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Music.

Music is something I have a very personal relationship with. So personal I very rarely share my music interests with others. So personal that I have stopped listening to entire genres of music because I could not control my emotions or desired actions while listening.

Music is so personal to me I literally feel it inside of me. My favorite thing to do during my substance abuse days was to sit by myself in nature, on LSD, and listen to music. To let it absolutely consume me. My every atom. That is, to this day, my favorite experience in life. I don’t know if that will ever change.

I’m starting to finally be able to feel music again. I can listen to Metal again which is fantastic. I’m actually going to a Slayer & Lamb of God concert this summer with my cousin, Ryan. Well, Megan’s cousin, but he’s mine now too. I don’t think of him as anyone but my cousin, and family. That’s why I am comfortable with going to this concert with him. This concert in this genre of music that means so much to me.

After I went crazy music was dead to me.

Completely, utterly, unquestionably, dead. I could not feel it inside of me. It gave me no pleasure. People would try to share their music with me and I would pretend to care. I couldn’t listen to anything. Not the Rolling Stones, Faith No More, Metallica, Tech, Rage, Queen, Tribe, Common, Zep, and on and on and on.

It’s one of the worst experiences I have dealt with — and it lasted years. It really wasn’t until the last few months where music made me really want to move around again. I’ll never be much of a dancer, but I’m saying that I wouldn’t even tap my foot to a beat at this time.

There were spurts, surely. But it wasn’t as deep or as consistent as it is right now. I’m open to and discovering new music. Something I haven’t done again until recently. For the longest time I was either listening to sports radio or film scores — as I never lost my love and emotion for film, so their scores were a form of music I was still capable of connecting with. Kind of a funky roundabout, but it really helped me cope with the issue for a long time.

It’s Metal and my love for Paul Perkins that has brought music back to me.

My cousins Kevin & Paul are the biggest metal heads I know. They were just finally getting myself and my brother into it right before I went insane. Alan went on to become just as big of a metal head as the both of them. I, on the other hand, could not listen to it any longer. I was too angry and it put me in even more of an angry place. Even when the songs weren’t inherently angry! Something like Amon Amarth’s Live Without Regrets is just super optimistic and inspiring.

Unfortunately Paul is no longer with us, but I like to think that part of the reason I am able to really connect with music again is because of that loss.

The journey of me being able to connect with music again can be traced back to a trip myself, Alan, & Kevin took to a record store in San Francisco while visiting Alan together — not very long after Paul’s passing.

This was the first exclusively vinyl store I have ever been into. My brother is hugely into collecting vinyl records like I am with physical movies, so he was super excited to show us his digs. There was a great smell in there. Like the kind you get when opening a brand new paperback book. It just wafts of creativity awaiting consumption.

Rows of boxes with hand-written cardboard signs denoting genres, sales, & price ranges. Records just littered in organized chaos, awaiting fingers to eagerly rifle through them. It’s here that I just went off on my own and started looking around. Alan wanted Kevin and I to each pick out something so we could listen to it together. Alan, Paul, Kevin, & I spent many hours solely listening to music together. Music was our language. I just wasn’t feeling it, though. I didn’t know what I was interested in picking up — because I wasn’t interested at all. I just wanted to get out of there.

Then I watched them look through the Metal section, and walk away from it without anything in hand.

I thought to myself “Well, if there’s nothing interesting for them, maybe I can find something.”

That’s all it took. I walked over to the left most box in the section that was facing the wall and started flipping through each record. I’m the kind of person that loves to judge a piece of artwork by the cover chosen for it. If you don’t put effort into your presentation then don’t expect me to put effort into what is behind it. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” has been far more relevant to me in life when it comes to people than when it comes to actual books.

Tempest
The album artwork for Tempest, by Lycus. ©2011

And then I saw it, Tempest, by Lycus. There was something about the album artwork that just spoke to me. It felt like something that if showed to Paul he would not allow me to put down. He would grab my shoulder vigorously and bring his head close to my ear with a “Duuuuuuude! That’s wicked!” So I called Kevin & my brother over and they did something really similar. It was everything I wanted it to be.

Lycus is a specific kind of Metal, Doom Metal. It’s very melodic, deliberate, and patient. There’s  a lot of chanting, and it just had a way of worming into my bones when we listened to it. It’s a kind of music that really allowed me to embrace my torture and grow with it rather than fight it.

Since the three of us first listened to that album my connection with music has been like a tarp full of water with a small tear in it. It starts as a small drip, but as it continues to rain, and slowly drops — that rip ever grows.

I realized today after having reconnected myself with music like Bullets & Octane, Coheed & Cambria, and even the original World of Warcraft scores — the tarp is almost entirely gone now.

I can bask in the rains of music again.

It’s a really liberating thing to be honest. I missed it quite a bit. I’m pretty sure human beings as a species in general share this same connection with music that I have. So you can understand when I tell you that having music dead to me is maybe the worst thing out of this journey that I have experienced.

This is the thing I am talking about when I say that everything happens for a reason.

The greatest gift I can give Paul in his passing is what I am doing now. I am using his loss, and my heartbreak from it to make me a more complete person again. It’s what he would want. He would be so excited to hear that I am going to the concert this summer. I only wish I didn’t have to carry him with me and that I could actually have him there next to me.

Thank you for inspiring me, Paul. Thank you for bringing music back to me. I miss you.

Music 2
From left to right: Paul Perkins, Trevor Elms, Kevin Perkins. ©2008 – Self Portrait

 

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Featured photo taken by Trevor Elms ©2015, Pictured from left to right: Kevin Perkins, Alan Elms
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Care.

