Sami Martin

Tag: lifestyle

  • Lessons Learned Later – Love and Loss!

    Lessons Learned Later – Love and Loss!

    When I woke that morning, she was there. Not physically, of course, but present in one of those dreams that feels real enough to follow you into the day. She does not appear often anymore, but still enough that I pay attention. I usually feel a little off afterward, as though I woke before some unfinished conversation had reached its end. The details disappear quickly, the way dreams dissolve the moment daylight reaches them, but the feeling remains. Sometimes the feeling is the only part that matters.

    I wish I were better at capturing dreams when I first wake up. I have forgotten some truly fantastical ones over the years, entire worlds created in the dark and erased before the coffee finishes brewing. I always think I will remember because everything seems so vivid in that first moment. Then an hour later, I am left with a few disconnected images and a mood I cannot explain.

    One of the things I learned through therapy is that the people who appear in our dreams may represent different parts of ourselves reflected through them. I do not know if that explains every dream, and I am not pretending to understand the subconscious, but the idea stayed with me. Certain people enter our lives and reveal something that had been hidden inside us. They give us permission to be softer, louder, more adventurous, more creative or simply more alive. Long after they leave, we may not only miss the person. We may miss the person we became while standing beside them.

    Perhaps the woman in the dream was not there to remind me of a particular relationship. Perhaps she appeared because some part of me had gone missing, and my sleeping mind used a familiar face to point me toward it.

    After waking, I did what most of us do and reached for the device beside the bed. Notifications, messages and the usual morning scroll through a world already making demands before my feet touched the floor. Then I noticed a small interaction connected to the past. It was nothing dramatic, nothing that would mean anything to anyone else, but the timing stopped me. Why that morning? Why while the dream was still hanging in the air like dew on the grass?

    The logical part of me knew there was no connection. A dream is a dream, and a social media notification is a small electronic event created by an algorithm, a thumb and chance. The world is full of coincidences because our lives are full of moments. Eventually, two of them are going to land beside each other in a way that feels meaningful. Still, for a brief moment, the spell of wonder started spinning in my head.

    Was it a sign? I tried to shrug off the thought because this life has no time for such things, or at least that is what I tell myself. There are bills to pay, work to do, responsibilities to carry and ordinary problems that will not be solved by searching for messages in dreams. Yet here I am writing about it, so apparently I have more time for such things than I care to admit.

    Maybe signs are not predictions or instructions. Maybe they do not mean we should reopen closed doors, reach into the past or assign cosmic purpose to every coincidence. Maybe a sign is simply something that causes us to stop long enough to notice what is already happening inside us. The meaning may not exist in the moment itself. It may exist in the thoughts the moment awakens.

    Music does that to me all the time. A song comes on and suddenly I am no longer wherever I happen to be. I am in another city, another room or another version of my life. I can see what I was wearing, remember who stood beside me and feel the emotional weather of a day that disappeared years ago. A few notes can accomplish what hours of deliberate remembering cannot.

    I have always seen parts of life through song lyrics. Sometimes a lyric explains what I am feeling before I have found my own words. Sometimes memories play out to the same old songs, even when I believed I had moved beyond that part of the story. Our lives accumulate soundtracks whether we intend them to or not. There are songs for falling in love, songs for leaving, songs for driving without a destination and songs for sitting alone after midnight wondering how everything changed.

    Some songs we play repeatedly because they help us feel something. Others we avoid because they make us feel too much. Years later, one finds us in a grocery store, a café or a random playlist, and the memories begin performing their old choreography.

    “Love Hurts” by Incubus is one of those songs that states the obvious while somehow making the obvious feel newly discovered. Love hurts. We know this before we have enough life experience to understand what it means. We hear it in songs, see it in movies and watch it happen to other people. Then it happens to us, and suddenly all those warnings stop being ideas.

    Love can be the greatest joy we experience and still carry the ability to dismantle us. The pain is not always proof that love was wrong or false. Often, it hurts precisely because it mattered. Someone became woven into our ordinary life, and removing them pulls at everything around them.

    There are different kinds of hurt. There is the immediate pain of an ending, sharp enough to make the future feel impossible. There is the quieter ache of realizing that two people can love one another and still be unable to build a life that works. Then there is the delayed pain, the kind that waits beneath the surface until a dream, a notification or an old song finds it.

    For years, I treated pain as a problem I could solve if I thought about it long enough. I would return to conversations, decisions and turning points, looking for the moment when everything could have gone another way. If I examined every detail from enough angles, surely I would find the hidden answer that made the ending fair.

    Oh, the unfairness of it all. Seriously, that was my attitude. Why could I not love someone more? Why could they not love me in the way I wanted? Why could something that felt important simply end?

    The answer is not satisfying: sometimes it just does.

    Life is always evolving, and so is the love between two people. Those who are lucky evolve together. The rest of us… not so much. Hi, my name is Sam, and I have spent a fair amount of time living in the “not so much.”

    We talk about love as though feeling it should be enough. It is a lovely idea and makes for excellent songs, but two people can genuinely care for one another and still be incompatible. Love does not automatically heal old wounds or teach us how to communicate. It does not guarantee that two people want the same future or know how to reach it together. Sometimes love is present and the relationship still runs its course.

    When love leaves, it usually leaves a scar. That brings me to “Scar Tissue” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a song that has followed me through many different versions of myself. Scar tissue is a perfect description of what remains after we heal because healing does not return us to the person we were before the wound. The body repairs itself, but it remembers. The new tissue is tougher in some ways and less flexible in others.

    Emotional scars behave much the same way. We survive, but survival changes the texture of us. We may become more cautious about vulnerability or create rules designed to prevent history from repeating itself. We tell ourselves that experience has made us wiser, and sometimes it has. Other times, what we call wisdom is fear wearing a more respectable jacket.

    I created rules because rules felt safer than uncertainty. If enough time passed and I followed the correct steps, surely I would emerge healed and ready for whatever came next. Unfortunately, healing is not an administrative process. There is no form to complete, no required waiting period and no certificate announcing that the past can no longer reach you.

    I also learned that happiness and healing are not the same thing. A new experience can make us happy while old pain remains buried underneath it. We can laugh, travel, create and make plans while some unexamined part of us quietly continues to shape our choices. I believed I had healed because I was functioning. What I did not understand was that I had pushed some of the pain so deeply inside myself that I could no longer see how it affected me.

    The scars were there. They appeared in my expectations, my reactions and the rules I made about what love was supposed to feel like. They showed up when something in the present sounded too much like something from the past. A wound does not have to remain open to remind us where it was.

    The challenge is learning to live with scar tissue without allowing it to become our entire identity. A scar can be evidence that we survived, but survival is not the same thing as living. Eventually, we have to stretch the healed place. We have to risk movement, knowing it may feel uncomfortable and trusting that discomfort does not always mean danger.

    Then there is James Blunt’s “You’re Beautiful,” perhaps one of the clearest musical examples of the distance between a meaningful moment and a lasting relationship. Beauty can be real without becoming ours to keep. A connection can matter without developing into the future we imagine for it. Sometimes we see someone, recognize something extraordinary and then continue in separate directions.

    That is difficult for those of us raised on happily ever after. We want the beautiful moment to be the beginning of a permanent story. If it ends, we assume the story failed. We keep returning to what might have been, polishing the possibility until it shines more brightly than reality ever did.

    Memory is a talented editor. It cuts the awkward silences, softens the arguments and turns ordinary moments into beautifully lit scenes. It knows exactly which songs to place underneath them. Real life was never arranged so perfectly. Love is not only private jokes, thoughtful gestures and moments when another person changes the gravity of a room. It is also bad timing, incompatible needs, tired conversations and two people changing in ways they may not understand until the distance between them becomes too large to cross.

