Life Overview

Posted: October 12, 2021

By: Wesley - Nomadic Polymath

Typically, the tale of my life begins with the comical line, "I was born in Wisconsin on a road trip". That's my answer when people ask where I'm from. It's an attention grabbing and truthful statement of my origins. Three generations of women; my grandma, mom, and sister; were all on a road trip visiting various sites through Wisconsin when I was born a few weeks early. At the time, my family had been living in Illinois.

Other than a few months in Florida, during which I sleeping through a Hurricane, most of my single digit years were spent in the Mid West. Slowly migrating closer and closer to Canada, up from Illinois to Wisconsin to Minnesota. Throughout this venturing north I struggled in school mostly because I felt unchallenged by the material and naturally would act out to make things interesting. Put simply, I was a little shit in my youth and eventually grew out of it… a decade or two later hehe.

From two hours south of Canada we moved to six hours north of Mexico when we transitioned to the Dallas area in Texas. Did you know that Texans defended the land that was rightfully theirs in a 200 year old Mexican Mission? This and many other fascinating nuggets of weird and biased history brought to you by 7th grade Texas History classes. With school coming easy to me, luckily I suppose, I managed to graduate a year early so that I could attend my Senior year abroad in Germany. Also, fun fact, if you complete your transcript in summer school you don't get a diploma, more on that later.

At some point, I will write more in depth about my experiences in Germany. Spending that 10 months in a foreign country during my last year of school fundamentally changed how I view the world and the people in it. The focus of this here is not to dive deep, rather to begin to weave a story of self that hopefully starts forming an image of me for you. Or it can be seen as vanity… either way, as the reader you get to decide.

After Germany, I almost immediately started on at University in Utah, there was like a two month gap between the landing back in the states and starting school. Sooooo I managed to get into college with nothing but my smooth talking skills and a high school transcript. No diploma and no standardized tests for this silver tongued wizard. My first degree, still only one at the time of writing, is in Computer Science. The program was supposed to be complete in two and half years, I finished in three and a half years. My first true setback of six months came in as a shell shock between the effort K-12 took and the effort actual work took, plus a fair amount of distracting parties. The second setback of another six months came when a close friend of mine died. You never really move past your best friend dying.

Once I graduated I moved back in with my folks, that was as much for them as it was for me. Four years of partying hard and hardly working I jumped ship back to Utah to escape from the growing number of energy vampires in my life. Back in Utah, I flipped the script and hardly partied, instead focusing on working hard in my new career as a Teacher. Learning is at the core of being a Teacher, not only do the best ones have to stay sharp through continually educating themselves they often inspire others to go on to great things. I've again been lucky that I've had some of the best Teachers cross my path. I hope that I was one of those for others.

I'm no longer a Teacher by trade, rather, I'm back in my field working remotely for a company that implements the best practices. Remote in the truest sense of the word as I'm currently a digital nomad operating out of my van. Coupled with an abundance of interests and goals ahead of me I keep myself moving forward. In this log I'll be exploring more of what's been outlined above and beyond. Thanks for making it this far!