Something that people who know me closely are aware of — I generally don’t like people, strangers. I’m distrusting and they make me uncomfortable. Something that people who know me very closely are aware of — when I care about people I truly and deeply care about their well being and their life. I would in a split second give my life for them without question.

Today I am going to write about how I spent two weeks living on my friend’s floor to save his life from opiate detox, and how I don’t know if he is alive today.

This is another one where the person will not be named. For one, because if he is alive, I don’t know if he would want this story written about him or not. I would rather err on the side of respect. So this person will henceforth be known as Ben.

Ben is one of my very best friends. You’ll find I have a lot of them. Whether we are in touch or not they will always remain my best friends because I love them for who they were at that time, and whom they have helped me grow to become as a person.

My brother Alan is my other half, just like Megan. Two sides of the same coin. When I went to Hawai’i I had this very large void in my life that needed to be filled. I very much missed my big brother who at that time was more mature than me in a lot of ways. Ben filled that void extremely well. He really took me under his wing as a true drug user and distributor.

That last sentence is a bit sharp, and honest, but it’s also exactly at that time what I was looking for and what I wanted. I’ve already written about how I don’t like school, it was really hard for me to apply myself, how confused I was, and the fact I like to try everything once.

So, I decided the thing I really wanted to learn was how to make a living breaking the law.

Not the things my friends and I in Colorado were messing around with at the time. I’m talking weight, weapons, lack of personal welfare — and a willingness to lose one’s humanity.

That is probably as specific as I will ever write about those times. I honestly can’t even remember too many specifics, one of the worst things about it; or maybe best things. It just goes to show how deep I was into my substance abuse. I also just don’t remember a lot of things about that time because I’m still getting chunks back that were lost within my mental break with reality. Just recently a friend reminded me that the name of the tree we were always sitting under was a banyan tree. I have forgotten simple details like that.

This is about the thing that caused me to hold on to that humanity, and how I was able to see where I was headed if I didn’t correct course.

I still lost my mind after this, but I think the stress of taking care of Ben, and his business; as well as my own consumption of a concoction of substances from Meth to experimental hallucinogens like 2Ci — really compounded into what became my crazy spell. That puts it a bit lightly, but I was. I was absolute batshit crazy. I went to bonkersville.

Spending time with Ben meant I progressively didn’t spend much time with anyone else. I began to spend less time with my friends in our self-described Ohana, and Ben and I even hid from his roommates quite a bit with the door locked. Talking business, bonding over different substances, just in general being best buds. Brothers, so to speak.

Over this time I watched Ben who was never tall, but very stout — go from a very healthy looking individual shooting up a water solution of opiates into his anus, to a very frail — hardly ever lucid sack of skin and bones. A skeleton that wanted to physically assault myself and his roommates for taking and disposing of his terribly hidden stash of black tar heroin.

It was then that I began sleeping on his floor. Getting up any time he needed to release himself in any way, in any fashion, and help him accomplish that.

If I remember correctly his roommates helped him just as much, as I was still running around campus at times during the day and night; trying to close out a lot of Ben’s business. As well as get him out of the nonsense and debt he was putting himself in with the heroin. Classes were so far from a priority at this time that I’m not sure I went to a single one.

Shortly after Ben’s detox I remember one of his roommates getting a hold of family to get him a way out of Hawai’i in hopes to save his life. His room was empty, locked, and closed out but someone still attempted to break in at knife point to get some money from Ben. I’m honestly glad that I was really well known and friendly around campus, but in my dealings with Ben’s business I worked pretty hard to be quiet and not make too much of an impression. I think it may have saved my life.

I skipped ahead there a bit, but it was just to illustrate the kind of people Ben and myself had in common with at that time.

It’s​ this period that caused me to see what things other than alcohol can truly do to a person first hand. Someone who is close to me. Someone who I care about. I’m really glad that Ben had a huge stash of marijuana so that we didn’t need to worry about smoking at all. I’m really not sure he would have survived without it. Pot gave him great relief from the pain, fever, and convulsions that he needed to be helped through.

Nightmares with cold sweats, and absolute full body retching which would not stop no matter how empty his stomach was. It was living death and I never wanted to see anyone ever go through that again.

Not long after Ben left campus my friend Tony passed, and that was the nail in the coffin of opiates for me. I’ve been an advocate for marijuana over the corporate-fueled and socially accepted heroin that are prescription pain meds since. I was very close with people that it has hurt greatly. The two mentioned in this piece both started with 100% legal pain medication which is all too often shoveled into peoples’ hands without any afterthought.

Of course when I broke my shoulder years later I had a great time abusing my prescriptions like the addict I am.

No one in my family even gave it a second thought at that time, including myself. I’m not sure if we all thought I had gotten past it or not, but I very quickly went through two re-fills in a week. By the following week I was popping four pills as I woke just to take two more in an hour to actually feel it.

I think the greater meaning I have been looking for in this piece when thinking about caring for Ben is that:

Opiates are a really dangerous thing. Please be really, really careful with them. They, just like any other addictive drug — can turn an incredibly bright person into something very, very dark.

I really hope I never have to see someone go through that again, and that I never put anyone through something like that myself again. I am an addict, I will always be an addict. It’s something I strive to be better at every day just like my bi-polar. When I say that I am sober I mean from everything but alcohol and marijuana. Those are two things I feel like I have the ability to be a responsible adult with, and I feel like my current life has proven that.

The last time I spoke to Ben was not long after sending him a Facebook message to tell him that I was able to plead guilty on all my charges — and lucky to get five years probation on a deferred sentence.

His way of congratulating me was by calling to ask help him move some weight of Ecstasy through the mail from Hawai’i to California, where he was now residing.