    Remembering the magic does not require us to deny the difficulty. Something does not become false because it ended. A relationship does not need to last forever to have succeeded at being meaningful. Some people are not meant to accompany us through every chapter. They arrive, change the direction of the story and leave before we understand what they taught us.

    Lessons learned later still count.

    “1973,” another James Blunt song, captures the way people, places and music become tangled together. My memories do not belong to that exact year, but I understand the feeling. We remember someone and the soundtrack returns with them. We hear the song and, for a few minutes, the past is not past at all.

    Every generation has its version of this. The songs change, but what they hold does not. Music stores more than memory; it stores the person we were when we first listened. A song from decades ago can return our old hopes along with our old heartbreak. It reminds us of what we believed life would become before life had the opportunity to become something else.

    The danger is mistaking nostalgia for direction. The past can be beautiful when viewed from the right distance, but it is not necessarily asking us to return. Sometimes the old song is simply reminding us that we survived that chapter. Sometimes it points toward a part of ourselves that became buried when the music stopped.

    I have lived in different places, known fascinating people and experienced some cool stuff. I have also hit versions of rock bottom mentally, emotionally and financially. I have journals filled with stories, though reading them now can be an adventure. Some pages contain insight. Others are the self-indulgent ramblings of a kid—or an emotionally stunted adult—questioning the same thing a million different ways.

    I was trying to think my way into emotional certainty. Because of my quest for happily ever after, I severely overprocessed my feelings, especially during endings. Life, however, is rarely fair in the tidy way I wanted it to be, and there is no amount of overthinking that can force it into submission. We can learn from the past, but we cannot solve it. At some point, reflection becomes another hiding place.

    The older I get, the less interested I am in reducing people to heroes or villains. Most of us are inconsistent human beings doing our best with whatever emotional tools we have available. We love imperfectly. We protect ourselves in ways that hurt others. We remain silent when we should speak and speak carelessly when silence might have been kinder. Then we carry our version of the story forward, usually unaware that someone else remembers the same events differently.

    I have been hurt, and I have hurt people. Any honest examination of my life must include both. Growth demands a view that is not always flattering. There were times I struggled to be vulnerable, times I communicated poorly and things I expected others to understand without ever explaining them. I overprocessed some feelings while avoiding the ones that required actual change.

    Acceptance does not mean approving of everything that happened or decorating painful experiences with forced gratitude. Sometimes terrible things are simply terrible. Acceptance means allowing the truth to be true without endlessly trying to negotiate with it.

    It was good. It was difficult. It mattered, and it ended. All of those things can be true at the same time.

    After “Love Hurts,” “Scar Tissue,” “You’re Beautiful” and “1973,” I find myself arriving at Coldplay’s “Adventure of a Lifetime.” Not because every painful lesson suddenly turns into an upbeat ending, but because eventually we have to choose whether we are still participating in our own lives.

    There is a point when healing has to become more than looking backward. We can spend years identifying the wounds, understanding the patterns and explaining why we became who we are. That work matters, but there is also a world outside the examination room. There are places we have not visited, people we have not met, stories we have not written and parts of ourselves we have not yet discovered.

    Adventure does not have to mean jumping out of an airplane or running away to another country, although I would never completely rule out either. Sometimes the adventure is allowing yourself to want something again. It is trying after disappointment, creating after failure and trusting joy without demanding proof that it will last forever.

    That may be the part of myself the dream was pointing toward. Certain people reveal qualities within us—creativity, playfulness, vulnerability, wonder—and when they leave, we sometimes behave as though those qualities left with them. We associate that version of ourselves so completely with the relationship that we forget it was ours.

    Those pieces never belonged to anyone else.

    Healing is not about becoming someone new. It is about finding all the pieces of yourself you lost along the way and finally bringing them home. Some pieces were abandoned because we needed to survive. Others became attached to people, places or former versions of our lives. We assumed they disappeared when those chapters ended, but perhaps they were waiting for us to return.

    I am in the back nine of life now, a little wiser and perhaps a little saltier. Some parts of the climb from rock bottom have been easier than others. There are days when I can see the distance traveled and days when it feels as though I have barely moved.

    Patience. Do the work and reap the reward. That is what I tell myself, although I remain impatient and would prefer the reward to arrive ahead of schedule.

    I still do not know whether dreams contain signs. I do not know if the universe places coincidences in our path or if the human mind is simply talented at arranging random moments into stories. I suspect I will continue moving between skepticism and wonder because both are honest parts of me.

    What I know is that the dream made me pay attention. It did not make me want to return to the past. It made me recognize what I had left there.

    Letting go does not mean pretending someone never mattered. It does not require us to erase love, deny the magic or reject the person we became through knowing someone. Letting go means accepting that a relationship belongs to another time while reclaiming everything within us that is still alive.

    The memories will continue to appear. A dream, a photograph or the opening notes of an old song will bring them forward when I least expect it. For a few minutes, another year may feel close enough to touch. I may remember the room, the laughter and the person I was then.

    But I live here now.

    Here is not perfect. I am still learning, rebuilding and finding pieces of myself in places I forgot to look. Some lessons took decades to reach me. Others probably arrived years ago, and I was too busy arguing with life to hear them.

    That is okay. Lessons learned later still count, and the pieces we recover still belong to us.

    Maybe healing is not the moment when the old songs stop playing. Maybe it is the moment when we can hear them without mistaking memory for a destination. “Love Hurts” can remind us that feeling deeply carries a risk. “Scar Tissue” can show us that healing leaves a mark. “You’re Beautiful” can help us honor a moment without trying to possess it. “1973” can let the memories dance again without trapping us inside them. “Adventure of a Lifetime” can remind us that the story is still happening.

    We let the songs play. We honor the lives attached to them, gather the pieces of ourselves they return to us and then continue forward—scarred, wiser and more whole than we were before.

  • The Realities of Living With Knee Pain

    The Realities of Living With Knee Pain

    Let’s Start With Honesty, Not Inspiration

    I’m not going to open this with a transformation story. I don’t have one yet. What I have is a body I haven’t been easy on, two knees that are letting me know it, and the decision—made recently, quietly, without fanfare—that something has to shift.

    Knee pain

    This is the beginning of an ongoing series about rebuilding mobility and physical health in midlife, specifically from home, specifically without the kind of pretend-enthusiasm that fills most wellness content. I’m a gender-queer person in my fifties living on Isla Mujeres in Mexico, and I’ve spent years loving this island’s ocean while increasingly struggling to move around it the way I want to.

    That has to change. So let’s talk about where I actually am before we talk about where I’m going.

    The State of the Knees: Full Accountability

    Both knees are bad. The left one is worse.

    This is a combination of things. Old hockey damage from years ago that healed improperly or just wore in ways that compound over time. The natural deterioration that happens when you’re aging and you’ve put your body through its paces. And—and this is the part I’m not going to hedge around—weight. Carrying more weight than my frame and these joints handle well, for longer than I should have.

    I’d say weight is contributing to maybe seventy-five percent of the current problem. The rest is injury history and age. Both of those I can’t change. The weight situation is more complicated, more gradual, and more within my influence than the other factors.

    Walking is difficult on bad days. Some mornings I get up and I can feel exactly what kind of day it’s going to be from the moment my feet hit the floor. There’s stiffness that doesn’t resolve quickly. Discomfort that changes the way I move through space—shorter steps, more careful navigation of stairs, a hesitation before anything that requires impact.

    I’ve lived with this long enough that some of it stopped registering as abnormal. That’s what chronic discomfort does—it normalizes itself. You adapt your life around it without fully acknowledging that you’ve adapted. You stop walking places you used to walk. You sit when you used to stand. You find workarounds until the workarounds become the default.

    I’m naming this clearly because I think a lot of people reading this know exactly what I mean—and I don’t see it described honestly very often. Most content about knee pain and mobility is either clinical and detached or aggressively optimistic. Neither of those is where I am. I’m somewhere in between: clear-eyed about the problem, realistic about the work required, and tired of the status quo.

