Buss Grows Up

You know…I’d forgotten about this place.

Seriously…three and a half years since I’ve posted? Looking back, I think writing was a way to deal with my depression and anxiety. It was a way to get my voice out there while in a job and a life in general where I felt I wasn’t being heard by anybody.

And I cannot believe how much my life has changed in that tiny amount of time. As the clock neared midnight on New Year’s Eve, my wife and I looked back, as I’m sure many people do, on the years before us and the year to come. I had to marvel at how, in a couple measly summers, that our lives had changed far more dramatically than it had in the previous ten years combined. Through some VERY hard work and a VERY supportive wife and network of family and friends, I managed to finish school and graduated Summa Cum Laude with my bachelor’s degree. While doing my capstone project, I seized an opportunity to use that project to build an application for a local company on the outside chance that it might be seen as a six-month long job interview. Turned out, I was right. They hired me on a month or two before the project finished.

This means I am no longer with the company I’ve written a few entries about, and no longer working for the boss I was working for (to my one former boss who has any chance of reading this, I am not referring to you. You have been a solid friend and I truly appreciated working for you during the short time that I was). I’m working in my new field and have been immensely enjoying myself since I started. That may sound weird, I know, but going to work makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something. I may only be arranging ones and zeroes around, but when I build a process it feels like I’ve made something (more or less) permanent.

Enough on that. Suffice it to say, the change, and the chance to start over, has been very good for me. I will always value the “family” I had collected while at my old job, and try to keep in touch as much as we are able, but it was time to move on.

Graduating, though, was one of the five biggest moments of my life. In high school I knew I was going to go to college, and use that as a springboard for…whatever I wanted to do. Walking down the aisle to get my diploma with a gold cord draped over my shoulders was not only proof that I was NOT as dumb as I was previously convinced I was, but finally completing something I had secretly been beating myself up for in the last decade or so. My stepfather, who I have had issues with for many years, choked up as I walked. That itself meant I had graduated in more ways than one. :-)

But even that was dwarfed later that year when probably the single biggest event of my life occurred…the birth of our daughter.

I have never experienced such a surreal moment at when she was handed to me and I just sat there holding her and counting fingers and toes. My life had changed so much, and yet it was about to change so much more. No degree, no job, nothing else can compare with the job title of “Daddy”.

I have to keep that part short, as I can likely drone on about her all day. She’s getting closer and closer to her second birthday now, and she can still blow me away with her smile. I kind of laughed when these commercials say “when you’re ready to love more than you’ve ever loved before”, but I now understand. She’s the single best thing I’ve ever accomplished.

Since then, life has been largely raising her and trying to work my way up in my new career. We sold our house and built a new one this last year, and spent the holiday season in our new home. It doesn’t feel like home yet, but I seem to remember that taking a year or so before as well. The house is absolutely gorgeous, and I look forward to truly settling in completely.

Lest this post just be a brag session (anybody reading this likely knows all this stuff anyway), I have also been reflecting lately on how all this stuff came about. It took more than a bit of luck, but honestly a lot of the changes in my life have been accomplished through hard work and the courage to make decisions that aren’t easy or safe. Going back to school was damned scary, as I’ve written previously. Even knowing it was one of the only ways out of the rut I was in, it was going to be incredibly expensive and difficult, and I wasn’t sure I was smart or enterprising enough to handle it. But in the end it just required me to set it as my goal and not give myself the option to fail. The decision to step up and take on the capstone project for this outside company meant that we’d have a more difficult time than most projects, as we had to conform to a real business environment. While we could have stopped with minimal work and documentation and probably passed, we went a lot further, and it paid off by landing me a job even before I graduated. When our professor called us outside and told us what a tremendous job we’d done, and asked if he could use our project as an example to show people how well not only the class, but how well the IT program itself was doing at educating people, it was worth every second we had invested.

I also think back on my previous job, and realize this outlook could have created an entirely different working environment for me. Any job is capable of being horrid or great, and it’s often the attitude that it’s approached with that defines your experience. I didn’t excel at my last job because I didn’t want to do the job. It wasn’t what I had gone to school for, and while some aspects were very enjoyable, the day-to-day tasks that the job entailed were a lot of what I didn’t like about my field. It’s not the job’s fault; it was simply that I’d had it with the entire thing. So while I do not believe my former working environment was the healthiest, I acknowledge and accept that I could have still made it a great job, yet I chose not to…so I have to accept some of the blame as well. I’m taking this as a learning experience, and at my new job I keep a sharp lookout for the same sorts of attitude problems in myself. These are lessons I will never forget, and I always try to be and do my best.

This whole “courage and hard work” philosophy has really changed me and how I approach life. I’ve stopped running from life-changing choices just because I don’t want to create ripples or problems for myself. I acknowledge that very little in life is handed to us, and I understand that if I want something, I have to be willing to work hard to get it, and believe that it’s possible. I also have to hold myself and my work to a high standard, and make sure I can be proud of my accomplishments when I’m done. Keep doing that...task by task, day by day...and you’d be amazed at what you can do.

Making these choices and changing my attitude has improved my life in every way possible. I feel like I’ve lived more in these three and a half years, than I have in a long time, and only more major life changes to come in this next year!

So maybe I’ll head back over here every once in awhile. Not to ease my depression, but to occasionally write down a few thoughts pinging around my head. Until then...


“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” - Lao Tzu