Saying Goodbye To My 20's

It’s been a long ten years.

I’m on the cusp of my thirtieth birthday, exactly one week to the day actually, and I suppose that warrants at least a little bit of introspection about the last decade of my existence. It’s strange to be equal parts excited about inching my way toward the next plateau of life and, at the same time, totally exhausted from the experience I’ve had up until this point.

A few nights ago, I was asked, if given the chance, would I go back and do my twenties over? What would I change? What would stay the same? It was borderline alarming how quickly and unequivocally the word no escaped my lips, especially considering that I would definitely like to live life over again at any point prior to twenty. Go back and be a kid? Hell yeah, give me that opportunity. Go back and be a young adult? Nah. The universe can keep those years.

Anyway, I thought it would be a fun little experiment to go back and reminisce about the past decade, starting from the age of twenty and slowly working my way up to the present day. And since I don’t have anything better to do this afternoon, I figure that this is the best time to do so.

So let’s get at it.

20 — 2008

November 4th, 2008; me, sitting alone in a dark living room. A broken furnace keeps the body moving to and fro, blankets draped over the walls and plastic covers the windows to keep in body heat. A small space heater sits at my feet and there’s a gentle hum that fills the room from an open oven door in the kitchen. I could see my breath when I exhaled and there’s a muted TV shining at a composition notebook that sits atop a comforter and my shivering knees below that.

Barack Obama is the new president of the United States. I’m apathetic as I’ve ever been, broken-hearted and stoned, but the crying faces and dancing in the streets make me feel a little less so of both. I’m not confident that my own life is going to change at all due to this, but it seemed like a large part of history and I was lonely enough to at least take a spectator’s point of view. I write in my notebook:

“New president. New face. Same me. Still cold. This is change I can believe in, or so I’m told, but I’m not sure I’m capable of doing that. It all seems like such nonsense, pomp and circumstance with no consequence, and I haven’t talked to anybody in days. 19 was weird. 20 is just dark. And cold. God dammit, it’s cold.”

The night carries on and an old friend stops by. He’s excited about Barack Obama and he’s hungry and he wants to go to Denny’s. I wrangle up enough change for a Coke and we drive to Missouri. He says that he doesn’t want to eat alone and so he offers to buy me a meal. I reluctantly let him.

One cheeseburger. No pickles.

Spring comes and I’ve saved enough money to replace my broken Canon 20D after shooting film for the better part of four months. This is the first time of my twenties that I find any kind of optimism at all and I spend months relearning everything about photography that I’d missed out on in the months prior.

I never did get the furnace fixed, but I did move out. And that was a start.
That was a change that I could, indeed, believe in.

21 – 2009

I move out of my family home and move into a cheap apartment on the other side of town. The place is consistently filthy, from the outside looking in and vice-versa, but I find a certain pride about paving my own way. And if the heater broke? Well, that wasn’t even going to be on me to repair. Call the landlord. I don’t give a shit.

Truth be told, I don’t remember a whole lot about 2009. I spent the bulk of it trashed, slipping down that rabbit hole of depression and anxiety and putting my liver through the ringer.

I took on a job designing websites for a local computer company and, since I didn’t have a car, I relied heavily on my grandmother for rides to and from work. It was around October when she started to complain of severe back pains. She found it hard to get out of bed, thought that maybe she’d slipped a disk in the summertime after she fell while taking out the garbage. It was alarming to me, not because of the complaints themselves, but because of her sudden and dramatic weight-loss. I suggested she go to the doctor and she did.

Terminal cancer. 3–6 months left to live.

I remember visiting her in the hospital, the once strong and empowered female-figure riddled away to bones and ravaged by chemotherapy. I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I did what I would discover to be a pattern years later and I ran as far away as I possibly could. I quit my job, I sold my car, and I hopped the first train out of Iowa and toward Chicago. I didn’t want to watch my grandma die. I couldn’t sit there and be part of that. And I’ve regretted this decision ever since.

One night, in the dead of winter no-less, my grandma called me. Her voice was strained and it was clear now how much pain this woman was actually in.

