"all the fear has left me now / i'm not frightened anymore / it's my heart that pounds beneath my flesh / it's my mouth that pushes out this breath / and if i shed a tear i won't cage it / i won't fear love / and if i feel a rage i won't deny it / i wont fear love..." from fumbling towards ecstasy by sarah mclachlan

i started writing this journal a couple years ago as a sort of online therapy. a place to write down a bunch of things i could never actually say outloud. i sometimes ramble, and a lot of stuff doesn't exactly come across like i first intended, or make a lot of sense for that matter, but close enough, i guess.

i'm twenty four at the moment, but i feel a lot older or younger depending on the day. i don't really think age is just a number, but it's all relative to your life. i've made all the regular mistakes a twenty-three year-old has made and some that other twenty-three-year olds haven't. i've somehow managed to stick around, though. i live in milwaukee, wisconsin, but i'm from a little farming town in northwest ohio. i grew up there, but i feel like where i live now is much more home than back there. it's taken a lot to get here, though. i do feel like i have a small-town boy in a big city attitude, still, that i'm not sure will ever go away. i'm kinda thankful for that. it makes me feel a little more grounded.

i feel like i've lived a lot, but that i've let a lot of life pass me by. it's what i've made it, though, so i have no one to blame but myself sometimes. i've made some bad choices and decisions, but i like to think i've learned from them. some of my views on life have stemmed from the consequences fo those choices, but i always like to try to keep an open mind even if that doesn't always happen. sometimes i get in the way of myself, and sometimes i'm worried that i'm becoming too jaded.

there's a bunch of different sides to me. i hate how that sounds like there isn't a bunch of different sides to everyone else. but as cliche as it is, it's the truth. not a lot of people see all that i am. certain people only like certain parts. i guess maybe that's a good thing, being able to adapt to my surroundings. i have to cut myself off from all that sometimes. go through a little "emotional detox" every now and then. not everyone likes that or understands that.

i come off a lot more serious or sad than i am in day to day life in this journal. i guess it's because i do this to get some of the crap out of my head. i'm always trying to figure stuff out about myself and writing helps me do that, even if that's a little egotistical. the truth is i'm a little strange, and i admit that.

a huge part of my life is music. i can't play anything or sing or any of that, though. i have around eight-hundred cds. everything from abba to rob zombie and everything in between. mostly female singers. i usually never know how to express myself, and music helps me out. i love feeling the emotions put into songs. a movie or television sometimes does that to me, too. maybe i'm affected by media too much. i analyze thigns too much, either way.

so after all this time, i still write in this journal for reasons i still don't understand. to ask questions that don't have answers or to vent or hide behind or live in. it's a little dramatic at times, as i can sometimes be. it's sometimes more than myself, sometimes less than myself and not anything like myself at times. just what i'm thinking at the moment.

i do think that i've grown a lot since i started this site. growth is a crazy thing. you don't always notice that it's happened, until you look back and see how far you've come from where you started.