My Decoder Ring
A little about myself
Disclaimer
I am the definition of over-thinker and I have a fear of not being able to effectively communicate things that I think are of significant importance. As a result, I am going to more often than not over explain, provide superfluous context, etc. Sorry in advance. In that vein, I want to explain why this is what the first post will be.
I am going to be diving in head first into a lot of stuff people really care about. I intend to stir some shit up. I believe that I have been provided with an understanding of God. But I am a human that is bound by time. I do not have the ability to truly understand multiple worldviews. So whatever I am going to say will have those biases in it. It will be based out of me and my life experience and the resulting understanding of the world. I want to provide the cheat sheet to de-Matthew-ify whatever truth I have. Not only do I have a culture and time period “rind” to whatever potency truth I have to give, I am also crippled by my sin and stupidity. So again the point of this is to use as a guide to deconstructing my ideas to hopefully get a more concentrated understanding of God.
Early life
I grew up lower middle class in the 90s and 00s. I never needed anything growing up material wise, but I definitely did not have a lot of access to things a lot of my friends did. Video games, people. My mom became a Christian sometime from when I was two to when I was five. I could ask her specifics but I’m too lazy. We moved to the town where she met the friend that facilitated the process when I was two and I prayed a prayer when I was five. So that’s my math on that. I grew up in the church. The one caveat I would put on that is that my parents were new Christians and my brother was 8 and I was 5. Sister would be born in 2 years. They/my mom defaulted to better safe than sorry and there was a significant difference to what normal was as they continued to learn how much they did not know about very serious stuff like spiritual warfare, giving the devil footholds, etc. There was a definite period of cultural sheltering in my childhood and I was hardcore into Christianity. Telling my friends about Jesus in elementary school. AOL screen name in middle school was JesusFreak50922. I was completely bought in.
There was also some significant trauma happening to the family from my dad. When I was in college I worked at a summer camp. In staff training we were learning about child abuse and how to recognize it in our campers. That’s when I realized that I suffered emotional abuse from my dad because I had like 10 out of the 15 signs and symptoms when I was a kid. When I was getting discharged from my group therapy because I missed to many days in 2019, one of the facilitators told me to look into growing up with a parent with borderline personality disorder. That was the first time I was able to name what I had gone through as a kid. I knew it was not ok but I didnt know how/why. I didn’t take myself out of the cycle of stupidity until I was 15-16 sometime in my sophmore year of high school. He then left our family and moved out March of my junior year.
Middle/High School
This trauma and my faith came to a head in middle school. I did not like myself, would do anything to be accepted socially, did not care about school like I did previously, would eventually quit swimming, was a late bloomer puberty wise so I was fat with long hair, braces, and glasses, etc.
In hindsight this was my first major depressive episode. But I had multiple sources telling me I was messed up, most of them me. Add onto that struggling with porn, and my spiritual life was a lot different than I thought it should have been/was taught it should have been. I read a crap ton of sexual sin scripture, prayed my butt off but nothing changed. I was still a socio-emotional wreck, spiritually broken because I couldn’t stop sinning even when I knew it was bad and overall completely dissatisfied with life.
Sometime between 8th and 9th grade, I made the decision to turn my back on God. Every testimony I had heard was the archetypal cliche; addicted to drugs and living on the street. Then meet Jesus and completely turn life around and now volunteering at a local shelter. My thing was I never had a new beginning. I was never born again. I was five. I wasn’t some crazy sinner. Most of my sinning started after I knew Jesus. It should not be like that. Jesus takes it away not gives it out. So I decided I was done. I’m going to do whatever I want and at some point I’ll turn back to God and it will all work out. Middle of freshman year is when puberty started to kick in so by the time I was in 10 grade, I was taller, skinnier, no braces, contacts.
When I was a freshman my brother was a senior. Seemingly because I was now his peer, I lost the “uncool little brother” tag. Because of that, I was then included in his friend group for some things and I had a quasi-support system of people that were “cool”. My quality of life was significantly better than the past three years, home and school. My brother started experimenting with alcohol and weed at the end of his senior year, really getting more bold in the summer that followed before he left for college. I crossed weed off my Bingo card of “things you do when you’re not following God” in the beginning of August 2007. My mom caught my brother and I recounting another eventful evening a couple weeks later. My brother left soon after but I had many more years of learning how to be way more cautious and deceptive, despite my mom’s best efforts. Throughout my high school experience I crossed off several more Bingo squares. But I continued to build a positive self image, realizing that I was actually kinda cool and good at stuff.