He’s since disappeared from Facebook and I can’t find him anywhere. I do not know if he is alive, and truly wish him the best. However, it was the phone call that proved to me he was lost beyond all doubt.  I did not need to be in contact with him any longer if I wanted to make something of myself.

Thank you for all the support and love that was given to me during my recovery. Ben is the big brother I never want to be.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Photo taken December 13th, 2008 by Mariah C. Pictured w/ Kelli K. just days before mental break with reality.
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School.

Previously I wrote in my article successful college dropout about how school and I don’t get along very well. There was one school, though. One school that made a very big difference for me.

There’s some people who may think that there were some bad influences in there, but I believe with everything I know about myself that I was going to go in the direction I went regardless of the school I went to. It was this school I went to that gave me the tools and the opportunity to do what I am doing today.

September School.

Bear in mind this is less about traditional education and more about what they gave me in terms of knowledge, encouragement, and experience. There’s a lot of little things the people working for that school did for me as a student — and showed me parts of them as people, that really made me feel like I mattered. That I was somebody, someone besides my parents, actually cared about.

That’s really all I needed sometimes.

I don’t know what it was about me growing up, but kids didn’t like me. They really liked having me around so that they could put me down — and honestly, because at that time I just wanted friends. I let them do it.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. I don’t know if it was the age or the area, but this started when we first moved to Colorado and I was going to elementary school in Longmont.

Before then I had plenty of friends and we all got along in Halifax, Hong Kong, & Andover. Seriously, always. There wasn’t really any bullying or fighting. We were just laughing and having a good time regularly.

Well, there was one time in Andover.

We were riding on the bus and one of the fifth graders (I was in second grade at the time) was turning around the seat making fun of my friend, Jamie. Jamie and I haven’t spoken in years, but he was always really kind and generous with his things. He had more video games than me and a trampoline, so I loved spending time with him and getting to know him.

This jerk of a kid kept calling my friend a “lonely fat ass loser”

And so I looked him dead in the eye and said “Hey! Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, mongoloid!”

This was funny for a number of reasons. One, I think that’s the first time I had ever used that word and I heard it on an episode of the Simpsons… or Beavis & Butthead.

Secondly, I was a second grader telling this to a fifth grader about twice my size.

Thirdly, this is the very first time I was punched in the face.

I can’t remember if I got a suspension or just a stern phone call from the school for this, but I remember running up to the front of the bus crying to the bus driver.

The driver asked, “what’s going on?”

I, being of the healthy vocabulary I had at this time properly responded with the timeless:

“He punched me in my fucking nose!”

And that’s about the last conflict I remember with anyone in Andover before we moved. I had very many friends after that, all who wanted to spend time with me.

I really wish I was given a chance to do something like that early on in Colorado.

In Colorado I think kids quickly figured out I had something wrong with me way faster than I ever did. They spent a lot of lunches riling me up just to see me get angry and have a fit. I have fairly good equilibrium with my anger issues these days thanks to my meds, but back then I think kids got a lot of entertainment from me losing myself in a maelstrom of rage. I’m talking about the vein popping, murderous kind. There’s nothing about it I am proud of and I am glad to say that there are very few people now who can remember seeing me in that shameful state.

There’s a lot of details about those years that don’t need to be gotten into. What does is that when I went to September School, I was accepted.

I honestly really hurt myself there a little when I went. There were lots of kids I could have made really close, lifetime relationships with. But, being the person I am,

I found a girlfriend and completely absorbed myself in her.

I think, at that time, it was everything I wanted for my self-confidence and it honestly did help me focus on school, especially writing. Which looking back I think a lot of the teachers there very much focused on trying to get a lot of writing out of me. Getting me to practice it. 

I was very often, almost constantly encouraged to write while I was in that school. It’s something that maybe didn’t mean as much to me as it should have then, but I can’t stop thinking about now.

I do still have some friendships from that school — though more acquaintances these days; it’s more my fault than anything. They were really nice and accepting kids that I am glad I got to know. I still miss a number of them as I was truly beginning to garner some really close friendships before moving off to college and losing my mind.

I really want to focus on the teaching, though. That is the thing that is really beginning to impact me now.

I wrote about encouragement earlier. September School is pretty much built from the foundations up on it. Now, it’s been about 10 years since my graduation so I am not entirely sure how much things have changed. I do know that while I was going there homework was not a priority.

Being there, being accepted, encouraging one another to be ourselves. That was pretty much the biggest deal that went on, and the teachers did this as well. I feel like they often tried their best to get through to the kids they were teaching to try and ignite something in them to apply themselves to.

Back then, I now know they were seeding some really good roots in me.

I still had my legal and mental problems after graduation — though looking back I have absolutely nothing but respect, admiration, and gratitude for what that school did for me.

I was actually able to graduate, for one! I could not apply myself enough in public high school for me to have been able to get a degree there. It would not have happened. I can very easily say I would not be where I’m at today without their schooling. At least not in the same way.

Now, with all this writing just coming so freely from me, I just don’t think there is a way to truly express my gratitude enough.

So I am going to do what I am doing now. Everything I have ever been encouraged to do. I am just going to keep writing.

I think, the deeper meaning I am trying to find from this piece is that maybe

it’s not always about how the person does in school — but how the school does for the person.

Were it not for September School I think I’d be far less successful and happy than I am now.

I wish there were more teachers like the ones at Sep School, the ones before them gave up on me pretty easily.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Featured Photo by Michael H.-C. ©2008 – Various 2008 graduates pictured in Thailand.
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Imagination.

One of the things I am doing with this site to keep me inspired even when I am not — is to find words I love and write about them. I want to take one word and turn it into something more.