    What I’ve Been Doing (Nothing)

    Right now, my movement routine is: nothing.

    No formal exercise. No structured stretching. No deliberate low-impact activity. Walking when I need to walk. Sitting more than is good for me. This is what years of chronic discomfort and a lifestyle that got progressively more sedentary produces.

    This is not a proud admission. It’s also not a shameful one. It’s just where I am, and naming it accurately is the first step toward changing it.

    I’ve had periods in my life of being more active. I’ve had periods where I was more conscious of movement and strength. I know the difference it makes. I’ve let those periods end and not reinitiated them, which is the pattern I’m looking at now.

    The reasons are real: pain creates a disincentive to move. When movement hurts, the rational response is to move less. But less movement leads to weaker supporting muscles, which leads to more pain, which leads to less movement. It’s a loop that tightens quietly until you’re much further from functional than you realized you’d gotten.

    I’m further from functional than I’d like to be. That’s the truth.

    Why Low-Impact Movement Is the Only Realistic Starting Point

    Here’s what I know about starting over with mobility when you have damaged joints: you don’t start where you think you should. You start where you actually are.

    For me, that means low-impact. That means nothing that loads the knees with impact—no running, no jumping, no anything that requires landing on a hard surface with your full weight moving through already-compromised joints. That’s not defeatist. That’s physics.

    What I can do:

    Walking—carefully, gradually, on surfaces that aren’t punishing. The island has good surfaces for this. I have access to beach, which is softer, and to relatively flat streets. Short distances. Consistent frequency. Not intensity—frequency.

    Water movement. I have the Caribbean. I have access to some of the most beautiful snorkeling water in the world, and moving in water takes significant load off the joints while still engaging the body. This is something I already love. This is something I’m going to use deliberately.

    Chair-based and floor-based mobility work. Stretching. Strengthening the muscles around the knees—specifically the quads, hamstrings, and hip stabilizers—which takes pressure off the joint itself. This is foundational work that doesn’t require equipment and doesn’t require impact.

    That’s the beginning. Modest. Deliberate. Consistent.

    Weight, Honestly

    This is the part I want to get through without either glossing over it or turning it into a self-flagellation exercise.

    Weight is a significant factor in knee joint health. This is not opinion—it’s mechanics. Every pound of body weight exerts multiple pounds of force on the knee joint under load. For someone who is significantly overweight with already damaged joints, this is not a minor consideration. It’s central.

    I’m not going to give you numbers because the numbers aren’t the point. The point is that I know—I have known for a long time—that my weight is contributing heavily to this problem and I’ve done very little about it consistently.

    Part of this is the loop I already described: pain reducing movement, reduced movement contributing to weight, weight contributing to pain. Part of it is emotional eating that I understand intellectually but haven’t always managed well in practice. Part of it is living somewhere where food is social and joyful and the local cuisine is genuinely wonderful and moderation has not always been where I’ve landed.

    I’m not starting a dramatic dietary overhaul. I’ve done that enough times to know that dramatic overhauls produce dramatic short-term results and then relapse. What I’m doing instead is starting to eat more deliberately. More consciously. Less reactively.

    Less food that serves an emotional function and more food that serves a physical one. Not deprivation—I’m not built for deprivation and I don’t believe in it—but consciousness. Attention. Choosing what I put in my body the way I’m trying to choose everything else: with some awareness of what it’s actually doing for me.

    What Rebuilding Actually Looks Like in Practice

    Let me be concrete about what the beginning of this looks like, because I think concrete is more useful than aspirational.

    Week one: Getting up from sitting at least every hour. Walking to the water at least once a day—not fast, not far. Starting. Just starting.

    The first movement routine: Fifteen to twenty minutes in the morning before the heat sets in. Seated stretches for the hips and hamstrings. Slow knee extensions. Gentle quad sets—contracting the muscle, holding, releasing. This is not a workout. This is a conversation with a body I’ve been neglecting.

    Water movement: At least two swims per week. The Caribbean is right there. Using it. Not just as background to my life—as active therapy.

    Daily tracking: I’m going to track pain levels, movement, and what I ate—not obsessively but honestly. If I can’t see the baseline I can’t measure the change.

    None of this is impressive. None of this is Instagram-worthy. But this is what rebuilding looks like when you’re starting from zero: not the progress photos and the before-and-after, but the moment before any of that, when you decide to actually show up for yourself in the least glamorous possible way.

    What I’m Not Going to Do

    I’m not going to pretend I’m twenty-five.

    I see a lot of midlife wellness content that sort of winks at aging while actually presenting a fantasy of defeating it. People in their fifties doing CrossFit and hot yoga and triathlons with the implication that if you just try hard enough you can operate like a thirty-year-old with a thirty-year-old’s joints.

    That’s not the game I’m playing. My knees are what they are. My age is what it is. The goal is not to reverse time—the goal is to function well in the time I have. To walk without wincing. To snorkel without dreading the getting-in and getting-out. To move through my days on this island with more ease than I currently have.

    Functional. Not impressive. Functional.

    I think that’s an honest and useful bar for a lot of us in midlife—especially those of us carrying old injuries or dealing with the real physical reality of aging bodies. We’re not competing with anyone. We’re trying to live well. Those are different projects with different metrics.

    The Ongoing Series: What’s Coming

    This is the first post in what’s going to be an ongoing series. I’ll be checking in on Patreon with more frequent updates—real ones, including the days when I don’t move and the days when moving hurt and the days when something shifts and I can feel it. The actual record, not the curated highlight.

    Saturday Morning Coffee is where this will get discussed live. I show up every week with coffee and whoever wants to be there, and we talk about whatever’s real. Mobility and health and aging are going to be part of that conversation regularly from here forward.

    The YouTube content is coming too—short pieces about specific exercises I’m trying, what’s working and what isn’t, honest check-ins on progress. Nothing polished. Just real.

    What I’m building here—across all these platforms—is a record of someone in midlife doing the actual work of rebuilding. Not the inspirational version. The honest version.

    If you’re somewhere similar, I hope it’s useful to see someone else in it with you.

    Why This Matters Beyond Just Knees

    Here’s the thing I want to say before I close this out.

    Physical health and emotional health are not separate systems running on parallel tracks. They’re the same system. When I’ve been in relationships that depleted me emotionally, my physical health has suffered. When I’ve been sedentary and in pain, my mood and my mental clarity have suffered. When I’m not sleeping well because my joints are uncomfortable, everything else degrades.

    This isn’t a metaphor. It’s literally how bodies work.

    What I’m starting here—with knees, with movement, with deliberate attention to what I’m eating and how I’m moving—is not separate from everything else I’m rebuilding. It’s the same project. The same decision to stop waiting to feel better before I do the things that will make me feel better.

    You can’t always wait for the right conditions. Sometimes you have to create them, imperfectly, starting from wherever you actually are.

    I’m starting from here. From real. From the beginning.

    Let’s see where it goes.

    I’m tracking this whole process on Patreon—pain levels, movement logs, what’s actually helping, and what isn’t. If you want the honest ongoing record and not just the blog highlights, that’s where it lives. And join me for Saturday Morning Coffee every week—live, unscripted, and always real. Links below.

  • The Adventure from East Los

    The Adventure from East Los

    Every once in a while something small pulls the past forward.

    A piece of music drifting through a room, the smell of warm pavement after a long hot day, the way the city lights start to glow when evening settles in. Suddenly the years fall away and I find myself back inside those early Los Angeles days, when everything felt new and wide open and a little reckless in the best possible ways.

    Almost 20 years ago, that chapter of my life was just beginning, though I didn’t know how important it would become. Looking back now I can see clearly that she stood right there at the beginning of it all. Not guiding me exactly, not shaping things deliberately, but simply by being who she was and letting me step into her world for a minute or two.

