Meet Jake

My mission is to touch people’s lives in a positive way. My friendships, my relationships with family, through patient advocacy and through the stories that I write. Even when I was a host at a restaurant, I would try to make people feel welcome and start conversations with them.

I haven’t had a ton of opportunities to do that lately. So that’s been difficult. This has been one of the most difficult times in my life. I’m in my room, trying to figure out what to do with my future. And it’s not great for the mood. But I hope to find more opportunities to do that in the future.

The stories I write are very raw and real. I try to make you feel like you learned something new about the human condition or give you the motivation to do something. The first book I wrote is a children’s book called One Wants to Be a Letter. It’s about celebrating your uniqueness, about trying to accept yourself for who you are and not trying to compare yourself to other people. I know that’s not a groundbreaking message, but I think there’s something about the way I told it. I wanted to do it in a unique way.

I did the kid’s thing and now I want to move on to something else. I’ve lived a complicated, difficult life. I’m working on a script right now for a dark fantasy series. I met a director in LA who said I could send it to him, but only send it once. So I’m trying to make it as good as possible. If you’re going to get something like that done, it has to be your main focus all day. And today I’ve had back-to-back meetings with my life coach and my psychiatrist and stuff so it’s hard.

Freshman year of high school I started wearing colorful pants– red, orange, blue khakis. You know, I’d be wearing bright yellow pants. That was a fun era for me. I am not afraid to wear something that’s unique or explore my more feminine side of fashion. I feel good when I express myself because I’m a very artistic person. I do believe that fashion, like books or movies or shows or video games or music – all of those are art forms. And fashion is definitely one of those. Fashion allows me to express my colorful nature as a person.

I get where the sentiment of wanting to call me a hero or inspiration comes from.  But I have aspirations of my own and I want people to remember that. I’m just trying to live my life and that doesn’t necessarily make me a hero. Just because my life might look nice, it doesn’t mean it is all the time. It’s hard for me to be happy at this point when I’m just so lost. It must look like I have everything figured out when I’m up on stage giving presentations. I have accomplished things that I’m very proud of myself for, but that doesn’t mean that I feel like I’ve accomplished all that I can. Life is like a roller coaster. I’m down right now, but I know I’m going to go back up. And then I’ll go back down again. How do we take our experiences as people and move forward and be the best and live best goddamn lives we can?  I don’t really take my own advice a lot of the time.