Recently I was incredibly inspired and am feeling a bit drained. However, I feel like a difference between a successful writer, and a hobbyist — is that they can push through times of drainage and learn to force inspiration out of themselves.

So that is what I am doing today. I picked one of the tens of drafts of words saved during times of inspiration and am looking to find more within it. I believe I have chosen a good word for my first drainage since starting this website.

Today I want to write about the word imagination and what is has meant to me as a person.

My imagination has gotten me through just about every day that I can remember. From as early as nap time making finger fights between knights and dragons — which truthfully just looked like two hands kicking each other.

Imagination is something I never, ever want to lose. It’s something that I feel I have certainly lost sharpness to over the years. Even feel like part of me starting this website was to fight for it back. To not just sit on the couch and satisfy my creative desires by consuming others’ hard work. Not to say that is a bad thing, but I have spent a lot of time in the last few years just consuming media wracking my brain for what I could do with myself.

What I could apply myself to on my free time that could be supported with my full-time job, while not distracting me from it. I’ve needed a true outlet for my imagination for some time. I work in design for a living, but there are guidelines, and decisions that are not my own. I do not begrudge these things, this is part of being a working professional and I quite like what I do and how I do it.

I did need something that is 100% completely my own however. Where I make the decisions, and choose how things look, feel, and express.

When I first created this website I didn’t even know how it would be perceived. And I am not saying it is a success, far from it. However it is already a success in the way I have wanted it to be.

I have spent the last week crying, almost daily, about the things that have been written. I have broken through a wall of creativity that has been blocked (excepting small, important doses) for nearly 10 years. I’ve been able to use my imagination again.

I love to use my imagination in my writing, even when writing non-fiction. Which I seem to be writing a lot more lately and find funny. I grew up always wanting to use my imagination to write fiction, but believe I am better served using it to illustrate real things, and real perspectives. At least at this time, that’s what’s pushing me to write more.

I don’t necessarily think people deserve to or should read these things, but want to get them down. I want them out of my head for more space for more imagination so that I can continue to do things with these words that have been missed so much.

Words and imagination go hand in hand in for me. My parents spent a lot of time teaching me the value of money growing up — but one thing they also valued was books.

My Mom would take me to the book store to buy one any time I finished the one I was previously reading. No chores needed, nothing. They would buy me books without question while growing up and I cannot thank them enough for this. I was reading adult literature like the Lord of the Rings by around 11-12, and studying it.

That is how I learned to love words and how they can be used to paint any kind of picture for any kind of mind.

Books and books and books and books. So many books that I don’t even really read them any more. I read way more comic books. Almost 100% of my actual personal reading for entertainment comes from comic books these days.

One of the reasons for this is that I really don’t want my own imagination, and my own prose affected by another’s. I really need to keep myself away from those things if for no other reason than I am terrified of accidentally being influenced by something — and then being looked at as a fake because of it.

I know I am already influenced by everything I have ever read. Though now  I feel like I have a strong grasp on the English language, and would be better served by speaking to an editor to learn more.

Maybe this is a bad choice, I am not sure of it, but I am not interested in reading books so much right now. We still have a bit of a library in our house — sometimes I will pick up a book already read and crunch a good 250 pages into it before it goes on the stack next to my side of the bed, almost certain not to be cracked open again.

I’ve been trying to find some larger meaning here, but this time I’m not so sure there is one.

I just love the word imagination, and what it brings with it. I want to make sure I never lose mine, because I feel if I do I will lose a very large piece of what makes me.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
In featured photo from left to right: Alan Elms, Brian Capone, Kevin Perkins, Paul Perkins, Sean Capone, Trevor Elms.

 

 

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Friendship.

I want to preface this piece by saying that I have a good amount of friends and I care for them all deeply. Moreso than I can express. This is about one friend, though. The one whom through most length in my life has always accepted me for who I am and loved me regardless. Without him I do not know what I would do.

Not shortly after my mental break with reality I told my friend Alex Thiessen.

Alex Thiessen is not just a friend. Alex Thiessen is the closest and best friend I have ever had in my life. He is not the only person in this category, but he does have a category of his own within it. Just as each of my friends does.

Alex Thiessen literally owns a piece of me, and not by choice.

He is someone who I am uncontrollably myself around. Whom when we do not speak for days, weeks, or months at a time — it feels as nothing. We are the same as always. Like a rock in the sea. Life bashes against it and it changes over time, but in the end it is always the rock. Ever the rock.

It was not but 60 seconds into the phone call that Alex told me he was flying himself to Hawai’i.

You have to understand — I was a nineteen year old recently bailed out of jail/mental rehabilitation center dragger on, and he was an eighteen year old hard working, putting himself through college badass.

Friendship 3
Pictured from left to right: Neal Radia, Jack Russel, Kisa Vanderford, Austin Haigh, Trevor Elms. Photo taken by Neal Radia in the Lexus February 1st, ©2009.

Alex didn’t think twice about dropping everything to come and see me. And I didn’t have to wait long at all. If I am remembering correctly, I was able to pick Alex up in the used Lexus that was purchased with one of the last drops of my college savings — which wasn’t going to legal fees, less than a week later. That car was too good for me.

One of my favorite things about Alex is that whenever I get around him I just want to spend time with him. We were always using our imaginations and playing trading card games. We can talk about video games, Pokémon, comic books, really any kind of media that until recently wasn’t all that accepted in pop-culture — for hours.

Even though Alex and I are odd ducks that got into real trouble in our teenage years, we never got into any with each other.

I think, mutually, we never wanted to be a bad influence on each other and we never wanted our parents to dislike us spending time together. So when Alex and I spend time together, we spend time together. It’s almost like no one else is there, because honestly I don’t think in those moments they are.

