Consequences, pain, and growth

Ten years ago today every bad thing I have ever done, and every bad decision I ever made, came back to bite me.  Hard.  Tore my world apart, in fact.  Caused me to lose everything I really cared about.  And I knew I had no one to blame but myself.

In a lot of ways the person I was before died on that day.  Many times since then I have felt that every day since has been a sort of "freebie".

I still have the emotional and psychological scars, and I always will.

But I also believe the experience made me a better person.  At least, I sure hope so.

My pain immediately caused me to get active and begin to write more than the occasional letter to the editor.  Having nothing else to lose took away a lot of the fear I had before- fear of silly things.  Yeah, it's true: "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose".

I would have never started speaking out before that day.  I would never have decided to run for president, which means I would have never started writing this blog, and I would have never written my books or made my videos.

It took a while, and I now have things to lose again, but most of the fear never came back.

But, I still wish I could fix things.

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