    When this story begins I was still living in Toronto. A life that held a rhythm I was familiar with. Church Street, the bars, faces I recognized in a crown, the comfort of living inside a community where people see you before you even walk through the door. It was easy to exist in that world because it already understood me.

    But somewhere in the back of my mind Los Angeles had always been calling.

    Sure, I had visited a few times before, and every time I left I carried the feeling that the city was unfinished business for me. It seemed bigger than logic, louder than reason, full of energy and contradictions that didn’t quite exist anywhere else. I didn’t know when I would move there yet, but I knew eventually I would.

    So while I was still living in Toronto I started reaching out. I was looking for connections friends, something…

    Craigslist was one of those strange early meeting grounds where people looked for such connection s. Friends, dates, conversations, whatever it was. That’s when I saw her. Her photos stopped me.

    There was something in her smile that felt alive, a spark that seemed to reach right through the screen. She was beautiful of course, with that soft caramel skin and an easy confidence in the way she held herself. What caught me more than anything was how natural she looked ad how easily our conversations started.

    We started messaging. Casual conversation at first, getting to know the outlines of each other’s lives. Where we lived, what kind of music we liked, the small details that slowly form a picture of a person in your mind. There was an ease to it from the beginning. No pressure, no expectation.

    That February I traveled to Los Angeles for work and we decided to meet. I was staying on Hollywood Blvd attending a conference at the Roosevelt Hotel. The plan was to meet up on a night I did not have to work.

    She picked me up at the hotel and we headed to Akbar, a well-known queer neighbourhood bar located in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles. Imagine a newbie who had loved Los Angeles in a club at the intersection of Fountain and Sunset It felt like stepping directly into the pulse of the city. Music carried through the room in steady waves while people gathered shoulder to shoulder at the bar, conversations overlapping and laughter rising above everything.

    Friends came over immediately, leaning in to hug her, picking up conversations like they had only paused earlier in the evening. Watching her move through that space made it obvious this was part of her world. All the while I stood beside her taking everything in.

    Being in a queer bar in Los Angeles had a different feeling than the ones I knew in Toronto. The room felt loose and open, like people had come there simply to exist without explanation. And I was there with a woman I was deeply attracted to.

    I found myself watching her more than anything else. The way she ordered drinks, the way she laughed, the way people leaned toward her when she spoke. I was mesmerized.

    The patio felt almost like a small garden tucked behind the bar, enclosed but open enough to breathe. Soft market lights hung overhead, just bright enough to see faces clearly while still keeping the mood relaxed. Conversations drifted through the air while people gathered around small tables.

    I mingled where conversations opened up, though I’ve always been more of a watcher than a talker in rooms like that. Observing people, studying the way they interact, has always been more interesting to me than dominating the moment.

    But my attention kept returning to her. By the end of the night I was smitten. It was clear to me, she was not.And that was perfectly fine. There were no expectations attached to that night. The attraction simply existed between us without pressure.

    Two days later, I returned to Toronto, though I knew something had shifted. My dreams to be in Los Angeles now had a face. My yearning to move to LA intensified.

    My first weekend there I was still living in a hotel while figuring things out. The city felt enormous and chaotic and fascinating all at once. So I reached out to her and she said she would come and get me and we would go out.

    She arrived at my hotel on the first Sunday there and we headed to Ventura Blvd to find a place to eat.

    We had dinner at a small French restaurant that felt warm and intimate, candlelight reflecting off glasses while quiet conversation moved between tables. Sitting there across from her felt surreal in a way that only new beginnings can feel.

    At one point I looked across the room and recognized someone famous. It was the actor, Brendon Beemer, now playing Sean Douglas on Days of Our Lives. My first LA star sighting. Though I kept that to myself. I did not want her to know I watched soap operas.

    It was a small moment but it made something click in my mind. In Los Angeles the world of television and everyday life overlap constantly. Star sightings were something everybody had.

    After dinner she took me somewhere darker. A queer bar further south on Ventura, I cant remember its name, but she said it only opened on Sunday nights. Tucked away from the obvious nightlife, the lighting was low, the atmosphere almost gothic, very few bodies, mostly men.

    That was my second star sighting. There in one corner were Joan Jett and Carmen Electra. Not performing, not drawing attention. Just two people wrapped up in each other. Two unlikely stars disappearing into a dark room far away from Hollywood’s glare.

    The next weekend we had another date. We planned a picnic at Venice on Venice Beach. She brought heirloom tomatoes and I got the wine.

    We spread a blanket on the sand as the sun slipped below the horizon and the waves rolled steadily toward the shore. The air cooled while stars slowly began appearing overhead. We sat there talking for hours before heading back to her apartment in Boyle Heights.

    Getting to know the basics of each other’s lives. Sharing food, stories, small pieces of who we were. For me it felt like time slowed down around us.

    Our time together became increasingly adventurous. We planned an IKEA trip for a creative mission conjured up in pillow talk and emails. When the days came to go shopping, we were walking through the aisles looking for objects that might become part of whatever experiment we imagined. Thin wicker sticks, fabrics, containers, anything that sparked ideas.

    This became our challenge after on weekends that followed. Art stores, seedy hotels in other cities in SoCal. We discovered our connection through canvas, paint and Brushes. Alcohol was usually involved.

    Back in her Boyle Heights apartment those materials often ended up spread across the floor or bed. I would paint her body while she rolled across the canvas, leaving streaks of colour behind. It was messy and playful and full of laughter.

    Vegas came early in the story, Inspired spontaneously after we visited a strip club in LA and found ourselves unimpressed. Too many rules, too much distance between performers and audience. The whole thing felt oddly sterile. I guess these were the rules. Rules we rejected.

    Somewhere in the conversation while sitting at the table in the club someone said, “this would be better in Vegas”. And that was enough. Next thing I knew we were driving through the desert late at night towards Vegas.

    Vegas reveals itself slowly when you approach it from the highway, first you pass through Primm, the first sign of the energy. A distant glow of the lights grows down the highway and then suddenly becomes a full explosion of neon and light

    Inside the casinos the sound never stops. Slot machines ringing constantly, voices rising and falling, the chaos of people winning and losing all around you.

    We wandered through Harrah’s laughing, playing roulette, watching the energy of the tables. We eventually made our way to O’Sheas, a smaller casino located mear Harrah’s where we were staying.

    That was a fun night. At one point we joked that we were newlyweds. Just married. Playing the part fully Holding hands at the tables, leaning into the story for the fun of it. By the time we left we had enough money for breakfast and the kind of memory that only comes from spontaneous decisions made in the middle of the night.

    Those nights opened something inside me creatively.

    Eventually she moved from Boyle Heights to Highland Park. I spent one weekend helping her move items from the old place to the new. We carried items down the stairs of the Boyle Heights apartment, loaded them into her silver Ford Echo, and drove back and forth a few times from Boyle Heights on the I-5 North (Golden State Freeway), then to the CA-110 North (Arroyo Seco Parkway) towards Pasadena, exiting at Avenue 60. The trip generally takes about 15–25 minutes depending on traffic.

    Her new place was a small back house cottage tucked behind the main house. Quiet. cozy, slightly hidden with a quaint little yard.

    I found myself driving from North Hollywood Highland Park frequently. This usually involved taking the freeway through the Cahuenga Pass (101 or 170) before transitioning to local streets, avoiding traffic congestion near Hollywood or Downtown. 

    Other nights though less adventurous were still incredible for me. Driving around Los Angeles to find places to explore. was part of our thing. Steak dinner’s at Ruths Chris, in Pasadena or Sushi in the valley, and just exploring. I was amazed she was so willing to get out with me with me week after week.

    Driving around Los Angeles became one of my favourite parts of those moments with her. Learning the freeways. Yes Freeways not highways. The 101. The 110. The 5.The 405. Highland Park to North Hollywood to Ventura Boulevard and everywhere iwe could discover together n between.

