The Lost Days...
As my journey to recovery began the days blurred together, the hours dragged on, and learned the healing process has its own timeline.
Most of the time my tiny apartment was a place of quiet isolation. Other times the slightly muffled high-pitched whine of my dad’s routing of Corian countertops in the cabinet shop became the soundtrack for the day. When I wasn’t exploring the fledgling internet (it was 1994), I passed the time listening to my 1,000+ album collection accumulated during my DJ days.
My love of story often led me to song lyrics as a way to escape when I felt overwhelmed. So every morning I pulled out a few of my favorite albums and listened to them from start to finish, secretly hoping to find some nugget of wisdom to calm my mind.
One morning I was listening to the Eagles album Hotel California and feeling quiet mellow when the song “Wasted Time” came on. In that moment it felt like the perfect metaphor for my professional career and my life in general.
The soundtrack for the lost days reveals itself…
Though Wasted Time is a song about a lost love, there are a number of poignant and lines within the lyrics I connected with that morning:
How do you start it over
You don't know if you can
So you live from day to day
And you dream about tomorrow
And the hours go by like minutes
And the shadows come to stayMaybe someday we will find
That it wasn't really wasted time
Those lyrics felt comforting and reminded me that I was not alone. We all experience periods in our lives where we feel lost. Times where we wonder how we will move forward. Times where we question whether the time we invested (in the project, the job, the relationship, or any number of other things) was simply wasted time.
For the next several weeks, that song made regular appearances on the turntable as I slowly began to understand how I had arrived at that point in my life. I also began to realize it was going to take some time to recover and rebuild (likely far more time than I expected or hoped).
Impatience does not move you forward…
While the music calmed me, my inner struggles did not disappear. They confronted me regularly and I began to hate the isolation of my new life. The introvert in me loved having more control over my time, but the achiever within hated not seeing progress and struggled with sorting out the next steps.
Bluntly stated: I was a mess.
My mind was still trying to make sense of the trauma memories recalled on the couch in the counselor’s office a few months earlier. Anger began to bubble up with me that I didn’t understand. Nor did I know who to direct it toward.
For the next several months, I spent my time journaling about my experiences and trying to find peace of mind. During that time I went to appointments with three different counselors as I searched for guidance they could not provide.
Most of the time I just felt angry, alone, and afraid...
It didn’t help that I was living in a place where I had not spent more than a few weeks a year for the past two decades. Those I knew when I grew up there were busy with their own lives, and even if they hadn’t been, I was too embarrassed about my situation to want to engage with anyone from my past.
Occasionally the phone would ring as an old friend or colleague reached out, but most of the time I was isolated and anxious. I was living off my savings and knew if something didn’t change soon I would be experiencing something I never imagined for myself, i.e., being flat broke with no prospects.
As the second holiday season approached I realized I’d been hiding out for a year and a half. The realization I’d been isolating for that long hit me hard. It was time to move beyond wallowing and start taking some sort of positive action.
Putting the lost days in the rearview…
I picked up my journal and made a few declarations in the hope of using the New Year as a jump start for my reboot.
First, I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and expecting things to change. The truth was I had screwed up and I’d burned through most of my savings hoping someone or something would intervene to change things. But I was the only person who could change things.
Second, I decided to start doing things I had done in the past to succeed:
Make a list of people I knew who might be able to help me connect within the local business community.
Connect with those people and be open about where I was and what I needed, aka to ask for help.
Stop hiding and start engaging with people so the path can reveal itself.
Finally, I decided to stop obsessing about the bad things that had happened in my life and choose to create a better path forward. Today I joke this was the second or third time I declared myself to be healed from my childhood trauma, which I wasn’t. But at that time I needed to redirect my mental focus, so I chose to move forward.
Committing to those three declarations changed everything. It gave me a focal point for taking action and allowed me to take ownership of my situation. Most importantly, it reminded me the only way to move forward was to take action and leverage the things I knew best that had worked in the past.
PS—No doubt it is obvious that the story I am sharing here is the way I recall it three decades down the road and in hindsight everything seems clearer than it was in the moment. If you’ve been down a similar road, please don’t think I am making light of the process and the challenges it brings. Nor am I suggesting it is easy…if it was I wouldn’t have kept walking away from doing the work.