I am writing this to explain to people the journey I went through in the past 7 months as well as to express my true gratitude for my friends.
Over my life I developed the ability to dream bright dreams of the future and convince my employees to follow those dreams. That ability led my to a lot of success in life. For a long time I thought I was the king of the world, I had the wife, the kids, the job, the car, the house, everything.
But that whole life was based on a 21 year relationship that was fundamentally flawed from the beginning and as we entered our mid-life it became more and more unstable.
I really have no one but myself to blame for what happened. I had the false pride to truly believe I could hold that unstable relationship together just from pure force of will. As the relationship became more and more unstable I invested more and more of myself into shoring it up; beyond reason, beyond sanity and finally beyond the point of no return. And when that relationship shattered I shattered with it.
At first I could not see anything but the pain of that shattering. I stopped dreaming about anything. I learned what it was like to live a life that was so bad that you could see preferring nothingness to facing another day.In the days that followed my family stepped in to try and rescue me. My oldest son grew up overnight and returned 18 year of love by refusing to leave my side. I am ashamed to say that my child lent me his strength when I had none of my own. My family tried over a long distance to help me also. But they were slowly losing the battle.
And that is when my friends stepped in to help:
It was a good friend who branded a message on my back so that I would never forget it. A message that said; win or lose, only I could conquer the pain inside me.
It was my friend and mentor who spent hours listening to me talk and had the wisdom to know when to work me till I dropped, when to deliberately hurt me by making me face reality and when finally to slap me across the head and tell me to master myself.
It was the best couple in the whole world who spent a Sunday letting me vent pain and sadness until I was finally empty and could face another week of life and who spent the next 7 months checking on me to make sure I was okay.
It was one of my friends who faced a far worse situation that I had with such grace and dignity that she made me ashamed of myself and broke me out of my cycle of self-pity.
It was a little wolf who pinged me one night on my phone and spent the following months snapping at me every time I doubted myself.
It was an old friend who reached out to me, gave me a safe place to find peace and to begin bonding with my new girlfriend
It was my friend in California who let me complain all the time and who when I truly hit bottom wrote me a text I still keep on my desk cussing me out and reminding me of all the things I had to live for.
It was my friend the Sadist who stabbed me in the hand with a fork one night and told me the next time he heard me feeling sorry for myself the fork would go through to the table.
It was all the couples and individuals who reached out to M and I to help me begin a new relationship and to welcome me back into their lives when I was ready.
And last but never least, it was the woman who became mine. The woman who had the courage, love and trust to believe in us and let me be with her when I was still struggling to be with myself.
As I emerge from all this I am not the person I was. I don't smile as much and I lost the easygoing agreeable nature that I had. There are still times when I grow quiet and stare into space trying to think of what I could have done differently. But in the end I have become a better man from the experience. Now I see that maybe I needed to experience what I did to allow me to rebuild myself. I don't think I am really there yet but, as a friend of mine said... every day I wake up one step closer to my goal.
In the end it is my friends that gave me the strength I needed to survive the experience and to learn to love life again and I will never forget that.
Over my life I developed the ability to dream bright dreams of the future and convince my employees to follow those dreams. That ability led my to a lot of success in life. For a long time I thought I was the king of the world, I had the wife, the kids, the job, the car, the house, everything.
But that whole life was based on a 21 year relationship that was fundamentally flawed from the beginning and as we entered our mid-life it became more and more unstable.
I really have no one but myself to blame for what happened. I had the false pride to truly believe I could hold that unstable relationship together just from pure force of will. As the relationship became more and more unstable I invested more and more of myself into shoring it up; beyond reason, beyond sanity and finally beyond the point of no return. And when that relationship shattered I shattered with it.
At first I could not see anything but the pain of that shattering. I stopped dreaming about anything. I learned what it was like to live a life that was so bad that you could see preferring nothingness to facing another day.In the days that followed my family stepped in to try and rescue me. My oldest son grew up overnight and returned 18 year of love by refusing to leave my side. I am ashamed to say that my child lent me his strength when I had none of my own. My family tried over a long distance to help me also. But they were slowly losing the battle.
And that is when my friends stepped in to help:
It was a good friend who branded a message on my back so that I would never forget it. A message that said; win or lose, only I could conquer the pain inside me.
It was my friend and mentor who spent hours listening to me talk and had the wisdom to know when to work me till I dropped, when to deliberately hurt me by making me face reality and when finally to slap me across the head and tell me to master myself.
It was the best couple in the whole world who spent a Sunday letting me vent pain and sadness until I was finally empty and could face another week of life and who spent the next 7 months checking on me to make sure I was okay.
It was one of my friends who faced a far worse situation that I had with such grace and dignity that she made me ashamed of myself and broke me out of my cycle of self-pity.
It was a little wolf who pinged me one night on my phone and spent the following months snapping at me every time I doubted myself.
It was an old friend who reached out to me, gave me a safe place to find peace and to begin bonding with my new girlfriend
It was my friend in California who let me complain all the time and who when I truly hit bottom wrote me a text I still keep on my desk cussing me out and reminding me of all the things I had to live for.
It was my friend the Sadist who stabbed me in the hand with a fork one night and told me the next time he heard me feeling sorry for myself the fork would go through to the table.
It was all the couples and individuals who reached out to M and I to help me begin a new relationship and to welcome me back into their lives when I was ready.
And last but never least, it was the woman who became mine. The woman who had the courage, love and trust to believe in us and let me be with her when I was still struggling to be with myself.
As I emerge from all this I am not the person I was. I don't smile as much and I lost the easygoing agreeable nature that I had. There are still times when I grow quiet and stare into space trying to think of what I could have done differently. But in the end I have become a better man from the experience. Now I see that maybe I needed to experience what I did to allow me to rebuild myself. I don't think I am really there yet but, as a friend of mine said... every day I wake up one step closer to my goal.
In the end it is my friends that gave me the strength I needed to survive the experience and to learn to love life again and I will never forget that.
