Moments of Crisis Don’t Just Appear Out of Nowhere

All of a sudden my life was in crisis and everything was spinning and crumbling around me. Everything I had built felt like it was on the brink of total collapse.

I have heard, and said to myself, some iteration of those words more times than I can count.

And to some extent they are true.

Until you really start to look at how you got there. Then you begin to see how it felt “all of a sudden” when it was actually only a matter of time.

The crisis happened because your life was whispering at you for years, or decades, and you looked away and now your life is screaming at you.

If I look back honestly at my 15 years spent in addiction, 20+ arrests, 6 trips to rehab, and an attempted suicide by jumping 35 feet off a balcony, all over the last 5 years of it, those are some pretty loud screams.

What I didn’t listen to were the whispers along the way: the pleas from my girlfriend and family to stop, the “sick” days missed at work, or when my friends stopped inviting me on golf trips or to their weddings.

The truth is, it’s really hard to give the whispers their proper due because they’re whispers; they’re not that bad, they’re pretty easy to come back from, and there are rarely real consequences to them.

It’s easy to dismiss a whisper because “I don’t have time for that right now,” or “I have more important things to worry about.”

The screams of a full-blown crisis, however, are very fucking LOUD!!!

Your wife is gone, or she’s about to be.

You’re both looking outside the marriage, her because she’s done. And you because something else would be easier.

Your career is on the brink.

You’re in the worst shape of your life.

You’re isolating because everyone close to you can see what’s happening.

The whispers are there trying to get your attention; they are the exit ramps on the highway that dead-ends at your own self-destruction.

Whispers can look like any number of things:

• Leaving open loops because you’re too exhausted: going to sleep upset with your wife frequently, sweeping disagreements under the rug, not having the conversations you know you need to have at work, and constantly feeling stressed and overwhelmed by your to-do list or responsibilities.
• Rising irritability levels: shortness when asked to do something that’s “inconvenient,” lashing out in anger for no apparent reason, silently resenting your partner, a growing lack of desire to show up for your life because “it’s too stressful,” and falling into the victim role a lot.
• Silent thoughts of leaving your relationship or business because it would “be easier”: another woman would be so much more fun, my life would be better if I were single, a different business would be way less stressful.
• Avoidance patterns: staying late at work because you don’t want to go home, staying home because you don’t want to go to work, creating reasons to be “busy,” drinking too much and too often, and deflecting the responsibilities of being a husband and a leader.
• Near misses: almost getting a DUI, barely making it to big meetings because you’re always a step behind, wife threatening divorce then backing off, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, people questioning your integrity for the promises you made that you didn’t keep.

By the time you speed past all those off-ramps, fixated on the destination, you’re going 1,000 mph straight into the hellfire that is a life, a marriage, and a reputation burning down; now it’s way too late to pull up and stop the momentum.

So no, you didn’t just magically appear at the crisis because of one bad weekend: you created the crisis by looking away from the root causes for too long.

In a way you actually chose the crisis. Now it’s up to you to choose how you rebuild from it.

If only you had listened to the whispers…

Listen to the whispers to avoid the screams.