Colón’s Corner: 2023 — The Year I Finally Entered Adulthood

What these 12 months in particular taught me

Looking back over my shoulder to borrow an old line from a really good Mike & The Mechanics song, 2023 was in many senses the year I finally entered into this whole adulthood thing if you will.

This time last year, I was not a happy camper. Sick with coronavirus after having gone a whole two years without catching it, I was saddled at home frustrated with both a physical illness and the crescendo of what to that point had been a fruitless and empty job search. I felt stagnant and doing my podcast provided me with really the only constant in my life.

Staring at the same four walls every day with no job and no car, I grew to be pretty miserable and had begun to revert to a cold, irritable, always angry, jaded, brooding, and darker version of myself that I’d been during the height of my unhappy middle school years and had previously vowed to move away from and never be again. To sum it up, I felt like a failure. Just a walking ball of nothing with nothing to contribute.

Realizing my back was against the wall, I had a choice: keep doing the podcast, hoping that I’d catch some sort of a media break and have that be my ticket to real money, or take a hiatus to focus on changing my at the time unideal situation. The choice was much harder than you’d think. As you can tell, I love doing my podcast. The show has allowed me to meet and network with people I could’ve never envisioned crossing paths with and the positive feedback I’ve received from those who’ve been kind enough to tune in meant and continues to mean everything to me.

The show at the time was one of the few things I felt I had going for me, and now, at what I also felt was the apex of the program, I was going to walk away? After careful deliberation, I knew if I was going to make any sort of headway, it’d have to involve some sacrifice, and that sacrifice was very reluctantly yet very necessarily taking a pause to assess where I was and what I needed to do to move past this rough patch in my life.

Change didn’t happen right away but still, perseverance was of the essence. I said both internally and aloud that 2023 was going to be the most important year of my life. I applied, applied, and applied some more to jobs. Rejection would follow, but still, I knew I couldn’t throw in the towel. Good things come to those who wait after all. While I waited, I stayed occupied, starting to go to the gym with regularity and work my body in addition to my mind. I returned to writing and created a newsletter to keep myself on the radar media wise.

Then upon the suggestion of my friend and now boss Kevin Kubler, I put my resume not on LinkedIn, Indeed, or any job site that comes to mind but…Facebook. Spoiler alert: it worked. In that group would be a man who is now my boss and friend, Captain Jake Urban of the West Haven Fire Department here in Connecticut. I’d been wanting a job that blended both my skill set in media production and my love and passion for the first responder community at large. Turns out, that’s exactly what the department was looking for.

Fast forward to mid-April and after a long, exasperating, and grinding three-year search, I was finally gainfully employed. Step one was at last complete. Step two? A secondary job as an associate producer with the popular fire service podcast Gettin’ Salty Experience co-owned and operated by retired FDNY firefighters Lou Rufrano and the aforementioned Kevin Kubler.

To say I’ve enjoyed both jobs has been an understatement. You’re lucky if you can find a job that has a unique and fun set of duties. You’re luckier if in addition to enjoying the job description, you enjoy the people you work with. I’ve been blessed to have both. I love going to work and being around my peeps. They make me feel welcome, and they make the days fun and seamless. I truly hit the jackpot in both facets of my respective employments.

Much like you can’t hit a baseball without a bat, I couldn’t turn my attention to the other goals on my list without getting a steady source of income. Now that that crucial step was completed, I turned my attention to getting a car.

From the moment I started my job in April until about mid-July, I’d been taking two buses to get to work. What’s now an at worst 15-minute drive to work was taking me an hour. Hey, I was just happy to be employed so I paid my dues through the rather interesting (and they were interesting) treks provided by CT Transit for those first few months. In what had been a strange set of circumstances, I had gotten my license during the height of COVID in October 2020, I just didn’t have a car. And with no income stream coming in at the time, I didn’t have the means to buy one.

Putting whatever money I could to the side and getting a big boost up from mom (no shame in that), finally, I got on the road.