During this time, I was involved in church activities as much as my mom made me. If she didn’t make me go I didn’t. In the fall of my senior year, I had went to talk to our new youth pastor about what we should keep from the old regime. It quickly became something else and ended with me agreeing to pray every day for a month- But only for as long as it took on to drive the shortest street on my way to school. The deal was if I did this and I didn’t notice a difference, he was good with my worldview/lifestyle. But if it did, I would dive back in. This was the start of me figuring out what I actually believed about God because I knew what I learned as a kid was incomplete. That also started a significantly influential relationship with the pastor that would become my mentor. I spent the next year and a half learning as much as I could, debunking bull crap I had learned, asking big questions that didn’t really have answers but ultimately trying to understand God enough to commit my life to him.
College Years
My church had a denominational youth conference in January of 2011, weeks before my first semester at college. That trip cemented the course I was about to set my life on. I had learned enough and was now put in the situation to do it or not. I did it. Came home, broke up with my long term girlfriend, changed my major, applied to work at the Christian summer camp I went to as a kid, started a young adult ministry with my mentor at our church. My time at Kenbrook (the summer camp) was a major growing experience for me. After my first summer, during which my brother moved home after graduating, I convinced him to make the same change I did, from not caring about being a Christian to figuring out what you think for yourself and then seeing what’s up from there.
My brother and I moved out of our family’s house and into an apartment at the end of 2012. This was end of sophomore year beginning of junior year. I was not exercising like I did after high school. I had turned 21 so my piety standards slackened. I was on my own for food, so I got fatter again.
I needed to work as much as I could to pay for school and all the expenses that come from living outside your parents house. I was still super plugged into church stuff but things started to slide back down. It was gradual but persistent. This season came to a head in 2014 when I eventually failed my social work internship. I had to sit before the Academic and Professional Review Committee, a group of social work professors that meet with you and your internship supervisor to decide if you should continue your social work education. AKA the meeting where you see if you wasted four years of college. The APRC allowed me to continue in the program but I had to redo my internship, get counseling from the school mental health thing, and meet weekly with my advisor who was part of the review. My final semester with actual classes was the only one I made the Dean’s list. So the interventions worked. I got back to feeling like a healthy me again. I graduated May 2015 and then moved to Kenbrook to work the summer and then start on year round staff doing pretty much whatever they needed me to. This opportunity was available because my mentor had gotten the Executive position at the camp in the beginning of that year. During that summer I would meet my wife on staff and start dating her after the summer. The summer was a continuation of that “healthy” Matthew feel. My relationship with God got a bigger than expected turbo charge from that summer at camp, kinda. The bulb of me thinking that normal me was not ok for public consumption was starting to bloom. Things were good but it was short lived.
Context Break
I need to back out of the narrative to give context because we are going to be zooming in pretty hard into this next season. Kenbrook broke me. There is a lot that went into it, hence the zoom in. Another reason for the zoom is because this is how I learned a lot about me. If this is the decoder ring for my content, then I want to lay out how I got to the place I am. I don’t ever want to portray that my thoughts are correct. They are an attempt to understand something way beyond me. But there is no way I get to where I am in my understanding without what happened.
So looking back toward the narrative, more context then I’ll finally start. I didn’t work on summer staff for the summers of ’13 or ’14 because of an upper management hire and subsequent culture change that took place during 2012 that I saw during the summer. My mentor was hired at the beginning of 2015 and one of his goals was the restoration of the former identity. I also had a personal stake in this restoration because of how influential that former way of doing things was on me as kid and young adult. When my mentor got the job, he made it clear that there was going to be a place there for me when I graduated that spring. During the lead up to the summer, I heard a lot about the issues and possible remedies. Two of the biggest things were the Summer Camp Director and his wife, who all but shared that role, and the Maintenance Director, two carry overs from the previous regime/culture.
The other piece of relevant context is my role in my family growing up. To my dad, I was the “Golden Child” and my brother was the “Scapegoat”. AKA I get treated like he cares about me and he treats my brother like crap. A big part of what this meant was that I was his confidant. I would then try to solve his problems for him, take his worries on as my own, seek his needs over mine. Kenbrook would press almost all these buttons for me, and in 2015 I had no ideas these were my buttons. Ok back to the story.
