My name is Will Barnes, and I was born William Delbert Barnes. I am an American/Native American artist. I consider myself a New Mexico mutt, as I am a mixed-race artist with bloodlines from Dine’, Tewa, and Mexican Indian tribes, as well as Castilian Spanish, Sephardic, Ashkenazi, and Scandinavian ancestry.
I have been making jewelry since September of 2017. I initially began making jewelry to teach my wife, a longtime lover and wearer of jewelry. Being a welder since I was 17 years old, and also doing various types of brazing, I was able to learn to make jewelry very quickly. I began creating jewelry with an old brass bed frame, copper pipe, and stones from the Jemez Mountains that I found in the Rio Las Vacas, a small stream that I fished many times throughout my childhood, located near Cuba, NM as well as Jemez Pueblo. It wasn’t until several months after I felt comfortable using mixed metals, that I began using sterling silver. At the time, I had a small lighting, furniture, and welding business that I had called Strange Grain, which I decided to keep for several years because it seemed to still convey my various artistic styles.
My jewelry is a culmination of my culture, where I came from, what I’ve done, and where I’ve been, which is quite vast, as I’ve done a lot of traveling within the continental US as well as a few countries in Europe in the early 2000s. I am also fascinated with history, science, quantum physics, and spirituality, and enjoy collecting wisdom along the way. I tend to use Turquoise or Variscite mostly, but have used just about every stone under the sun since I began smithing precious metals into jewelry. I specialize in handmade Native American jewelry, the lost wax casting process, and fine jewelry, and for the past year, I have been teaching myself computer-aided drafting to compose 3D models for casting.
The Longer Version
I would consider myself to be a lifetime artist. I began rudimentarily as a child, drawing and painting, often having my school artwork at the New Mexico State Fair in Albuquerque. My mother worked for Valiant Printing Company, in downtown Albuquerque, working in the binding department, so she would bring stacks of scrap cutoffs for me to draw on. Being a product of a single-parent family, we were very poor and lived in various housing projects throughout Albuquerque. I had to grow up tough, resilient, and smart to stay out of trouble. I played baseball at Thunderbird Little League throughout my childhood but failed to get the necessary grades to play for Del Norte High School.
Having been an opportunity to keep me out of trouble, the lack of playing baseball led me to a life of delinquency in my late teens, leading to my mother kicking me out. I didn’t have a place to go, so, at 17 years old, in 1996, I took a bus to Colorado Springs to live with my father, Veldon Barnes, who I met for the first time when I was 16. He was an outlaw biker and on Parolee when I first moved in. He showed up about 3 hours late to pick me up from the Greyhound station. Having been in the fall, it was dark for a few hours. This was the beginning of a pretty bad time in my life. While he managed to teach me how to weld, do mechanics on automobiles, as well as bodywork on cars, it was a short time after that, that he began doing methamphetamines and began transforming into a psychopath. Several months later, now 18, I foolishly began doing drugs with him, and one night, under the influence of alcohol, I told him how much I hated him for destroying my childhood and how it affected me. Instead of an argument, he lunged at me, wrapped his hands around my throat, and strangled me to death. When I gained complete consciousness the next day, his girlfriend at the time, told me that he had to perform CPR to resuscitate me. My chest hurting, my lungs were sore, and with an aching headache, I was scared and didn’t know what to do, so I went to a friend’s house and drank all day. I was scared to be in the same house as him, so on the way home that night, I started a fire in a car so I could get arrested and have a place to stay. A very bad decision it was, as I was charged with 2nd-degree arson, and even though it was a first offense, I spent the longest length of time before being released, even though the bail was low. Nobody, including my mother, knew where I was for this period because he wouldn’t answer the phone, nor bail me out. Upon release, 6-8 months later, I had to hitchhike to the house with an inmate who was being released at the same time. My father wasn’t there, but the door was unlocked, so I grabbed a duffel bag that I had, and a few handfuls of clothes, and started walking down the main road by the house. His ex-girlfriend just happened to be driving her VW bug down the road and saw me, and picked me up. She allowed me to stay at her house for a few days while she also helped me get my probation transferred to Albuquerque, under the condition that I found a job within 2 weeks and continued reporting to the probation department. I also got a hold of my mother, who sent me money for a Greyhound bus ride back to Albuquerque. Unfortunately, my mother and her trust fund husband at the time didn’t want me to live with them, so they bought me a week at a weekly motel, and basically said, “good luck”.
Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on my side and I didn’t find work within the time allocated. So, because I violated the conditions of my probation, they wanted me to go back to Colorado Springs. Still scared, I decided that I would never go back to Colorado Springs, ever! Not having an adequate roof over my head, I began spiraling out of control in Albuquerque. Having been discarded by my mother and murdered by my father, I became a drug addict for a few years, doing crack cocaine and other hard drugs. At that point in my life, I didn’t see myself living to the age of 21, nor did I want to. Several years later, I knew I had to escape the drugs, and I got a job at a place called ProTek Chemical, traveling city to city, state to state, selling an all-natural cleaning product via an ad for a job in the Albuquerque Tribune newspaper. I was interviewed and shortly thereafter given a bus ticket to Columbus, OH. This allowed me to kick the drugs, and separate myself from the girl who introduced the drugs to me.
Upon arrival in Ohio, I was literally transformed overnight. Having lived in Albuquerque my entire life, on the wrong side of the tracks, being a product of my environment, I had just discovered that nobody talks like me outside of NM, dresses like me, nor had the chip on my shoulder that I possessed at the time. That experience was transformative for me. I instantly changed the way I dressed, the way I talked, and the music that I listened to, and began relishing the ideology that happiness does exist. One of the stipulations of the job was that if you wanted to quit, you’d receive a bus ticket home, no matter where we were in the US. We had just done some cities in upstate NY and just finished a few cities in New Jersey, and I decided that I wanted to move back home. My mother and her then-husband said that I could stay with them this time, which was good. I lived with them for several months until I met a girl named Deanna. We fell in love almost instantly! Her mother had recently died and while growing up in Southern California, she decided that upon her mother’s passing, she would move back to Riverside, CA. Now 21 years old and still being head over heels, we packed up and moved to Riverside, CA. I immediately found a job in Ontario, California working at a distribution center for a store called Home Base, then eventually getting a job in Romoland, CA at Orco Block Co., a concrete block manufacturer. I worked as a millwright and a welder/fabricator for them for 6 years, eventually working at their Riverside plant. Around year 5, I broke up with Deanna, moved to Los Angeles, and found myself with an equally great woman who saw the best in me, Jordan. She was an aspiring actress, and I was still commuting to Orco Block, in Riverside, which turned out to be 4 hours in the car driving every day. At around this time, I began reading self-help, motivational books, books about business, quantum physics, and an array of interesting subjects. I also began doing Bikram yoga (hot yoga) to add to building my inner spirituality and did so for nearly 5 years, regularly. Jordan was a mortgage loan officer and after the collapse of the California real estate market, she was laid off. We were then put in a predicament where we were forced to move from LA. She had a sister in Phoenix who said we could stay with her, so her father Cameron, who ran stables in Prescott, AZ, brought his horse trailer so we could pack our things. En route to Phoenix, her sister decided that she didn’t want a man living in her house. Being a lesbian, she didn’t feel comfortable being around men, let alone living with one. Luckily, my aunt Tami, my father’s sister, lived in Phoenix, too. While it was a spur-of-the-moment call, she understood the circumstances and said it was okay that I lived with her. The only thing was that my girlfriend whom I lived with for nearly 5 years now lives in Gilbert and I lived on the west side. Also, before we left LA, I had applied to be a fine art salesman aboard cruise ships, for a company called Park West Gallery, in Michigan. Having had the affirmative on my second interview, I was scheduled to attend an intensive Fine Art Sales course at their gallery outside of Detroit. Upon completion, I was to be flown to Orlando, FL to begin the job immediately. Unfortunately, it was the time when they changed the stipulations for a US passport, requiring millions of people to get it. And because I needed a passport to get the job, the wait exceeded the time needed to be hired, needless to say, I didn’t get the job. Foolishly, I chose the job over my girlfriend, who. So, the next thing I knew, I was now living in Phoenix, a place that I didn’t want to live to begin with. Back in Phoenix, I found a job working as an Operations Manager for a 3rd Party logistics company, called Continental Fulfillment Group, which was owned by famed Herbalife distributor Anthony Powell. It being a startup that couldn’t gain enough clientele, I was laid off with severance pay. While living in Phoenix, I wrote and published a self-help motivational book called “The Expansion of the Soul”, sharing what I’ve learned and how others could escape poverty and drug abuse and just about anything else using the power of the mind. I wanted to test the theory that everything happens for a reason with my book. And instead of having it flow how I wrote it, I decided to shuffle the chapters, which turned out to be a bad idea. The book tanked and I only sold probably a dozen copies worldwide. I took this as an opportunity to move back to Southern California. A friend of mine from Myspace, Amanda, was looking for a roommate, so I took the opportunity. While I didn’t have much money, I had enough to be able to look for a job for a month or so, which proved to be enough.
