Something that I am becoming passionate about, equally as much as I am passionate about paleo, is dialectical behavior therapy. It is an equally important part of my health.

Dialectical behavior therapy is the only clincally proven way to cure borderline personality disorder. It involves a variety of journaling practices and thought exercises that are designed to teach you how to keep your emotions in a moderate happy medium, how to put fear in its proper box of context, and how to function in life. It involves learning how to be more assertive, when appropriate. It involves learning how to improve your physical health. It involves learning how to master new skills and hobbies that help you build your sense of yourself as a full, complete person. It involves things that probably come naturally to neurotyical people but that people with BPD need to explicitly be told and taught and need to practice.

I am making so much progress in therapy. The differences in conduct and character from the start of this month, when I was so sad I literally couldn't get out of bed, to today, when I was able to play lacrosse with some degree of spirit and vigor and when I was able to step back into my CrossFit gym, feels very rewarding. I still have a long way to go in terms of my self-development, but today was a very good sign that things are improving and getting better.

This article may be one of the hardest for me to write. Partly because I am tired, and partly because I have never really felt comfortable talking about this. So let's see how far I get before I zonk out and crash for the night.

So, my absolutely biggest, biggest, biggest, biggest failure in life is getting fired from Cornell University, which happened in 2015. Cornell was my very first job right out of college. I was supposed to graduate from college and then go be an assistant to the professors at a summer course on black studies and black art history at Cornell University. Then I was going to move to New Jersey with this kid Sammy, one of my best friends from high school, and start a grad school program in fashion studies at Parsons--The New School for Design. That plan kind of got thrown to the wind when, barely week into training for Cornell, I got fired.

It's been two years almost to the day exactly since the firing, and my life has honestly been a mess, an experience of aporia and anomia, since then. I have really struggled to know how to define myself, how to function and socialize, how to get up in the morning, how to really live since then. I have at times tried putting the Cornell experience on my resume, and I have at times tried the approach of taking it off my resume and hiding it. I have been so utterly confused and bewildered, not knowing what to do. Feeling very numb. Dissociating from reality. That means pretending that what is around you is not real, is not there. It's sad because I really spent most of 2016 honestly just hiding in bed and wishing I was not alive. It's only recently that I have started therapy and have started on a path toward reclaiming a healthier, more integrated self.

The essence of BPD, or borderline personality disorder, is that you had a fucked-up childhood experience, which I did, were chronically mishandled by your parents, which I was, and therefore have trouble socializing in a normal way as an adult, which I do. People with this condition have trouble finding the happy medium in friendships and relationships. We are either too intense, outpouring all of our emotions at once in a way that can be overwhelming for the other individual, or too internally dead and emotionally vacuous, devastated by experiences of rejection or perhaps closing ourselves off from other people for fear of being hurt again. I have been misdiagnosed as other things from time to time, but I am fairly certain that I have BPD.

I was fired from Cornell during one of my intense emotional outpouring phases. I remember feeling a lot of anger and having explosive outbursts that were upsetting to my coworkers and that definitely were not appropriate for someone who wanted to be in a role model/ leadership position like becoming a Cornell staffer/ junior faculty member. I consider this firing experience one of my biggest failures in life. It just wasn't part of the plan, and I don't fully know how to recover from it. Since the firing, I have transitioned from pursuing a career in fashion and art history to pursuing a career in finance. I am definitely on a path to earning way more money than I ever would have earned if I had continued on the path I was on before. I have gotten into one of the best universities in the world for graduate school. I have met new friends whom I am so grateful to have met. Yet I still have trouble accepting my life since Cornell as okay, as anything more than a cosmic freak accident.

BPD can be successfully treated and completely cured, that is the good news. The treatment for BPD is called dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT. I have a great therapist who is kind of walking me through the steps that are involved in DBT. One day Cornell will be a distant memory in the past. For now, though, yeah, it's one of my biggest failures and tragedies in life.

This is an article about the paleo diet, which is one of the most important principles in my life right now.

I decided to become paleo about one year ago, during summer '16, right before my 25th birthday. It's something that has really changed my life. I have not weighed myself in months, but I know that I have lost about four pant sizes in terms of my waist getting that much smaller. I know that, even without attending CrossFit very consistently, I am very proud of how my body and my abs are looking. I'd like to try and explain and uncover why paleo dieting is so important to me.

The essence of paleo, as I understand it, is to eat in a way that makes logical sense for our bodies. If you were to go into a field and try to grab some grain growing in the field and eat it just like that, the barbs on the exterior skin of the grain would hurt your body and attack your stomach and irritate your insides. Nature designs those grain-barbs as a natural protection for the growing plant, so animals won't come and eat it. The logic of paleo says that if grain is so bad for you in a natural state like that, then it probably is also bad for you in any form, no matter what kind of processing and cooking you do to it to put it in an edible form.