Kenbrook
I still had all my things with my brother, aka bedroom furniture and clothes, during the summer of 15. In September, I spent all the money I had to by a basic apartment set up (thank God for thrift store furniture) and I moved up to camp. I had the half the basement of a duplex. My two neighbors one with the two floors above me, Summer Camp Director and his wife, and the other with the opposite half of the house, the Maintenance Director and his family. “The solution to pollution is dilution.”- direct quote from my mentor regarding my role at camp year round.
The biggest piece of this move for me was the isolation. During college there was some of it because my brother would work out of state and there were weeks where I lived by myself but all the time was a different level. I was working three days a week with the Maintenance Director as an assistant and hosting retreat groups on three of four weekends. One of my friends from the summer stayed on for a year long internship. We had a weekly game night with the summer camp director and his wife. To me this was part of creating the culture that was long discussed. This social support disappeared when they left at the end of the year. For the rest of my time there, no other consistent social group was cultivated.
I developed a really solid relationship with the Maintenance Director. I learned a shit ton. I would rate myself now as an amateur handyman, but I came in mixing up screws and bolts. We also talked a lot about spiritual stuff which led into talking about personal stuff, which for him included his previous ministry experiences elsewhere and his time as a part of the previous Kenbrook staff. During both the things he was teaching me and the conversations we would have, I was introduced to a new perspective/paradigm. Very pragmatic and less idealistic, seeing what things can become instead of what they are/have been. Objective in a worst case scenario kinda way. Very critical, high standards. I also got to see why he was the “issue” that he was and I did not disagree with him. I understood where he was coming from and I was able to appreciate what he was trying to do even when he wasn’t that good at communicating things. I worked as his assistant from September ‘15-March ‘16. There were many times I was told to do less talking and more working, but I would like to think that I asked enough questions of what he believed to get him reinvested in his relationship with Jesus.
The summer camp directors left at the end of 2015. I was the obvious successor, like I would bet multiple units on the fact that the former camp directors knew who would replace them. The job did not get posted. But I didn’t start working on anything summer related until I was hired March 28th. My mentor wanted to announce the hiring of the summer camp director and the retreat director at the same time. The hold up was they needed to do an actual job search for the retreat position. I was informed in February that I was officially the next summer camp director.
Summer Camp 1.0
This delay is significant to me because I was rebuilding the program. There had been a year and a bit of vision casting for what this would look like with my mentor. I also had my own things that I wanted to see returned to the way we had done them previously. It seemed like I was the man on the inside that was doing the stuff that was being talked about by my mentor, specifically in the problem areas of summer camp and maintenance and now I had two months to put together everything for the summer. I want to stress everything. We did not have any staff hired except the ones coming back again from the previous summer. No theme, brochure, church visits, website design, social media management. Going on multiple youth group and Sunday morning advertising trips a week. Let alone revising the staff manual and planning out a week and a half of 16 hour a day staff training. The half week of leadership training before that including a two day canoe trip on a local creek. Like shit was ambitious. I’m not going to literally list everything but this isn’t half. It’s an insane task to have 7-8 months to do. Less than two was a crippling blow right away. Follow that up with the summer itself where 80-90 weeks were standard and 100 hour weeks way too common. The self-imposed pressure to make everything as good as it could be, added to running this insane vehicle of chaos for the first time by myself was too much for me. My mentor had addressed my concerns in our February talks over not being allowed to work on anything for the summer until I was hired by pledging his support. He had served multiple summers as the assistant director so he felt confident we wouldn’t need the extra prep. The previous summer he and his wife adopted a newborn and that year he started a masters program that required him to be in California for multiple weeks during the summer. I did not have the support I thought I would. There was no budget for an assistant like the rest of the past decade. It was a shit show. On the day staff were arriving for our leadership canoe trip, as my mentor (who was coming on the trip) and I were prepping gear, I am saying over and over “Dude, I am not ready. I am freaking out, etc.” His response amounted to suck it up it’s too late for that.
