ACCORDING TO ZAC

I feel like I’m at an intersection with a bunch of crossroads and exactly no idea what road looks even a little bit better than any of the other ones. Normally I find people in situations like this really unbearable. Can someone truly have no opinion about where they want their life to take them? Is it really that hard to make a decision and trust that it can get cleaned up if it doesn’t go as planned? But now I’m that exact person, and it’s not a great time. It’s interesting to consider my indecision, but perhaps more interesting to consider where that indecision comes from (does it sound like I’ve been in therapy a long time?). I think I’m needlessly worried that I’ll be seen as some kind of failure if I make a choice I have to back out of later. Who wants to eat crow? There’s some worry about how people might perceive me if I make a big life change they weren’t expecting. I also feel like this might be the first time that I need to make some decisions where there’s less immediate sa...

It’s Sunday night and I can’t sleep. I’m mad about it. But I should have known this would happen; I took a nap at 3:30 this afternoon. As I’ve lain here, my brain keeps going over a surprising situation I’ve found myself in (that I won’t be chronicling in detail here… yet?). It’s something I’m completely surprised by, something I wasn’t planning, yet something I’ve speculated on for a number of years. It also happens to be something I have prayed about but haven’t really found any answers. For many elements of my life I love to use trial and error and know that the Big Guy is waiting in the wings in case things go sideways. Then He and I work to find a better route. However, this is something I was hoping He’d give me the nod for. All I’ve gotten is radio silence. In replaying the last two weeks and forecasting the one ahead, I somehow had a memory pop up from 2015. It was the last summer I lived in Tucson, and we befriended two guys who had moved into our ward for the season. I though...

For a minute there, I was mad at my therapist. Not for a breach of confidence or any other kind of unprofessional behavior. No, I was mad at him because he’s right, and he has been for the better part of the three years I’ve been working with him. Change is hard, and the process to develop personally can be grueling. But even if I was mad, it’s not lost on me how lucky I am that I’ve got a trained professional to help me through it all. Most remarkable about what I’m realizing isn’t that this guy has been right all along—I knew he had credentials and a wealth of experience at the outset—it’s that he has allowed this process to be mine , even if it probably (certainly) prolonged the outcome. He has let me move at the pace that’s appropriate for me, even though the path through this maze has probably looked pretty clear from his vantage point. While the endpoint, the goal of getting through this maze, was why I started working with him, the fact that he didn’t dictate anything has meant ...

Because of who I am (gregarious, emotion-driven, etc.), I’m predisposed to become emotional when I watch other people doing something cool. And usually it’s emotional in a good way, thankfully. And sometimes it feels sort of cosmic, or like there’s this great big interconnectedness between complete strangers that I can only catch a glimpse of every now and then. Instead of making me feel small, given how many people there are in the world, it actually makes me feel like I’m right where I’m supposed to be by virtue of the commonality I share with literally every person on the planet: we’re all human, and we’re all trying. Yesterday I went to my first concert since last 2019. The screaming was fun, the singing was great, we didn’t get trampled in the pit like I thought we would. There was a lot of good happening! But I think what was most significant was early on in the band’s set when I thought about how incredible it is that there were a few thousand people in one place for the same re...

It’s not uncommon for there to be lulls in conversation during my sessions with my therapist. Sometimes they feel like a bit of a standoff to see who will fill the void first; those are the days that I’m not feeling as introspective, or our previous conversation hasn’t sparked much for me to sort through. But other times the quiet helps me make some sense of what I’m feeling (or reel from being confronted with something I don’t know how to make sense of) and then decide what to jump into next. This week there was one of these pauses, and I’ll admit that I didn’t feel like I was really working through much. But I wanted to wait out the break to make the doc determine the direction we would go. It’s a tricky game of chicken because he will either ask me, “What are you thinking about?”, and that doesn’t always work on a day I don’t have much bouncing around my brain, or he’ll ask me a question that cuts right through me. It feels like there’s absolutely no in-between. This week he leaned ...

Stanely Tucci is a national treasure, and I won’t hear otherwise. The Devil Wears Prada was probably the first time he came on my radar, but his role in Easy A sealed the deal for me. Caesar Flickerman in The Hunger Games ? The icing on top. I just want to be friends with them in real life. Stan (we’re on a first name basis, obviously) stars in Supernova alongside Colin Firth, and together they tore my heart out, ripped it up, put it back together, tore it apart some more, but then mostly mended it and gave it back to me. That’s pretty much exactly how I like my books and films because it helps me keep in touch with my own humanity. It’s a harrowing process, but one I think is really important. “Do I still have feelings? Am I still a person?” I’ll muse. And then a piece of media will knock me on my ass. “So I guess that’s a yes.” The premise of this film is that Stan and Colin are lovers, one of whom is living with early onset dementia. And that’s pretty much it; that’s the plot. Yo...

Once upon a time I moved to Mesa to learn how to be a functioning member of society (aka not be a leech on my dad’s seemingly unending generosity). I got a full time job, started cooking for myself, and navigated living with roommates. The other thing I did was build a social circle for myself. The other groomsmen are cropped out because they didn't time their jumps right. Another testament to the power of our friendship. On my first day in my new ward, I sat next to a guy in the “New Member” class. His name was Derek. Because we didn’t know anyone else there, he and I stuck together through those first few activities as we met new folks and figured things out. As I got acquainted with more and more of the members in my ward, I made friends and met cool people, but it seemed like I’d struck it best with Derek on day one. Fast forward a few months and Derek was assigned to be my home teacher with a guy named Eric. They came to visit me like the good men they are and Derek and I deci...