I found a job working for a company called Piece of the Past, which specialized in Autographed memorabilia, as a Personal Assistant. Since he provided various incentives, I was able to attain a percentage of the sales that I produced and turned out to be a lucrative job. As a company, we eventually bought out a prop house called Star Wares and started selling film used props and wardrobe. Because of the hard work that we did as a team, he attained the finances to purchase a longtime venue called the Hollywood Show, which is a quarterly autograph show held in Burbank, CA. While the pay was good, and I was able to meet hundreds of Hollywood actors, I was eventually laid off. The same Sunday that I was laid off, I discovered that my grandfather in Montana, whom I was named after, had stage-four lung cancer. I didn’t have a good male role model growing up, so my grandfather was always my hero. Soft-spoken, tough, and very respectful. The timing was right, so I decided that I would help my aunt Carrie and her then-husband Randy, who lived in Grand Junction, CO, to move to Thompson Falls, MT so I could spend a bit of time with him before he passed. However, after being there for a while, I discovered my grandparents didn’t have the same sentiment for me as I did them, and decided to move again after several months. It didn’t cause me to dislike them or anything, knowing that they came from a different time, but after enduring the brutal winter of NW Montana, I was ready for some sunshine and in January of 2009, I moved to Fort Myers, FL with a different friend of mine that I knew from Myspace. She wasn’t going to charge me rent until I was on my feet, so I began the long drive from Montana to Southwest Florida. With a huge snowstorm ahead of me and a huge snowstorm behind me, as long as I kept up with the news, I could drive on plowed roads the entire way. I stopped twice along the way and slept in my car. I had never been to Florida before, so upon arrival coming down the I-75 from Georgia, I was in awe at how tropical and beautiful it was. I drove from a place that was -20 degrees Fahrenheit to a place that was still 80 degrees. Even the paint from by BMW emblem peeled off from such a change in temps. My friend set me up with a job helping her real estate office, Compass Real Estate, do marketing and graphic design stuff as well as whatever else the brokers and agents needed, including repair appliances at some of their rental units. I became such an asset to them that they decided that they would pay for me to get my Real Estate License, and soon they were talking about setting me up in one of their condos and putting me on salary, as I really wasn’t making much money doing piecework. The same real estate market that crumbled in California, eventually crept in and hit SWFL equally as hard and I wound up getting laid off. I decided that I would head back to Albuquerque to stay with my mom for a bit.
Upon arriving back in Albuquerque, I found work in the film industry as a background actor, and appeared in various TV shows and Movies. I found this to be incredibly fun and I met a lot of great people and made some good friends, but I still didn’t want to live in Albuquerque for too long. I didn’t have much left that I didn’t sell after losing my job in CA and bouncing to MT, then FL, so I decided to sell my car and move back to California to open a Photography business. I had never lived in LA without a car so I didn’t know what I was up against initially. Maggie, a friend of mine that I met from when I was selling memorabilia had just had a baby and invited me to stay with her till I could get the ball rolling. She was in the middle of moving and wanted me to help her with a security deposit, but I really didn’t have enough money to do so, so I had to find something else to prolong the buoyancy of my sinking raft. After buying a bike to get around, I found an ad for a sober living house that had a $400 rent. I had been sober for a long time now but needed cheap rent, so I just went ahead and moved in. It wasn’t ideal, but I was able to inspire a few of the guys there to do better, change themselves, and see a better future for themselves. I didn’t last long there before my money started to dry up. I had spent most of my money on marketing material and business cards, brochures, etc.,. From one of my daily journeys riding my bike through North Hollywood, I saw an art school called AI (Art Institutes) and had it in the back of my mind that I would like to do something like that. The following month, I couldn’t make rent and the sober living house, and they told me that I would have to leave by the end of the week if I couldn’t pay. Now, I was faced with a decision that I may actually be homeless. I still had an expensive Canon 7D camera that I could resell