Standing on the Ledge — Month One: A Personal Accounting

This month didn’t unfold in clean days.

It came in overlaps. Sleepless nights. Missed numbers. Days that bled into each other and some that didn’t survive the night at all. Time stopped behaving the way it’s supposed to when things collapse faster than you can narrate them.

What I thought was an ending turned out to be a reckoning.

At the start, the ground dropped out all at once.
The company was gone. Fifty-nine days straight with no pause, no margin. Carrying more than my share. Believing support was there when it wasn’t. Staying anyway.

Not heroic.
Not dramatic.

Just quiet devastation.

I wasn’t standing because I felt strong. I was standing because disappearing wasn’t an option I was willing to choose.

The early days were nothing but rubble.
Shock. Inertia. Anger. Embarrassment. Grief. That nuclear-strike feeling where even the word rebuilding feels dishonest. Days where showing up meant breathing and nothing else. I kept going not because I believed in some outcome, but because stopping felt dangerous.

As the days went on, I started seeing the systems more clearly.

Work. Leadership. Fear-based motivation. The slow violence of environments that reward endurance until bodies fail. I saw how pressure replaces care. How manipulation gets dressed up as leadership. How fear creates compliance while hollowing people out.

I knew one thing with certainty: I wasn’t going to rebuild my life using the same tactics that broke me and the people around me.

Then my body stepped in.

Doctor visits. Tests. A stress test they stopped early. Blood pressure at 268. Medication that flattened me. Sleep that wasn’t rest. I had to face the fact that I’d been calling adaptation “resilience,” and endurance “strength,” when really my body had been negotiating far longer than it should have—absorbing strain so the system didn’t have to.

Losing the contract started to look different.

Maybe it wasn’t failure.
Maybe it was friction.
Maybe it was the moment my body finally refused conditions it was never meant to survive.

That realization shifted everything.

What I was doing wasn’t rambling.
It was reconnaissance.

I started walking the perimeter of the impact site. Mapping what collapsed. Noting what held. Identifying what I was never willing to rebuild again. The ledge stopped being a place of paralysis and became what it actually was—a lookout. A seasonal station. A gatehouse between what was and what no longer applied.

The old rules were gone.
The new ones weren’t written yet.

Living inside that gap was the work.

Not leaping.
Not freezing.

Standing. Looking. Taking small actions that created movement without locking me into a future I didn’t yet understand. Direction without cement. Motion without mythology.

Boundaries came before plans.

The real question wasn’t what do I build next?
It was what am I no longer willing to build again?

Along the way, the past surfaced—not to trap me, but to be acknowledged properly. Losses. Catalysts. The suicide I responded to years ago that split my life open and redirected it. A career that grew out of that fracture. Scars that still hum—not as wounds, but as guidance.

I looked back long enough to name the spark.
Then I turned forward again.

Something shifted in the second half of the month.

Not louder.
Quieter.

I found steadier footing. I reclaimed my standards. I stopped letting unstable authority shake me. Doubt still showed up—but I stopped treating it as failure. I recognized it as friction. A sign that something real was reorganizing.

I kept going on days I wasn’t confident. Not because I knew this was helping—but because continuing kept me out of the abyss.

Setbacks still came.

They just didn’t send me spiraling anymore.

They made me still.

I stopped confusing motion with progress and panic with strategy. Setbacks became signals: look again, realign, choose deliberately. I wasn’t chasing change anymore.

I was choosing it.

By the end of the month, one truth had sharpened enough to say out loud:

Sitting still with a stagnating mind isn’t neutral—it’s corrosive.

Staying inside too long doesn’t protect me. It turns me into a turtle in its shell. Safe, maybe. But stuck. And stuck minds spiral. So I learned to interrupt the spiral. To get out. To move—even without purpose. Even if it was just a walk.

I don’t have to conquer the world.
I just have to not collapse inward.

This month wasn’t about answers.

It was about staying upright.

I’m still standing.
Still breathing.
Still rebuilding from whatever rubble is under my feet that day.

I’m not forcing promises I can’t keep.
I’m not pretending clarity where there isn’t any.

I’m telling the truth about where I am on the ledge—and refusing to disappear.

That’s Month One.

Not a triumph.
Not a resolution.

A foothold.

Godspeed.

No more posts for this month I start Chapter 2 in the New year!