I think something that people don’t understand about true friendship is that it is true love.

I have a relationship very similar to Alex that I have with my wife. I tell him everything. Everything. 

Friendship 2
Photo taken by Alex Thiessen in Honolulu ©2009

Alex is one of the friendships in my life where I have true love for him, and him for me. We always try to end the phone call by telling each other we love one another. There is nothing subtextually or overtly sexual, but I love Alex Thiessen with every fiber of my being. He is one of the greatest people I have ever gotten to know in my life and we have both helped each other improve as human beings over our time together.

The morning after Alex arrived, the first thing we did was take the car for a walk to go to the rental store.

I can’t remember if it was a Blockbuster or not but I do remember that we grabbed a few movies and video games. The games being Prince of Persia (2008), and Infinite Undiscovery. We also grabbed an unhealthy amount of junk food and soda.

This was further rehabilitation for me, support.

Something that I believe anyone from any walk of life who goes through a hard time needs. I had a lot of support from a lot of people, which a great many people unfortunately are not afforded — and that is a tragedy. There is a lot of self-fulfilling prophecy that goes on in a person like myself’s head & life when we do not seek and gain the support we need to function.

Alex’s support was exactly what I needed at that time.

I’ve been trying to find a meaning within the words to end this piece on and support is the word to focus in on. I could probably write 30,000 more words just about Alex, but I think being as concise as possible can more often than not get the point across most clearly.

Please support your fellow humans, you do not know who they are or what they have gone through.

I feel if we spend more time supporting one another and less time judging one another then maybe we can accomplish more than we already have as a species — and that is a pretty cool idea to think about.

Give a homeless person extras while walking to your car, give a glass of water to a person working in your home, give a person who looks alone just a little bit of your time and introduce yourself. Just a little can do a lot. I have seen it and experienced it myself.

Support and give to your fellow human beings, you never know when they need it most. Give them friendship. Give them love.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Featured Photos taken by Kathleen Thiessen & Edited by Trevor Elms
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Experiences.

I had a tattoo session recently where my friend as well as tattoo artist Jayce and I got to talking about all the stupid shit I signed myself up for as a kid.

We got to talking about this because I legitimately was about to jump into another stupid idea on a whim. Graham, another artist at the shop who I have gotten to know pretty decently over the last ~40 hours at All Sacred — made mention of something. He just blurted out while Jayce was adjusting his machine for going too fast –

“You should just do it. Check it out, get tatted with it going that fast.”

I responded without a second thought:

“Fuck it, why not? Let’s do it.” — though immediately pivoted and asked a pertinent question,

“Wait, if you actually try to tattoo me is it going to mess up the tattoo?” There is no stupid questions, only stupid answers — but I think we all know the answer I got to that question.

I told Jayce to just keep working on his stellar artwork and we’ll revisit the idea after the session, because I truly was interested.

I was interested because it was an experience I had not gone through before.

This is a very big part of my personality that I very much embrace within some bounds of personal safety. The motto “try everything once” is a creed I believe in.

I believe we can often gain wisdom and learn more through life experience than anything else. And the more we experience the more we can gain empathy and be able to put ourselves in one’s shoes.

Growing up I opted to do things like take an XL water balloon sling at full blast in the back — point blank.

I opted to to be taped in a cardboard box and slid down a flight of stairs, rolled down Niblick Dr. in a garbage can, as well as sled over a large cactus patch (we all did that one, multiple times).

My earliest memory of something like this — I don’t think I could have been much older than four or five. My cousin Kevin who is a little over a year older than me and absolutely brilliant, convinced me of a grand farce.

If I were to ride my Mongoose bicycle down my grandparent’s wooden stairs a magical fish would give me three wishes. I’m not sure where he got the idea of a fish, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t matter what he told me. All I needed was a cool thing to do and a reason to do it.

One thing I need to mention about the stairs, and this memory. They led to my grandparent’s driveway down a very acutely angled hill. The driveway is not very wide, and the stairs are perpendicular to it.

Did I mention there was a flatbed trailer on the opposite side and a partition of very old, very stoic pine trees behind that?

You can see where this is going from here. I ended up flying ass over handlebars across the flatbed to land softly in a bed of pine and branches. Thankfully young children don’t have much mass, so I got a scrape here and there as well as a way cool story.

Actually, how could I forget when my brother had me take the snow tube down the back of the house? I hit a log going at a decent whip and backflipped into an olympian-like landing.

I was two years old.

Story after story keeps popping into my head but I think I’ve illustrated enough here. This is a part of my personality that I now know I was born with. My experiences go beyond daredevil nonsense though, and that is just one of the extremes that I had the penchant to explore.

I want to share my experiences traveling the world and exploring different cultures from as early as five years old.

I think one of the greatest things my family ever did was move outside of the United States to live in Asia and discover the planet. My father took an opportunity to succeed and support his family in a promotion that meant he had to leave the U.S. behind — and he packed up his family with it.

This was in 1995 and he was working for PictureTel which was working on (and succeeding at) video conferencing over the internet before the majority of people even had it. We moved to Hong Kong and our lives were never the same. It was the 1990s, which I think in the future will be remembered a lot like the roaring 1920s. What I mean by this is when we moved to Hong Kong PictureTel didn’t just set us up there and that’s where we stayed 100% of the time.

PictureTel regularly paid for my father to take his entire family with him across countries and continents.

Places like Australia, Bali, the UK, France, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines (though we couldn’t leave the resort), & Thailand. All before I turned 9 years old. I think there’s a couple more in there I am missing, but just those blow my mind when I think about it.