Another major factor that led to me burning out incredibly hard was my new understanding of “the worst case scenario”, combined with running a sleep away camp for other people’s children where 18, 19, and 20 year olds are their care takers and the buck stops with me. Just one anecdote. A camper leaves sick mid week. Discharge process is completely new because this never happened before. Worried about custody things and getting signatures and whatever. I/We forget to give daily meds back to kid/family. Not having had time to rearrange the summer camp office, we had two phones, one for the director and one for the assistant. So I had one on my desk that I had posted on the website/programmed to be the summer camp phone. The other had been put on a bookshelf when we initially rearranged the room at the start of the summer and never touched again. Over the weekend, in the office I see that the bookshelf phone’s has voicemails. The kids parents had left multiple messages everyday since the kid left trying to get those meds back. I end up driving two hours to get these meds back to the camper. Nightmare fuel for the dude that is worried about a law suit shuttering the camp because of how much he knows of the financial health of the organization. At the time I compared the anxiety to a concrete vest, it just made everything you did harder.
A Bunch of Small Things
The summer was objectively a success. I achieved a lot of the goals I had for program reform and an increased support system for summer staff. Coming out the other side of the summer it was like I had a spiritual auto immune disease. Small things that normally wouldn’t have had a major impact on me and what I thought I needed to do, did. One of these smaller things was me trying to make myself more socially acceptable. Since the summer of 2015 there had been a number of events in which me “being me” resulted in another person being triggered. Through conversation with my mentor my goal was to change this via a turning off/suppression/neglect of what I would consider baseline personality traits in order to achieve this goal. I used sacrifice of self to underpin why this made sense. This concept merged with my idea of who I should be, which later became clear I wasn’t going to be able to make happen. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I want to zoom out to avoid making this a full book and provide some context around this next year at camp.
Since the 00’s, summer camp numbers were down year over year. This was/is a national trend but Kenbrook tried to address this multiple times/ways. One of those changes was the 2011-2012 culture change/new hires. In sum they shifted from a Bible centric camp program and denominational focused retreat center to trying to attract retreat groups from New Jersey/New York and having a summer camp that was trying to be the best camp and thus significantly less Jesus. The hiring of my mentor was a message to the traditional base that there was a return in focus. Our summer program vision was almost identical. Make it the best Kenbrook could be, not best camp it could be. However, I realized that our vision for what my position was were not the same. This difference was another one of the small things. The previous position was “program director”, mine was “director of youth ministries”. I thought that meant my mentor had agreed with me on how to best handle the job when we talked in February. My vision was that along with everything that the summer required, my primary focus would not be running the camps different year round programs but instead would be investing in our summer staff. We had talked about two days in office and the other three would be on college visits and such. I would be mainly investing in our staff as that would have a two fold impact on the larger numbers problem and returning it to the best Kenbrook it could be. The more I invest in my team, the more willing they will be to buy in to what we are doing programmatically which did ask more of them without adding more compensation. Second the camper experience is significantly better when the summer staff community is strong and healthy. I had done enough summers to see both healthy and not by that point and that was why I wanted to pour as much as I could into my staff. The returns would multiplied in their campers experience. I came to realize that my mentor had a much more business minded approach to getting more numbers. Strong social media presence, multiple programmed events to get people to come to the camp when it wasn’t summer, etc. This meant I had five days in the office and once I made space in my schedule I could meet with people. The issue with the addition of more events is that the burden was on me and therefore my staff. Several were my responsibility in total, but I was default volunteer coordinator for all of them because I had access to the people that had most availability to volunteer, summer staff. This was another thing I saw as adding work to their plate while giving them nothing back but the opportunity to serve.
Another small thing was the full time staff “culture”. The idea was the staff would make up a community of believers where all parts were included in organizational plans. This would be backed up by a literal community with the people that lived on site. There was zero actual community, I hung out with the Maintenance Director more than my mentor. The real impact of this culture change was that staff meetings became a weekly opportunity for the directors to pick apart each other’s work. This critique really only applied to my mentor, the retreat director, and me. There were times everyone felt the heat though. Having that extra layer of criticism multiplied the drain of the added events/programs that were created. I did my best to try and accomplish both visions but I only managed to make it to each summer staff once a semester and hold a winter break hangout at camp. At that point, that was the only life giving work, everything else was a drain.
Get Married and Summer 2.0
Personally, I knew my relationship with my girlfriend would not last another summer apart. I proposed middle of November at the fall work day and we were married at camp Easter weekend, a month before the summer started.
