What to Do When You’re at a Fork in the Road: Lessons from the Road Less Traveled

Forks in the Road (The Road Less Traveled)

They don’t tell you this when you’re young, but most of life is spent standing at forks in the road, staring into the unknown, weighing the risk, your heart pounding in your ears, wondering if this next step will save you or break you.

For me, the road less traveled wasn’t one fork. It was three, maybe four, each one taking me further away from the life everyone expected me to live—and closer to the life I was born to live.

The First Fork: A Flower in My Hair

I was reading The Mayor of Castro Street just days after getting attacked outside a gay club in Huntington. That book felt like the universe talking directly to me. And I listened.

Within weeks, I was on a Greyhound bus headed to San Francisco, all that was missing was a flower in my hair. I was leaving behind expectations: family, a political future, a future they all saw for me as the guy who would lead Huntington into its progressive era. I left it all for the unknown, for freedom, for the chance to be fully, unapologetically myself – whatever that may be.

I was terrified. Anxious. But determined. Faking confidence until it became real. And when it did? The freedom was bigger than I ever imagined.

The Second Fork: Leaving Success for Something Real

Years later, I was in San Francisco, making near six figures as Y2K dawned, working at Wells Fargo, living in the Castro—living what many would call “the dream.” But it didn’t feel like my dream.

The gay community I loved was becoming commercial, Pride was more about profit than protest, more about fetish’s than love and even with my salary, I couldn’t afford to buy a home in the city I’d come to love and that was in 1999. I wanted to paint again. I wanted to organize again. I wanted to live in color, not just in spreadsheets.

So I bought a home in Palm Springs and packed up and moved chasing a different kind of stability and a dream of building a new kind of community.

And then there was him. You know the type. The one who walks in like a storm, rearranging your furniture and your brain chemistry, making you think you’re flying when you’re actually free-falling. It wasn’t love. It was the kind of lightning you chase even when you know it’s going to burn you. And it did. We all have that one chapter we’d rather skip but can’t because it changed us, cracked us open, made us see what we would and would not allow in our lives ever again. He pulled me back into old habits, but he didn’t get to write my ending. I’m still here, living free, finding joy, even landing on a magazine cover or two, a little older, a lot wiser, and far more alive than I ever was when I was chasing that storm.

The Third Fork: Choosing Life Over Death

The true fork came on a highway outside El Paso, heading north toward Albuquerque. I knew the intersection was coming—go left back to California, back to Palm Springs where he lived, addiction and death waited for me, or take a right into the unknown.

I took the right.

I left behind the darkness, the sex, the drugs, the hopelessness, the feeling of being less than enough. I chose a year of recovery in Florida, with Bailey by my side, even in the recovery home, where every night he climbed a ladder to sleep next to me. I chose sobriety. I chose life. I chose Alain, who returned to my life permanently after that.

What the Road Less Traveled Taught Me

They say taking the unconventional path comes with costs, and they’re right. I’ve felt fear, the gnawing anxiety that I might end up old and penniless because I never really planned for a future I didn’t believe I’d live to see. But I did live. And somewhere along the way, I learned that life has a way of providing when you show up for it.  When you’re sober enough to be there when is presents itself. I’ve found reasons to wake up grateful, to keep going, to build a life I don’t take for granted—a life I get to call my own.

In exchange for the risk, I gained a lifetime of stories. I found the common threads between shrimpers and drag queens, between gay men in big cities and farmers in the heartland. I lived as a witness to America, my feet on the ground but my eyes wide open, seeing people, truly seeing them, even when I struggled to see myself. Especially because I didn’t want to see myself.

I learned that fear is just love waiting to happen, that risks are the price of authenticity, that if you’re young and it won’t kill you, you should jump—every single time.

Now, success and happiness look different to me. It might be a condo overlooking the Bay, or it might be a 300 sq ft studio on Miami Beach where paint takes priority over food. It’s not about having less or more—it’s about having enough and living in alignment with what matters most to you.

To Those Standing at their Fork

If you’re at that fork, staring down a road you didn’t expect, wondering if you should take the easy path or the one that scares you—don’t do it half-assed. Don’t run home when it gets tough. If you’re going to change everything, then change everything.

And as you go, cherish your friendships along the way. The places will be temporary, but the people are what make the journey worth it. I wish I had held them closer instead of treating them as passing stops on my route.

Because in the end, the road less traveled isn’t about arriving anywhere.

It’s about becoming fully, deeply, beautifully you—under big open skies, vibing with nature, with your dog’s beside you, with the love of your life at your side, and with peace in your heart that you lived your life, not just survived it.