Twenty years...

It’s been twenty years since Memorial Day Weekend 2001, when I packed up my life and left behind a toxic profession (law practice in New Mexico) that was quickly killing my soul, my psyche, and my body. I took a pay cut and moved across the country to New York’s Hudson Valley to rejoin the archives profession I’d left behind ten years earlier. I’ve now spent over 14 years at the Franklin D Roosevelt Presidential Library and nearly 6 years (and counting) at the Rockefeller Archive Center. Not too shabby for someone who once was lost.

Don’t get me wrong. There have been some ups and downs, and triumphs and disappointments along the way. But I can say this with certainty: everything good and great in my life is the result of the decision I made twenty years ago to take the dramatic actions necessary to put my life back on track and to find happiness and joy.

Everything I have to be thankful for—my partner of nearly 14 years, my proudly and openly living as a gay man, my sobriety, my chosen family of a small but mighty circle of close friends, my love of New York City and especially Broadway, a great career arc, amazing professional colleagues, and a lot of incredible stories—are because of that act of faith in myself twenty years ago.

To those of you who have been a positive force in my life these last two decades and helped to lift me up, I say thank you. I try every day to pay it forward and to demonstrate that your confidence in me has not been misplaced.

To those of you who have tried to hold me back or push me down (you know who you are), good luck to you when your karma debt comes due. You’re not as powerful as you think you are.

As a character from my favorite movie says, “Regrets are a waste of time. They’re the past crippling you in the present.”

While I might wish I had done some things differently or better, I have no regrets. And I’ll never regret packing up that U-Haul in the hot, brown high desert of Albuquerque in May 2001 and pointing it towards the bright, green northeast and the place where I found myself, my life, and my love.

Believe in yourselves. The bravest thing you can do is get unstuck.