A Decade in Retrospective: 2000

2000 was a year of transition.
A few months prior, I made the difficult and slightly crazy decision to leave BYU after three years of completion to pursue a dream of studying culinary arts. Having grown up in a cougar blue household, graduating from the Y had been and always was the end goal of my educational ambitions. Leaving Provo for the unfamiliar was an enormous step out of my comfort zone, and I was deeply conflicted about it. My concern was that I could be walking away from everything I had so carefully planned for myself over the past several years. It's funny how those tentative steps into the dark can turn into unanticipated paths of illumination.

In January 2000 I stepped onto the Utah State campus for the first time as an enrolled student. I discovered that I was a lot stronger than I had previously thought. I had my heart broken, beaten, and shattered-- and lived to tell the tale. New friends entered my life and buoyed me up during my difficult moments. One of those friendships grew into something more.

2000 was about classic college life. Drama, dances, and dinners of communal pots of macaroni and cheese. (From which I ended up catching an awful case of mono... thanks, Brett!) I spent spring break in sunny San Diego with my new girlfriends. The mountains of northern Utah & southern Idaho called out to us during the lazy summer weekends. I fell in love at first sight with the Moab landscape. And realized while we were there that I had also fallen deeply in love with Bryson.



Change can be terrifying. But most of the time I've found if you can just fight through the doubt and heartache...
Change is good.