Hunter S. Thompson taught me one of the greatest lessons of my life. When I discovered his work during my sophomore year of college, I became convinced that the only way to become a great writer was to live like he did. Inspired, I decided to hitchhike from Chicago to Louisville, KY, to visit my girlfriend that summer. Along the way, I rode shotgun with a Zyn-addicted trucker, exchanged bars in the backseat of a self-made Soundcloud rapper's Buick, and hitched a ride on an Amish buggy. But after arriving a day too late to Indianapolis, exhausted and disillusioned, I concluded that I couldn’t “crack it” like Hunter. So I took the Greyhound to Kentucky. If that adventure taught me anything, it was this, cows do not sleep standing up. In Indiana they nap laying down.
Somewhere in between and since those adventures I got hit by a car, volunteered with Syrian refugees in Jordan, interned at Nickelodeon, got really into tarot, and moved back home to Seattle. I’ve been writing through it all, and although those experiences have informed a lot of who I am, those trials taught me an even more important lesson:
“I don’t want to be Hunter S. Thompson - I just wanna be me.”
