Andrew Alpaugh Blast From the Past

There's a name I haven't said out loud in years. Not because anything dramatic happened between us — no blowout fight, no betrayal worth telling. We just drifted, the way people do when life gets louder than the friendships that used to hold it together. His name was Denny. We met in our twenties, back when Greenville felt like a small enough town that you could know everyone worth knowing. We'd spend Friday nights on his back porch, talking about nothing in particular — music, bad decisions, what we thought our lives were supposed to look like. He was the kind of friend who showed up with beer when you didn't ask and left before things got maudlin. I liked that about him. Then somewhere around my early thirties, I got busy. That's the honest word for it — not complicated, not tragic. Just busy. I stopped returning calls as fast. Rescheduled things twice, then three times, then eventually stopped trying to reschedule at all. He did the same, maybe mirroring me, ...

There's a story people tell about starting over that goes like this: you hit bottom, you get back up, you learn your lesson, and then you never have to do it again. I don't think that's how it works. The people I know who've done the hardest rebuilding — in careers, in relationships, in finances, in reputation — didn't just learn a lesson and check a box. They came out with something more durable than that. A different relationship with uncertainty. A clearer sense of what they actually cared about versus what they only thought they cared about. A kind of patience that people who haven't lost anything significant don't usually have. Starting over is expensive. It costs time and energy and often money. It costs the version of your identity that was built around whatever you're starting over from. That part is harder than most people admit in public. But here's what I've noticed about people who've been through it: They stop confusing...

When I was younger, I had a very clear picture of what success looked like. It had a job title in it. A certain kind of car in the driveway. A house in the right neighborhood. It looked like confidence from the outside — moving fast, making decisions, knowing exactly where you were headed. I spent a lot of years chasing that picture. Some of it I caught. Most of what I caught didn't feel the way I thought it would. And eventually I had to sit down with the question I'd been avoiding: whose version of success was I actually running toward? The answer was uncomfortable. It was assembled from pieces I'd picked up along the way — from how my parents measured things, from what got respect in the environments I worked in, from the cultural shorthand of what "making it" was supposed to look like. Very little of it was actually mine. I don't think this is unusual. I think most people operate on a borrowed definition of success for a long time before they reali...

  Hey, everyone! Welcome back to my blog. Today I want to talk about something that is very important to me: being kind to one another. You might think this is a cliché topic, but hear me out. We live in a world where there is so much negativity, hatred, and violence. We see it on the news, on social media, and sometimes even in our own lives. It can be easy to feel hopeless, angry, or depressed. But I believe that we can make a difference by being kind to one another. Being kind doesn't mean being weak or naive. It means being compassionate, empathetic, and generous. It means treating others the way we want to be treated, regardless of their race, religion, gender, or background. It means recognizing that everyone is going through something, and we don't know their whole story. Being kind has many benefits for ourselves and others. According to research, being kind can boost our happiness, health, and longevity. It can also improve our relationships, reduce our stress, and inc...

  Scott Andrew Alpaugh