Rebuilding Life: Strategies for Personal Growth

Welcome to Standing on the Ledge, my dear Ledgewalkers, you rebuilders from the rubble. How are you today?

I’m doing well. I’m actually scheduling this post. By the time you read this, I’ll have written it almost 24 hours in advance. That alone is a small sign that my structure is changing, and in a good way.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been incorporating tarot readings and astrology into my morning ritual. I want to apologize if that’s caused confusion, or if it looks like I’m drifting away from what I originally set out to do. In some ways, maybe I am. In other ways, I see it as progression.

Rebuilding is not just “fix what broke.” It’s also “build what didn’t exist before.” New habits. New mental pathways. New rituals that get you through the day when the old ones don’t work anymore.

A lot happened to me in rapid succession: losing the contract, health issues popping up, and now a medical appointment at a heart institute to get my heart checked out. Life didn’t just change. It restructured. And in the middle of all of this, this blog has become part of my daily structure.

At the moment, I spend about two hours a day working on content and figuring out what I actually think. That time has been valuable, because it keeps showing me patterns in my own behavior. One of the most important ones is this: when I’m activated, my first impulse is to respond fast, respond hot, and respond like I’m still in the fight.

So I’ve been practicing something new: slow down, cool down, read it again, then decide if a response is even required. If a response is required, I write the email I want to send, then I do not send it until my nervous system is back under control. I’m trying to reprogram myself. I’m trying to follow my own advice. And yes, it’s difficult.

That said, I also have to face the reality of the basics. I need to find work. The mortgage doesn’t get paid by hope. And I may need to post a little less for a while to focus on what I need right now. I still plan to continue this journey in some form, because it’s helped me a great deal, and I hope it’s helped somebody out there too.

Quick win for the day: I checked the book sales, and we’ve sold five copies. It’s only been out for a few weeks. I’ve never done this before. I know a few copies went to people I know, but at least one went to someone I don’t know. That matters. That means this is leaving my immediate circle and reaching an actual reader.

If you’re interested, the book is on Amazon: Standing on the Ledge: Field Notes, Rebuilding from the Rubble, published under the name Kevin McLaughlin.¹

On the contract dispute side, I’m still waiting on next steps. I’m expecting documents to review sometime over the next week or two so I can see where we proceed from here. I suspect it’s going to be a long, grueling process, but it has to be done. Somebody has to stand up for the front line.

I keep referring to the “bourgeoisie” way this company has treated me, and I want to define what I mean by that, because words matter.

What I mean when I say “bourgeoisie”

In plain language, I’m describing a tone and a posture: insulated, dismissive, procedural, and confident that delay and paperwork are power. The kind of posture that can afford to treat a working person’s time, cash flow, and stress as negotiable.²

In the older class-analysis sense, “bourgeoisie” refers to the social class tied to ownership of property and capital, and to the system where wealth and control accumulate on that side of the ledger.³

A socio-psychological lens on what’s happening here

From a socio-psychological lens, I’m watching two things collide.

First: systems create roles. When a dispute becomes procedural, the process itself can become leverage. Deadlines, documentation, silence, vague claims, and delayed follow-through can all function as power moves, whether they are intended that way or not.⁴

Second: my nervous system responds to perceived power imbalance like it’s danger. That’s when I’m most likely to send the hot email, chase closure, and burn energy I cannot afford to burn. So my real work right now is not “win the argument.” My real work is “stay regulated long enough to act strategically.”

This is what rebuilding looks like in practice: not becoming a different person overnight, but becoming a person who can pause, choose, and act with intention instead of reflex.

One stabilizing step for today

Here’s the one step I want to take today, and maybe you can take it with me:

1. Orient to the pattern: Name what’s repeating in one sentence. Example: “When I feel disrespected, I rush to respond.”
2. Act on one thing: One concrete action that improves tomorrow. Not five. One. Example: organize the document trail into a single folder, or send one clean, factual request, or apply to one job.
3. Review: At the end of the day, write three lines:
   • What worked.
   • What did not work.
   • What I change next time.

That’s it for now, my dear Ledgewalkers. Keep your footing. Keep your receipts. Keep building the next version of you, one small, repeatable step at a time.

Godspeed.

---

Footnotes

1. Kevin McLaughlin. Standing on the Ledge: Field Notes, Rebuilding from the Rubble. Self-published; available via Amazon listing. (Edition details vary by printing.) ↩

2. Everyday usage note: most modern English dictionaries distinguish (a) “bourgeoisie” as a historical class term and (b) “bourgeois” as a casual term meaning conventional, comfortable, or self-satisfied. ↩

3. Classic class-analysis usage: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848); Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867). ↩

4. Institutional/power framing: C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1959), especially the “personal troubles vs public issues” idea. ↩