So paleo dieters are avoiding grain, avoiding processed food, and avoiding things that are generally bad for the body. I remember when my CrossFit coach first explained paleo to me. He was like, "Avoid processed food." And I was like, "Isn't cooking a process?" 

It's funny becuase in a way that's true. Cooking is a process, especially when you do things like add a lot of excess sugar to food or extract sugar from the fiber in fruit or things like that. I guess paleo is not this absolutely ideological pure return to nature and eating food purely as it is found in nature. If you want and are into that kind of thing, there are blogs on the internet about how to be paleo in terms of making your own shampoo or soap or toothpaste from natural materials instead of buying it from the store, but that's not an extreme that I am ready to go to--not now or not probably ever. I take pleasure most especially in avoiding grain and avoiding added sugar, the two main nutritional culprits that I feel contribute to the epidemic of American obesity.

Something that I feel is cool about paleo and that I feel is only stated implicitly, but never explicitly, on paleo blogs, is that from the standpoint of this paradigm, not only are a lot of people overweight, but even people who have what you would call a normal or healthy weight are still also visibly suffering from the effects of grain-induced inflammation. It's like if you were to eat something that was outright spoiled or poisonous, your face and your body would obviously swell up and stuff right, as your bod tries to fight off the toxins. Well that is what grain and sugar do to you on a minor level. Think about it: when you look at people who are really, really athletic and fit with low body fat, their faces are super chiseled. The rest of us are on a gradient of different levels of inflammation compared to that. 

I feel like being paleo successfully is probably my biggest success of the past year. That, or getting into Georgetown and passing the GMAT. I've heard it said that ninety percent or more of diets fail. I guess I've gotten really lucky that I have found a diet that works for me, then. A diet that makes so much sense. Something I take a lot of pleasure in right now is cooking recipes out of the cookbook "Paleo Takeout." I don't recommend this book for beginners but only for intermediate or advanced level paleo people. The author is kind of a non-traditional, cavalier paleo guy. He eats rice, etc. So you will want to get a feel for the diet yourself first and know what your personal boundaries and non-negotiable limits are as far as what you will and will not eat. Then you can go forward and interpret what he says as you will.

So, yeah. Hi. I think it's a good idea for me to have a blog and to write things. 

I read a New Yorker article recently about the end of the era of the online personal essay. The premise of the essaay was that during the Obama years, it was really common for people to write these long, indulgent articles about themselves online. About their personal struggles, about their journeys, about their nuances, whatever. In many ways these articles were the logical culmination of the LiveJournal/ Xanga/ Tumblr fads of the 2000s. But now, during the Trump era, when people are so focused on the serious and often problematic events in the news, the personal essay has mostly faded into obscurity. Websites like Thought Catalog, BuzzFeed.com, and LongReads are becoming less popular. Gawker is an example of a personal essay website that has altogether died out. 

I agree with the thesis of that article. I myself am a product of the online personal essay era. I had a Xanga. I had a LiveJournal. I had a Tumblr. I loved reading longreads articles on lazy Sundays when I was in college.  I thought it was normal and okay to share so much about yourself online. It was reflecting on the repercussions of the end of that era that led me to start this website. I wrote a lot of personal essays on the internet during the past five years or so, and I feel like they are outdated both in their form, i.e. the literary form of the online personal essay, as well as in their content, i.e. conflicted attempts to carve out a nonconformist position within Mormonism. The culmination of that was probably 2013, when this guy at Harvard wrote his undergraduate journalism thesis on me, about my life. I thought it as so cool at the time--like, wow, a guy at Harvard is writing about me!--but now I feel so humiliated and embarassed. I think my Mormon self was really ugly, while in some ways I'm sure I was just as confused as lots of kids at BYU, it's a shame that my struggles in particular are public fodder  for mass consumption on the internet.

When I look at my online landmark, my digital signature, well, 90 to 95% of what you find about me on the internet involves some sort of discussion of race, gender, and/or sexuality within Mormon culture. I no longer identify as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I've come to identify as bisexual rather than gay, I'm pursuiing a career in finance now rather than art history, and I've been doing the paleo diet and have been the member of a CrossFit box for almost a full year now. It's kind of uncomfortable for me to see a digital version of myself, enshrined on Google from four or five years ago, that no longer reflects the person whom I am in the present.  I wish I could just snap my fingers and instantly create a digital footprint that actively reflects who I am in 2017, but I know I can't just snap my fingers and do that right away. So this website is a modest investment in the idea that I can one day reclaim my digital signature and build the online identity that actually reflects myself and who I am.