My mind was either elated about my freedom or depressed by how lost I was. It was a volatile back-and-forth between these two extremes.
And it was exhausting…
…
She told me nothing.
But she showed me she had moved on.
There. On a date. At a hockey game. With him.
She was afraid to hurt me, but being hurt is exactly what I needed.
I needed to be thrown from that fucking empire state building of romanticized life.
She saved me from a life of waste.
She opened me up to a world of potential.
It sucked.
Pain isn’t what it feels like
It took me a year to pull myself together.
A year full of sleepless nights, self-induced famine, exhausting crying sessions, and full days of self-hate, guilt, and loss.
Add months of depression medication and sprinkle in some therapy, and I had the worst year of my life.
Heartbreak isn’t everyone’s rock bottom. I get that.
And relatively, it’s not even close to the worst things that can happen to a person. However, it’s important to recognize that the comparable pain someone feels to another’s is irrelevant.
A worst pain is still a worst pain.
And it may be the breaking point for someone else, even if it’s trivial to you.
As a romantic, heartbreak was mine.
…
After I started to see the light of the world again, I had a thought that crossed my mind that threw a wrench in any greatness of my future:
“I’m too late”
Yeah…I thought it was too late for me to become something new at 28 years old.
*rolling eyes*
And that my friends is the effect social conditioning has on us as individuals!
We were never taught to think for ourselves, to understand our emotions and their influence on our decisions, and to be skeptical and critical thinkers.
So, when we’re broken up into a million pieces in life, no wonder we feel so distraught and lost.
We were bamboozled.
Hoodwinked!
Shanghaied!
Of course, we go to victimhood…
We were never taught to be responsible for ourselves; to chart a path, seek adventure, and sail into the unknown.
It’s the ones of us that have followed someone else’s rules for too long. It’s those of us that have made decisions because of what the world has told us, not by the decisions we’ve made for ourselves. We’ve missed out on doing things with an individual intention for so long that we don’t think there’s any way that we can catch up to the rest of the world that seems to be not just successful, but so wise and deeply experienced in their craft that it feels impossible to match in our lifetime.
But who told you that anyone had it figured out from day one?
Everyone is lost.
Whether that’s at the beginning, the middle, or the end.
…
The problem is that life has been sold to us linearly. It’s been mapped out. It’s been shown to us as a graph that shows continuous compounding growth.
And it theoretically makes sense.
But it’s wrong.
Because real compounded growth lives on multiple planes.
Side to side, up and down, back and forth.
Life is insanely relative
As a previous athlete, I learned that the strongest version of the body is a balanced one. It’s not just repetition that makes us strong. It’s the diversity of work that helps the body grow together, not just in the areas of your strengths.
It means strengthening our weaknesses.
You learn that you have to train in the three different planes to become balanced and therefore stronger and more resilient.
The three planes of exercise and movement:
Sagittal, frontal, and transverse
Just to make my point.
The Truth about Growth
The challenge here is that the human mind is insanely powerful.
Hindsight and foresight do amazing things for us. Hindsight gives you the ability of memory; to learn from your lessons. Foresight gives you the ability to predict; to take what you know and act on a path.
But we’re so susceptible to our emotions that we believe in the way they manipulate our thoughts.
We see where we went down instead of up, way too far to the side, or fell back a mile.
We’re living too constricted through the single plane of linear growth.
We think:
“Love has failed me”
“I’ve spent too long doing the wrong thing”
“I never make good choices”
“Everyone is stronger, smarter, and too far ahead of me”
Growth however is multi-dimensional and dives as much as it rises.
Growth is in our failures AND our pain AND our mistakes AND our destruction AND our loss AND our being lost.
It’s uncomfortable, painful, uneasy, and shrouded in doubt and mystery. It’s unpredictable, coincidental, and disturbing.
…
I spent 20 years as a trade electrician.
I chose it not because it felt right but because I was too scared to not make a choice. I was too scared to “be nothing” when the world was telling me to grow up. So instead of trusting any sort of impulse at all, I acted out of pressure.
A decision that sent me down a two-decade experience of self-induced misery. I hard a really hard time overcoming the regret of a past that I couldn’t change.
But what you decide to do will create benefits no matter how “not you” it actually is.
I learned about people. I learned how to make others feel comfortable and trust me. I learned how to direct conversations and create confidence.
I learned to work with my hands and taught myself how to make sense of the objective world of man’s constructions. I don’t fear the world that makes life more convenient and efficient.
I learned and adapted to the physical elements and my body became resilient and capable. I’m in far better health physically and mentally than a lot of other people.
I’m more confident because of it. I’m more capable because of it. I’m more of a people person because of it. I’m more driven because of it. I’m more in tune with my ambitions because of it. I’m more driven to love because of it.
It was so much of who I wasn’t, that it gave me to power and clarity to become who I wanted to be.
The linear timeline doesn’t matter.
You have time to be whatever it is that you’ve either figured out you want to be or figured out who you wanted to be all along. And the reason why you can is that it’s not that you have to be noticed or successful to do it. All you have to do is live your life doing it every day.
That’s what makes you that thing.
And the only thing linear about it is that it took the compounding effect of all the things that happened up until that point(growth) that finally gave you access or the strength to choose that transition in life.
So…
When you realize that you’re lost…
Or you feel like you’re lost…
Remember, that the world is not happening to you. It’s just happening.
Who we are is a collaboration of our experiences. Who we want to be is just our courageous decision to use what we have to become it.
You’re not behind, you’re just starting the next adventure.
Truth and Love Reader.
You powerful, sexy thing you…
…
If you like my writing and the things I question, you might( I mean…probably) also like the questions and conversations on my podcast, The Rebel Minded Podcast. Find it with the link below on Substack, or on Spotify, Apple, and Google Podcasts.
There are so many great stories on Medium! If you want to have access to some of the best writing by thousands of creators, start your membership with the link below, which will also support my writing.
Remember…question everything!
https://therebelminded.substack.com/
https://therebelminded.medium.com/membership
—
This post was previously published on medium.com.
***
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS. Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
 |
 |
 |
 |
—–
Photo credit: Honey Yanibel Minaya Cruz on Unsplash
