Nic Wasbotten

The New Year is upon us and I have been thinking about resolutions. I’ve been thinking about how exactly I want to be spending my time, my resources, my energy, my life. I have a friend who has claimed to be living his dream, yet all I see is pain and agony. I hear the struggles of this person and wonder if he can see the answers as clearly as I can. And then it hits me, he can’t. Just like I can’t see the answers that are directly in front of me. I’ve spent a lot of time pretending to be all the things I am not, so much time that I begin to believe I could actually be those things. Sober. Mentally sound. Financially stable. Emotionally secure. Triathlete. Facility director. Good brother. Loyal. The list does go on, and some of those things are even true. Some of those roles are simply masks that I put on to continue forward momentum. Does that make them wrong? 

I faked sobriety for nearly two years before I got it right, in the meetings I have attended it would seem that those two years didn’t count. The time that I spent trying to be sober and failing, learning to cope with emotions, learning to cope with life, all of that doesn’t add to my “sober date”. July 23rd, 2018, is the last day alcohol touched my lips. But October 27th, 2017, was the first time I truly decided that I wanted to change my life and be sober. It was sometime in early 2016 that I realized I actually had a problem with alcohol. And it wasn’t until May 12th, 2019, that I realized I also had a problem with marijuana. It wasn’t until the pandemic hit that I learned my methods to replace my drinking and drug use were actually also just another vice disguised as healthy. 

So now that the New Year is here, I want to try not faking it. For the first time in my life being honest with myself and the people closest to me. I’ve always tried to write about things that matter to other people, try and capitalize on an industry that is built off people “trying to do better”. The health industry just isn’t doing it for me. The social media influencers that seem to post about the hottest topics, I wonder how much of that is just other people faking it till they make it. 

I used to be obsessed with guy who posted mountain bike videos on YouTube. One day, I was watching a video and heard about someone who spent all of their time being a “content creator” and they didn’t even enjoy the content they were creating. Mountain biking was my life and I couldn’t imagine a cooler life than traveling around the country biking and filming iconic trails and riding bikes with people. It hit me, people fake it. People fake things so that it can become their reality. 

I don’t know what I’m most passionate about. I spent a lot of time trying to mold myself into a box that could be captioned and capitalized on and that box just kept changing. My interests change. My hobbies change. One day I am a mountain biker, the next I am a snowboarder, the next day I am taking apart a water pump for a pool. My interests and hobbies and life are ever evolving and it is impossible to try and fit into a box. 

So maybe 2022 isn’t about discovery or finding the real me, maybe 2022 is about accepting it. Today I am sober. Today I am vegan. Today I am me, and that is okay.