if I had to, but I still was pushing to get my photography business going. The time was ticking down, so I stopped at the school to talk to an admission counselor if it was possible to get a student loan and student housing. It was my only option! I had great news. I had been accepted, had a schedule, and just needed a $250 down payment for student housing. I didn’t have the money but put myself to the task of finding the money. A person that I had called a best friend since childhood said that he’d lend me the money, no problem. Told me the day and time to call, but when I did, he was nowhere to be found and didn’t answer or return my calls. So, even though it was the last thing I wanted to do, I had to sell my camera, the main part of moving back to CA. Not only did I need the $250, but I also discovered that the GED test that I took online in the early 2000s was no good. So, now, I had a school schedule, and a roof over my head, but if I didn’t have a GED within 2 weeks, I would have to leave AI. So, I immediately found out where and when the nearest and soonest GED testing would be. I had to travel 40 miles by bike and bus for a week with a single chance to pass. And to even my surprise, I passed the first try with a B average. Even though I was forced to drop out of high school because of absences, I was in gifted, enriched, and honors classes, which were mostly college-level. So, now that I had succeeded in passing the test, I could rest easy, although I didn’t have any income yet. However, now that I didn’t have the camera, I couldn’t do the business. This was ironic, because the day I sold the camera, I got two calls for photographs. It was heart-wrenching to tell the customers that I had just gone out of business. At this point, I had already begun taking classes, so I was looking for something remote, or freelance that way I could keep a full-time schedule. I already knew a lot about HTML, MySQL, and PHP coding and found a job creating email marketing templates for movie DVDs to movie rental stores like Blockbuster, or Netflix (when they sent DVDs in the mail). I did these for just about every big-named movie house in LA. I would be paid per template that I created using assets from the production companies or movie houses. The pay was good until they decided to hire a different operations manager, who made my pay a net 60. Which means I would receive my pay 60 days after the work was completed. He wanted to pay himself first, and me, last. I forced them to pay me what I was owed, then I quit.
Soon, I was called to the office at AI (Art Institutes) and told that if I couldn’t pay a hefty $15000 bill, I would have to withdraw. Even though I was on the honor roll, making straight A’s, it didn’t matter. So, I was in the predicament that I didn’t have money again and now will have to search for another place to live. By strange coincidence, my friend Charles’ ex-girlfriend Morgan contacted me and said she was traveling to LA from Fort Myers and wanted me to show her around. We wound up messing around and she soon wanted to move to Los Angeles, too. She flew in and had her car shipped from Florida. I picked her up from LAX in her car, and she stayed with me in my student housing which was a regular upscale apartment complex in North Hollywood. It took about a week or so for us to find an apartment and then we moved in soon after. From there, I found a job working for a man named Richard Marcello, aka “The Treasure King”, selling high-end antiquities and Tiffany stained glass, in Van Nuys, CA. The pay wasn’t much, and they would often forget to pay me, so I had to always call, or text on a Friday or Saturday and ask where my pay was. I was able to sell enough items for him to buy a Ferrari and a Rolls Royce Ghost, but I never received a bonus for doing well. Although I enjoyed working with the antiques, I didn’t see a future for me working with Richard. From there I began doing freelance graphic design and web work for various creative talent agencies, until that dried up, and was forced to move out of LA. Not only because of my lack of ability to find work but also, because I don’t speak Spanish, just about anything blue-collar or service-related jobs in LA nowadays require you to speak Spanish in Southern California. So, couldn’t flip burgers, wash dishes, dig trenches, or swing a hammer, without the ability to speak Spanish. Because of my lack of ability to pay my end of the rent, me and Morgan’s relationship also failed. Next thing I knew, I was on my way to Union Station taking the subway from North Hollywood with probably 700 lbs of luggage and a guitar to the Amtrak terminal, then back to Albuquerque. One of the wheels broke off my luggage, so I literally had to drag 700 lbs across the floor, with no help, to get from train to train.