With those three years in my early childhood alone I had seen and experienced more parts of the world and more cultures than most people will ever get to. This gave me a level of wisdom about acceptance and tolerance for those different than me that is now just inherent in me. I cannot understand not being accepting and tolerable of those different than you. When it comes to race, religion, rehabilitation, gender, sexual preference, personality disorder, mental illness, learning disability, birth defect, or beyond. If it is not affecting another person directly, negatively, I believe “Live and Let Live” to be a commandment of life we should live by.

It is my thirst for experience that gives me a lot of happiness in life.

It has also handed me plenty of strife. However, the biggest lesson I learned from reading “What the Buddha Taught” is that Life is Suffering. We cannot have the good without the bad. We cannot feel what truly makes this world and this life beautiful without understanding and experiencing what makes it dark and foreboding.

That doesn’t mean you need my experiences. Everyone’s are their own. But we do need to try and glean as much knowledge and wisdom about our experiences as we grow so we can continue to learn from them. All of them, not just the ones we like to remember to make ourselves feel better.

The ones we remember whether we want to or not.

I leave you by repeating this:

I believe we can often gain wisdom and learn more through life experience than anything else. And the more we experience the more we can gain empathy and be able to put ourselves in one’s shoes.

Thank you for reading.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Photo by John Elms
Posted on by Trevor Elms · 6 Comments

I Am A Successful College Dropout.

This is not an endorsement, far from it. This is a part of my story.

I went to college for all the wrong reasons.

I went because I thought it was what I was supposed to do. Doing what you think you are supposed to do when it comes to your far-reaching life choices is just not something I would recommend. At some point we need to be selfish. Being selfish is not inherently bad; everything in moderation, right? So there is a time and place to be selfish — and what you do with your life after graduating high school is one of those times and places.

My Dad had recently moved abroad again, my Grandfather had recently died,

and I recently discovered how much I enjoyed experimenting with the different experiences that excessive drug use could exhume from the mind.

School was never my forte. Don’t get me wrong, I love to learn. I will read and study endlessly about the things that interest me until my mind is full. The public school system just never did well at making me feel engaged or that a majority of what they were teaching me was going to apply to my every day life. At least, not in the way they were teaching me.

I have known for a long time that I was going to make something of myself, whatever that something is, and schooling wouldn’t be able to take much credit for it.

There is a school I give a lot of credit, September School in Boulder.

However that is a time for another part of my story.

Because I don’t like school, and because my parents did well by themselves (and saved for college since my birth), I decided I was going to take an all expenses paid vacation. The only place I wanted to go was a place that inspired just about every fiber of my being while I was there. Both good and bad.

I chose to go the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and study as an English major.

My Dad had recently moved abroad again, my Grandfather had recently died, and I recently discovered how much I enjoyed experimenting with the different experiences that excessive drug use could exhume from the mind.

What I wrote earlier is very important to this decision, as there was something about Honolulu that no television, brochure, visit, or news anchor had ever mentioned to me once in my 18 years on the planet.

Honolulu is a very dark and dirty place, one of the seediest underbellies in the nation. Waikiki itself at night particularly — and nobody talks about it.

This was the perfect storm for what became my mental break with reality, subsequent legal troubles, and battle with mental health.

You’re going to get tired of hearing this, but that is a story for another time. I’m a successful college dropout, remember?

If we skip forward by about 2 years I found a job interview to get into the ground floor of an eCommerce paintball site, literally. It was in this guy’s basement.

I have been offered every job I have interviewed for, and this was no different. Interviewing is probably the single most important part of securing a job. Nobody cares what your resume says if you can’t function like a professional adult and present yourself as a confident person who knows what they are doing.

If you aren’t confident in yourself, how can you expect your employer to be confident you can do your job?

I was ecstatic to receive this job with no benefits and starting at $10/hr. At the time I was working in retail at an educational toy store for $7.50/hr +.03% commission. That number is not a joke. The catalyst for this new job was them reducing my pay by $.50/hr and giving me a commission rate that would make me have to sell 5 times the store’s paltry daily take just to make that $.50/hr back in commission. The store’s mission was great, the management was out of touch and incompetent and I felt like a high school kid in a high school job.

Hustle Paintball was the exact place that I needed to springboard myself into the career that I have now. I was able to do everything from shipping and receiving to order management, marketing, video recording/editing/writing, and graphic design. Graphic design was something I was always doing growing up on forums. In my early teens (00s) I was moderating and game mastering private online Lineage 2 servers. I was taking free commissions from randoms to design them signatures with any kind of imagery I could find at that time. I even have a really old Photobucket account lying around with some of it in there.

Being the guy who designed logos, banners, websites, etc. Really gave me the experience I needed after almost 4 years to feel like that is what I wanted to do with myself professionally.

No more 3 hour phone calls with no sales, No more shipping, No more front-end retail anything.

Just graphic design. The idea was a little daunting, but why not? A challenge was necessary. I wanted to see if I could hack it. Hell, I wanted to see if anyone would actually hire some dude with a high school degree and some college experience as an English major — with the audacity to call himself a graphic designer.

So like previously, which I neglected to mention — I had my wife (then girlfriend) and my wonderful mother comb through Craigslist for another job listing for me. There are some things I cannot very well apply myself to, and this is one of those things. I am so appreciative that I had their help at that time.

Another interview, this time much more thorough and professional.

We didn’t even start face to face. It all began with an email response asking me if I could schedule a phone interview. This is where my process about this became very important, I feel, and I could even ask my current co-worker and former boss that hired me to find out.

I responded to the email as quickly as possible with my open (unemployed) schedule at that point, we set up a time and I was excited. I didn’t look forward to it too much or think about it too much, I feel like that can mess me up. So I set my mind on other things until it was time.

