My favorite memories, though, would have to be Haunt preview night here at Dorney Park. We would not really have much more than our normal work to worry about as Dorney Park switched from regular operation to the Haunt season. Oftentimes, we could go as a group to the preview night of Haunt, where they made sure all the actors and such felt prepared for the first night with patrons. It was a great reminder that the place we worked at was actually meant to be fun, while also giving us a chance to hang out outside of work, where we had to be somewhat professional.

I also have several other items from my childhood that I keep but do not use. Ash and I still have many of our video game systems from when we were younger. Initially, we kept them because older game systems lacked backward compatibility, so we needed the original systems to play games on the GameCube or PS2. Although this is no longer an issue, we still have them.

We even have a television dedicated solely to those systems, as well as the Game Boys. I am unsure of their significance to my life, but I continue to hold on to them.

However, I hope my first impression is that I’m a safe space. That can depend on the situation, though. For example, if I’m directing a musical or working with new volunteers, I’d want to come across as someone to respect and take seriously because of the leadership role and the process of creating something in that space. More often than not, though, I want people to see me as a safe and trustworthy person, even if how I look might suggest otherwise at first.

Take Shakespeare’s plays, for example—they’ve been around for hundreds of years, and the further we get from them, the less the author’s intent really matters. Compare that to something like God of Carnage, which I’m directing this spring. That play came out in 2008, so the author’s intent is still very clear, and there’s only so much room for reinterpretation. But with something like Much Ado About Nothing or King Lear, you can do almost anything with it.

I’d also love to be there for the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. It would be fascinating to see how such a normal, everyday moment turned into something so huge, especially in the last five years. Did Gary Gygax, despite all his flaws, have any idea it would become what it is today? Did he realize it would outlive him? As someone who’s so into Dungeons & Dragons, it would be incredible to see how it all began and whether he had any sense of its future impact.

One example: When I was living in Chicago, before Ash and I were dating, the night before something happened, I said “I love you” for the first time. That gives you some context about the kind of person I am. The very next day, my car got broken into in Philly on Diamond Street—because, well, it's Philly. Ash was freaking out, and I was just sitting there like, “It happened, so now we’re going to deal with it.” That’s kind of how I approach things now. There’s never been one thing that’s come up where I’ve thought, “No, this is the end. This is insurmountable.”

So, while the experience of almost dying was definitely an obstacle, I’m not sure it fully meets the criteria of your question. But it’s impacted me in that nothing since has felt as bad as that moment. That makes sense, but for a different reason.

At the end of the day, sure, I wish I had gotten my master’s degree sooner. Would that have solved everything? Maybe. But nothing is broken, nothing is unfixable or insurmountable. You’re just going to trade out problems for different ones. Might they be better problems? Sure. But who cares?

I recently read about a concept that expands on this idea: the notion that we are never without problems; we're simply trading one problem for another as we solve them. Since problems are inevitable, there’s no reason to always seek a perfect solution when a good one is often easier to find.