This was one of the many things I did to try and insulate myself from the burnout of the previous summer. Adjusted the budget to better compensate staff and hire an assistant for the summer. Started seeing a therapist. Went to my doctor for my stomach/mood. Ultimately it didn’t matter-I was already broken. The concrete vest continued to grow until it was a bomb suit. After the summer, the wheels completely fell off. I was barely pulling 20 hour weeks. Only getting into the office at 1pm. I was given the choice to resign and have a small severance plan or get fired and be on my own. There were a couple wrinkles to this. Working for a religious non profit I didn’t pay into unemployment so I didn’t qualify if I was without work. Our housing was also part of my pay. So I was given that choice in October 2017 and I would be paid until the end of November when we needed to move out.
Fallout
My relationship with my mentor took a lot of hits during the year and a half I was running the summer camp. I had gotten an idea of what professional ministry might be like from my mentor and his time working at my home church. But this for me was the equivalent of looking behind the curtain. Having spent six months listening to the maintenance directors rough experience in professional ministry and then living my own experience, I was fully disillusioned. The next year and a half was me trying to be a regular person and failing. Got fired once more. I was trying to figure out another career/purpose because ministry wasn’t it. The issue I ran into was I still couldn’t motivate myself. Part of me going to my PCP was to get my stomach figured out, the other part was mood. My stomach became a thing after I did a round of heavy antibiotics in 2016. From that point on, most of my crap was manifest in that chronic stomach pain. This was the driver for a lot of the inability to do anything. During that year and a half numerous urgent care/emergency visits led to a specialist referral. Things came to a head in May 2019.
After getting other diagnostic scans, I had a colonoscopy scheduled. Leading up to that time, I had run out of good will at my next job and was taking unpaid medical leave so I didn’t lose that one too. For me this was the precipice. Since the beginning of going to my family doc, getting scoped was the definitive test. If it gets bad enough I’ll go under to get a look inside. I wanted a concrete thing. Something that was actionable. Something that had an understood/mapped out plan/next steps. Something that would be able to be fixed and let me live a normal life. Honestly, I would have been relieved to get a cancer diagnosis. It would provide an explanation to what was happening more than what I already knew, that I was a sack of shit that couldn’t get his crap together.
Tipping Point
It came back clean. I was looking at page after page of pictures of a perfectly fine bowel. It must have been confusing for the doc giving me the good news cause I was shattered. I’m asking questions looking for something wrong. My issue was the something wrong was my brain not my gut. The amorphous monster that I had been fighting my entire life was the only other option to explain what was happening. The hope of the life I wanted for myself was gone. My mom had taken me to my appointment because my wife was working. So on the way home as this is sinking in and she is trying to offer solutions I start to lose it. Yelling at her about how they won’t work, I had tried everything and I was still fucked. For me the only option was death. I’m not going to make my wife a caregiver when I wanted to be the provider. Have her be sole income earner and also have to take care of a husband that ended up being an incredible burden instead of a partner. How will I be able to be a father if this is how my life is? All of this plus the monster I still needed to fight was too much for me to try and face.
As I am processing this while freaking out on my mom and eventually my wife too, I let them know my plan/the only viable solution. This goes as well as you’d expect. My mom is calling my brother to come stay with me cause wife should be away for work already. Wife is on the phone with crisis intervention and I’m sitting on my couch playing methodology out in my head. It’s not far into this that I know I’m not going to be able to go through with it. If I had a sure thing that was easier it might have happened but I didn’t.
I had worked enough to qualify for unemployment by then so my immediate next steps were to invest as much as I had into my recovery. This is when I joined the group I mentioned earlier where I was dropped cause insurance wasn’t cool with me missing almost half of it. Needless to say I didn’t have much of anything to invest, so most of that next season was doing nothing. Content consumption and video games, the classic distraction/“turning my brain off” that I have been very used to. There was also a new “posture” of being completely disillusioned with my own existence that I would just lay on the couch eyes closed, regulating breathing so my stomach wouldn’t hurt so much and just being bored out of my skull, almost as a punishment for being so useless. Like I didn’t allow myself the comfort of the distraction. Because of this significant time of nothing, I am going to switch from a narrative to more of an explanation of the mental work/thinking that I was doing.
