Alone

I’ve spent a large portion of my life alone. I don’t necessarily mean that I’m completely by myself, but if there are people around, I don’t know them. Even before the last few years have forced so many people into isolation, I was trying to learn to be okay with just myself. From roadtrips through New Zealand, train rides across France, or hiking in remote corners of Iceland I’ve worked on how to thrive on my own.

Don’t take this as me complaining, or whining that I am lonely, because neither of those things are the case. I’ve come to appreciate being alone, sometimes to a fault. Maybe it’s coming from big family, or maybe it has slowly been growing in me since being an 18 year old packing my life up and moving across the United States to somewhere that I knew virtually no one. Wherever it started, becoming comfortable being alone was one of the best things for my life.

Lookout Mountain, GA, USA {2018}

Over the course of my life I’ve been to almost three dozen countries. If I hadn’t been willing to travel alone, that would have never happened. Since graduating from college I have moved my entire life across multiple oceans, often to places where I knew fewer than five people. If I hadn’t been comfortable being alone, I would have been miserable. In the three and a half years I’ve been in Albania, I’ve made almost 50 videos about my life here. If I hadn’t been able to work on those alone, I would be in a far difference place in my career. It all comes down to one thing, not being afraid of my own company.

Somewhere in Iceland {2017}

Not being afraid of my own company does not mean that I hate being around other people. When I take trips I am often looking for someone to join me. Experiences are more fun when you can share them with others. Reminiscing is far more fun when you can text someone and say; “Remember that rainy night in Cancun when a bus drove through a puddle and the splash completely engulfed you?” As I get older, I’m realizing this more and more. I’m far less likely to hop on a plane - or in my van - and head to somewhere random without someone else I know involved in the trip.

However, in my wanderings around Albania it’s rare to find someone. Those who are willing rarely have the time, and those with the time rarely have the willingness. So for the foreseeable future, I will have to tap back into what led me here in the first place.

But again, I’m not complaining. Being alone is how I got myself to this point. I owe my career to being able to work alone, without someone pushing me. I owe my mental health to being alone, giving myself time and space to process. I owe most of my accomplished goals to being alone. So I say bring it on.

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Best Year of My Life - 2021

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I’m thoroughly convinced that each year of my life is better than the last, and 2021 was no different. Sure, every year has its ups and downs but I never want to be caught looking back and thinking, “Man, remember that other years? It was way better than this one.” For that reason, I make sure to edit together a recap video of each year. This way, I can have a visual reminder of all the things that I did in each and every year and can recall those memories much easier.

This year’s recap took a bit longer to finally put together, but it’s better late than never. Because when I look back on this 2021 recap video in 5, 10, or 20 years I won’t worried about when I uploaded it… but I do know I would regret not uploading it at all.

Cheers, 2021, thanks for the ride!

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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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Vau i Dejës

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Two and a half years ago I got an idea for a short video series… Little did I know it would take two and a half years to finally bring it to completion.

After asking over and over about the people and places depicted on Albanian bank notes, I decided to just take matters into my own hands and do the research myself. This brought me to the idea of creating a 5 part series that went through each of the bank notes and gave a short explanation for anyone else that may be interested. To make the videos more interesting not only for myself but also the viewer, I set out to find each of the spots on the notes. After visiting Vlorë, Butrint, Krujë, Frashër, and now - finally - Vau i Dejës, I have completed that journey.

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Create • Explore • Learn

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I love minimalist tattoos. Many of my tattoos are minimal, and the reason for it is two fold. First, I just like it. I like the aesthetic, and I like having a small, unsuspecting symbol that carries so much meaning. The second reason is something that is debated amongst anyone with tattoos. I know people that absolutely hate it when they repeatedly get asked what it means, and there are others that will go into every single detail, even down to the placement. As a storyteller, I love it when people ask about my tattoos. I thoroughly enjoy explaining the nuances of the different pieces.

So naturally, I’m always trying to find different ways of representing something big in a minimalist design. Which is what led me to glyphs. Simply put, they’re symbols that represent various aspects of life. They’re exactly what I like in a tattoo; small, unsuspecting symbols that carry meaning.

Create.

If you’ve found yourself reading this, it should come as no surprise that I love creating. For as far back as I can remember I’ve always loved being able to make things. As a teenager, and even at the beginning of college, I would get random work helping on construction sites. There was always something fulfilling about seeing a structure go up. Through the use of my own hands, and a variety of tools and materials, I (as part of a team, of course) constructed something that didn’t exist before.

This kind of fulfillment obviously continues in my life now, but in a more virtual space. I would love to continue creating in a physical capacity, but I don’t have the opportunities. Creating for me now is most often in video or photo form, and more increasingly in written form.

Explore.

Exploration is yet another passion of mine. One of my favorite parts of moving to such a relatively unknown country is that I hadn’t seen photos of it plastered all over the internet. Don’t get me wrong, I love New Zealand and Hawaii and all the photos people take there, but having the feeling of discovering something for the first time is unmatched. I realize that I will never be the first person to discover something, but being in Albania is as close as I can get. Swimming in lakes, chasing waterfalls, and climbing mountains that I never knew existed until recently makes me feel like a real explorer.

Learn.

It’s no secret that I am not a fan of school. I never have been. I went to college specifically to fulfill a dream of mine in playing basketball in the NCAA, but had it not been for that I possibly would have never bothered attending. As soon as I walked across that stage in 2014 there was no doubt in my mind that I would never go back into that form of education. That being said, however, I love learning.

Learning can be done in so many different environments that do not include a whiteboard, taking notes, or exams. When I finally understood this, I finally fell in love with learning. Through practical experience, through self-guided studying, and by listening to those wiser than myself I have learned far more than I would have expected. It’s possible that I have learned more outside of a classroom than I ever did inside one.

Watch me willingly let a man stab me repeatedly with a needle.

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Rock Climbing in Korçë

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While I was attending college in northwest Georgia, I had a number of friends who were into rock climbing. Because of where our school was situated, most of the climbing took place outdoors. I wasn’t super into the climbing, so I didn’t buy any shoes for it and because my feet are larger than average, none of my friends had shoes for me to borrow. This led me to being the one in the group to either sit in a hammock and watch, or belay.

Moving forward a few years, I had a handful of jobs working with youth. A few of these jobs had outings to places that had climbing walls, but most of the time I was the one supervising and making sure the children didn’t hurt themselves. If I remember correctly, there was exactly one instance that I have ever set foot on a rock climbing wall. That is, until last week.

I had heard a few things about an indoor climbing gym in Korce, about 40 minutes away from where I live. So i took the opportunity to hang out with a friend, and try this out for the first (real) time.

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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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Where to Buy Food in Albania?

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A few weeks ago I asked people in my audience what sort of things they would find interesting to watch. One of my brothers replied and mentioned that he and his kids would be interested in seeing what grocery shopping looked like in Albania. So, I decided to give them a look.

Many things in Albania have become so normal to me that I forget they aren’t necessarily the typical way of life in the rest of the world. For instance, getting any fruits and vegetables from a guy on the street who has his tomatoes and apples sitting on the sidewalk in cardboard boxes. I see it every single day so I forget that it would be something novel to someone who spends most of their life in the United States.