I have been noting on my social media 4 years in particular from 2020 to 2024 as that was a time when I most recently spent several years on my own healing from a past marriage and discovering so much about myself. There has been several other ways of growth that I have done that have been very important in the year that came after. However, those years were very pivotal in many ways, but I will get to that.
My history in Florida actually began a LONG time before that. In the senior year of my high school, my dad got a job in Florida, and we moved from Oklahoma to Florida to an area on the offskirts of Winter Haven. I would attend Winter Haven High School and would graduate with a 3.5 GPA. I was on the newspaper staff at that school, learned to love literature at that school, and was working during that time and years after at the AMC in the next town over, Lakeland. At that job, I rose from usher to concession to usher trainer to projectionist and gained a lot of respect and memories at that job and among that crew.
During that time of working, I was also going to the local community college and was living with two roommates away from my parents. It was a very defining period of my life to become myself more. I tried different things in that time like being a model. I was Mozart in the local paper in one gig that I did, powdered hair wig and all. I bought a resident Disney pass and went to that a lot. The next year, I attended Florida Southern College. That was another developing experience. There, I was on several social planning clubs, joined a fraturnity, was on the religious group, and was training to be a resident advisor. I was also working as a youth director. Actually, I was a youth director from high school years up to that point at a Methodist church. I was selected to go to the general council for the church as part of that. However, a death of a child in my group hit me hard, and I left the state for a period to live with my family and returned the next year. There, I met my first wife, and we got married and had our first child.
Following that, most of the period after that was in other states and the miliary, until the late 20 tens, after the birth of our 2nd child. In that time, I did a lot of raising of the youngest, while doing online schooling, first for being a teacher and when jobs froze up for that switched to accounting. My degree under boht of those was religion and was done in the years that I was homeschooling our first child due to certain life realities. Anyways, so I finished my accounting and would get hired out of the state and would not return until 2020, the period I spoke of at the beginning.
In that period, I learned how to stand on my own as my kids were not in my house, and I learned a lot of things that I loved to do and ways of being that still resonate with me, today. I did a lot of amazing things and had a lot of amazing experiences. And, the very weather and ocean and such touched deep in my being and left a footprint that will remain, forever.
So, yes... I was there for 4 years a few years ago. But, my soul has always been tied to it, and I have memories and pieces of myself left all over central Florida that I look forward to collecting, again, as I move forward to make new memories as the me that has grown from all of those yeaars and the recent ones. Florida is my home, and I look forward to planting my roots there, again, soon.