My Year In Review...

I touched on this at the end of But You're Wrong #56, but I thought I'd go into more detail here. Sorry, if anyone is disturbed by the overlap, but it's my podcast and my website and I can do whatever I want.

I had really high hopes that 2012 was going to go better than 2011. 2011 started off with my unemployment after relocating to Pennsylvania to be with my girlfriend. In February I started a new job in sales and for the first little bit, it went okay. Then things really started to go downhill. The hours were taking a toll on myself and my relationship. Plus I discovered that I wasn't cut out for the sales world. I had worked related to sales, but I'm not meant to push items on people that came in for something else.

I have a hard time convincing someone that this item is something that they have to have. If you're in the market for one, I can sell you on one or the other, or I can push you over the edge, but if you're coming in for something basic, I'm not the guy that's going to convince you to drop another $300 bucks today. Especially in this economic times. Needless to say, I was getting very disheartened. The one big plus to 2011 was that my girlfriend and I moved from her mom's house to renting our own place. This helped the relationship quite a bit.

I made some friendships in 2011 that have turned out to be noteworthy and have lasted through 2012. But those didn't really become an actual friendship until 2012.

But as 2011 came to a close, the deck was stacked in favor of 2012 being a shit year. Then something happened. I started to take control of my life. In January, I finally went through and finished the first massive series of edits on my novel, Work in Progress. Something I had been working on for a long time. At the start of February, I built this website. I got home from a terrible day at work. Sat down at my desk with a bottle of wine and said, "I need to do something that means something." So I built this website and made the decision that I was also going to take the self-publishing route with my novel that I did with my short story collection, Not My Problem. I had gotten such good feedback and encouragement based on the short stories, that I figured the novel could find it's audience eventually.

Then, a few weeks later, I got fired from my job. It wasn't a surprise, like I said, I'm not cut out for Sales. Someday I'll talk more about this experience and what exactly came after. It was dark times that followed. At first it was great, but then as the job hunt started it grew bad. You know how Empire Strikes Back ends on a really down note and you just imagine Luke feeling terrible for a long time? It was kind of like that. But then with some help from my girlfriend and my friends, I decided to really take control of things. And that's what really made the difference.

Somewhere in May, and it might have even been sooner, my great friend Greg DiNicola and I talked about starting a podcast. One day we'll get into our origin story a bit more, but we had met when I was up in Boston and we hit it off. Not only did we have a similar sense of humor, with similar interests, we just found that we had a good time talking to each other. Since I had moved though, we'd send occasional emails, and texts, every few months we'd see each other for a day if I was up in Boston, but we had stopped talking the way we used to. In an idea, borrowed from Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier. I had suggested we start a podcast. It would be a creative outlet for both of us, and get us talking the way we had before. I think we finally decided to do it May and then, later that month we actually recorded when I was up in Boston. The first audio we actually recorded appeared in Episode 30 and Episode 1. Episode 30 was technically recorded first though.

In June, we launched But You're Wrong and have been doing two episodes a week for a while now. It's been an absolute great experience. Especially seeing our fans grow and seeing people from all over the world listening to us.

I also launched my novel via Amazon Kindle in July and have gotten some great feedback on that as well.

Somewhere around this time though, I could have easily slipped back into a dark time. I plan to eventually tell the full story on the podcast, but basically it's this: Pennsylvania unemployment services has this thing where you can come in, take a test to measure your skills and then help you figure out what a good career for you would be. This sounded great because despite being in a creative career, I wasn't sure what a good path for me would be. I took the tests and was told I did fantastic! Lots of high scores. But when they went to measure me up with jobs based on scores and personality - it was a big fat fucking zero. But I decided to make jokes about it. Laugh at some of the more random jobs it said I could do with a little training. (Explosives expert was one of them.)

But I decided to continue taking control of my life and do what I wanted to do. So in August I proposed to my girlfriend and she said yes! I had taken her to look at rings in June. (Also mentioned on the podcast, Episode 3.) I've continued looking for work and decided more of what I wanted to get into for Real Work, and through a connect was able to get an internship in that field. I wanted to get more into marketing and they wanted someone with a little more writing experience. That's been great the last few months and I've learned a lot that will hopefully help me get a job in that field, even if it's entry-level.

So really, 2012 turned out to be a great year for me and a great turning point. There's been a ton of other little things that have happened, that I didn't mention here, but if any of my friends are reading this, I appreciate it all.

Tomorrow, I start of the New Year with some of my personal tips for happiness in 2013.