To say it’s been liberating would be yet another understatement. I can go anywhere and make my own schedule on just about anything. Driving my friends around, peeling off on a whim to hang out, cruising down to the train station to catch a train down to New York City, and simply being able to drive to and from work has added at least a decade to my life. It’s amazing how much life seems to open up when you can get around on your own terms. I’ve gotten to that stage a bit later than most, but nonetheless it doesn’t make me any less ecstatic to have finally reached it.

I felt refreshed. If you know me, you know I thrive on routine. I like being busy, I like having a wide assortment of things to do. When I’m not doing occupied, I become that guy of 2020-2022. The unhappy camper who was essentially an unwilling freeloader. Though my loving mother didn’t view it that way, I did. Give me a schedule, give some tasks, and I’m a happy man. Now with a car to my name, I’ve become the road warrior I always longed to be but at times never thought I could. I’m not home often and when I am, I tend to enjoy my downtime a heck of a lot more because now I actually feel like I’ve earned it.

Still, it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine this year. In July, I lost my grandfather at the age of 86. He was a wonderful man and was without question the patriarch of our family. We are emptier and certainly worse off for not having him around.

In a sense I guess you can say this was the moment where I finally ‘grew up’. At 23, you understand the sad moments in life a lot better. The emotional depth and perspective that getting older has afforded you makes that a reality whether you like it or not. How you handle the situation itself is what defines you and your character as a person. And so, with a heavy heart, I willingly took on the responsibility of being there for my family and being the rock for them during his loss in 2023 that I wasn’t in 2011 when I lost my grandmother a month shy of my turning 11.

With his death, a chapter in our family history, a chapter in my life, closed for good. The finality of it symbolized when I carried his casket to his grave. It’s been five months. I’ve made my peace with it. The suffering he was enduring courtesy of dementia left him without a quality of life. And nothing short of a stellar quality of life was something a man as good as he was didn’t deserve to lack. Do I miss him and think of him often? Of course. By the same token, am I happy he’s no longer suffering from the effects of such an awful disease? Of course.

Around this same time, following the appropriate time off to handle everything I needed to, I returned to the podcast. The emotions were perhaps the weirdest I’d ever felt. On one hand, I had accomplished the milestone of finally getting my first car and was thrilled to return to a program I’d really missed doing. On the other hand, I mourned his death.

Everything seemed to happen simultaneously. In June, the program re-commenced around the exact same time I learned he was entering hospice care. And on July 7, 2023, everything really blended together when that day I received two life changing calls from my mother. The first at 9AM to congratulate me on getting the car. The second a few hours later just after 12PM, to inform me he had died.

Truth be told, I didn’t know what to feel. Happy or sad? But as my friend and colleague Lieutenant Andy Bennett wisely told me: “There’s no rules man. You can feel both”. And boy did I!

I picked up where I left off and though I felt rusty and it took a bit to regain my footing as a host, I thankfully had an audience that was waiting for and despite the break, never left me. Furthermore, in a pleasant twist, the numbers which I feared would dwindle, actually grew and recently I crossed the 2,000-subscriber threshold.

I’ve got a business too, dipping my beak into the consulting world. That’s been fun and though in the early stages, I’m excited to see what I can do with MC Media Editing Services. 2024 reckons to be interesting and hopefully, fruitful on that front.

Turns out my forecast at the end of 2022 was correct: This year was the most important year of my life. I will look back on it as the one in which I finally took that next step. I grew as a person, I seized the opportunities, and even in grief over my dear grandfather, I learned. Through mostly positive experiences and negative with his loss, I demonstrated the kind of growth that I feel has prepared me well for whatever may lie ahead.

I’ll be turning 24 in February and as I push forward. I know I’m in the golden era of my life and that zest, enthusiasm, and joy that for so long was missing is back. The page has turned and as I write this ever-changing next chapter, I do so a wiser, healthier, more productive person. 2023, the most important year of my life, and in many a sense, one of the best.

Mike Colón is the host of the Mic’d In New Haven Podcast which can be found on all podcast platforms and is simulcast in video form on YouTube