This has sort of become a routine of mine since 2008, but I’ve decided that I was going to make this year-end retrospective of mine just a public text post.
I want to say that 2011 was a good year for me. To be frank, that’s an understatement. Have you ever looked back at a year and said “such and such year was MY year”? Well, 2011 was my year. For me, I’m always going to look back at this year and say that this was the year that I turned my life around for the better. I’m going to share with you how it happened.
At the beginning of 2011, I was a broken man. I had been broken since 2009 began, and I essentially spent the better part of two years trying every wrong method of repairing my damaged self. I made several dumb mistakes, with a number of them being ones that compromised my morals. I won’t go into detail, just because I prefer not to talk about them. Not to mention the fact that adding the details just makes things more depressing.
To be frank, Blistered Thumbs was the only positive force in my life. My church felt spiritually dead, I wasn’t getting along with my family, and I had a hard time connecting with people. All these factors made me a miserable bastard, and there were a lot of complaints about me at the site. All of them were justified, because I was acting like a damn bully.
There was a point where I made a crucial moral mistake, and I won’t say exactly what it was. Let’s just say I did something that was completely against what I believe in, and I compromised myself because of it. In a call to my best friend, Devon, I told him what happened, and where I was in my life. He offered me a chance to look for something new. The proposal was simple: Spend five days with him looking for jobs in his area, which was the area I went to college in. Essentially, we take a leap of faith, and see where God sets us down.
Once I got here, I didn’t have a whole lot of luck. Most potential employers seemed disinterested in hiring, until I came to my last spot. In a place I call “hotel row” in Bloomington, I walked into my now current employer. My future boss gave me an instant interview, and in one week, I was hired. In fact, I was flattered that my boss said I was too smart for anything aside form the front desk. He needed someone good with computers and with extensive Windows experience, so here I am. I’ve been working here for seven months.
However, trouble didn’t end there. I had to earn my way back to having any sort of positive image with Channel Awesome. So, that’s what I did. I worked hard. I focused on improving my videos, and making sure that every review I did was given as much effort and time that I could possibly give to it. However, I didn’t do this for myself. One thing I had to remind myself was that the whole process wasn’t about me.
I am in the information business. It’s my job to inform. The thing is, information services aren’t about holding info over people’s heads or putting yourself on a pedestal. It’s about serving the public. It’s about providing a service to people who come to me for the information and perspectives that they want to read and hear about. Who am I really if I don’t provide that service? If I get lost in my own head, I lose my effectiveness.
Today, I’m 26 years old. My life isn’t perfect, but now I can say that my life is mine. I’ve rekindled my faith, my ideals, and have taken charge. For the first time in years, I have a future. At the end of the day, I have only one thing to say about everything.
-Micah C.