    I spent a lot of those drives sitting in the passenger seat taking everything in with wide-eyed wonderment, probably looking a little dorky just staring out the window in awe, but I did not care. I was fascinated.

    Big Bear brought another kind of memory.

    The cabin had a fireplace that filled the room with warm, sensual light. We spent time on the floor in front of it while the glow of the fire moved across the walls.

    At one point we stepped outside briefly, laughing at the absurdity of standing naked in bear country.

    The photographs from that weekend remain some of my favorites. Some sensual and erotic. Others simple portraits. Her standing comfortably in warm light, completely at ease in front of the camera.

    Looking back now what stands out isn’t just the places we went or the strange adventures that unfolded so easily back then. It’s the way those experiences slowly shaped how I moved through Los Angeles afterward.

    She had already built a rhythm inside that city long before I arrived, and somehow I found myself stepping into it, learning its pace through her eyes, adopting part of those spaces and places for myself.

    Through her I learned to wander instead of rush, to explore without needing a destination, to let the city reveal itself slowly rather than trying to force it open. That is how LA became home.

    The creative chaos we shared opened something in me as well. Those messy evenings with canvas on the floor, paint everywhere, music playing while we experimented and laughed, drinking a little too much and creating playful moments. They were the beginning of understanding that creativity and intimacy could exist in the same space without rules.

    She took me to San Francisco pride for my first time. Up until them the only prides I had been to were in Toronto. both Toronto and San Francisco hosted massive, world-renowned Pride celebrations, but they differed in scale and focus. SF Pride was a premier US political hub with over 1 million attendees, emphasizing activist roots, while Toronto Pride was rapidly growing into one of the world’s largest, known for its massive, multi-day, carnival-like street party.

    Exploring the Haight-Ashbury history, Delores park where the edibles were sold like popcorn by hippies wondering Delores park on dyke day! We walked the Castro looking for breakfast the next day hungover from the love fest and all the alcohol.

    Somewhere along the way the intensity softened and the relationship changed shape. What remained were the memories of that beginning.

    Looking back now, what stays with me isn’t the individual moments themselves so much as the feeling of being pulled into a world that was already in motion. She moved through that city with an ease I didn’t yet have, and somewhere along the way I found myself learning its rhythm beside her.

    It felt like being invited behind the curtain of something vast and unpredictable, a place that could be wild one night and quietly beautiful the next. I arrived wide-eyed, taking everything in, letting the city reveal itself slowly instead of trying to understand it all at once.

    There was a kind of magic in those early days, the sort that only happens when you step into a place without expectations and someone is there to open the door just enough for you to see what’s possible. I didn’t realize it then, but she was giving me a way into Los Angeles that felt natural, unscripted, and completely alive.

    For someone just beginning to find their footing in that city, it could not have been a more perfect way to get my feet wet.

    That was the adventure from East Los.

  • Island Life Without a Tribe

    Island Life Without a Tribe

    The Emptiness of Not Connecting

    There’s a kind of isolation that doesn’t come from being alone — it comes from being somewhere you chose, living a life you worked for, and still feeling like you’re standing just outside the firelight.

    It’s not dramatic. It’s not cinematic. It’s quieter, heavier, more personal.

    It’s waking up in paradise and wondering why your soul feels like it’s sitting one seat away from the table.

    The sun hits the ocean right. Salt on skin feels familiar. The wind carries laughter, engines, music from passing golf carts. Life here is alive.

    And yet there’s a part of me hovering — almost like my spirit hasn’t fully landed where my body is.

    That’s where I am.

    I’m on a Caribbean island. Warm water, trade winds, sunsets most people would pay to see once in their life. A place that should be connection-rich, community-forward, magnetic and alive.

    And I’m grateful — I truly am. I know beauty when I see it. I know privilege when I live it. Yet here I am… feeling more disconnected than I ever have.

    Not lonely because I don’t like people. Not isolated because I shut myself off. But because somewhere along the road — I stopped fitting into the world the way I used to. It feels like nobody wants to be my friend.

    There’s no moment I can point to. No dramatic pivot. No big loss of identity. It was slower — subtle — like erosion. Like the tide pulling sand from underfoot until the earth beneath you changes shape.

    And the truth is, I don’t know when that happened. But I feel it every single day — in my heart, in my soul.

    I Chose This Distance — and It Still Surprises Me

    The truth is, I’m not a victim of circumstance here. I chose this life.

    I left my tribe — not because I didn’t love them, not because I didn’t want their companionship, but because adventure felt necessary. Growth felt necessary. Freedom called louder than familiarity ever did. From an early age.

    First Toronto to LA. Then LA back to Canada. Then here to Isla.

    Each move a leap. Each chapter a reinvention. Each goodbye a little tear in the fabric, even if I didn’t feel it fully at the time.

    Some relationships held — the lifers, the ones who know my layers. Shannon, Renee, Gina, Shann and Erica.

    Some became friendly digital echoes — Facebook updates and “miss you” messages that keep history alive without ever touching the present.

    And others stayed behind in memory… chapters closed, not bitter, just finished. Life’s just foolish like that.

    I’ve slowly realized that choosing a bigger life sometimes means choosing solitude as well.

    And for the most part, I’ve embraced that and sought out new tribe mates. I like being different. I like that I built my world on my terms.

    But this loneliness? This quiet? This sense of being emotionally unmoored? This territory feels new — and I won’t pretend it doesn’t sting.

    Coming back to Isla after COVID, after the isolation of Toronto’s lockdown still stuck to my bones — heartache imminent on the horizon and grief in my pockets —

    I wanted to fall back into something familiar here. To reconnect with the spark I once felt on this island. Maybe even save the relationship.

    But life doesn’t rewind just because we remember the past fondly. People change. Places shift. Energies evolve.

    Maybe the version of me who fit here before belonged to a world that doesn’t exist anymore — not on this island, and not inside me. Though I clung to it.

    And so I’m learning what it means to choose solitude, only to realise solitude chose me right back.

    That’s the part no one warns you about — that even intention has consequences. Even courage can echo.

    Isolation That Doesn’t Ask Permission

    This wasn’t chosen solitude. I wasn’t seeking stillness. I wasn’t craving quiet. I needed something different — and yet here it is.

    It isn’t dramatic. It isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t feel like the “hero wandering alone” trope.

    It feels like waking up and thinking, I used to know where I fit. I used to feel tethered. What changed?

    It feels like trying — really trying — to connect and realizing intention doesn’t always equal connection.

    It feels like being seen, but not met. A gentle ache, not a wound. An awareness, not despair. A pause, not a collapse. But real nonetheless.

    There’s a humility in admitting that. A soft surrender. Not to defeat — but to truth.

    A Storm No One Saw

    People talk about COVID like a logistics event. Masks. Travel rules. Supply chains. But the real pandemic happened inside people — in the fault lines we didn’t know existed.

    During those early months, my relationship unraveled slowly — not with explosions, but with quiet erosion. A year of dissolving, piece by piece, understanding that love doesn’t always equal longevity.

    There was pain, yes, but also truth in letting go. She never loved me, never wanted our connection — our friendship — the relationship I felt in my heart.

    And then — in the middle of that emotional exhaustion — my brother passed away.

    Not a distant loss. Not a chapter you can close politely. A loss that leaves you feeling more alone despite the complicated lack of knowing each other deeply.

    I carried those losses into everything that came next. Living here, what I wanted for my life, and how my heart shut down.

    There is a version of grief where you don’t collapse — you keep moving because stillness is too sharp.

    You build. You distract. You plan. You try to outpace the ache. Grief waits. It always does.

    And when borders opened and flights resumed and I stepped back onto Isla, I didn’t just arrive with luggage —

    I arrived with heartbreak and absence stitched into my bones. I thought the ocean would hold me. I thought sunlight could knit me back together. I thought the place that once felt right would feel right again. I thought I’d find her again and she would save me.

