30.

For a few years now, I’ve been keeping little tidbits in a saved folder so that I could try and write a good recap of spending ten years in Los Angeles. I have a little more than a year to go to cross that milestone, and taking stock of accomplishments (big or small) has never been something I’ve been very good at.

I’ve been able to make a career and a living as an actor, something that truly felt like the most absurd dream I could come up with. I’ve supported a family as an actor. I’ve been able to work with directors and performers who were heroes of mine, and I’ve made a community with some of the most talented and hardworking people I’ve ever come across.

But these tidbits never seem to get across the full story, or even the basic story, of my time in LA.

Along with everything I’m proud of in my career, there is something more obvious sitting right in front of me. Or, occasionally, next to me while we watch Shark Tank until she falls asleep at 8:45 pm.

I was a kid who grew up with tremendous loss, suffered from PTSD and impostor syndrome, and always felt like settling into a comfortable life would be just a little bit out of my reach; it almost seemed impossible. In fact, I had conversations with some of my greatest mentors where I told them I had to keep scrambling away from being happy because I would risk some greater romantic creative ideal. I thought my talent and my power was in my pain.

But I found happiness and contentment in Los Angeles. And the reason I found that is because I found a person who gave it to me.

Now, I didn’t live some miserable, wretched life of loss and torment. I dealt with one major blow, but I had the support of an amazing family that kept me afloat. I was happy on a day-to-day basis, I would say, for the most part. But being big-H Happy and content truly felt like a world that I didn’t understand. For me, even at my happiest, I was always searching; always reaching for something else that might be out there.

I’ve had good relationships in the past, with tremendous women who each deserve a gold medal for dealing with me. I’ve loved for sure, and I’ve been loved. I feel very secure in that. But when you’re living with a brain with faulty wiring and an emotional distance that was paramount to protecting you from another devastating event, it’s tough to let someone fully in unless they force their way in there.

But at the end of 2010, I met a supernova.

Jennifer Hunt loves unlike any person I’ve ever seen before. She quite figuratively enveloped me. I pushed and I pushed and I pushed and she stood absolutely still (aside from the two weeks she “moved” back to Boston to threaten me into proposing but like SHE HAD EARNED IT, IT HAD BEEN YEARS).

A woman who decided at 21 to move across the country so she could live with a guy who didn’t like to use the word “girlfriend.” A woman who bet her early twenties on an actor who, in 2011, had done one Bruins commercial and was worried that his freelance craigslist writing gigs were going to dry out. A woman who doubled down and offered to work a second job to help make ends meet when that actor spent a second year in Los Angeles without a single paying gig. (At this point, I was very okay calling her my girlfriend).

That is the woman I got to marry in 2016.

I had dated women in their early twenties before, and I knew very well how much people have to grow as they start to wind towards their thirties. I had grown apart from previous “loves of my life” before. I was terrified to invest in someone who I knew would still be learning about herself for years, expanding and charting her own path.

But sometimes you get lucky.

I got to stand there and witness an already incredible woman become an advocate for change, a voice for herself and others, and one of the most awe-inspiring mothers I’ve ever been around. I got to start a life with a person who builds me up while building our daughter up while saving just enough time for herself.

I got to start a life.

Jennifer Hunt is loud and passionate and creative and forceful and tender and patient and a real asshole sometimes. But she’s also become the living embodiment that I don’t have to be unhappy to be happy. It sounds pretty easy to come to that conclusion, but it took me most of my life to figure it out.

So, as my diminutive better half turns 30, I figured I’d focus on the actual important things I’ve done since moving to LA in 2010. Here’s the full list:

I love a woman who loves me, I married a woman who loves me, and together we made a future woman that has become our entire world. (plus I bought some great shirts and I have several friends)

I would like to wish my wife a happy birthday today, because happy is something she’s already given me.