When Things Get Rough, Do This

I recently received an email from a former colleague.

This colleague witnessed firsthand my personal disaster. “She still thinks I am alive” was my first thought upon seeing her email. Well, at the time, I was that close to physical end my life.

First, I Almost Died: Then, I Didn’t Have a Job

Afterward, I went into a long period of unemployment, during which I had nothing else to keep myself busy but ruminating about the past — the past that I regretted which was, in no way, helpful from a therapeutic and clinical psychological standpoint. In fact, nothing is worse than a person who tries to get out of the hole continues to, in his imagination, digging the hole

Yep, Everyone Thought I Was Dead

So, I was not that surprised actually that many people thought I was dead after my disappearance from all social networks.

Anyway, the content of her email was nice.

I could feel the strongest sense of empathy. She herself is now facing a hardship of her own. “I want to hear from you and learn from you how did you manage to get out of such a dark moment in your life.”

Later, I Decided to Turn Around

That line in her email got me thinking. How did I decide to turnaround? It was a difficult time. I couldn’t find anyone to talk to. I no longer had close friends and most people who weren’t close thought I was dead. Without any income, I was living in the living room of my tiny family’s apartment like a loser, scrapping for food whenever someone in the family did not manage to finish his plate. Obviously, I was also disgusted by myself.

Fast forward, after the said period of unemployment, I’ve gotten myself a job in the field of digital technology and digital policy implementation.

For the past year, I’ve been helping cities, companies, and individuals digitally transform using technologies such as cloud, digital data exchange platforms, and so on.

This might not sound surprising unless you know that I was trained as an architect and had always been the end user’s side of things when it comes to technology.

How Did I Do It?

I didn’t have any of these skills to turn around before, but those months of unemployment were so damn hard that the only way I could try to get through was to make myself “useful.” So, I helped out with chores and tried not to be a burden to my family. With the career that I had built for the past 2 decades officially over, I thought to myself “What if I create a new one?”

Usually, this question gets answered as quickly as the speed of light: “Yeah, where would you find the time to do it?”

Well, for this time, I had all the time in the world.

So, in a difficult time, I personally think that it is a great moment to get yourself to learn things that life otherwise would have steered you away from learning.

As a big fan of Apple and many other tech companies, I had always been fascinated by the maker’s side of digital technology. Between those months of unemployment, I managed to finish 10 difficult online courses. As an unemployed, I received financial aid to pay for all of them. Because of the unfamiliarity, they were super difficult. But it was good because, while learning those courses, I didn’t the mental capacity to get distracted by anything including by the past mistakes that I made and regrets in life.

I also managed to finish 100+ books, from the fields of psychology to neurolinguistic programming (NLP), to Buddhism, to different types of scientific skills.

Of course, I would have chosen not to have those months of unemployment but, looking back, it was indeed a great break. I used learning to prevent myself from thinking about the past, but they in turn helped me to find my path to reinvent myself.

Moral of the Story: When things get rough, do what you otherwise would not choose to do, like learning skills that you probably wouldn’t learn unless you have all the time in your hand to try what’s it like.