    I was wrong.

    Grief doesn’t obey geography. And belonging doesn’t always come back just because we remember it fondly.

    Some pain follows you. Some lessons unpack slowly.

    Some seasons don’t end where you expect them to.

    The Return That Didn’t Click

    I expected to reconnect with the rhythm I once had here. To fall back into easy friendships, new creative energy, conversations that felt like possibility.

    Instead, I walked back into a familiar room where all the furniture had been moved. Same walls, same sky, same ocean. Different frequency….

    The island didn’t reject me. But it didn’t catch me either.

    There’s a particular ache in being somewhere beautiful and feeling a step removed from it. Not ungrateful — just unanchored. Not unhappy — just unheld.

    I tried. I showed up. I invited, reached out, joined in, stepped forward.

    I didn’t hide. I didn’t isolate. Connection just… didn’t land. The energy that once found me here didn’t recognize me this time. Or maybe I didn’t recognize myself enough to be found.

    Sometimes we outgrow spaces before we realize we’ve evolved.

    The Work Is Still Here, Even If the Noise Isn’t

    Here’s the thing — I haven’t stopped working. I won’t. I’ve just shifted focus.

    I’m building: ShiverMedia. Salty Blue. My personal brand. Projects. Templates. Content. Helping Tammy build her platform. Client work when it comes. New systems. New strategies.

    Foundation work. Deep work. Work people don’t see until it blooms. I don’t resist effort. Effort built me. Discipline never intimidated me — silence does.

    Because work fills time, but connection fuels spirit. And right now, the work is happening — but the world around it feels thin. That’s not failure. That’s… in-between.

    The season where seeds grow roots before they break the surface. The quiet phase. The internal muscle building before momentum arrives.

    Distance in Love, Distance in Life

    Two years ago, I met Tammy, from Indiana, travels regularly to a Isla. Tammy live currently in Vegas.

    Life placed her there — responsibility, family, health, timing. Not conflict — circumstance. Loss. Duty.

    We are solid. We are committed. We are building in parallel. But distance changes the sound of days.

    When your life already feels a bit unanchored, being physically apart from the person who sees you most clearly sharpens the quiet.

    Love holds. But distance leaves room. And the room echoes.Not doubt — just longing. Stretched across time, flight routes, and ocean. I don’t resent it. I just feel it.

    Maybe this island was meant to be a sacred pause — a place to grieve, to shed, to face truth, and then to launch toward the next horizon.

    Sometimes stillness is not stagnation — it’s alignment gathering strength.

    When Solitude Stops Feeling Like Strength

    I’m good alone — Solo Sam, always have been. I don’t need crowds or chaos or constant stimulation. I don’t chase noise.

    But this isn’t chosen quiet — it’s quiet that lingers even when I reach for connection.

    I’ve tried here. I’ve opened doors. I’ve said yes when I didn’t feel like it. I’ve shown up.

    Yet connection… floats. Conversation lands politely but not deeply. People are kind; sometimes they feel performative — but ultimately, the fit simply isn’t here.

    It’s like tuning a radio station that’s a half-second off the rhythm of your heartbeat.

    And acknowledging that stings as much as it steadies me.

    It’s not that I can’t belong. It’s that I won’t force belonging where resonance doesn’t live.

    When Life Isn’t Aligned, It Lets You Know

    I’ve lived long enough to know this: When I’m not on the right path, life resists. Not violently. Not as punishment. Just subtly, steadily — slightly off-axis.

    Momentum stalls. Opportunities slip by. Energy drains. Even small tasks feel uphill.

    Confidence flickers in ways it never did before.

    That’s where I am — not broken, just out of sync with the life that fits me best.

    This isn’t weakness. It’s awareness. 

    I am not fully where I’m meant to be — yet.

    And when I’m off-path, I feel it in my bones. The world becomes friction instead of flow.

    That’s why the search for work has been harder — not because I don’t have value or skill or drive, but because the right fit hasn’t appeared. I refuse to contort myself into misalignment just to ease discomfort.

    Same with love.

    No doubt, no regret — just the ache of knowing we belong together, just not like this, not here, not yet.

    We aren’t broken.

    We’re waiting for the right door to open — and building until it does.

    I don’t force belonging — not in geography, not in career, not in love.

    Out of sorts doesn’t mean off track — it means recalibrating.

    This season isn’t collapse.

    It’s compass-work.

    The uncomfortable clarity that comes before the shift.

    And when truth arrives, I don’t ignore it — I move.

    Quiet Resolve

    This isn’t a goodbye letter to the island. Though I am seeking other destinations, there is no resentment or regret. Just truth.

    I expected belonging. Instead, I found introspection. TAnd maybe that’s exactly what this chapter needed to be.

    I’m here. I’m breathing ocean air. I’m working. I’m healing. I’m relearning myself after grief, disruption, and loss.

    And when the tide turns — whether here or elsewhere — I’ll move with it.

    Not out of desperation, but alignment.

    Because I trust myself. I trust the seasons. I trust truth. And I trust the ocean enough to know: the tide always returns something.

    Until then — I will stand where I am, grounded and honest, eyes on the horizon, heart open, work steady, and spirit intact.

    Trust in the tide while I find my bearings and my tribe.

  • Starting From Here

    Starting From Here

    The Backline of Midlife

    Some beginnings don’t come with fireworks.
    No declarations.
    No big reveal.

    Just the quiet drag of a box across the floor, the hum of a fan in a new space, and the kind of silence that finally feels like possibility instead of loss.

    This is where I’m starting from.

    Starting From Here

    The Year That Broke Me a Bit

    I spent the last year feeling like I was on the outside of my own life, watching it from somewhere slightly removed.
    Work dried up. Not all at once, but enough to make me question everything I’d built. I’ve always made it work—pieced things together, freelanced, created—but this time was different. The financial stress cracked open everything else: my health, my mindset, my ability to keep pretending I was okay.

    My body followed.
    Weight gain—again.Ive talked about the roller coaster. Its exhausting and my fault.
    Knees giving out. I should have listened to Dr Armstrong so many moons ago. Hockey was hard on my knees.
    Stomach wrecked. Tammy says it’s likely IBS… I just want it to stop
    Eyes are deteriorating, especially the left one with BRVO, like my body was trying to say what I wouldn’t admit: something has to change..

    Backline of Midlife

    This isn’t some victim arc.
    I’ve had incredible accomplishments.
    Graduated in graphic design and advertising back when it meant sketch pads, markers, typesetting by hand.
    I cut my teeth in the early days of the internet—when websites were built line by line, when communities were carved out in forums and chatrooms, before social media ruled the world.

    Payment processing, digital communities, early social platforms, media creation—been there, built that.
    I’ve worked with big clients, hungry startups, small dreamers chasing something real.
    Earned my stripes in the digital trenches when it wasn’t glamorous, just necessary.

    But even with all that under my belt, I’ve often coward in the presence of my own fears.
    I let perfectionism box me in.
    I let pain pull me sideways.
    I let plain old panic shut down the bigger parts of me that wanted to show up in the world.

    Now, at the backline of midlife, I feel the edges of time pressing in.
    Not crushing, but undeniable.
    There are fewer chances left to squander, and I don’t want to waste another one.
    It’s time I got the most from my life.
    Starting from here.

    Leaving the Old Life (and the Old Me)

    I left a senior marketing role in 2015—interim director of marketing, with the steady paycheck, the corporate ladder stretched out before me like a conveyor belt to retirement. I could see exactly where it was all going.
    And I didn’t want any part of it.

    I wanted sun on my skin, salt in my hair, dirt under my nails from building something of my own.
    Not just marketing other people’s stories—but living mine.

    I wasn’t new to travel. I had seen pieces of the world already—London, Amsterdam, Scotland, Mexico.
    Everywhere I went, something stirred.
    A deep, stubborn longing for more.

