There’s an hour and 11 minutes left in A.D. 2007 as I start writing this. A little over an hour left in a year that turned out radically different from the high hopes I had when it began. 2007 was to be my “coming out” year. Now that I was two years into my recovery, had new habits and routines established to keep the recovery going, now that I was receiving active treatment for my social anxiety and arrested development issues and was dealing with them better, this was to be the year of radical change—the year that things would at last start moving forward and upward for Steven Buehler.

Things did radically change for Steven Buehler, but there’s no idea if the changes are for the better or for the worse yet. There was definitely change, but it all seemed to be backwards. It all seems to be back to where I was a decade ago, before I got married, before I packed up and left it all behind in California to relocate to Florida, before I finally started climbing out of my isolative shell and started reaching out to people.

It seems I’ve said goodbye to a lot of things this past year and crawled back into isolation, with a few significant exceptions.

In late April, my wife had back surgery and moved with our son into her parent’s spacious house on the other side of town, supposedly to recover while I continued to work and provide for my family. She didn’t come back after she had fully recovered.

In July, the company I was working for decided that my job could be done more cheaply by somebody else—in Slovakia—and I was notified that my position was surplus and I was “at risk of involuntary termination,” given 60 days to find another position in the company. No new position became available that somebody would hire me for, and by the end of September I was unemployed. I am still living off the company’s severance package four months later, unable to find a full-time job at the same salary level. My wife decided not to come back home until I had a new job, and in the meantime she went back to school, started working full-time at a preschool, and set up our son with a developmental psychologist. She went on with life without me, even though we are still legally married—although I expect that may change in the near future also. I got no “happy Thanksgiving,” no “merry Christmas,” and so far, no “happy new year,” and the only time I have heard from her was related to money. So, I assume it’s over.

I have said goodbye to a lot of things this year—starting with my family, continuing with my job, and—if things don’t look up with a new job in the next month or so—everything else as far as “material things” goes. I end 2007 in the same way that I started 1998, before all these things came that have now gone: alone, in front of a computer screen, not doing much of anything except holing up in a home office surfing the web.

To keep the perspective balanced, though, there are some constants, and some very different things in my life today that weren’t there ten years ago. I’m no longer drowning in pornography addiction like I was for nearly fifteen years before I was caught in 2005 (probably the event that ended the marriage, since it never really recovered from that). I have a support and accountability team in the form of Celebrate Recovery that I didn’t have ten years ago, to keep me from going back. The social anxiety that I had for years is now being constructively treated, even if it does screw up my sleeping patterns (there’s a bunch of Red Bull in the fridge for 2008 to deal with that issue in the mid-mornings). I have more opportunities to serve and minister through Celebrate Recovery and F.A.I.T.H. Riders that I didn’t have ten years ago (I also wasn’t riding a scooter thousands of miles ten years ago to make a difference). If ministry with my scooter or with CR could provide my paycheck, I’d do it the rest of my life (or until God puts me somewhere else). However, it doesn’t, and creditors don’t care if I have a job or not.

Over the past few months, though, I have met some very interesting people—mostly online, a few in person just this past week. I rode 200-something miles down to Miami this past week for the first time in my life to have breakfast with Jeff Pulver, Florian Seroussi, Jeff Sass, and Jonathan Gluck, and got to explore a little bit in the short time I stayed there, as well as enjoy a nice mini-vacation out on Florida’s Turnpike for two days (the first “vacation” of any kind I think I’ve had since I started working in Florida). I’ve gotten invitations to try out new services-in-development like Seesmic and get to know the entrepreneurs behind them, making things happen on the Internet. Social Media appears to be the “next big thing” in 2008 and beyond, and could it be that I’m being allowed to become involved at the ground level? Perhaps an interesting topic to explore in 2008 is how things like the Internet and social media affect our spiritual lives as well. If only I could be paid to do it…

With a half-hour left in the distressed image of 2007, looking into the blank canvas of 2008, I have some tough decisions to make. Do I attempt to rebuild from the wreckage and sticks of what little remains, or do I decide to “burn the ships” and start 2008 from completely nothing and construct a totally new life and outlook from scratch, no turning or looking back, and leave behind those that don’t go with me to choose their own paths?