There I was, back to square one, literally. And this time, like all other times, I had no intention of staying in Albuquerque, so I thought. My mom had a two-bedroom apartment on Wyoming blvd. in the Albuquerque Heights area, so it was perfect and my mother welcomed me as usual. I found a job doing landscaping for bank-owned properties. Loving the great outdoors, I enjoyed traveling to the various beautiful places in New Mexico for work. It reminded me of the beauty of my culture, my people, and my home that I had pushed away into my inner file cabinet. A place that I tried to separate myself from for so long, was now calling me. I began taking beautiful pictures of the sunset with silhouettes of our flora and fauna, celebrating our unique cuisine. These things made me, but I had been separated from them for so long that I needed them, like food for the soul. Having a keen eye for graphic design and producing various types of media as well, I decided to make a page on Facebook, called ‘I am New Mexico’, celebrating the culture and cuisine of New Mexico. One of the most unique cultures, globally, and it was an instant success. Not only that, there wasn’t anyone producing media at the caliper that I could create after working in LA for prime movie houses.
Once my work started to pay off, I stopped landscaping and became a full-time influencer. But instead of making the page about myself, like others, I made it about the people and culture of New Mexico. I felt NM needed a facelift and wanted to create robust tourism dollars for a state that doesn’t get much publicity for the beauty that it possesses. I was soon looking for love and decided to download the Tinder app, among others. I met a few girls here and there, but nothing that seemed serious. My phone was disconnected, simply because I couldn’t afford it, but it was an iPhone, so I had iMessage. So, I would ask a girl for their phone number, then, only if they had an iPhone too, I would be able to text them any further with iMessage. Yeah, not very ideal, but it was what I had. Also, I didn’t have a vehicle. So, the odds were stacked against me. A girl named Alissa (now my wife), seemed to have a bit of interest but was concerned about picking up a guy without a car. I told her it was up to her, and just moved on. A few days later, she said that she decided that she would like to meet me. It was love at first sight, and within a few weeks, I had already moved in with her. A year or so later, we were pregnant, and not too long after that, we purchased our first home. I continued to publish media for my “I am New Mexico” page on Facebook, but the traffic, etc., curtailed, so I began trying to fill the gaps and began a woodworking company. I called it Strange Grain. It didn’t exactly do well. I had multiple very nice pieces of furniture, but I wasn’t having an easy time selling them. That kinda stemmed into wanting to do some wrought iron work, so I decided to wire a 220 circuit and bought an arc welding machine. I did a small job here and there, but collectively I still wasn’t making much money from either endeavor. One night my wife had a dream that she called “extremely vivid” of her making jewelry, and felt it was something that she needed to do after such a dream. She did some research and deduced that we needed a lapidary machine and soldering equipment, so she got on top of it right away and bought an old Lortone combo unit from eBay, a butane torch as well as solder, and a bit of silver. Started watching videos, etc., and was stoked to finally give it a try. The Lortone unit needed a bracket made, which I did with some angle iron that I had in the garage, and created a gravity-fed watering system to keep the wheels wet while processing different types of stone. She was ready to roll! Upon trying, she discovered that it was much harder than it looked. So, now we had all this stuff that she was excited about, but she was filled with disappointment. I knew nothing about jewelry at the time. How it was made, materials used…. I knew NOTHING, nor was I willing to watch videos. I’ve always preferred the fail your way to success principle, so I decided that I would learn how to make jewelry, just so I could teach her. Because most of my income from ‘I am New Mexico’, was passive, I had the extra time to learn. But instead of using silver, I decided to use an old brass bed among other scrap brass, as well as copper. I repeat, I never watched any how-to videos to make jewelry. Instead, used my prior brazing knowledge to persevere. I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I would cut the base plate the size and shape of the stone, then I would cut and bend my bezel wire. Because it was so thick and hard to bend, I eventually started cutting prongs, which I later discovered was called a castellated bezel. I had already opened a store on Etsy for Strange Grain, so I decided to put up a few pieces just to see if anyone even liked what I was making. Within a week or so, I had begun selling brass and copper pieces! While my wife still wanted to make jewelry, we were pregnant with our second child and had a baby to take care of, so she decided to take a break from learning because of the harmful chemicals that she could be exposed to. Nonetheless, she was still buying stones and stuff. The stones I had used up until this point, I had found in the Jemez Mountains. My wife decided to go to a local place in Albuquerque, called Thunderbird Supply Company and brought home a piece of Kingman Turquoise Rough. From that day forward, I was hooked on turquoise. I would literally go to Thunderbird every weekend to buy more and more until I