    When I was in my teens, I dreamed of moving to a small beach town in Mexico.
    I pictured it vividly: a little cabin steps from the ocean, days spent surfing, swimming at dawn, shaping sculptures and creating art under the slow spin of a ceiling fan.
    No internet. No emails. No urgency.
    Just life, raw and real.

    Of course, life doesn’t bend so easily.
    We need money.
    We need structure.
    We get pulled into jobs, into deadlines, into expectations.

    But that dream never really left me.
    And in 2015, when I landed in Isla Mujeres, it felt like maybe, finally, I could build something close to it.

    I thought Isla would be my hub.
    A place to launch more adventures, to travel, to explore, to live light and free.

    But it wasn’t meant to be.
    Life had other plans.

    I fell into a relationship.
    Six years deep, and complicated in every direction.

    It ended in late 2021, maybe early 2022, though honestly, endings like that don’t stick neatly to a calendar.

    The healing wasn’t clean either.
    The loss wasn’t just about someone else—it was the loss of a part of myself I had finally found.

    During those years, I had glimpsed a version of me that was more real than I had ever known.
    I believed in myself, in what I could create, in what I deserved.
    I saw my own strength in ways I never had before.
    When it ended, I didn’t just grieve the relationship—I grieved the clarity it had given me.

    At first, I tried to merge what I had found with who I had always been.
    It was messy, hopeful work.
    I lost nearly 50 pounds.
    I trained, hard.
    I moved my body with purpose again.
    I dug deep.

    I was starting to find a groove—a rhythm that felt like mine.

    a vusion of mt desk

    And then, mid-2023, I met Tammy.
    The woman I share my life with now.

    Tammy didn’t fix anything.
    She didn’t rescue me.
    She simply saw me—fully—and gave me room to stand in my own skin again.
    Flawed, creative, saltwater-wired, and endlessly curious.

    With Tammy, I found permission to be the Sam I had worked so hard to rediscover.

    But even with love in my life, something still wasn’t clicking.
    The rest of my world was out of alignment.

    I was still clocking hours on work that drained me.
    Still hustling for survival instead of reaching for meaning.
    Still waking up with a weight in my chest that said, “this isn’t it.”

    I wasn’t living.
    I was surviving.

    And no matter how much love surrounded me, I knew—deep down—that I had to make a change.
    Not for anyone else.
    Not for validation.
    For me.

    To honour the dreams I planted when I was young.
    To finish the journey I started when I walked away from that safe marketing desk ten years ago.

    Starting from here.
    Starting with me.

    The Move That Mattered

    The move wasn’t filmed.
    Too real.
    Too heavy.
    Too damn exhausting.

    But that’s part of the story too.
    Maybe the most honest part.

    There’s a version of moving that looks good on camera—timelapses of boxes stacked neatly, friends laughing while carrying a couch, the golden light of “new beginnings” shining through spotless windows.

    This wasn’t that.

    This was sweat and swollen fingers.
    This was three solo golf cart trips across cracked streets, leaking oil the whole way, knees burning and begging for relief.
    This was loading and unloading until my hands cramped, wondering if I’d even make it through the day.
    Then my buddy Cosne showed up—steady, no questions asked—and for a while, the weight felt a little lighter, the grind a little less brutal.
    But the real shift? That still had to happen on my own.

    I can show you glimpses—cardboard bruised from the weight, clothes stuffed hastily into bins, plants buckled under the heat, the last sad pizza box from the final night in the old place.

    I can show the boxes, the unpacking, the little pieces of “before” making their way into “after.”
    The random receipts from a version of my life that doesn’t quite fit anymore.
    The notebooks half-filled with plans I outgrew without even noticing.

    But the real shift?
    That didn’t happen in the packing.
    It didn’t happen in the lifting or the sorting or the swearing under my breath.

    It happened after.

    It happened when the last box hit the ground and the echo in the new apartment was mine alone to hear.
    It happened sitting outside on the new patio—bare feet on cool concrete, sweat still drying on my skin, heart still hammering from the weight of it all.

    It happened when I realized I wasn’t running anymore.
    I wasn’t clinging to what had been lost.
    I wasn’t trapped by what hadn’t worked.

    I was breathing.
    For the first time in what felt like forever, I was breathing on my own terms.

    And that’s when I knew.

    This wasn’t just a move.
    This was a reset.

    Not loud.
    Not polished.
    Not pretty.

    But real.

    And real is enough.

    packed boxes

    This space has a garden.
    It’s not big or flashy, but it’s enough.

    Enough to feel the sun stretch across my skin first thing in the morning.
    Enough to sit outside with a coffee, barefoot, letting my mind settle before the noise of the day creeps in.
    Enough to watch the tiny anole lizards dart through the foliage, their quick green flashes a reminder that even in stillness, life moves.

    I arranged the plants myself—pots dragged from old places, new greens picked out carefully, a mix of old soul and fresh start.
    There’s something about setting them down, shifting them, making a space feel claimed and alive again.
    It’s not a manicured garden; it’s more of a living patchwork—wild in places, quiet in others, breathing around me.

    Some mornings I catch the sun just right, slanting through the leaves, casting soft shadows across the patio.
    Sometimes there’s just the sound of the wind clipping through the palms, the low hum of the island waking up.
    No headlines.
    No rush.

    Enough to remind me that peace doesn’t come from having more—it comes from creating room for what matters.
    Enough to remember that beginnings don’t always shout.
    Sometimes they whisper through the cracks and the roots and the quiet corners we make for ourselves.

    And here, in this small garden, in this small beginning, I’m learning to listen again.

    Starting From Here

    So this is it.
    No rebrand.
    No reinvention.
    Just a return.
    A return to someone I may have known once upon a time, in flashes and fragments.
    A person I desire—with all my heart, all my stubborn will, and all my worn-out soul—to rediscover again.
    To pull forward the pieces of myself I once trusted, and to find new things still worth learning, worth fighting for.
    To face my fears not with shame, but with a new-found perspective carved out on the backline of midlife, where the waves are slower but heavier, where every choice feels sharper because there’s less time to waste.

    I’m not looking for some dramatic arc.
    No reinvention worthy of headlines or hashtags.
    No curated story of triumph tied up in a bow.
    I’m looking for something simpler.
    I’m looking for truth—raw, unfiltered, mine alone.
    For health—not just in muscle or weight, but in spirit, in breath, in presence.
    For balance—between the hunger for more and the grace to stand still.
    For creativity that feels like oxygen, not obligation.
    For clarity strong enough to quiet the noise when the doubts come calling.

    I’m looking for the version of Sam that’s been there all along—
    quiet beneath the stress, steady beneath the stories, stubborn beneath the scars.
    The version of me who didn’t quit, even when it would have been easier.
    The version who still knows how to trust salt air, deep water, and the messy, beautiful business of trying again.

    This year, I choose to move with intention.
    Not to rush.
    Not to prove.
    But to build slowly, piece by piece, a life and work that reflect who I am—not who I think I should be, or who the world told me I was supposed to become.
    I choose to honour my body, even in its brokenness, even in its betrayals.
    To feed it.
    To listen to it.
    To stop punishing it for being human.

    I choose to tell real stories.
    Stories that don’t need a filter.
    Stories that don’t have a clean ending yet.

    I choose to live the dream I set out to chase ten years ago—even if it looks different now.
    Even if the edges are worn and the road is not the one I mapped out when I started.

    Because it’s still my dream.
    Because I’m still here.
    Because the ocean’s still out there waiting.

    This is my reset.
    This is my backline.
    This is my hand on the board, eyes on the horizon, ready for the next wave.

    And I’m starting from here.

