About Me

(last updated November 11, 2024)

Hey folks, thanks for visiting my little journal/blog/make-the-world-a-better-place website… thing. 😊

If there’s anything I’d want you to know about me, it’s that more than anything, I want to make a difference for good everywhere I go. I want the world to be a better place for my having been born–for every person’s life to be brighter when I’m around, and for every place to be better because I was there.

I want to spend my whole life encouraging, inspiring, lifting, loving, and serving every person with whom I come in contact. I want to be an influence for love and peace and light, and as many other good things as I can be, as far and as wise as I possibly can. 🥰

I also want to be the very best person that I’m capable of being. I want to be kind, compassionate, gentle, understanding, humble, and filled to overflowing with love for every living person and creature on this earth.

These, greatest of all my desires, are my dream, my passion, my hope, my heart… my life.

🥰

Though I have these dreams (and have had them for a good chunk of my life, if not all), I am very much a work in progress: I still struggle to live up to my own ideals, and while I’ve tried to do many very good things in my life, I’ve also done bad things as well.

My hope is that I can make amends for any and all of the bad things that I’ve done and spend the rest of my life just… lifting the world.

🤞😊

And that brings me to this blog:

I hope that by sharing my life, my thoughts, and my experiences via this blog–the good, the bad, the beautiful, and the ugly–that this blog can be a means of lifting the world, of comforting those who are struggling, of helping people feel understood and loved. I hope it can be a resource of hope and strength and courage for all who might find themselves in pain of any kind. I hope that, at the very least, it’s a source to help others feel that they are not alone.

I hope to pass on to the other side having left the people who knew me or knew of me feeling understood, safe, and loved for who they are, where they are–petals, thorns, and all.

So that’s the most important stuff. 🙂

Other potentially interesting details:

I’ve been a paperboy, a missionary, a salesman (briefly), a student (spent time at three different colleges/universities 😶), a teacher, a freelance writer, a customer service/tech support person, a mason’s assistant, a car detailer, and a car mechanic… (might be missing some things 🤷).

What else…

I’ve had the great privilege of having been able to travel all over the United States and the world (I think I’ve maybe been to 45ish of the 50 states, 20ish countries, and 6 continents), though some of those countries only very briefly (I’ve only been inside an airport in Australia, for example. 🙃)

I have lots of fun stories and experiences, ranging from the exciting to the embarrassing to the harrowing. 🙂

Let’s see… added up over time, I’ve spent probably 2 years of my life living in a car 🚗 (gratefully, by choice).

I’ve generally been a devout Christian (despite my many personal failings in that effort), specifically a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints; But for the last handful of years, I’ve been struggling with my faith in God. I’ve been all in, and I’ve been mostly… out. I’ve turned my face toward God, and I’ve turned angrily away.

Currently, I’m… somewhere in between. 😅

Sadly, I’ve turned from being an energetic, positive, passionate person (at least I think I was?) to being more of a discouraged, worn out cynic 😞 — allowing the feelings that came and still come with a number of long-lasting really difficult and challenging experiences to take root and eventually dominate.

😞

But I’m working on it.

I’m fighting. 💪

I’m now in my [gulp] 40s. 😶 I’m single. I’ve never been married. I have no children.

That’s actually been… really hard. Loneliness runs deep.

That’s one of those really challenging things I mentioned above.

The greatest desire that I had in this world, other than the tippy tippy big ones that I mentioned above, was to have my special someone at my side all day everyday–from now to forever–as we, together, gave our entire hearts, souls, and lives–united as one–to love and serve and lift the world and each other in every way we were able.

[sigh]

That’s my picture-perfect life.

Unfortunately, it’s not reality. 🙃 What is reality is that not only do I lack the companion I long for, I qualify to be the third installment of The 40-Year-Old Virgin trilogy. 😆

What is also reality is that I recently moved out of the country house that I had been living in for the previous 8ish years, moving my little butt into a 2000 Ford e250 high-top van. 🚐

#vanlife 🙃

His name is Rover 😊

There’s no running water and no refrigerator and nothing to cook with 🙃, but it’s shelter and transportation all in one. 😊

And that works out just fine, as though I have been living in Arkansas since 2016, I’m feeling the winds of change… most likely sending me back out west. 🧭

I don’t know where I’m going yet, but it’s time to leave behind everything else that I’ve done in my life, work wise, and to finally start the community-building organization that I’ve wanted to start for much of my adult life and that I’ve talked and talked about but never done anything about.

The only thing that would keep me in Arkansas, at this point, would be if I feel like this is the best place to start that organization. Otherwise, I’ve realized (now that I’m not working gazillions of hours every week, year after year) that Arkansas just isn’t a place where I can simply relax and be outdoors when I’m not working.

Being outdoors, away from human creations, is my haven, my heaven… my home.

But I’m Arkansas, the humidity… the heat… the ticks… the chiggers… they’re too much. I can’t just sit on the ground and relax and enjoy this beautiful world.

And that’s… hard on my already struggling soul, to feel like there’s no place I can rest.

So I’m heading out on the road. 😊

Gratefully, one of the things that helps make my lifting-the-world dreams more possible than ever before is the job I was able to get in January workingas an online mechanic, helping to answer customer’s questions via chat and phone calls.

Though I’m not making anywhere near as much money as I was before, I can work when I want and where I want, which is the perfect combination to be able to pay for the necessities of life while having the flexibility to get this organization off the ground and do my best to… change the world. 🙃

The time is now.

After sevenish years busting my body as a mechanic, and after years and years of talking and talking about leaving all that behind and starting my little organization, it’s time to get rolling. 😎

I’m feeling a little excited. 🙂

And scared. 😅

So anyway, that’s where things are right now. 🙂

I hope this little blog thing is a blessing to you.

Feel free to send me messages, ask me questions, make comments–whatever you’d like. The blog part is just about my life, the things I believe, the things I’m learning, and it, hopefully, chronicles some good things I’ve tried and will continue to try to do to lift the world.

As far as the contents are concerned, I want to be completely transparent with everything in my life, but that’s hard when there are other peoples’ lives intertwined with mine, and I want to respect their privacy even when I’m not really concerned about my own.

Accordingly, I can’t be completely transparent without risking injuring others, but to the degree I can share without causing harm to others, I will.

I hope that by sharing just about everything, from my triumphs, to even the deepest, darkest, most “shameful” parts of my life, that it will help others to know they’re not alone, that we can be good people and still struggle with challenging and embarrassing things.

If you’re reading this and you feel I’ve wronged you in any way, if there are amends I need to make, please send me a message, and I’ll do my best to mend what I’ve broken.

I really do mean that.

It’s my goal to leave every person and every place better than I found them. I hope I can do the same for you.

My love to all of you.

Lift the World.

~ Stephen

P.S. If you’d like to learn a little bit more about me and my life, click on the links below at your leisure. I think I wrote most of them while I was a bit sad, so please forgive any negative undertone. I will be going back through each one periodically to make edits in an effort to provide the most-accurate representation of my life that my memory is capable of 😊.

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