“How are you, Cody?” She asked me.
“Oh, I’m fine grandma. How are you doing?”
“I don’t like you up there in that big city. Are you eating? Do you need anything? Do you want your grandpa and I to come get you? We will, you know.”

I’ll never forget that exchange. There she was, literally dying of a cruel disease that was stealing every last thing from her. She was losing her hair, losing her muscle mass, losing her mind and control of utilities and everything else that a person can lose in themselves; and the only thing she cared about was if I’d eaten a good meal.

She died before my 22nd birthday.

22 – 2010

The walk home from my grandma’s funeral was such a strange thing. The priest ordered her to be lowered her into the earth and I found myself, for the first time ever, envious of the more religious members of my family. They would come up to console me and offer me the common gems that one often hears at such an event. Things like, “don’t be sad, she’s up there waiting for the rest of us to arrive now” and “she’s in a better place!” Sentiments that, while I appreciated them, I still adamantly disagreed with. From my vantage point, my grandma was in a box six feet below the grass and beside a bunch of other dead people. That’s where she was. I remember thinking to myself:

This would be a whole lot easier if I believed this shit.

I still didn’t have a car and I didn’t particularly want to be around anybody anyway, so I walked up and out of the cemetery and took the long trek back to my friend’s house. I recalled the childhood memories, remembered her teaching me about English and sharing my poetry with her, and found a little light at the end of that tunnel upon discovering that she could still remain alive in that capacity. Every time I wrote, I thought, there she was. Alive. Breathing. Laughing. Teaching me.

I recall walking inside to an empty house, something that I’d been familiarized with over the previous few years, and I walked back to the mini-pharmacy of my dresser. Greeted warmly by my friends, the orange bottles glowed like a shortcut out of an infinite forest and I grabbed my favorites from their precarious place up front. I grabbed a textbook about accounting and crushed an Adderall up on top of it, separating the pile of dust into three distinct, neat piles. I repeated the process with a Xanax tab and then cracked open a fresh bottle of Jack Daniel’s to wash it all down with.

Up the nose they went. And then I packed a large bowl of weed and vegged out for the next several hours, gently peaking and falling like driving through a mountain range. It was as beautiful as it was absolutely bleak.

A friend down south saw the spiral for what it was and knew my skill-set could be mutually beneficial to him had we found a way to work together. So he offered me a cameraman job and 1/3rd of his growing internet empire. I reluctantly agreed.

23 - 2011

New Orleans was the perfect place for a drug addict like myself. And a drug addict with a sudden means of capital? That means taking drugs to brand new highs, exploring the new lows of coming off of them, and having enough cash to do it all over again the next day.

I felt like it was the perfect city for me. I would wake up, usually around one or two in the afternoon, shoot a video or two and then edit it, then have the entire evening to myself to do whatever the hell I wanted to do. I was emotionally running away from so much, a few things that I’m still skirting by with a struggle even as I type this today, but it seemed like drugs were the only thing that even gave me a semblance of relief from the struggle of being myself. That’s ultimately what I wanted to escape from, and doing that with a clear state of mind would have been impossible short of a belt around the neck or a bullet through the temple. I didn’t want to hurt anybody else, but I did want to hurt myself. I wanted to hurt so much that I became somebody else. And for a few blissful hours, whether it be from a capsule or a bottle or a blunt, I was free from my own thoughts.

I remember watching the sun rise from my bedroom window with a cigarette dangling from my pursed lips. There was a small lizard on the windowsill and he seemed to be the only other living creature for miles around. The streets were empty, my bag of weed was nearing it’s end, and I had yet another empty bottle of prescription amphetamines sitting next to my outstretched hand. My nostril ached. The light bent and it hurt my eyes. I was sad again. I was sober.

Drugs might have been my true love, but I also dabbled with faceless women. It was easy to do back then because users can always find other people that use. There’s this strange magnetic pull between the two and, especially if I was running short on something, all I had to do was walk into a bar or a club and wait. Eventually, somebody would offer me something, and those nights usually ended with the two of us absolutely annihilated, naked and comatose until the wee hours of the next evening.