  • Generations of Music 3 – GenX

    The GENX Episode – Hayden’s Mom

    In the previous instalments, we delved into the diverse musical preferences of individuals spanning multiple generations. From Hayden’s contemporary playlist, representing the Gen Z demographic, to Susan’s selections resonating with the Boomer generation, albeit a youthful member. However, in this latest episode, we shift our focus to Renee, a teenage rocker hailing from Scarborough.

    Renee, who happens to be the Gen X mother of Hayden and my best mate, provides a unique perspective that bridges the generational gap between herself and her daughter. Additionally, despite our six-year age difference, Renee and I share a bond forged through our upbringing in different corners of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). While Renee called Scarborough, in the east home, I, proudly own the moniker “ West End Guy!”. Our friendship blossomed during the vibrant nightlife of Toronto’s club scene, where we found ourselves immersed in the pulsating rhythms of Decos and Buddies & BadTines.

    Hayden’s playlist.

    TELL ME YOUR TOP 5 FAVORITE SONGS WHEN YOU WERE 16

    Renee RK – GenX – 16 Yrs Old – 1990

    When you are 16 years old, as Renee said, “Everything is about longing.” and she goes on to say “which sums up the teenaged experience, really” and I would agree. In my days as a 16 year old I was certainly full of longing and music really helped shape my views on things. (As well as live vicariously through the lyrics) So below are Renee’s picks for her 16 year old self. Let’s see how much longing there was there through her musical choices!

    Patience – Guns N’Roses

    Oh man, there was a lot of hype when Guns N Roses came onto the metal music scene. Some hated them, some loved them, girls were crazy for Axl. Well at least in my circle of friends. I did not understand the music or the love of Axl. Likely because I had already moved onto the grunge with bands like Alice in Chains and the song Man in the Box. Still in the hard rock metal ish genre, however I was not the GNR fan others were.

    Fade to Black – Metallica

    This is a song Renee and I likely had in common but only a few years apart. I remember how this song spoke to my soul when I was in grade 10 industrial arts class. I would be working on my jewellery or my Ratt and Roll tea set when a fellow student asked what was in my headphones. I shared with her. She did not understand. How do you explain Metallica to someone who does not get it. Especially when listening to the “Ride the Lightening” cassette. (Yes! I did say cassette.) Back in the good old days when we still had portable music devices but they were Sony Walkmans that played cassette tapes and were tethered to your ears with wires that often failed.

    This song definitely described the teenage experience for me. Not only in music but also in substance. Angst, deep dark emotions I had no idea how to deal with, life moving past me ( I still feel this way) While truly I had not then or now lost the will to live… however sometimes words and music can just express what the mind in the moment is incapable of processing.

    Crimson and Clover – Joan Jett

    This song most represents the teenage longing Renee speaks of in her descriptor. I mean not just in the music, but the lyrics as well as the secret lesbian crush most young blossoming dykes held for Joan Jett. I recall one night at a club on Ventura. In a very dark men’s bar with goth like dancing, there were Joan Jett and Carmen Electra making out. Seriously true story. I actually did not believe it until we were out of the club and once it sank in I wanted to go back. There could not have been more than 10 people including staff at this club.

    I can see why Renee might have liked Joan Jett. I mean she always gravitated towards dark haired masculine women. Joan would have been her type I suspect. (Feel free to comment Renee) For me it was different, though I get it now. I was never attracted to Jon Jett, but I found her to be so cool! This was the draw. Finding out she was queer only made it that much more interesting.

    But back to the teenage longing… The video starts with her letting out a moan and a close up of her lips… as the song progresses the hunger seems to get more and more. Not an original to Joan Jett but a well received cover done with that rock flair of the late 80s.

    Great song! Cannot deny that… I mean the guitar intro at the beginning, the vocals, its a great song.
    I am just not a huge Pink Floyd listener. Blasphemy right? I do respect the music and every so often I will give it a listen. Like when building the accompanying playlist or listening to all songs repeatedly to accurately tell how I see the music.

    I do have a life story watching Pink Floyd, The Wall on the television at my friends house while eating pomegranate seeds. Highly surreal as we were also on acid. (Yeah! It was the 80’s!) There were a lot of these types of weekends back then.
    I admire people who are die hards of Pink Floyd. It’s almost like the fans of the Grateful Dead. I mean they have some good songs but really? lol No offence, just my perspective.

    Love Song – The Cure

    The Cure were always a band I enjoyed listening to. They stemmed from my love of 80’s Brit Pop! A timeless classic Love Song captures the essence of enduring love. The back drop and what draws me in, the haunting melody and lyrics that expound the story of love. There is a simplicity in the songs structure that gives it strength as a love song. There are lyrical sentiments that just resonate with the listener. I mean we are all young and passionate about love once right.

    The sure and Robert Smith have this ability to write music that spans generations.It is heartfelt, introspective and leaves a lasting impression.

    FAVOURITES FROM 2020

    “Now, I feel like I have everything and, apparently, I’m worried it’s going to run out.”

    Delving into the song selections of the era, one can’t help but notice the profound evolution that has taken place over the years. Each track serves as a poignant reminder of the passage of time and the inevitable shifts in taste and perspective.

    My long time mate’s musical preferences, once adorned in leather jackets and immersed in the vibrant energy of our Deco’s days, they now exude a sense of tranquility and ease. It’s a testament to the profound impact that 34 years can have on one’s outlook and demeanour.

    I’ll Look Around – Billy Holiday
    This track is a poignant and soulful exploration of love and loss. With Billy’s distinctive voice, I would not be turned on to her music until much later in life. However, when I did in college, I was so drawn to her delivery of haunting vocal performances. Her ability to just resonate that bittersweet feeling of longing and acceptance.

    I’ll Look Around stands as a testament to Holiday’s artistry. The ability she had to convey profound feelings and emotion in her music. What a mark she left on jazz and music history.

    Ain’t No Sunshine – Bill Withers
    Another timeless masterpiece in Renee’s list. Clearl she likes songs that carry haunting melodies and profound emotional depth. There is a longing and a heartache in the song that lyrically resonates making the song relatable.

    This is a Withers signature track. Ive always loved the power behind the lyrics and his refrain that echoes through the loss and pain of heartbreak. I think we have all been there.

    Renee is shifted into a world of songs that will always stand the test of time.

    Time – Pink Floyd

    So, full disclosure: I might not be the biggest Pink Floyd fan out there. (And yeah, Renee’s not exactly rushing to put on some Rush or Van Halen on either) Yet, if I had to pick a Pink Floyd favorite, “Time” would be it.

    There’s this indescribable feeling about it—the serious and riveting exploration of time that is introspecitve. From the opening clocks through the lyrics the track captures lifes relentless march forward.

    “The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older” – it hits home, doesn’t it? It’s like seeing Renee fret about time slipping by, and you can’t help but feel a twinge of empathy. Because in the end, it’s all about the journey, the ups and downs, the fleeting moments that make life so precious.

    And from out of left field comes this one! Not exactly haunting and introspective, but her son gets a kick out of dancing to it so… Gotta keep his feet moving! (I may also need to admit I got up and started doing various 56 year old versions of the robot dance)

    Intergalactic – The Beastie Boys

    The boy ceetainly likes a high energy sonic adventure that blasts us into a futueristic realm of hip hop dance and innovation.

    While it is not a deep song by any stretch what I love about the tune is this. The song’s pulsating rhythm and catchy hooks… its impossible to resist moving to. Plus the rapid fire clever word play! A true showcase of the Beastie Boys’ signature style.

    Bad News – Owen

    And we are back to the hauntingly beautiful journey through the depths of introspection and melancholy music my mate has adopted. This tracks delicate accoustic guitar melodies paired with plaintive vocals draws in the listeners emotional side.. The lyrics paiting a vivid sense of longing that lingered long after the music ended.

    Not sure it is my jam but if you ever wanted to listen to more Beastie Boys or 80s Metal I am all in!

    The final instalment, my top 5 from then 40 yrs ago (1984) and now!

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