidified the opacarophile in me. Not to say the sunsets from Lookout Mountain weren’t special, but watching the sun sink into the ocean while sitting on the warm Hawaiian sand just took it to another level. The sunsets I experienced in Maui have probably spoiled sunsets for me for the rest of my life, but honestly, it’s not that surprising. The sun would sink behind the waves and just when you think it was over, the clouds would explode in a grande finale that would put every 4th of July firework show I’ve ever experienced to shame.

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While the clouds really help to enhance most sunsets (assuming they’re in the right position), it’s the cloudless sunsets that really stick with me. Watching the sun drop out of the sky and disappear sliver by sliver is something that I will always love, whether it is over an ocean or the mountains of Georgia. The moment the final ray of light disappears is one that I have difficulty describing.

For about two seconds, no matter what is happening around me, the entire world falls silent. Everything stops. Every sunset comes flooding back to memory. Every person I’ve ever watched the sunset with is suddenly back watching with me again. For about two seconds, nothing matters, and the world is at peace.

It’s this feeling that I wanted to immortalize. It’s the memories of all the places I’ve watched the sun set, all the people I’ve watched it with. It’s the sense of peace I feel every time. And while it’s obviously not plausible to watch the sunset every night, I can see a representation of it on my arm. A constant reminder that despite whatever is going on, there’s a way to feel at peace.

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Freedom

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March 13. Everyone knows what that date signifies. Sure, it may fluctuate a bit from country to country, but everyone in the world had a mutual experience at the beginning of March. I don’t need to get into it.

For me, March 13 is the day I was told to not come into the office. Lockdown measures had spread their way through every corner of Albania and the proceeding days had seen schools, restaurants, and public transportation coming to a halt. Now, it was our turn.

I spent most of the lockdown working from home building a website. Filling spare time with lots of YouTube, podcasts, Netflix, and the occasional chat with a roommate that spent his time in online school or playing video games. I would sit out on the balcony of my flat soaking up the sun as I watched the police on the street stopping passing cars and pedestrians, checking for the proper paperwork. I watched as groups of teenagers rode their bikes up and down the road, not worried about the policemen. I wish I could be as carefree, but I wasn’t willing to risk a fine just for a casual stroll. The most that would happen to those high school kids was a cop telling them to go home, which would likely result in the group just moving along to a different part of town, unbothered.

As I sat, my mind would inevitably wander. I would day dream about what life would be like if I was allowed out of my house for more than just an essential run to the grocery store. I sat for hours and stared into the hills that rise up behind the apartment buildings across the street. Day after day I scan the hills, noticing little dirt pathways crisscrossing their way to the top likely formed by herds of goats as they wander around the mountains. As many of the surrounding hills that I’ve been in, this one is an exception. My calves haven’t felt the burn of this incline. I haven’t seen the view from this peak.

That’s when I decided. Not necessarily on a particular day, but during the long hours of lockdown, the long hours of staring at the hills as they turn green with the coming of spring while we sit inside waiting to be allowed to wander without penalty. I decided that as soon as it was possible, I would climb this hill and again truly appreciate the freedom of being outdoors.

Again, the exact day escapes me, but when the lockdown measures eased up a bit we were allowed out with fewer restrictions, but with a curfew of 5pm. I didn’t let the time go to waste, and the first chance I got I was out the door. Calves burning, nostrils finally reintroduced to the smell of dirt, I climbed the hill. After the first five minutes weaving through alleyways between stone houses, I found the pathway that I had been staring at for the past four weeks.

As I climbed I kept looking over my shoulder as the city slowly grew smaller. I didn’t plan to take any photos, so I was hiking without the weight of a backpack on my shoulders - a rare occurrence for me. I followed a few goat trails until I stumbled across what seemed to be a service road for the electrical lines that rose and fell through the hills around Pogradec. The road wound up behind the peak I had been eyeing for a month and I lost sight of the city.

Rounding one more bend in the road, I noticed a rocky pathway that was either a goat trail of a runoff for water. I didn’t care either way, it was heading north, which is the direction I wanted to finally have a different view of the town I had been locked in for 30 days.

Within two minutes I came over the crest of the hill and was welcomed with what I would argue is the best vantage point of Pogradec: a panoramic view of Lake Ohrid, sparkling in the morning sun, surrounded by hills and mountains on all sides. The red roofs of Pogradec below by the lake shore provide a contrast to the fresh greenery of spring. Huge clouds float lazily by blissfully unaware of thousands of people below that are finally able to appreciate the blue sky yet again.

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