Hi everyone. Yes, I am still alive, and yes, I am still going to write on this blog. Hopefully. I realize it has been 55 days a little while since I last wrote here, but a lot has happened since then. The new year started, the government reopened, we watched the Super Bowl, got mad at a razor company and then a few high school kids wearing hats, and so goes the modern culture. In my life, I went back to school for another semester, started working on video editing (I’ll try to upload them online in case anyone is interested in watching my garbage videos), started on the Executive Board for the College Republicans, walked a mile for the Muncie Mission, published another article for Byte, and worked a number of hours so I’m not completely broke at the end of April. Oh, and I also had my 20th birthday.

It was weird to think about at the time, because it really felt like just another busy week. I was exhausted Tuesday night and ready for bed when it dawned on me that I would be 20 years old when I woke up. I spent the day attending my four-hour class, then working at Byte for the rest of the day, including the two meetings I was required to attend. Other than my sister and her friends offering to buy me dinner and eat with me, it didn’t feel like a very different day. I get that this birthday won’t be as fun or exciting as the next one, but 20 years old is still significant. I’ve spent two whole decades in this world, most of it in school (which is depressing). Based on the current average life expectancy for males, I’m approximately 1/4th of the way through my lifespan (which is even more depressing). Not to mention, I’m coming up on a lot of big changes. I’m looking for internships over the summer, I’ll be changing apartments next fall, I might be changing my concentration within TCOM here at school, and I will in all likelihood be graduating school at some point during 2020, either May or December. After that, I will hopefully get a good job that I won’t hate and settle into a community to build the remainder of my life. But where exactly will that be?

I’ve been grappling with this question ever since junior year of high school, when I started to realize that adulthood was quickly approaching around the corner. For the longest time, I’ve just imagined that I would be able to get a job near Mishawaka, likely at a TV studio, and remain with my already established community there. I have lots of great friends in and around the area; I like my church that I’ve grown up in since we moved there; I’m relatively close to Grand Rapids, where lots of my family is, so I don’t feel isolated; and I’m already familiar with the area and some of the mainstays, particularly the GEARS robotics studio, where I worked with my globally-competitive robotics team for most of my junior and senior years in high school. But, is that a really realistic goal?

After all, there isn’t a wide variety of jobs in my particular industry in that area, as most TCOM people head to Los Angeles, New York, or Atlanta to find work, mostly because those are hotbeds of film and media production with competitive tax incentives and/or a history of established media giants. And my draw to the area is very little more than nostalgia. I can find other churches, other friends, and become familiar with a new area if circumstances require me to. That’s what happened in 2008, when my family moved from my childhood home in sunny North Charleston, South Carolina, to our current residence in bleak Granger, Indiana. We had to find a new church, become accustomed to a new school and a new area with far less vibrancy or variety as the surrounding Carolina Coast granted, and I had to make new friends and find new interests and hobbies. There were lots of big changes after we moved, and I became even more resistant to it than I already was. Part of my current fear is that of another new change, having to remake or reinvent myself because I moved somewhere completely foreign to me. This is possibly why I resist the idea of leaving Indiana.

Another part of that is I simply don’t know where else I would go. I hate big cities, and I refuse to move to anywhere in California. I’m not as interested or motivated to climb my way through red tape and the executive ladder to break into the big Hollywood studio system. And the media landscape is changing so rapidly, what with the Internet and streaming services, that pretty soon cable could easily die out within five years. What would that do to our national media? What about smaller media, like local news, public broadcasting, and independent productions? Surely these causes are endeavors worth fighting for, but they are already dying a slow death because most people don’t really pay them as much attention as they do for Netflix, Disney, or Amazon. Am I doomed to enter a field that I and most of my professors won’t recognize in a few years? Will I be forced to migrate to a metropolis and become a cog in the machine of a media giant, or else find a new line of work? Will I ever be satisfied with a job and find a life in a community outside of it that makes me feel content? These are the questions I wrestle with regularly, and I feel uneasy about not having the answers. And if this is where I’m at after 20 years, I can’t imagine what the next 60 will feel like.