Posts Tagged 2007

There’s an hour and 11 minutes left in A.D. 2007 as I start writing this. A little over an hour left in a year that turned out radically different from the high hopes I had when it began. 2007 was to be my “coming out” year. Now that I was two years into my recovery, had new habits and routines established to keep the recovery going, now that I was receiving active treatment for my social anxiety and arrested development issues and was dealing with them better, this was to be the year of radical change—the year that things would at last start moving forward and upward for Steven Buehler.

Things did radically change for Steven Buehler, but there’s no idea if the changes are for the better or for the worse yet. There was definitely change, but it all seemed to be backwards. It all seems to be back to where I was a decade ago, before I got married, before I packed up and left it all behind in California to relocate to Florida, before I finally started climbing out of my isolative shell and started reaching out to people.

It seems I’ve said goodbye to a lot of things this past year and crawled back into isolation, with a few significant exceptions.

In late April, my wife had back surgery and moved with our son into her parent’s spacious house on the other side of town, supposedly to recover while I continued to work and provide for my family. She didn’t come back after she had fully recovered.

In July, the company I was working for decided that my job could be done more cheaply by somebody else—in Slovakia—and I was notified that my position was surplus and I was “at risk of involuntary termination,” given 60 days to find another position in the company. No new position became available that somebody would hire me for, and by the end of September I was unemployed. I am still living off the company’s severance package four months later, unable to find a full-time job at the same salary level. My wife decided not to come back home until I had a new job, and in the meantime she went back to school, started working full-time at a preschool, and set up our son with a developmental psychologist. She went on with life without me, even though we are still legally married—although I expect that may change in the near future also. I got no “happy Thanksgiving,” no “merry Christmas,” and so far, no “happy new year,” and the only time I have heard from her was related to money. So, I assume it’s over.

I have said goodbye to a lot of things this year—starting with my family, continuing with my job, and—if things don’t look up with a new job in the next month or so—everything else as far as “material things” goes. I end 2007 in the same way that I started 1998, before all these things came that have now gone: alone, in front of a computer screen, not doing much of anything except holing up in a home office surfing the web.

To keep the perspective balanced, though, there are some constants, and some very different things in my life today that weren’t there ten years ago. I’m no longer drowning in pornography addiction like I was for nearly fifteen years before I was caught in 2005 (probably the event that ended the marriage, since it never really recovered from that). I have a support and accountability team in the form of Celebrate Recovery that I didn’t have ten years ago, to keep me from going back. The social anxiety that I had for years is now being constructively treated, even if it does screw up my sleeping patterns (there’s a bunch of Red Bull in the fridge for 2008 to deal with that issue in the mid-mornings). I have more opportunities to serve and minister through Celebrate Recovery and F.A.I.T.H. Riders that I didn’t have ten years ago (I also wasn’t riding a scooter thousands of miles ten years ago to make a difference). If ministry with my scooter or with CR could provide my paycheck, I’d do it the rest of my life (or until God puts me somewhere else). However, it doesn’t, and creditors don’t care if I have a job or not.

Over the past few months, though, I have met some very interesting people—mostly online, a few in person just this past week. I rode 200-something miles down to Miami this past week for the first time in my life to have breakfast with Jeff Pulver, Florian Seroussi, Jeff Sass, and Jonathan Gluck, and got to explore a little bit in the short time I stayed there, as well as enjoy a nice mini-vacation out on Florida’s Turnpike for two days (the first “vacation” of any kind I think I’ve had since I started working in Florida). I’ve gotten invitations to try out new services-in-development like Seesmic and get to know the entrepreneurs behind them, making things happen on the Internet. Social Media appears to be the “next big thing” in 2008 and beyond, and could it be that I’m being allowed to become involved at the ground level? Perhaps an interesting topic to explore in 2008 is how things like the Internet and social media affect our spiritual lives as well. If only I could be paid to do it…

With a half-hour left in the distressed image of 2007, looking into the blank canvas of 2008, I have some tough decisions to make. Do I attempt to rebuild from the wreckage and sticks of what little remains, or do I decide to “burn the ships” and start 2008 from completely nothing and construct a totally new life and outlook from scratch, no turning or looking back, and leave behind those that don’t go with me to choose their own paths?

In honesty, I’m leaning toward burning the ships and soldiering forward. How about you?