Author of the Critically Disclaimed Barely Selling memoir
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"Are you sure you want to get into writing?" they said.
"Publishing a book is really hard," they said.
"Don't quit your day job," they said.
"You're really arrogant," they said.
"Nobody wants to hear from you," they said.
They were probably right.
How I Met Myself: An Odyssey in Modern Adulting
Too Long, Didn't Read
An ambitious, sometimes inquisitive, sometimes hilarious journey into the mind and world of the male Millennial on his Peter Pan Syndrome-curing Eat, Pray, Love experience.
The Setup
This particular story begins with a curious scene:
How did I end up in this situation, someone who doesn’t like talking to anyone, about to step on stage and speak to 200,000 people gathered along Central Park West?
Let’s back up to eighteen months prior.
Anxious, indignant, unfulfilled, and unsettled, I had just crossed over onto the wrong side of thirty with a credit score closer to single digits than respectability. I was living in Los Angeles and this “adulting” thing, a term my Millennial sisters and brothers coined to add a bit of whimsy and innocence to describe our collective struggle in the perfectly normal process of growing up, was as difficult for me to responsibly manage as a bottomless mimosa brunch.
It was all just wrong. What was wrong exactly? I didn’t know that for sure yet, but nothing in my situation was where I expected it to be, where it was supposed to be.
By thirty, I was due to be happily married, have made my first million, be gearing up for a run for Congress, have a second child on the way, be operating my own business, have seen like 70-80% of the world, be unreasonably fit for my age, have golfed at Augusta National, be spending summers at my lakefront second home in New Hampshire, and have control over every aspect of my life. Was that really too much to expect?
Unsatisfied with being unsatisfied, I set out with very little intention beyond a desire to see the world, to bust out of the office and live a remote work life, and to just, run. As my global odyssey begins, it is led by a scattered, uncommitted, distracted captain with no treasure map and a maverick “me against the world” mindset.
Quickly though, fueled by the guilt of my past, ambition of my future, and curiosity of my ever- wandering mind, I start to question the motivations behind what was unknowingly becoming my own Eat, Pray, Love journey, despite the protestations I make to family and friends around me.
With a newfound purpose to explore myself and place in the adult world, I begin to write about my experience, and the act of writing itself sets me off on a course completely different from the one I expected. As I work and travel location to location, month to month, beach to city, cold to warm, isolation to social immersion, the confrontations that drive the story are with myself, in a series of self- and social-evaluations of modern issues not uncommon from my Millennial peers, despite my unique and Instagram-worthy surroundings.