I decided to take a vacation back home in the fall of 2011 after a prolonged stretch of homesickness. I hadn’t been off the plane for even ten minutes when my business partner sent me a text declaring that he didn’t want to work with me anymore. At the time, it pissed me off and I viewed him to be an absolute coward with a backbone like a jellyfish. Looking back, though? I get it. I’d have fired me, too. I was too far gone, too far sad, and too much into the lifestyle of a burnout to be repaired or salvaged.

I dealt with it the same way I’d dealt with everything else, too, and I did a whole lot of drugs.

24 – 2012

I met this girl online and we quickly hit it off. She was from Detroit and had recently dropped out of college in Kalamazoo, and I was back in Iowa after losing a really good gig. I found her to be so endearingly oddball, and though I wasn’t a fan of her writing, I was a fan of her smile and the way she didn’t seem to give a fuck about anything. Even though she came from an upper-class family in the suburbs, she lived her life in the most punk-rock way possible and I found that choice to be so much infinitely more badass than accepting it as proxy.

I sold some camera gear and took a train to meet her in August of that year, and moved in with her only a few short weeks after that. We were a maelstrom, a weird concoction of shared trauma and experience, and we connected on a level that I hadn’t ever had with somebody else before.

I liked her so much, in fact, that I decided to quit drugs cold turkey after I hopped off the train in Kalamazoo that second time. For the next several weeks, I detoxed and I shook and it felt as if my heart was going to stop at any moment, a swift end that I would have eagerly accepted in such despair. The days were long and I was easily irritable and the nights were infinitely longer as I sweat and shivered simultaneously. To her credit, though, she never complained about any of it. She helped me get clean and, to that, I will forever be indebted.

Iowa winters are cold, but they don’t hold a Popsicle to Michigan. I’d never experienced such a dry, unrelenting cold and, god damn, were the two of us broke. We survived for months on nothing but dollar-store pasta and water. We even washed our clothes in the bathtub.

This is as punk rock as it gets. I thought. But, hey, at least we had each other. We had our little apartment (and a landlord to dodge). We had heat. Who needs money when you have that crutch?

Well, it turns out, we did.

25 – 2013

I convinced her to move back to Iowa with me and we found a nice little spread in my cheap little town. This was probably the happiest year of my entire 20’s as I’d found the perfect middle-ground between my family and my romance and my hopes for the future. My photography was really starting to take off. My relationship was gaining steam. I could take a short drive and visit anybody that I cared about. It was perfect.

My favorite part of the day, for the first time in my life, was the early morning hours. I’d have my routine cigarette, I’d put pen to paper, and I’d watch as the smoke danced in the sunlight. Sometimes it would rain and sometimes it would snow and sometimes I would spend the entire morning wondering how I would apologize for whatever petty argument the two of us had the night before.

But it always seemed like I was working for something, like I’d discovered a purpose beyond myself and I didn’t miss the drugs nearly as much as I thought I did. I mean, sure, occasionally I’d want to retreat back into that hole when the times were especially lean, but I always had a pretty damn good reason not to do it. And I never did. I celebrated one year clean that September when my girlfriend discovered Fairfield.

“ We should go check that town out.”She said. And so we did.

26 – 2014

She said she wanted to go finish her degree and I felt obligated to help her do so, and we found ourselves hunting for apartments almost immediately. There was this weird university centered around meditation called Maharishi University and that girl was so absolutely sold on finishing up college in that kind of hippie, liberal environment.

Her parents helped us get established and she started school the next semester. I, meanwhile, kept doing my photography and eventually landed a couple good-paying jobs centered around it. It wasn’t what I wanted to do, sure, but I was making money with my camera and that was better than not making any money at all.

Sadly, this is where the cracks began to expose themselves in our relationship. We started arguing about the most petty bullshit, usually money or something involving it, and I watched as my punk-rock lover started to grow up beyond me.

