Who Am I Now? Seven Months Beyond the Fall

Who am I right now, my dear Ledge Walkers?

I can begin by telling you who I am not.

I am not the same person I was six or seven months ago. I could not be. The person who stood there on December 15, 2025, watching a company contract disappear and a large piece of his working identity collapse with it, had no idea what would grow out of the rubble.

At the time, I was trying to understand what had happened. I was dealing with anger, shame, betrayal, money, exhaustion and the sudden loss of a structure around which I had built much of my life. I had spent years being useful, dependable and willing to carry more than the situation should ever have required. From the outside, that looked like competence. From the inside, it had become a way of disappearing into responsibility.

Then the structure broke.

Six days later, Standing on the Ledge began.

I reached for what I had: pen and paper, a keyboard, the internet and, yes, artificial intelligence. I started writing because I needed to turn that moving cloud of anger, fear, deadlines, numbers and unanswered questions into something I could examine. I did not begin with a finished theory or a perfect map. I began from inside the weather.

That remains important. This is not a victory lap written from some safe distance where everything has been resolved. Some structures are standing again. Some are still being repaired. Other parts of my life may need to be torn down and rebuilt differently. The emergency has changed shape, but the work continues.

What has changed most is my footing.

I am more assertive about what I want, what I need and what I will no longer carry. That is pissing some people off. I expected that it might. When people become accustomed to your silence, your boundaries can feel like aggression. When they have benefited from your willingness to absorb the strain, your decision to stop absorbing it can feel like betrayal.

It is not betrayal.

It is rebuild work.

One of the earliest lessons to emerge from Standing on the Ledge was that people-pleasing can become a quiet form of self-destruction. It is giving away your last match to keep somebody else warm while you freeze. It is convincing yourself that you can carry the entire load because you have always managed to carry it before.

Eventually, your knees give way.

The first brick of rebuilding was permission: permission not to be everything to everyone, permission to rest, permission to say “not today,” and permission to matter to myself. Every boundary I am setting now rests on that first brick.

I am responsible for my own actions, but I am not responsible for pretending that broken systems are healthy. I am not responsible for keeping everything looking functional by silently absorbing the cost. I am not responsible for preserving somebody else’s comfort by sacrificing my own stability.

That does not mean other people’s needs never matter. It means their wants no longer automatically outrank mine.

The people around me are going to have to step up, contribute and take responsibility for their share. If they choose not to, I will have to make changes—particularly concerning the space, access and influence they are permitted to have in my life. They may not like those changes. Their dislike will not automatically make the changes wrong.

That is one of the clearest differences between the person I was and the person I am becoming.

But this change is not only visible in what I now refuse. It is also visible in what I have built.

Since losing that contract, I have returned to paid work. I have completed two more college courses, including finishing Organizational Behaviour with an A+. I have taken what I learned about communication, conflict, motivation, power, group dynamics, stress, identity and organizational systems and used it to better understand the life I had already lived.

Education gave me language for things I had previously only known as pressure.

I have written approximately eight books. Four have been published; the others are waiting until they are ready. Standing on the Ledge grew from a personal account of collapse into books, field tools, case studies, podcasts and a practical framework for understanding how people move from warning signs to impact, from triage to traction, from system repair to gaining territory, and eventually toward meaning and direction.

That matters to me because the contract loss did not get the final word.

I stopped asking only, “Why did this happen?” and began asking, “What can be built from here?”

A problem became a question. A question became a checklist. A checklist became a tool. The rubble became material—not because the collapse was good, not because I am grateful that it happened, but because I refused to leave everything I had learned buried underneath it.

I have also taught myself how to use AI, at least to some degree. There are people who fear AI, people who hate it and people who dismiss anyone who uses it. Some of their concerns are legitimate. AI can be abused. It can be used carelessly. It can produce convincing nonsense, flatten original thought and make polish easier to achieve than truth.

Those risks are real.

But I remember many of the same fears surrounding personal computers and the World Wide Web. Schools resisted online research. People worried about stolen ideas, misinformation and unreliable sources—and they were not entirely wrong. Eventually, the internet became normal, then expected. AI may be regulated more tightly, and it should be held accountable where real harm is possible, but I do not believe it is going away. It is already becoming part of how society researches, communicates, creates and works.

For me, AI has not replaced thought or lived experience. It has helped me organize, question, research, format and produce what was already trying to find its way out of my head. The judgment, the direction and the responsibility still belong to me.

At the same time, I find myself moving farther away from Facebook. I still use it to share some material from Standing on the Ledge, but Facebook itself no longer fits particularly well with where I want to go. Social media can create the appearance of movement while keeping us circling the same arguments, reactions and performances. I am becoming less interested in performing a life and more interested in building one.

So where am I going next?

I do not know yet.

There may be major changes ahead. Some relationships, routines and structures may not survive the next stage. I am not going to pretend certainty simply to make the story sound more inspiring. Standing on the Ledge has never been about manufacturing a neat ending. It is about naming your actual footing and taking the next honest step from there.

What I do know is that I am moving.

In the early days, movement meant surviving the next seventy-two hours. Then it meant triage: food, sleep, money, work, documents and decisions. Later it meant rebuilding systems that could hold. Now, in at least some areas of my life, it means gaining territory—making choices based not only on what will prevent another collapse, but on what kind of life I actually want to live.

Forward does not always look dramatic. Sometimes it is a college assignment submitted. Sometimes it is another page written. Sometimes it is returning to work, publishing a book, learning a new tool, stepping away from an old platform or saying the hard thing in a steady voice.

Sometimes forward is simply refusing to disappear into responsibility again.

Am I moving forward?

Most definitely. You can bet your bottom dollar I am.

Am I going to allow other people to dictate where my life goes?

No. Definitely not.

I am done being complacent. I am done sitting silently in the corner while other people decide what I should accept. I will speak. I will question. I will call things out when they need to be called out. I will listen to evidence, and I will remain accountable for my own actions, but I will not turn every conflict into another trial in which I am automatically the accused.

Evidence before shame. Structure before verdict. Agency after reality.

I honour the person I was. He carried more than most people ever saw, and he survived things they may never understand. But I do not have to worship that version of myself or keep repeating his habits simply because they once kept me alive.

I stand firm in who I am now.

And I choose who I am becoming.

I am a worker, a writer, a student and a builder of things. I am someone who has built, lost, overreached, reflected, learned and started again more than once. I am trying to rebuild without lying about the cost and to leave behind something more useful than another speech about resilience.

I am still standing.

More importantly, I am no longer standing still.

That is all for the moment, my dear Ledge Walkers.

Keep your footing. Keep building. Keep going.

Godspeed.