I started caring about my career when my girlfriend dumped me in 2005.
Yes.
April 2005 is when everything changed.

If I do the math correctly, it’s right around 1,000 days ago.
It’s a trip how 1,000 days can spell
a world
of transformation.

Rewind to a time when urgency was less apparent.
I was about to graduate college, I was about to move into a nice Berkeley apartment with ridiculously cheap rent, I was about to start my new stable career at a non-profit I liked, and I had just met a girl that I was quite content with being all about.

So just to clear things up, I wasn’t dumped in April, that’s when I met the girl. The relationship ended in July. Yeah. The whole shindig lasted something shy of 3 months, but that had seemed to be enough to absorb me completely into a reality that I would spend a good amount of time afterward plucking myself from.

Perhaps it was the timing, perhaps it was her. It could have been that meeting a new person and immediately falling in love matched with the new job, and new home, and new chapter in life as a speck in this universe. Or it could just as well have been the way her skintone reflected in the moonlight. Either way, something happened so that within 90 days I had acquired into my vocabulary words such as “infinity.”

Just 1,000 days ago, aspirations to tour the world and read poetry were far from my thoughts. During that time, I had weighed in all of my passions for the relationship. I was convinced that I had met Eternity, and she was a jewelry maker from Stockton. And she had taught me what existence was, and as a result I would shape my own existence around her. It was a time when love inebriated thicker than granddaddy purp, and I had taken a hit straight to the dome. Exhale. There was no need to desire more, and my poems lay dormant in my fingertips and I didn’t trip that I was uninspired to write, because who needed poems about revolution when I had found mine already. iLL-Literacy, and my job, and other such little things were side projects to the love I was set on spending the rest of my life building.

I had cartons of soymilk that lasted longer than that relationship. As abruptly as I had found myself locked in foreign arms, I found myself getting used to waking up alone again. But I had somehow managed to plug it to enough facets of my life that her departure left me in a blackout. So what does one do when he’s committed so much of his universe to his relationship that even the sky reminds him of her? Naturally and inevitably I began picking at my life, embodying new rituals, creating new secrets in order to survive in my obstacle course of love’s artifacts. I needed plugs. And to fill the voids I obsessed myself with work, and art, and everything that I was convinced would have thrived so much more had I never been in that ill-fated relationship in the first place.

I found myself awake late at night checking emails, and MySpace, and AIM, and anything else my box would give me. The one step lower to calling people and possibly establishing some kind of human connection—because really, it wasn’t about that. I didn’t want to talk to them. I was waiting for something else. For the highlight of my day.

Whatever that something else was, it kept me up, anticipating it. Nervous for it, like I might miss it if I closed my eyes too early each night. I couldn’t miss out on anything else. After all, how much had I let pass by during those 3 months I had my head stuck in the sand?

One morning in September I was startled awake at 6am by a phone call whose caller ID had like 13 digits in its number. Drowsily, I answered. It was Paris. It was 6am, and I was being informed that iLL-Literacy’s first professional show was going to take place in France. I was very juiced. So juiced in fact, that I probably focused solely on the fact that my friends and I were going to Europe, and we were doing really well as artists starting out, and I completely ignored the fact that a seed was planted in my head right next to the one that had already sprouted tall enough to keep my eyelids open for hours on end each night.

From that point on, I wasn’t even waiting for something anymore, I was just waiting. But by that point I had celestialized my relationship to such an extent, that even that night in September I found myself still clicking away at my computer, still like a watchman on patrol for Fate. And that’s all there was really left to do—wait. For something like a big break in my career, or my anonymous soulmate to call me and tell me that I didn’t have to worry about anything anymore. But of course, that was just unrealistic (unrealistic like getting a random phone call from Paris, right?).

So like I said, I didn’t care about my career until the relationship ended. I didn't have the perception to. And I don’t blame the success that followed suit as much on me completely enveloping myself into my work as I do on the fact that it’s horrifically noticeable when someone’s violently trying to separate himself from someone who fucked him up big time. But regardless, the entire experience with said person heaved me away from a complacency in life that I had possessed even long before I met her. The end of the relationship awakened me from more than just love’s intoxication, I realized the passivity I intrinsically had in life itself.

I eventually figured out that art, the love of another person, or anything else wasn’t going to ever fill the voids I felt in the loss of my relationship. I needed to fill those myself, and in the meantime use the rest of my energy in building mountains with other people and things in my life. I imagine that if it were the other way around and I could no longer write poetry, even meeting my soulmate wouldn’t satiate the loss of that other love of my life.

So it’s been around 1,000 days and depending on who’s evaluating, some might say that I still haven’t gotten over—I still catch myself in the wee hours of the morning typing and reading and responding away. But it’s become more of a bad habit than anything else, and I accept that as a part of my life right now. Like I said, things have changed—in the way I live, view life, and behave in my day. Just like how it did after the relationship before, which had me obsessed with salvaging every particle of the present moment. Or the relationship before that one, which hurled me into a frenzy of writing sad love poems, which eventually spawned my love for poetry in the first place. Every relationship, or milestone experience, or moment at all for that matter, changes absolutely everything.

During the moments in between—when you’re learning to handle, deal with, overcome—that’s where you find life.

Good night.