Dallas Bragg went from law-school marketing executive to homeless, relying on a Christian Mission for clothes and food. Instead of surrendering to shame and depression, he visualized a better future on bus rides, using that mental practice to resist despair and rebuild his life.
Every day I would have to walk past the law school where I was once employed as the marketing executive. Now homeless and penniless, the clothes on my back was from the Christian Mission free clothing store. The Christian Mission that was one of the 5 organizations I studied for my doctorate, I had to go back to as a client. I could easily have been depressed, embarrassed, Hopeless, shamed. I could have dwelled on what I had done to my life and the lives of my children. It could have been crushing. I could have felt remorse over how I treated my mother. I could have given up, and I could have just went back to the streets. I could have felt overwhelmed by the amount of time and effort in front of me that it looked like it could— to build my life back, if it was even possible to build anything back. But instead, I closed my eyes on that bus. In between every destination. And at night before I passed out from exhaustion, and I closed my eyes and I lived in my future, I remembered my future. I would create and dream big.