In honesty, I’m leaning toward burning the ships and soldiering forward. How about you?

Lifeblog post, originally uploaded by Ewan Spence.

from Ewan Spence.

Updated to include my road trip to Miami 12/26–12/27.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rmPE55o1TY&rel=1]

I’m writing this from an extended-stay hotel studio suite in Miami Springs, literally across the road from the Miami International Airport. I decided to make the ride down here so I could have breakfast with Jeff Pulver and friends from the social media space Thursday morning, and got a steal on the price of a hotel studio suite for the night here in Miami. I don’t think I’ve taken an actual vacation in a number of years, so this is kind of a treat for me, even if it is riding down to Miami one day and going back to Lakeland the next. The ride down via Florida’s Turnpike was very nice, except for the section of SR-60 where it became one lane each way and there were the trucks’ air wakes coming the opposite way to contend with. It did take about five and a half hours instead of the planned four, because I stopped at every service plaza along the way to stretch and walk around (and grab something to drink at the second-to-last one, skipping the final service plaza near the end of the ticketed portion of the Turnpike). The roads here in Miami are rather confusing—nearly every major road in this area has two names (NW 36th St. = Duval Rd., for example); thankfully the GPS navigator I got for the scooter did its job and I’m finding my way around without too much difficulty.

For dinner I scooted the 11 miles on I-195 over to the Lincoln Road Mall area in Miami Beach after checking in at the Homestead Studio Suites next to the airport. It’s twenty-six square blocks of shopping that’s definitely an “interesting” area, and not one I’d recommend if you’re struggling with sexual addiction—lots of exposed cleavage, barely covered bikinis, and many with nothing else underneath their tops and not leaving much to the imagination. There were also a lot of interesting people, like the elderly white man wearing a “Jamaica” t-shirt balancing his backpack on his head while dancing, or the apparently gay couple with one of the guys wearing fluorescent orange shoes that could be spotted by satellites. And, if English is the only language you know, you’d definitely feel out of place as I did. Nobody followed the traffic rules; people cross against lights when they felt like it, cars and scooters alike were parked in commercial loading and no-parking areas, many didn’t have the required parking receipts.

It was also the first meal at a Burger King I think since I moved to Florida in 2000.

After walking around Lincoln Rd. for a while I headed back, dropping by the Starbucks closest to my hotel, which happens to be inside Miami International Airport. It turns out that the airport has designated motorcycle parking areas in the Short Term Parking sections, and that said parking is free (one doesn’t even go through the regular parking entrance; it’s a small turn-off from the main road around the terminals). I headed back to the hotel after wandering around the airport for an hour or two, scoring my addictive Frappuccino in the process.

So Thursday, I head to Jeff Pulver’s social media breakfast bright and early, and then start the ride back toward home on the Turnpike. Right now, since I’ve settled in and started relaxing a bit, my wakefulness is fading fast.

A last-minute item on my calendar: I’ll be attending Jeff Pulver’s social media end-of-year breakfast in Sunny Isles Thursday morning.  Here are the details if you’d like to join us:

Day 117/365: “Maybe Christmas,” he thought, “doesn’t come from a store.”, originally uploaded by swbuehler.

This is Christmas. I slept through most of it. No tree. No decorations. No gifts except for a couple I received from members of my Celebrate Recovery® “family.”

In this past year, I lost my job and my family—the former to offshoring, the latter because of my own emotional issues.But that doesn’t stop Christmas from coming. Because Christmas isn’t about jobs, families, trees, gifts.It’s not about any of that. It’s about the birth of the one thing—one Person—I still have left.

F.A.I.T.H. Riders - Bartow Center

F.A.I.T.H. Riders in Sebring