Today the last video of my series was uploaded and I want to take some extra time to reflect about what it’s all meant to me.
This last video I specifically dedicated to someone I met named Rico. Honestly I would say this full series is dedicated to him though.
I met Rico by complete chance, I was helping set up my grandmother’s church service that she was at and I ran into him and his friend in the bathroom. We got into a chat and I told them I was in college and they were talking about what they have planned for themselves being fresh high school graduates.
At the end of the conversation I shared this template for keeping track of finances I made and shared around at the time. (this template has many errors but gets the job done click here for it)
They both said their thanks and then we followed eachother on instagram. From there me and Rico came to talk a lot and I got a peek into his mind and some of the things he was struggling with.
When we first started talking he was talking about how he was freshly sober and getting ready for his new job in construction and how he really wanted to get some steroids to look like his favorite influencer at the time Alex Eubank.
I told him that steroids wont make you happy. The sadness and ache in your heart you feel currently won’t be fixed in this manner. The love of your body that you want to feel, the love of life that you want to feel can only be found in your own effort. Anything else outside of that, that makes it so that you’re getting the results quicker comes at the cost of the genuine happiness you’ve been searching for.
He basically blew me off at the time and I told him I hoped nothing but the best for him even if he chose to follow through with his choice.
During this same time period he would blow my phone up when he was struggling with withdraws. He would talk to me about how all he would want to do is smoke one more time, push his body to the limits of what he could handle and slip into a dull numbness where he doesn’t even feel real. Wishing to lose grip on his life one more time. And I would talk to him each time.
I would speak on having him think of all the progress that he’s made to even feel like this, how if he were to give in during this moment he would be ruining all the plans he set up for himself to look forward to. And I emphasized that he is in control over how his life will go even with this pain.
Another few weeks went by.
We caught up real fast just talking about how things have gone. He talked to me about how he started his job and been hanging out with his friends and chose not to get any steroids as it just wasn’t a good choice for him. I had recently started the series at this time and was reminded how because of his history of addiction he struggled to write. He put it himself as I forgot how to write.
When I started the series I was still off the edges from a breakup earlier before. I committed to starting this at the start of the summer, with classes over a new life waited for me and I had to get up to start it.
The weeks prior I had started drinking a lot and for the first week of the series I was drinking for every video just to feel comfortable doing something new.
But as I went along the journey that this was, I healed in an unexpected way. I came to love myself so much more, find confidence in who I am in a new way that hadn’t been experienced prior. I saw how the culmination of my efforts weren’t wasted but just needed a perspective shift.
In the first half of the series I spoke so much of love because I was trying to understand myself and the way that I loved. Not simply for relationships but just so I could really be happy with who I am.
For a very long time of my life I felt inadequate and lesser compared to so many others and placed the core of my being in external validation, which is where the ache of loneliness I felt was born from. I just hadn’t been aware of it.
The concepts of love and care that I came to name and verbalize were nothing but another avenue in which I could adequately verbalize the ways in which I do love myself but just had refused to see because I was still under an illusion of needing external validation.
Through reconnecting with my left side in this manner I came to fall in love with myself in a way that makes me a confident and loving person.
When it comes to setting the groundwork for expression the first half of the series is where things are set up so that I could blossom with freedom in mind.
In the second half is where I really let myself exist freely which came with its own type of growth and whatnot. I came to enjoy expressing myself in as many manners as I’d like.
To really live my life as art.
In total I view this series as a journey of self love to access freedom.
While around video 35 I was talking to an old coworker about how I was in the midst of recording this all and I spoke about it as an excuse to live.
With how things have aligned through the creation of this series, this blog, and my other projects I feel that it has been through nothing but my creative expression for where I can really feel alive.
I think of Rico and his circumstances.
Last week we started talking again. I let him know that I was dedicating the last episode to him and we caught up.
I learned how he’s gone deeper into sobriety and has tried to get into some new hobbies.
In his new journey of getting clean, he only struggles with quitting nicotine. And I was told about this moment where he had been playing soccer with some friends and there was this group that he had smoked with before that offered him a hit. And he said no.
I could tell he was excited to tell me through the texts. And I was proud of him to see how he’s grown in less than a year.
I think the message of what this entire series is speaks to the patience of perseverance. No matter how our goals are oriented, it takes time for anything to be accomplished. It’s not how we view ourselves at a certain moment that dictates the effort we put in, but it’s our effort that yields material results for us to evolve our perspective.
At the start my lines were shaky and undisciplined, they were unsure of themselves and weren’t firm. With each passing day a new expression was cultivated and put out into the world. With only 60 days, a new expression was practiced and made comfortable.
I’ve realized that the practice that this journey led me down had me practice all forms of my expression in their own ways which has now led me to living in a creatively fulfilling manner.
So I guess overall this whole thing is a testament to living life to its fullest no matter how it makes itself apparent. I feel the fullness of life that we push ourselves for is born out of creativity and lets us branch out into living in other methods, no matter how that really comes to be, the intersectionality between certain practices of life all click perfectly to the authenticity of our self expression. I don’t know how else to express it.
Be you, be weird, be different, and live and all that other positive messaging.
This whole things was really fun and I’ll be continuing this ambidextrous journey in other ways that I’ll show in my own way.
alexander makes a blog 
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