I've been away for a while, I know. If I were a smarter or more cre­ative per­son, I'd come up with an elab­o­rate story involv­ing a long-lost rel­a­tive, trauma and a near-death expe­ri­ence. That would cer­tainly be more interesting.

But I'm not that good of a writer. Unfor­tu­nately, the life I lead is not one that's ter­ri­bly inter­est­ing but it is one where I con­stantly find myself in a sit­u­a­tion that I've seem­ingly made more dif­fi­cult on myself then it ever should have been.

Okay, that's slightly cryp­tic. Let me try to sim­plify. I've felt very over­whelmed lately. Very over­whelmed. Some of these things — these issues — will get put down here even­tu­ally, some will not.

In one cor­ner, we have the everyday-monotony-craziness that is the life if a twenty-three year-old who lives with his best friend and is con­stantly try­ing to strike a bal­ance between all of the things that are impor­tant in his life; and, because he's try­ing to see many of these things through a dif­fer­ent set of glasses, fail­ing more often than not. What comes with this, of course, has been, for me, one of the tough­est things: really sit­ting back and tak­ing stock of the things, the peo­ple, the goals, that are really and truly what I value beyond the super­fi­cial, the banal and the mundane.

Per­haps I'm young and naive, but many of these things, I've never really con­sid­ered before. What is this per­son to me? How much do they mat­ter to me? What am I will­ing to do to make a friend­ship, a rela­tion­ship, a any­thing work when I con­sider feel­ings other than my own?

I won't lie I'm a self­ish per­son. To dif­fer­ing degrees, I always have been that way; and for the past four years, I've prob­a­bly been more self­ish and uncar­ing of oth­ers than I've ever been in my entire life.

That wasn't made clear to me until about a month ago. When you become account­able for your actions, even by your own admis­sion, it makes you well, it made me see things a dif­fer­ent way.

And so now I'm chang­ing a lot of things, rethink­ing them and pro­cess­ing them. Some of the changes are small and easy, oth­ers are like pulling teeth from a tiger but no mat­ter the dif­fi­culty, they're equally important.

I don't know where this course of life will take me. But I see now where the pre­vi­ous path took me, and suf­fice to say it's time to try some­thing new, some­thing that will stick, some­thing that will allow me to look in the mir­ror and appre­ci­ate the mug look­ing back at me.

So yes, I am alive. I apol­o­gize if I scared or wor­ried any­one with my absence. Thank you, by the way, to those of you that sent the e-mails, IMs and text mes­sages. I appre­ci­ate you all, and the answers will come in time. All I can say for now is that it was nec­es­sary. Hope­fully, that, along with these words and the ones that are sure to fol­low, will be enough. The flood­gates are open.

Until then, I'll be in the same place I've always been.

Right here.