The phone call went without a hitch. I am an introvert that absolutely despises the phone, I really dislike talking on it. There’s something about it that really fucks with me mentally and I am still unable to concisely put it to words. So despite that, I am able to very much ignore it for however long is necessary and present myself as I am, as someone who “wants” to be on the phone.

Brandi, the interviewer, ended the phone call telling me she was going to send me a graphic prompt to compare with the other candidates and she needed to have it from me by the end of the weekend.

She had it within the hour.

This was very important to me. I wanted her to know that I can work very fast when necessary but still provide quality work. That must have made an impression because here I am working at The Motorcycle Company as the Lead Graphic Designer closing in on 5 years later.

TMC is a Harley-Davidson Dealership group that manages 6 dealerships across the nation.

High Octane Harley-Davidson in MA

Palm Beach Harley-Davidson in FL

Rawhide Harley-Davidson in KS

Avalanche Harley-Davidson in CO

Riverside Harley-Davidson in CA

Huntington Beach Harley-Davidson in CA.

When I was hired by TMC they had just picked up their 3rd dealership (Avalanche) and were just starting to put together their dealership group because they knew it was only going to get bigger and harder to manage.

So again, I lucked into a situation at the very ground floor that gave me the opportunity to grow and succeed with the company.

I guess, the moral of this part of my story is that it is possible to be a successful college dropout. It just takes a hell of a lot of desire, starting low, working your way up by continuing to look for a better opportunity when it is time — and a dash of luck.

Make sure you learn to interview too. Legitimately, take an interviewing class. I took one in my senior year in high school and the lessons I learned were invaluable to me.

Don’t go to college just because you feel like you should based on societal, familial, or peer pressures.

If you are not ready, you are seriously not ready. It may just set you back a few years in other ways if you go when it isn’t time.

I don’t know if I will ever go back to school. I do know that I will be ready when I do.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Posted on by Trevor Elms · 16 Comments

Waking Up Bipolar.

“I am not bipolar, no matter how many doctors have attempted to diagnose me with it.”

– Myself, February 12th, 2009.

I am going to use this as a bit of a writing prompt for how things change over time. How a person can grow up and come to realize that just believing in something hard enough, isn’t going to make it true. This is a part of my story.

I am not bipolar. That was a fact.

The thing is, I am bipolar. I just wouldn’t or couldn’t admit it to myself due to a sense of pride, or something larger. A feeling that after my mental break with reality that I could still be a normal person. It was just a one time thing, I could pick myself up and go on going on in life like everything was normal.

And I did, and it was — except for that it wasn’t.

After completing out-patient and probationary treatment I didn’t take anything or talk to anyone for my bipolar for years. I kept at my job and my relationships with my then girlfriend (now wife) and family continuing to find opportunity after opportunity to find work and succeed. To an onlooker from the outside looking in, I’m sure everything was normal. I’ve gotten good at that — normal.

It’s inside though. It’s the roller coaster of two very associative emotions that constantly feed into each other in the worst of ways. I do not have typical bipolar, you see. I have bipolar 2 — this means that rather than regularly swinging between mania and depression I swing between anger and depression. I still have moments of mania, but it isn’t as frequent or as unmanageable as BP1. This is an extremely important distinction. Typically, with a lot of the anger I would regularly feel — I had just gotten used to hiding it from the rest of the world, or, at least not giving in to it outwardly. This would result in absolute eruptions about the smallest of things. In fact, I had two nicknames growing up, one “Meat”, which sticks to this day and came around purely because I don’t consider a meal a meal without it. The other however is less endearing, “Angry Man”.

I have bipolar 2 — this means that rather than regularly swinging between mania and depression I swing between anger and depression.

Angry Man came around when all stamping of every little micro-frustration just couldn’t be stamped down any more. I would erupt at something as small as someone asking me to pick up my things. I can’t think of a great example right now, because usually in those moments I could only see red and I no longer am able to think or control myself before I speak or act. It got me in trouble plenty of times.

My depression is not as strong as some other people, thankfully. It’s fairly easy for me to “ignore” in a way without medication. I used to like to describe myself in two ways. I had two emotions to share: ambivalence, or anger. The ambivalence is my depression. I just didn’t care, and don’t care about life and myself sometimes. Like it doesn’t matter.

But then, things all came crashing to a head one day.

I can’t remember the exact day precisely, but I know it was about two to two-and-a-half years ago. It was about 3:00 in the morning and I couldn’t sleep. Then a thought crossed my mind that hadn’t in quite some time.

“I should just kill myself. I know I have the balls to follow through, why the fuck not?”

This was, if I am remembering correctly, after a night where Megan and I did not get along very well. I believe there was something trivial she did that set me off and then we preceded to escalate on each other. This is a low point in my life because I think I came very close to hitting her that night.

So that exchange, coupled with my inherent nihilism and depression fueled by anger gave me the thought. Why not? There’s plenty of reasons why not that I don’t need to get into here, and what’s nice is I had plenty running through my head just after I asked myself that question. However that is a very serious question to ask oneself, for that to be a serious thought after nearly hitting my wife? I knew something was wrong with me.

So I went into the bedroom to wake Megan up and tell her I was concerned about myself.

Talking about my concern turned into “I want to kill myself and I think it’s time to talk to someone.”, but it wasn’t that clear. It was a different kind of eruption that I’m really not all that used to. An absolute deluge of tears and blubbering facial contortion while huddled in the fetal position grasping at my wife like lost child.

It was that night I realized that maybe my ambivalence was also me just stamping down my depression as well, and that was the first of what could be some very bad eruptions ending in the worst kind that affects everyone who loves us.

