A Year In Louisiana

A Year in Louisiana

This posting is a little late but Labor Day came around again, and with it came the realization that I had been in Louisiana for a full year. Well, over a year with both the projects I’ve been on, but a year straight for my current project.

I arrived over Labor Day weekend in 2025 expecting to work. Instead, I spent three full days doing almost nothing. At the time, it felt like a frustrating beginning. Looking back, it was almost a preview of the year ahead: long stretches of quiet, too much time inside my own head, and the slow work of learning how to live in a place I never really wanted to be.

The truth is, I do not like southern Louisiana very much. I have tried. I have learned how to tolerate it, and on better days I have even learned how to be content here. But contentment is not the same as belonging. This has never felt like my place. The scenery does not stir anything in me. The days tend to blend together. Work has often taken only a small part of the day, leaving hours behind that still had to be lived somehow.

There is a particular kind of loneliness in having plenty of time but nowhere you truly want to spend it.

I have a house in Oklahoma that I have barely lived in, but going home has not always felt like going home either. Most of my friends have their own lives now. We communicate through text messages and scattered check-ins, but rarely seem to occupy the same room. I have spent much of my life traveling for work, so I understand distance. Still, this year made me realize that distance is not always measured in miles. You can be a few hours from the people you know and still feel separated from the life you once had.

Louisiana has been lonely, but it has not been empty.

In the middle of all that sameness, I traveled farther than I ever had before. I went to Peru. I saw Machu Picchu. I spent 3 weeks in Japan. By the end of this year, I will have gone to Antarctica and stood on my sixth continent. The strange contradiction of this year is that my world became larger while my daily life often felt smaller. I crossed oceans, walked through unfamiliar cities, and planned a journey to the edge of the earth, yet I kept returning to the same apartment, the same routine, and many of the same questions.

Even Japan, a trip I had looked forward to, left me feeling more unsettled than I expected. I am glad I went, and I am grateful for what I saw and for the time I shared with a friend there. But the trip taught me something about myself: I do not only want to see new places. I need to feel something in them. I need open country, mountains, oceans, glaciers, and landscapes large enough to interrupt whatever is circling inside my head. I need to be reminded that the world is still beautiful and that my life is taking place inside something much larger than my mistakes.

That is part of what Antarctica has come to represent. It is not merely another continent to mark off a list. I want to stand in front of something ancient and immense. I want the noise in my head to become small for a while. I want to remember wonder.

This year has also been one of relentless self-examination. I began keeping a journal. I started reconstructing the story of my life, pulling apart memories, patterns, wounds, failures, and choices. I have learned a great deal about myself, though insight has not always brought relief. Sometimes I have followed a pattern all the way back to its beginning and expected to find a solution waiting there. More often, I have found acceptance—the far less satisfying answer.

There are things I can understand but cannot undo. There are people who shaped me, hurt me, or handed me burdens I did not know how to carry. There are also choices I made as an adult that belong to me. I cannot place all of them at someone else’s feet. That is one of the hardest lessons of honest reflection: eventually, blame runs out. What remains is responsibility.

I once imagined that if I examined my life closely enough, I could finally solve it. Instead, I am learning that healing is not a final explanation that makes everything stop hurting. Sometimes it is simply learning to carry the truth without letting it crush you. It is recognizing your patterns sooner. It is making a different choice when you can. It is forgiving yourself imperfectly and then having to do it again the next morning.

I still struggle with shame. My arrest and everything surrounding it changed the way I imagine other people see me. Sometimes I feel as though my worst moment reached the world before the rest of me could explain itself. I want community, friendship, and the freedom to be seen, yet being seen is also what frightens me most. I worry that if people look closely enough, they will decide I am exactly as bad as I have sometimes believed myself to be.

That fear has followed me into thoughts about work, friendships, and the future. I can become excited about a possibility—a new job, a different city, another version of my life—and then one mention of a background check can collapse that hope. My mind races ahead and rejects me before anyone else gets the chance.

I know that is not the whole truth, but some days it feels like it is.

