How This All Came to Be

My name is Jake. I’m 42… I think.

I grew up in a suburb of Jacksonville, Florida. I toured the world in punk rock bands, lived in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York. I was part of a once-in-a-lifetime local music scene that somehow produced every friend I’ve ever had that was worth a damn.

I could tell you stories so ridiculous most people wouldn’t believe them.
But none of that matters anymore.

That version of my life ended in June of 2023.

By July 1st, I was standing in a city where I knew absolutely nobody, at the only moment in my life where I genuinely needed someone else. For decades, I was the guy who kept a level head. The fixer. The one who always found a way out at the last second. I hit a lot of buzzer beaters. No matter how bad things got, I still had some control.

If I needed to go to war, I could.
If I needed to fight for my life, I did.

But when your entire identity for 16+ years is your family—your wife, your kids, being a provider, being a father, being a husband—you quietly let friendships weaken. You ignore them. You assume you’ll rebuild them later.

Then one day, life as you know it is over.

Not slowly. Not honestly.
Just… gone.

No conversation. No warning. No explanation. No fight to have. They were gone before I even realized what was happening. And suddenly, all that strength I thought I had? Completely useless.

I moved into a house in a quiet suburb outside Tulsa and realized I had no idea who I was. No sense of purpose. No definition of self. Everything I had been was for them.

Yes, I still get time with my kids. Not as much as I want—distance, school, reality. But it’s not the same as waking up to them every morning, getting them off to school, kissing your wife goodbye before work. That absence doesn’t fade. It grows. Fast.

Within a week, I didn’t want to exist anymore.

I’m honestly surprised I survived that period. I was reckless in ways that only make sense if you’ve already given up. One night of substances and bad decisions finally gave me the courage to do something extreme: everything with sentimental ties to my past had to go.

So I threw it all out.

At some point I blacked out. I woke up the next afternoon wearing one sock and a beanie. No clothes. No plan. I lived alone, figured I’d just order replacements online. What’s a couple days without clothes?

Turns out, when you’re burned out in every possible way, you don’t even bother ordering them. I slept. I doordashed. I slept more. I didn’t buy clothes because when did shirts start costing forty bucks? I used to buy band tees for ten bucks and call it a day. Screw it.

Then something unexpected happened.

A friend from junior high—now living in the Midwest—reached out. She wanted to come say hi. She walked into a full-blown dumpster fire of a human being… and stayed anyway. We caught up. I filled in the parts of my story I hadn’t told anyone. She told me hers.

And then she said something that changed everything.

She had gone through a similar loss of self. Not the betrayal—but the erasure. And what helped her reset her life was something that, at the time, sounded absurd.

A nudist resort.

I laughed. Internally panicked. Immediately flashed back to an old punk band shirt that proudly declared “I Hate Hippies.” I didn’t actually hate hippies—but this was definitely not my crowd.

She said, “We’re going tomorrow.”

At that point? Whatever. I didn’t care.

The next day, I stepped out of the car. Outside. No clothes. Nothing on my back. No weight on my shoulders.

And for the first time since my marriage ended, I felt… lighter.

I wasn’t magically okay. I wasn’t moving forward yet. But I wasn’t sinking anymore. I had stopped taking on water.

For context: nudity never bothered me. I’ve never been overly sexual. I need connection before intimacy. I’ve had exactly one one-night stand in my life, and that was purely self-preservation. Being a nudist was never on my bingo card—especially not within a family life.

So I had to understand why this was helping.

The answer was uncomfortable and obvious: I had made other people the source of my happiness. My wife. My family. When someone else is your reason for living, your fate is in their hands. And when they disappear, you spiral.

I realized something fundamental: people, relationships, things—they are happiness enhancers. They can add to your life. They can deepen it. But they can’t be the source.

At that moment, this—nudism, oddly enough—was the only thing helping my mental health that wasn’t illegal or slowly killing me. And I decided I wasn’t going to let uninformed opinions take that away.

If someone doesn’t know what you’re dealing with, where your head is at, or what’s keeping you afloat, they don’t get a vote. Period.

That decision tied directly into another reckoning: I had spent years caring way too much about what people thought. I bought expensive guitars to impress strangers. Nice things to feel important to people I’d never meet. And when I needed real support? Silence.

That was the moment I stopped performing for imaginary audiences.

Real friends don’t care about your stuff. The ones who do probably aren’t real. That realization gave me something back—control.

Then came the hardest part: self-worth.

Being naked around other people forces a reckoning. You either realize this isn’t for you—or you realize there’s nothing wrong with you. I don’t use nudity as shock value. I use it as a metaphor.

When you reach a point where you’re comfortable in your own skin, insults lose their power. You work on what you can change, you accept what you can’t, and you stop apologizing for existing.

This isn’t about telling anyone else to live this way. It’s about reminding people they’re allowed to pursue what makes them okay—mentally, emotionally, honestly—as long as they’re not hurting themselves or anyone else.

My life is awkward. It’s chaotic. It’s a steady stream of “how is this real?” moments.

And for the first time in a long time, it’s mine.

Welcome to Jake’s Awkward Days.