2023: The Year to Row

If there’s no wind, row.

It’s a proverb that my therapist likes to use to remind me that if I’m feeling stuck, or not loving how my life is going I have the opportunity to change it. It was a reminder I needed during my 2022 end-of-the-year visit.

At the time, I was feeling particularly down with the lack of progress in my life. From love to writing I felt stuck with little opportunity moving my boat down its metaphorical riverbed. I could feel the breeze as time passed me by.

What was making me feel stuck?

For starters, I had been out of the closet for several years and no guy had swept me off my feet. I had tried every dating app imaginable and felt like I was suffering from carpal tunnel from the amount of swiping left I was doing. When I finally found a guy that piqued my interest that earned the rank of an in-person date, I’d hear stories of car repossessions, or fall out of favor because I owned my own house (yes, you read that right). There was even a guy who knew a friend of mine from high school but quickly disclosed he hated him and his entire family — yikes. Don’t get me wrong there were also the occasional great dates that left me hearing the “it’s not you, it’s me” excuse that made me want to scream.

As if the thought-provoking rowing metaphor wasn’t enough my therapist decided to throw in a question that would shape what 2023 would look like for me.

“What would you want your life to look like if you don’t find a partner?”

Insert gut punch here. To think that the one thing I wanted more than anything in my life — to build a life with someone special — may not be in the cards for me was a tough pill to swallow.

But instead of sending me down a spiral of panic that I may have decades of solitude ahead of me, I felt a sense of freedom. I began to think of how I’d spend my time, places I’d go, priorities I’d carve out — really what I would want in my life if a partnership wasn’t to come to fruition.

That’s when the epiphany hit. Maybe I wasn’t finding love because I wasn’t where I needed to be in order to fall in love. There were many facets of my life where I felt stuck, and maybe I needed to get them moving in order to be in a better, stronger, more content place with myself.

The dating conversation helped me realize one thing — I was completely disconnected from the gay community. Aside from a few solitary gay friends, most of whom now lived in other cities, I was mainly surrounded by heterosexual family and friends. I wanted to feel a sense of belonging to a community I was now part of and to really understand who I was as a gay man.

I thought it would be even more important to create friendships with other gays. While I love my straight friends, with the shared experience of sexual identity lacking, I tend to feel like the perpetual outsider. Making new friendships would not only increase the odds I may meet a partner, but more importantly, I could start to participate in this vibrant and wonderful community I identified with.

I made a concentrated effort to hit the emergency brake on dating and instead invest my time and energy into quality gay friendships. It was nice to pivot from disaster dates, to more intentional connections. It also helped that conversations I was having weren’t solely devoted to sex and dating.

Thanks to some nudging from friends, I was putting myself in more gay spaces in order to meet people. I also ended up volunteering for Buffalo Pride that not only had me meeting so many incredible humans, but feeling a sense of pride in who I was and why I was there.

When I think back to the new friends I’ve gained this last year, it’s quite unbelievable. To know where I was a year ago — feeling like I was window shopping my gayness and not actually trying the clothes on — to today — where the gay friends I’ve made are an abundance of quality and quantity — is unbelievable. I don’t write this as a brag because for me quality overrides quantity. I’ve just been fortunate that in putting myself out there with the intention to build community, that I have expanded my friendship circle to include some really remarkable people.

This wasn’t always easy. I had to learn to set boundaries (another blessing in disguise) and realize that sometimes flirting and friendliness can be hard to distinguish. Some had a hard time understanding why I wanted to pull back from dating, but it reaffirmed my own desires for personal growth and greater connection. When you’re gay and looking to make friends with other gay men, the lines get easily blurred between platonic and romantic intentions.

I needed to reinforce to some that I was only looking for friendship, even when it may have felt hard or uncomfortable with the feeling that I was ‘hurting’ someone else. I quickly learned that setting boundaries is the kindest thing we can do for one another. It also meant taking time away from what I was used to doing and reinvesting it elsewhere. This led to feeling disconnected at times with family and friends, but ultimately a practice in allowing me to put myself first.

While my rowing for this year was predominately set on building community, and creating my own sense of belonging, there were smaller ways I’d utilize the ‘rowing’ mentality.

I set reading and writing challenges for myself to boost my creativity. I participated in a weeklong creative nonfiction challenge of writing 100-word creative nonfiction stories each day. It exposed me to a different writing style and forced additional creativity to write a story of exactly 100 words — no more, no less. I did a reading challenge to expose myself to all sorts of genres, but also books to inspire the stories I want to write. And complimenting the “what if a partner isn’t in the cards?” mentality, I kicked the year off with a solo trip to Fort Lauderdale. Yes, it is intimidating to travel solo, and to be at a bar or restaurant by yourself, but it forced me out of my comfort zone. It was also a low-risk trip to be in Florida and not Buffalo in January. These small practices helped me to set more intentionality on my writing, and to lean in to creating a life I want whether or not a partnership comes along.

Then came the moment I had to row because I had no choice. In early September I lost my job. Despite feeling content at work and crushing my goals, the volatile tech world, the messiness of mergers and acquisitions and constantly changing leadership led to my first ever pink slip. I had never been let go from a job before. I had always left one opportunity to find a better one.

I worried about bills and health insurance as I had to think about what to do without my usual income. Luckily for me, I listened to my gut, which told me layoffs were coming. I quickly landed a new job that is already proving to give me more opportunity than I had before. In having to update resumes, network with recruiters, and be on a hunt for what I wanted next, I learned that there are also times life forces you to row whether you like it or not.

The theme of ‘rowing’ has shown me that life doesn’t always hand you everything you want with a nicely tied bow, in fact it rarely does. When I was prompted to think about my life independent of anyone else, I really was jolted into a mindset of creating opportunity. Whether it was community, creativity or just plain old fun, I started living with more intentionality. It’s something that can be hard to see as you navigate the trenches, but when you’re on the other side and can look back at what you’ve accomplished, it’s hard to not feel a sense of pride of where you’ve come from and a curiosity for what’s still in store.