I traded the beaches of San Diego for the mountains of Denver. 15 years! I can't believe it, but it's true. I can remember the feeling as a nearly 17 year-old moving to a place that may as well have been Siberia that the world was ending. In a lot of ways it did, in that my childlike naivety and innocence got lost and/or changed, everything I knew vanished, and I had to figure out who I was all over again.
Looking back a decade and a half later, I am so thankful for the way that the changes have shaped who I am. The faith I have, the spouse I chose, and the kids that came of that. The person I have turned into is shaped in a lot of ways by where I came from (San Diego), but just as much by where I landed (Denver).
In a perfect world, what would I choose? I can answer that pretty easily - I'd be living on Coronado and writing novels that set me apart as a modern J.D. Salinger or Jack Kerouac. But I know that a perfect world in the reality of now is that I have the most incredible family that happens to live in a small townhome in a non-descript town in Colorado, and I turn out no writing of note. And that's exactly how I want it right now.
