On Restarting

Hi. You may know me from places such as having once written for and co-managing one of the internet’s greatest period pieces, the Process-era version of the website Liberty Ballers. You may also know me from various real life experiences, such as being a friend or former co-worker or both. You and I may be also be related. I might just be the person with the canceled foot avatar on Twitter and you absentmindedly clicked a link to a medium post, at which point you fell asleep and the scroll on your mouse made it down the page.

In any of the above cases, despite how you might know me, I’m the same person in each place, though it doesn’t always feel like it. At least through my eyes, it feels like I have a lot of puzzle pieces which make up my life that are scattered among friends, family, and followers.

My dual professional lives have mostly been kept separate — by design. At the same time that I had been offered and agreed to join the editorial staff at Liberty Ballers (for the few who don’t know — a Sixers blog), way back in 2013, I was finishing a masters program, waiting for word on whether I passed my fourth and final part of the CPA exam, buying a car, and secretly planning to move out of my childhood home for the first time. I was about to begin a career in public accounting, a life path I had planned for myself since, like, 2006. It also coincided with the Sixers announcing former team president, general manager, and heat magnet Sam Hinkie’s hiring.

A lot of things happened in that short period of time, some due to my own talents but a lot more due to luck, which changed the circumstances of my life and, over time, how I came to view the world. I’ll get to this all, including how a would-be auditor ended up in a position of significant editorial authority on a leading local sports publication and juggled the responsibilities of my paying job and my side-hustle at some point in the future. Rest assured, it was not easy.

I kept the auditing and writing lives separate from each other to the extent that I could. It was important to me in my real-life career to be defined by my effort, my skills, and the way I treated others, not as someone who moonlit as a faux-journalist on a team no one in 2013 or the ten years prior was casually interested in. I knew where my bread was buttered, and what paid the bills. I made less than my current bi-weekly paycheck amount after taxes in two years as an independent contractor at SB Nation (another topic to discuss… eventually) so I had to protect myself. Co-workers eventually knew and we talked about it, but clients could never know.

There was also a second reason for keeping those lives separate — and it’s easier to say now that I’m not entertaining writing as a career option— but I was incredibly insecure about my writing skills. Still am, actually. I hated sharing my writing outside of my twitter feed. I certainly didn’t post it where my IRL friends and family could see it. Most of them, I figured, could not care less about the Sixers anyway.

Plus, I shared digital space with three future full-time Sixers beat writers, multiple other professional journalists and media personalities, and Michael F-ing Baumann, who is among my three favorite sportswriters… ever? I didn’t major in journalism or take a single class — I started writing as an outlet to complain about former Sixers coach Eddie Jordan. I was in the company of people hoping to make a life out of sports writing, and with better odds than normal individuals based on my firsthand knowledge of their skills, while I at least feigned that it was just an intense hobby and I had no ambitions of doing more. In reality, I didn’t think I could hack it. Maybe I was being a realist? More likely, I just feared the risk of not making it and was just a coward.

After two and a half years of writing and working and doing virtually nothing else, I stopped managing LB to focus on my career and kept writing for a couple years sporadically, schedule-dependent, slowly but surely becoming consumed with Big 4 life and all of the ups and downs — mostly downs — of the cycle. My career performance improved, but in doing so, I abandoned writing about the Sixers almost entirely along with whatever few hobbies or interests I had. Work became my life for months out of the year, and I was too tired or consumed with my work that I was incapable of doing anything else. I knew I needed to change my career course if only for my own well-being.

I left my old job in August. Almost a month removed, I can finally say I’m starting to reclaim my free time. Writing of course is a big part of that. In starting a personal blog, rather than jump right into Sixers salary cap planning or whatever the hell else I specialized in back at LB, I hope to write about whatever interests me, which of course includes the Sixers, but it also includes what is happening in my life, TV, Philadelphia, books, firm life, Pokemon, or other things I find interesting or that I can be informative on.

I hope it’s interesting enough that you come back and will read what I write next, but more importantly, I’m writing because I enjoy writing, and hopefully in doing so can make the puzzle pieces fit and understand myself too.