I was born and raised in North Carolina, in the heart of the U.S. Southeast. It’s the kind of place where faith, family, and kindness shaped everything for many of us growing up in the 80’s. In my childhood home, love and discipline went hand in hand, where doing “the right thing” meant obedience to God’s Word. And while my religious beliefs have changed over time, those early lessons gave me roots that have both grounded and challenged me in the years since.
For more than twenty-six years, I’ve worked in the software technology industry — wearing just about every engineering-focused hat along the way: software engineer, engineering manager, leader/director, and consultant. It’s a field that rewards constant learning, adaptability, and persistence. In many ways, it mirrored my own professional evolution. Success came, but somewhere along the way, I realized that “successful” didn’t always mean fulfilled.
Life has a way of humbling us into clarity. Leaving the belief system of my youth in my 20’s and divorce in my 40’s led to two separate periods of deep personal identity crisis. My strong, stable career, I believe, was sabotaged without reason or clear explanation, forcing me to adapt to a new professional path. Add in recent health struggles that reminded me of my own age and mortality, and it wasn’t hard to understand that the wake-up calls were getting louder and louder. Each situation stripped away various noises that rang in my head, leaving me face-to-face with questions I’d avoided for years: Who am I without career titles, a religion, a spouse, “success”? What really matters? What does it mean to live fully alive? What does it mean to be “me”? I do not yet know the full answers to these questions, but they are where I keep my focus, curiosity, and experimentation.
Here’s what I do know today: I’m a father of two young children who teach me more about patience, curiosity, and joy than any person, book, movie, video, post, or job ever could. And when I’m not working or with my family/friends, I find peace in painting, hiking, mountain biking, kayaking, or just getting lost in good music, art, or a movie. These things have shown themselves to carry meaning in my life and make it feel more full, but I believe it’s partly because they are the times when I’m also focused on myself. They, combined with the special people in my life, are the things that get me out of the funk of living a life on daily repeat. Of living a life that otherwise seems rather stagnant.
What I also know now is that I’m on a mission to revive my life. And I’ve learned that revival isn’t one big event that I can set as a New Year’s Resolution and be done with it in months. It’s a series of small, honest choices to show up differently each day. To experiment and see what sits right with who I am and want to be. To acknowledge and yet learn from my mistakes. To find peace in understanding that there is no “me” that is not always changing in some way. So, this mission is what I refer to as my Reviving Life Project.
This space, and the work I’m doing, are my way of documenting that process. Not because I believe myself to be some expert guru who is going to provide answers to anyone else with how to deal with their own struggles, but as someone walking the same imperfect, beautiful path as everyone else. And who wants to capture that journey as something that I, and those special people in my life, can reflect on.