There have been times this year when I have hated myself. There have also been times when I have tried desperately to prove that I was still brave, still interesting, still capable of becoming someone worth respecting. Skydiving became part of that. I told myself I was doing it for me, but I suspect part of me also wanted evidence I could show the world. I wanted something dramatic enough to overpower the other story attached to my name.

Then I jumped from an airplane without being attached to another person. An instructor was there, but the leap was mine. I flew the canopy and brought myself back to the ground. I was proud, terrified, and completely overwhelmed. Afterward, I did not rush to do it again. I had proven that I could jump, but I was no longer sure what else I needed it to prove.

Maybe I will return and earn my license. Maybe I will not. If that one jump is as far as the story goes, it still counts. I stepped into the open air despite being afraid. Not every act of courage has to become an identity. Sometimes one honest attempt is enough.

I have tried to take care of myself in quieter ways too. I started working out consistently. The changes have been slower than I want, as most meaningful changes are. The scale has not rewarded me much, but my shirts fit differently. My chest, back, and arms feel stronger. I am stronger. Progress does not always arrive in the form I expect, but that does not mean it is absent.

This year included loss as well. My mom’s long hair chihuahua Tukka (Two-kuh) died in January. He was a pet from my former marriage that my mom kind of ended up adopting because we had left him with her so much anyways during traveling for work. I loved that little guy. He would always stand up on his hind legs and he had a white strip on his chest against his dark coat. I always said he was such a little gentleman because he looked like he was wearing a tuxedo. He was kind of neurotic but still so sweet and loving. He just wanted all the loves and all the pets. He was a special friend to my mom too and I know she misses him. I was able to see him one last time, and I knew when I saw him that he was tired and nearing the end. I am grateful I got to say goodbye, though it still hurts to remember the small signs that he did not feel well. Because I have been away so much, part of me can still imagine him at home. Then I remember he is not there. I loved you Tukka. Thank you for being such a sweet little guy.

His death also stirred the older grief I carry for Piper. I never received the kind of goodbye I wanted with her. I do not know what her final years looked like or whether she is still alive. What hurts most is the thought that she might have believed I abandoned her. Maybe that is one reason I have considered finding another Chinese Crested—not to replace her, because she cannot be replaced, but because I remember the gentleness of having her beside me. I do not know yet whether another dog would be healing or whether I am simply trying to reopen a door that has already closed.

That uncertainty has defined much of the year. I am old enough now to see how much of life has already happened, but not old enough to know what the rest of it will become. I think about the marks I missed, the things I lost, and the versions of my life that will never exist. Regret can make the past look like a place I might still find my way back to if I think about it long enough. But there is no road back. There is only the life that remains.

For all the reflection I have done, I have not reached a clean resolution. I still struggle with depression, loneliness, cigarettes, old dreams, and an exhausting need for redemption. I still want to feel connected to people without fearing what they might discover about me. I still want to believe that one terrible chapter does not get to summarize the entire book.

Maybe this year was never meant to give me answers. Maybe it was a year of learning to stay—staying sober, staying alive to the world, staying present with discomfort, and staying with the work of becoming someone I can live with. Louisiana was not the backdrop I would have chosen for that work. It is flat, humid, repetitive, and often painfully uninspiring to me. But perhaps that is why there was so little room to escape myself here.

I have spent a year in a place I did not love, learning that a life does not have to feel inspiring every day to still be moving forward.

I went to work. I went to the gym. I wrote things down. I traveled. I grieved. I made mistakes. I recognized old patterns. I kept trying. Some days that doesn’t feel like much. Looking back across an entire year, maybe it is more than I have allowed myself to believe.

Soon I will leave for Antarctica and Patagonia. I will see glaciers, mountains, and a part of the world that still feels almost impossible to imagine. I hope the majesty of it reaches me. I hope it reminds me of the beauty I have been missing. But I also know now that no landscape, however immense, can permanently rescue me from myself.

The real work will still be waiting when I return.

For once, that does not have to sound hopeless. It only means my life is unfinished.

I, too, am unfinished.