discovered they had a better selection at their Gallup location. Like any other business, there are ups and downs, and in 2018 I felt like my jewelry career, while still in its infancy, was pretty much done. So, while the walls were seemingly closing in, I decided to teach myself to make pottery. I found a huge 4-foot tall and 3-foot wide Paragon Manual Ceramics Kiln and a nice pottery wheel. For the next 6-8 months, day in, and day out, I made pottery until I was firing my kiln at least once a week. I was so excited to show the world my pottery, just to find out that Instagram wasn’t going to let me show it to anyone. I banged my head against the wall for a few months trying to get a sale, but it was obvious that because I had these other artistic outlets, they wouldn’t allow this other one to succeed, let alone be seen. So, while I still wanted to make pottery, I had to revert to jewelry, but this time I was going to kick ass and take names. Soldering things that seemed impossible, making unique designs, doing what others seemingly can’t. Not to challenge myself, but to test the depreciative systems built into Instagram and Facebook algorithms. While I was able to achieve higher highs and higher lows fiscally, upon the inauguration of President Biden, on day one, they shadow banned ‘I am New Mexico’, ‘Strange Grain’, ‘Strange Cabs’ where I sell cabochon, as well as “Strange Pottery”. At that time it was still a secretive practice of theirs, which they now impose on millions of people. It was absurd to think that because Biden was now president nobody loved their NM culture anymore. Their staff claimed that the content wasn’t relevant to the audience, even though I would reach more people than any NM page at the time. I was forced to quit all of them or dissolve at the same speed at which they prescribed. Having a family and a household, that wasn’t an option. New Mexico, which had already been devastated by COVID-19 and politics, was becoming more of a trap than a home. So, to stay ahead of the purge, or the hypothetical walls from closing in, we decided to renovate our home and sell it and move away from New Mexico. So, after creating millions of dollars worth of demographical data for Facebook, I was left high and dry. With all of social media now contaminated, misrepresented, and plotting together, I had decided to quit making jewelry altogether, but only because of the misconduct I dealt with by entities like Etsy, Facebook, and Instagram that I’ve undergone over the years. Having traveled to 45 of the lower 48 states, I had a few places in mind that I thought would be a good place to raise children, as our son would soon be of age to attend elementary school. We started off looking in Tennessee, then North Carolina, and even considered Asheville, NC. From there we looked in upstate NY, PA, DE, VT, and MD, mostly because of the Colonial or Victorian-style homes, which my wife really likes, but after thinking about it further, my wife wanted to look somewhere that had warmer weather. I told her that Florida was awesome and that I loved how tropical it was and how Southern hospitality is real. She had been to Costa Rica, Panama, and other tropical places on vacation and loved it. So, the next thing we knew, we were in Florida checking out the home prices, etc. After a quick four-day trip without the kids, she knew for sure that it was Florida that she wanted to move. When we got back, I stopped everything I was doing and began working full-time for four months to bring our property to market. Within a few weeks, we had several offers then eventually sold our first home, and in November of 2021, we moved to North Port, Florida.
Now the end of 2024, 3 years later, we couldn’t have asked for a better place to raise our children. While every demographic has its inherent dangers, each also has its beauty. Since we’ve lived in SWFL, we’ve endured several hurricanes, Ian being the worst, but the dangers don’t override the positive aspects of it. The tropical landscape is truly amazing, and we have nice weather nearly all year long. We now live closer to Costa Rica and Panama, than we do to New Mexico and the US west coast. We’re about the same distance to New Mexico as we are to the Equator. There’s really no wonder why millions of Americans have flocked to Florida to retire. It being home, it’s like we’re always on vacation. The kids love it, too!
While I didn’t think I was going to see the age of 21, I persevered and overcame extreme poverty and adversity, sexual abuse from the age of 5-10, being murdered by my father, being abandoned by my family, drug addiction, and alcoholism, I am grateful to have survived. I still believe everything happens for a reason beyond our control. However, I also believe that we are the creators of our existence. While these two belief systems may seem contradictory, the entanglement of the two is what life is fabricated from. Also, somewhere along the line, I discovered that divine intervention truly exists as well, and as a byproduct, I began to love myself and consider myself to be special, and my life became worthwhile. Even though I strayed off course a few times, I’ve always been able to get back up and keep pushing forward, even though things may not have happened as I planned, I wouldn’t have it any other way. This reminds me of a quote I once heard, “If you want to make God laugh, make plans”.
I’ve had a ton of different jobs and various aspirations along the way that didn’t quite pan out and I wasn’t exactly dealt a good hand of cards from the get-go, my path brought me here and I am truly grateful for every step I’ve taken.
Best,
Will Barnes