I couldn’t bring myself to give that much credence to the dollar sign and, especially as she grew closer to graduating, it seemed as if that’s all she could think about most of the time. I’d bring home paychecks that I was proud of and, though she usually never verbalized it, I could tell that she was also never quite satisfied with the amount of money I’d earned. It stung me. I began to resent her quietly and thought that I’d veered so far off course from the person I’d actually wanted to be that it seemed disgusting. I was sick. And, in my own fucked up way, I guess I probably blamed her for it.

I took on even more work and we moved from our apartment to a tiny house and, finally, to a three-bedroom home that was far too much for either of us to ever utilize.

But it gave us a lot of space, both for ourselves and from one another. This should have been an early warning sign, but it wasn’t.

[As a weird side note, this is also the year that my girlfriend got us featured in the MTV show TRUE LIFE, something that remains absolutely surreal to me even now years after the fact]

27 – 2015

Enter Forgotten Iowa.

I’d conceived of the idea late one night after steadily becoming obsessed with my own genealogy. I’d discovered that my ancestors had lived in towns that were right beside my own, towns that I’d never been to, and a few of them had constructed buildings and homes with their own hands that still remained today. I took a drive to visit those towns one morning when I was suddenly overcome with the realization that I’d have never went to any of them if I didn’t have that specific reason to do so.

I decided to visit every town in Jefferson county. Then I decided to photograph every town in Lee County, where I grew up, and then I just decided to go all out and photograph every single town in Iowa.

The project absolutely blew up overnight and I was suddenly being interviewed by VICE, CNN, and a whole slew of independent magazines, newspapers, and internet video companies. It felt as if I’d caught lightning in a bottle and I was so elated that I’d finally done something right after so many years of failed creative pursuits. To date, I’ve photographed approximately 750 towns in Iowa, though I’ve slipped on the project in the years since. I’d still like to finish it eventually.

My personal life, meanwhile, was going to shit. My girlfriend and I were changing in opposite directions and it was becoming obvious to both of us. We didn’t talk as much, didn’t do as many things together, and there was a dark cloud that seemed to hang over the two of us whenever we were in a room together. What kept the train rolling was that occasional burst of light when everything felt good again. But as the months rolled on, the light grew weaker and it appeared far less often.

28–2016

This period of life can be defined as “The Grinder.”

I was working upwards of 50–60 hours a week, every week, and spending the entirety of my time off working on Forgotten Iowa (which was growing very hard to do as we inched our way westward). I was gaining weight, I was growing sad, and I felt very isolated even as I shared a home with somebody that I still had a lot of love for.

I was burnt out in the worst way and began scheming of ways to change my life. Surely, I thought in my own selfish naivete, if we had less expenses than she would have less of a reason to care about money so damn much.

My personal goal in life was to get my girlfriend to the point of graduation, and then finding a camper to live in. We could travel the country in it, could make less money and still live relatively comfortably, and that could be the catalyst to saving our relationship. Times seemed dire and it was time to pull the trigger on one thing or the other or I was convinced that the two of us were going to implode like a dying star.

I maintained an everyday photo project this year and actually saw it to completion. You can check it out here.

November 8, 2016 — I’m alone in an empty house that is far too big for two people. I’m stunned as the polls tally up and it becomes obvious that Donald Trump is going to be the next president of our country. My girlfriend and I have been arguing for days and she’s upstairs by herself. I’m downstairs and then I’m at the bar, and then I’m watching two idiots fight each other on the street about whose candidate was better suited to run the country.

“Well, my life is better under a democrat.” I thought.
“But my art is usually better when I’m struggling. Maybe Trump will help that.”

I quit my job and I started scouring the internet for RV’s. I found one in Colorado and my girlfriend agreed to go look at it with me.

“Great.” I thought.
“She’s into this.”

29 – 2017

I bought the RV and my car-enthusiast friend Chris agreed to help us get the thing back to Iowa. We loaded her full of gas and got halfway through Nebraska before the thing just blew up. There was no saving it, either, and we ended up just leaving the thing there on the side of the highway with the title in the driver’s seat. What else could we do?

We checked into a hotel nearby, utterly defeated, and I opened up my phone to discover some of the worst news of my life.

