The hardest thing for me to imagine was becoming social. While I feel that fear, I do it anyway, and I invite you to join me as I share with you Five Paths of Resilience.
While intellectually knowing that no man is an island, I knew I was safe on mine – at least for now. And safety isn’t something I take for granted—I organized my life around achieving it.
As a child, various lessons taught me that becoming social posed risks, whereas alone, there was a specific relief from threat. Yet alone, there is a limit to one’s impact. For me, when you reach a limit, it’s time to grow, not stop.
As an adult, I wish that child had learned otherwise because, as an adult, I have to feel that fear and move into the light of social media anyway. As an adult, I’ve reached the extent of what my words can do for me, and now it has to be about how I can bring them to other people.
Bouncing Forward from Experience
How do you bounce forward from a lifetime of one-sided, toxic, damaging relationships? You believe in love and leap into a different community of people.
I have no interest in marketing to people who have no interest in introspection or self-improvement. If they aren’t readers, as many people aren’t, we aren’t even on the same track.
The only desire I have is to connect with the person who was like me so many years ago – lost and with no idea how it happened or where to go, while knowing that I had done it all myself. I’d made every decision – sometimes even with hopes and prayers, often with data and statistics.
In fact, “lost” was not the word I would have used. It sounded insulting when someone said that to me, like I wasn’t paying attention at the wheel of life. I would have simply said I was chronically miserable and uninterested in anything. Doctors called me depressed.
Maybe those who seek my experience and research are also engineers and managers, like me, who think they are supposed to be in their prime yet cannot bear the idea that they might only be halfway there. But I don’t know—the ones I met were (still) pretty darn confident that success was just around the next corner.
At any rate, I know the people I need to reach read, and I know one place where readers hang out.
To that end, all future posts will be on Substack, as opposed to here, which has been its primary and sole location. I’m starting the journey with Five Paths of Resilience: How to Bounce Forward From Anything so head on over if you want to read more.
Choosing Your Own Adventure
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