If I wasn’t done with living, then I needed to build a new/not broken way of thinking/understanding life. Every other time in my life this happened (major depressive episode) a significant change to my perspective/self view was crucial to the healing process. It is obvious I am broken. I have tried in the past to make myself better and I did something that contributed to my current situation. To put it a different way, there was so much sin built into my programming/processes of thinking and I did not have a diagnostic tool to surgically remove the issues. So I needed to start over. As I mentioned before, leaving the group therapy I was given a little x-ray of what might be wrong. Looking into it and realizing it was pretty freaking accurate to my experience gave me the ability to identify the some of the sin that was baked in to my baseline thinking. At that point, the big thing I was worried about was how much of me should I include in my public persona. I had come from the include less mindset based on the comfort of the people around me. Specifically the times where it was clear that I was the “source” of what was wrong with them. I learned that my hyper awareness of other’s emotional status comes from my childhood dynamics. It has always been DEFCON levels of bad when I think I am the source of another persons emotional distress. Specifically, I am trained to work with my dad until he indicates that our relationship is still secure. The problem was this setting was on the “everyone” option, not just the “for dad only” one.
Even more context
As an aside, this is what I would consider a type of sin. Programming my mind installed because it was a necessary defense to the situation I was once in. So yes I would say my dad sinned against me but it created this lasting sin in me that will continue unaltered until I fix it or reprogram it. To close this, I think that I am the only one that can reprogram me and therefore even though my dad created the situation in which this broken programming was needed, I still wrote the program myself and I am the only one that can change it again; therefore its my sin.
Finally, Almost Done
It has been this process of reconstruction that is the catalyst for my crazy ideas. Nothing changed between me and God. My understanding of him and my commitment to serving him were still central to my existence. I just needed to get a new understanding of myself and how I fit into his plan. I already did my initial “what do I actually believe” search in 2011. The problem was that there was so much church stuff wrapped up in my collapse that I needed to step way back from everything. Seeing that professional ministry was just another Americanized corporate institution made me need to try to understand God outside of the “Christian” lens I had viewed it from forever. I credit God for everything that came from this season. That is an eye rollingly obvious statement but what I mean is that I was not actively trying to better understand God, I was just trying to distract myself as much as possible. The arbitrary rule that I enforced on myself was there had to be some way that the content was informative to me. Either on the human condition or specifically about self work or even if I could relate it to my situation it counted. Having found JRE during the year and a half after camp really opened up the world of podcasts for me. College lectures, comedy podcasts for social education, books, tons of history podcasts. As I am compiling this collection of knowledge, it is being filtered through what I already know to be true about reality from my understanding of God and his plan for existence. That, added to the ridiculous amount of time I had to just think, created this perspective that made sense no matter what filter I ran it through. Filters being, current historical/archeological understanding, scientific understanding, other religions understandings, etc. I’m not going to go into all the scriptural backing of why I think this is ok cause that can be its own thing.
Conclusion
It is going to be super easy to get sucked into those kind of rabbit holes (giving all the scriptural backing that is currently coming to my mind); so, I am going to start tying things off. The way I have been since I was little has been to present ideas as if they are indisputably true. Psychoanalyzing myself, I am guessing it’s cause my dad would shred anything that he needed to, especially if it was weak to start. But with this stuff, it is all but impossible to have a complete understanding. So please do not think I am as stuck in my positions as I appear to be. I have done a ton of thinking about this so I am confident where I am. But that doesn’t mean I am right. I hope there is truth in what I think/will share but I am not trying to tell anyone how to live or shove anything down anyone’s throat. Context, to me, is a massive part of understanding someone’s perspective. Especially when they are hotly contested/super important to people. My hope for what honestly became a freaking memoir is that it will provide the solution to best extract the truth from the stuff I will be wrestling with. I am a severely messed up human. Having grown up with an abusive dad really shaped a lot of how my brain works/worked. I have spent a lot of time over multiple periods in my life trying to correct the faulty programming created through/during that abuse. This work became imperative when I had a mental breakdown. Through the rebuilding, I was blessed with an understanding of Jesus/Yaweh and his plans for existence/reality/eternity.
Post Script
I apologize for the length of this. I am an external processor, so once I am in the middle of something extra stuff starts popping out that is good but may not always be needed. I am also sorry about the irregularity of spaces between sentences. That is probably going to be a thing with me. This post has been edited. I did remove profanity but that doesn’t mean it won’t be in my stuff. It was just unnecessary once I had time away from the piece.
Love the addition of the pictures