My first real friend, a guy that I’d been close to for 20+ years, had jumped in front of a train and killed himself. I was absolutely gutted when I heard the news and immediately called my mom in tears about it. I believe this event was the stepping stone back toward a rabbit hole and I doubt I ever fully accept it or process it, but it happened and it continues to bother me even now. There are rare times that I forget he’s gone, when I’m excited about a song I wrote or a poem I’d composed, and I’ll go to his facebook profile to send him a message only to re-realize it all over again. I miss the kid. A lot.

In the place of an RV, since our lease at the big house was up anyway, I found a humble trailer in Keokuk and pulled the trigger on it. It was a mediocre middle ground for the initial happy middle-ground that my girlfriend and I agreed upon, but she did not like it one bit.

In fact, it just got worse. We were being openly vitriolic and mean toward one another, acting out and being rude for no reason and it was clear that we just needed to go our separate ways. And so we did. She went home back to Michigan and I stayed in the trailer. Alone again for the first time since 2012.

I took a trip to the mountains in Colorado to clear my head. I couldn’t find any peace in that trailer, not at that time anyway, and I’d always wanted to visit Pike’s Peak anyway. My brother Dakota and our friend Joel tagged along with me and we spent a few days just exploring. It was the best decision I could have possibly made at that time in my life.

And it was there that I was offered another trip on the other side of the country, this time in Pennsylvania to photograph a girl’s college graduation. I couldn’t think of a better thing to do with my time and, before I knew it, I was on the Amtrak again heading east.

I recall the exact moment that it happened and I have a photograph of the moment itself when I fell for somebody again. It was a strange time, but I couldn’t have been happier if I had to be. I thought this girl was perfect.

We ping-ponged back and forth from Iowa to Pennsylvania so many times that summer that I couldn’t ever seem to dig my toes in the ground. My entire head-space grew overwhelmed with her and she was the only thing I thought about, the only thing I cared to think about, and I was more than glad to showcase my emotions in the form of travel just to be around her for a little bit longer.

The two of us weren’t ever going to work, of course, and that probably made me want it even more. We traveled around the country together, ate endless amounts of food, drank ample amounts of booze, and eventually caused one another more grief and shame than was ever actually acceptable.

I didn’t mind, though. I’d have done it forever if I was allowed to.

(Almost) 30 — 2018

The wheels fell off. My car went to shit after a year of incessant traveling (almost 14,000 miles in one calendar year!) and my life was down the tubes. I hadn’t resorted to pills or other drugs, but I was drinking again. First a little, and then a whole lot, and then almost every single day, because that’s just apparently how I deal with things when my heart hurts.

I don’t like the person I’ve been the last year. I began to sleep around with ferocity, endless nights and endless drinks and waking up next to people I didn’t know or even want to know most nights, and it made me feel really gross. But some part of me needed validation. I needed to hear that I was good looking. I needed to feel somebody’s flesh against my own and know that they were happy to have mine there. I wanted to stumble into something new, something better than I’d ever had before, but I usually just wandered around swamps and complained that my clothes were soggy.

This afternoon, I took a ride down to the Chinese restaurant and got some lunch. My fortune cookie said, “Look with favor upon a bold beginning”, and that seemed strangely appropriate given the time-frame and the circumstances surrounding it.

I hear all the time that the thirties are such a better era for people than the twenties are. In your twenties, I’m told, you spent your time trying to figure yourself out. You’re trying to understand the world and your place in it, and trying to learn how to be an adult. By the time you’re thirty, much of that veneer is stripped away and you’re left with truths that are equally beautiful as they are bleak:

1. You don’t figure yourself out, but you accept that.
2. Nobody has a place in the world, but you accept that.
3. There’s no such thing as an adult, but you accept that.

I think that’s been a constant struggle for me. Acceptance. Learning how to grow and move on beyond my own shortcomings, learning how to navigate beyond them instead of rifting against the waves and trying to alter their patterns.

So that’s what I’m hoping to dedicate at least a portion of this next decade to. Accepting what is and what is not, not mourning what has been or dreading what may be to come.

Accept. Adapt. Adjust.

Goodbye 20’s.
I won’t miss you.