The next morning I looked into my health insurance and found a psychologist with good reviews nearby. I found someone who I felt based purely on a few lines of text and other superficial nonsense could mesh with me — so I went for it. I mentioned my suicidal thoughts and made an appointment as soon as possible.

When I got to see him we hit the ground running on those thoughts to find out the why, and evolved from there. In just a few sessions we did in fact settle on bipolar which I had been previously diagnosed with. However he was the very first to mention bipolar 2, cite its differences, and how they are relevant to my behavior in every day life.

“I want to kill myself and I think it’s time to talk to someone.”

My psychologist who I am still seeing about 4 times a year then referred me to my psychiatrist who worked with me on the long journey over a year through about 5 pills to find the exact one that would work for me. This is an adventure to say the least, and I will say that my prior drug history allowed me to have a very quick grasp on how different medications affected me. It also gave me a very clear idea of exactly the type of pill I wanted.

I wanted something that I could not feel or tell was in my system whatsoever. Couldn’t even tell a change in my behavior at all, but I wanted everyone else around me to be able to tell. And I found it, Trileptal, Oxcarbazepine, my magical Yin-Yang pill.

Magical is entirely the wrong word and right word at the same time.

Pills are not a magical fix for everything, or even anything. They aren’t magical and especially when it comes to mental health they are a tool in a wide breadth of tools within the box for someone to use. They do not and will not ever fix everything entirely, but they should if used correctly help make it easier for the person to function and be aware of themselves. I was even lucky in that I knew what I wanted and it only took me about 5 pills to get there. I just hope it doesn’t ever stop working.

Pills though are magical in that I often am truly far more in tune with my body and mind and am balanced to boot. Balance is something I have always really had difficulty with, and I always will. The balance that Oxcarbazepine has helped me be able to find along with family support has really made me feel like I am finally in a space where living in tandem with and being open about my bipolar is a healthy thing.

I just need our country and the world to understand that mental illness isn’t a disease that keeps us from being human, or functional, or caring. If there was less of a stigma maybe people would get more help.  I believe there is a vast majority of people out there with mental illness struggling because they are afraid of how they will be perceived. I can assure you it is much more freeing and healthy to just accept it and try to find a way to work with it.

This turned out to be much longer than I was originally intending, but it is an important subject to me.

I believe everyone should talk to a therapist, they don’t even need to be a psychologist.

We as imperfect human beings need an unbiased third party to just dump all our head trash that we don’t want to burden anyone else with. It’s unhealthy to keep those things inside — they can develop into worse problems if not taken care of.

So to bring this back around to the beginning, I went from being staunch about not being bipolar to coming to and understanding years later that it is okay to be so. If you need help, get it. Sometimes even if you don’t believe you need it.

National Suicide Help Line: Call 1-800-273-8255

Please call someone, anyone if you are having suicidal thoughts. Sometimes just talking to someone can make all the difference in the world.

©2017 Trevor Elms
Posted on by Trevor Elms · 4 Comments

Eulogy for Paul.

This is something I wrote on my birthday, October 24th, in 2015. This was just six days beyond the passing of my first cousin Paul, who shared my birthday with me and was exactly two years younger than me. It is also the day of his funeral.

He has been gone more than a year now, but I am still gripped by immense loss at times. I shared this both at the wake, and at Paul’s Viking funeral as well. Myself, Paul’s brother Kevin, and many of his friends built a Viking boat and burned it on the lake where Paul grew up.

It was something I know he would have loved.

Anyways, without further ado:

Eulogy for Paul (Birthday Buddy)

Hello, I am Trevor, and I am Paul’s cousin on his Mother’s side. Today is our birthday, and I feel a particular sadness — a vortex of misery and emptiness without my birthday buddy.

Paul Allen Perkins was one of the most genuine, kind, and thoughtful people we have ever had the pleasure to love in our lives. With all of us together, it has been wonderful to share stories about how helpful he was; how it all came straight from the heart.

There is too much to say, and Paul meant too much as a person to be able to appropriately use words to describe his impact on those around him.

Paul had a demeanor – a smile. One that could and would light up a room. You would have to experience it to understand it. I appreciate so much that we all have the ability to share knowing that feeling together.

Paul was an eagle scout, a craftsman, a mechanic, a metal head, a ladies man, and a loyal and true friend. Unfortunately there isn’t enough time to list off all the adjectives to describe Paul.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. How do you quantify a life? To say it is precious is almost an insult, there is nowhere near a powerful enough word to describe its worth.

We all are extremely lucky to have had every little moment we had in the life of Paul Perkins. It was not long, no. Tragically short – but it was full of love, laughter, adventure, and adrenaline. Paul took “live your life to the fullest” literally  and never looked back. We can all take solace in the fact that Paul passed as a happy man.

This… emptiness we all feel. This lack of understanding and inability at times to process a loss of this nature is a good thing. It may be odd to say that, or hear it – but it means that what Paul left behind is many good memories. He will be greatly missed and never forgotten.

Another aspect of our beloved Paul that we can celebrate is that we got to watch him transform from the innocent little boy who refused to grow up – into the assertive, passionate man he became. Paul had recently really discovered purpose in his life and was making steps to realize his dreams. As a young man, that is an incredibly important and wonderful step in life to take. We all have a window into Paul’s possibilities and they were endless. He was truly one of a kind.

I am so sorry to say that the world lost one of its best and brightest. We all must come to terms with that fact. And we have a long road ahead.

Happy Birthday Paul, we love you and miss you so much.

Paul
Paul Allen Perkins, 1991-2015
©2015 Trevor Elms