If you are someone who worked with me at the State, from your perspective I just vanished one day while we were all working from home, not a word said about it. For the most part, friends and family didn’t get much of any news on what I was going through or what I planned to do either. That’s because there wasn’t any plan and I really had no idea at the time what I was going to end up doing or for how long I would be in hibernation.
If your attention span is as short as most of ours are these days, I’m glad you made it this far – but I will give you the TLDR in case you are just mildly curious what happened to me or what I was up to these days. What follows will go into more detail because I think there are so many people out there struggling with mental health issues and working jobs that no longer serve them that may benefit.
TLDR : I quit taking my anxiety medication as it had become less and less effective over the years while the side effects were seriously reducing my quality of life. The resulting detox and withdrawal period made it near impossible for me to function in any social environment, let alone perform my job. What felt like recovery to me at that time turned out to be more of a manic period where I ended up torching most of my 401K to learn that the stock and crypto markets are not friendly to anyone in a hurry to become independently wealthy. Lessons have been learned and paper has been burned, so as the dust settles – I am now starting the life I have always known I should live. I am going to do everything in accordance with how I believe my skills and unique perspective will most help the world and the money will follow.
And now the deeper dive into this madness for anyone still present – and thank you for the attention you have chosen to direct here , it is the most valuable thing you have, so that is an honor. The rest of what I want to say will primarily be of interest to you if:
— You face challenges with mental health / addiction / recovery or have friends or family who do.
— You want to pursue work that aligns with your deeper personal values that inspires you instead of draining you and shortening your life from the stress.
Mental Health :
From the time when my boys were young, I was prescribed Klonopin to deal with anxiety. I originally started on this drug to cope with intrusive thoughts and images that constantly came into my mind around the fear of something happening to my children, family , pets or myself. These are thoughts everyone has to find their peace with, but they were excessive, so my Dr’s thought the best thing to do was simply numb me out and suppress them. This felt like magic at the time, but soon I ended up feeling overwhelmed with normal stresses at work and of course, their solution was to up the dose. I am responsible for what I put in my body, so no blame is being cast here – just a reflection on how pervasive it is for Dr’s to support the constant medicating of any and all unwanted thoughts and feelings.
The long term result of this was me with very little coping skills that I had maintained on my own, every stressful situation required the right amount of benzodiazepines in my system. This is not sustainable as tolerance continues to go up and eventually, the body no longer cooperates with this insanity. It was during the swirl of changes going on with Covid that this finally hit me in a way I could no longer ignore. When I started trading stocks and crypto and flung myself without checking for a net into the crazy world of then Crypto-Twitter, without knowing it, I was overstimulating myself to the point where the ability for my nervous system to bring me back to a calm state was lost. I started getting manic and not sleeping, so I decided I no longer needed the medication at all and quit with very little taper. I strongly advise everyone not to try this at home!
I have no regrets now that time has passed and I am looking back on all of this. I have learned so much from the intense immersion into finding my own natural ways to deal with my anxiety and fears. I am certain now that these insights could have been found just as well without putting my body and mind into shock and cutting all ties socially. The thing was , I was in a hurry to get it done! In my manic under slept state, I took this all or nothing mentality and attempted to build a fortune with it by trading stock options and crypto full time. I am sure you can guess how that turned out. You guessed it, I burned through my 401K in about two years and the ‘only’ souvenir I have now is the clarity and peace I have found by looking closely at everything I went through with compassion.
So if I could only tell you one thing after all of this – SLOW DOWN! No matter what it is you think you need to do, it can be spread out over more time and allow for checking in with yourself along the way and making adjustments. It normally takes someone with my length of benzo use around 2 years minimum to taper off and heal their brain. I did it in a month, but the overall cost to recover was more like 4 years and $150K. I consider this tuition for all that I have learned.
Finding your Life’s work
Do you feel like you are stuck working a job that does not align with your vision of how you could most effectively contribute to the world where your unique abilities are needed? If that question resonates with you, it is quite possible that you may be coping with the stress that this incongruence causes by self medicating. If you’ve managed to hold it down without drugs or alcohol, you might simply be distracting it all away by consuming an endless stream of content. I did both and this left me no energy or inspiration to create and share the things that would actually be the most beneficial to the people I could be helping. And while working every day on someone else’s mission, the belief that you CAN do something more satisfying to you and more helpful to others fades away.
After what I have experienced, I want to be sure to advise anyone in this position not to kick off their liberation the way I did. I didn’t intend to burn bridges with people that I had worked with for decades, but bridges were burned (no pun, for those who know what I mean). I never wanted to dump my responsibilities on others with little or no notice, causing unnecessary stress for people I respect and value – yet this is what happened. This happened because I burned out and if you constantly ignore the feedback from your body or numb it away, you will burn out; and you don’t get to choose the time of this fire you will be sitting in. In the spirit of amends, I am truly sorry to anyone that was hurt simply by proximity to my wreckage. Now where can we go from here?
I intend to build a community of people that are interested in mindfully creating together and finding their true value. The experience and perspective that I have gained from so much time building and maintaining software will not go to waste. Software will be built, but this will not be my focus. I will help others who have projects that could bring true value to their communities, but they lack the technical understanding to manifest their vision. The applications I will build are going to be the ones that I actually need to be the truest and most effective version of myself. Having lived for decades with ADHD and anxiety, I know that any tool that is able to help me continuously make my ideas into reality will also help so many others.
Second Attention (The Attention you pay with awareness)
I believe my most developed gift is my ability to write. I got this from my father and it carries too much potential for me to let it rot on the vine anymore. My Dad wrote “The Living Book” and I learned so much about him from this that I had never known from being his Son. The thing is, my Dad’s life work, he did it alone – so it didn’t reach as many people as a life’s work that is done in public and with a community that is working together for everyone’s benefit. My brand is called ‘Second Attention’ and you will see it in a ‘theater’ near you soon in the form of a YouTube channel, a website and posts that I will share here.
By the sheer fact that you are reading this last paragraph, I can tell that you are either a dear friend or family or you are someone who may find my work interesting and enriching. It is the enrichment I want to focus on the most. At the touch of your fingertip, you have at your convenience a nearly infinite supply of content that can entertain you, distract you or inflame you. It is your choice what you allow to pass through your eyes or ears and into your mind. If you choose to create rather than consume, then what you give life to will be available to everyone who needs it for all of our remaining history as a species. If you have realized that you can no longer be at peace with yourself when you are not doing the work you were meant to do, we may have work to do together!
