Lost
When I agreed to run the new company in March of 2023, I was not sure what the timeline was going to be. I dove in head first and tried to do everything I could think of to get it off the ground. I took over social media duties, marketing, recruiting, day-to-day operations, and everything in between. Most of my days were spent running the new company, on the brokerage, mentoring/coaching agents, handling my own sales business I was still operating, and trying to fit whatever family and personal time I could in. Although I love to be busy (I can’t sit still to save my life), I did not enjoy this time. It got to the point where I would wake up Sunday morning looking forward to next Saturday night when I could chill out on my couch for a few hours to watch a documentary or something similar.
When the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve 2022 and the calendar rolled forward to 2023, I was still feeling a void inside. I remember watching the countdown and immediately, when it became 2023, feeling like the void just got a lot deeper. It was a weird feeling, but for the first time since I could remember, I just felt lost. For example, every year on my birthday January 24th, I take the day off and go do something for myself, like spend time in nature, go to a museum, or just find a quiet coffee shop and read all day. I typically plan what I will do, but in 2023, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Nothing seemed interesting to me, so I just went to work. Finally, around noon, my partner asked me if I was going to do something. There was literally nothing I could think of that I wanted to do. Nothing. After a few minutes of badgering me to do something, I finally decided to go to the Field Museum in Chicago. There was a new exhibit that seemed somewhat interesting, so I reluctantly decided to go see it. It was about death.
Being lost is a strange place to be in. You wake up every day, but something just doesn’t feel right, and you cannot figure out what it is. You feel fine physically, and your mind is still sharp, but there is this like hole in the back of your mind that is there constantly reminding you of its existence. I tried to rationalize it as nothing that couldn’t be worked out by putting my head down and pushing through as I have always done, but as the days of the year ticked by, the feeling stayed with me. I even started seeing a therapist (something I was always opposed to) once a week to try to get myself out of whatever it was I was in.
My wife had planned a trip with her friends to visit their friend in New Jersey over the first weekend in November. She was leaving early on Friday and would be coming back Sunday afternoon, so it would just be my boys and me for the weekend. By this time, the year had worn on me, and I didn’t know what to do. I felt worse than I did at the beginning of the year and had no idea what to do. I asked my parents if they could watch my boys on Friday night so I could have some time to myself. I dropped my boys off in the morning and would be picking them up the following afternoon. I decided to work from home that day, and my goal for this time was to figure out what the heck was going on with me.
I worked most of the day and treated myself to a dinner of vegan buffalo chicken wings (I’m a pescatarian, which means I don’t eat meat or dairy but still eat seafood) and a ton of waffle fries dipped in BBQ sauce. After dinner, I took a warm shower before heading to the finished lower level of my house. I grabbed four pillows off my couch and stacked them up against the wall. I had mediated before, but never seriously or consistently, so this time I did some research before, and around 6:30 pm, I sat on the pillows with the hope of figuring out my life.