CAPITALIZE on Rock Bottom: WIN Big

Hitting rock bottom. There is hardly the space to list all the successful people who have hit rock bottom. J.K. Rowling finds herself 7 years after college with a failed marriage, no job, single parent, kid she can barely feed, and approaching homelessness. Hemingway at 19 is serving as an ambulance driver in World War I, convinced, like many young men, of his own invincibility. A mortar round and a 6-month hospital stay shattered both his legs and that illusion. In Greek mythology, characters often experience katabasis, or a going down. They're forced to retreat, they experience a depression, or in some cases they literally descend into the underworld. When they emerge, it's with heightened knowledge and understanding. We surround ourselves with BS. With distractions, with lies about what makes us happy and what's important. We become people we shouldn't become and engage in destructive, awful behaviors. This unhealthy and ego-derived state hardens and becomes almost permanent until Katabasis forces us to face it. Hard things are broken by hard things. The bigger the ego, the harder the fall. In fact, many significant life changes come from moments in which we are thoroughly demolished, in which everything we thought we knew about the world is rendered false. Whatever the cause, they can be catalysts for change we were petrified to make. Good or bad, the choice is ours. Pick a time in your life, or perhaps it's a moment you're experiencing now. A boss's eviscerating critique of you in front of the entire staff. That sit-down with the person you love. The Google alert that delivered the article you'd hoped would never be written. The call from the creditor. The news that threw you back in your chair, speechless and dumbfounded. It was in those moments, when the break exposes something unseen before, that you were forced to make eye contact with a thing called truth. No longer could you hide or pretend. We might have been delusional to head off and acknowledge our own flaws. Such a moment raises many questions. How do I make sense of this? How do I move onward and upward? Is this the bottom or is there more to come? Someone told me my problems, so how do I fix them? How do I let this happen? How can it never happen again? The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills. The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it. Vince Lombardi said this once: A team, like men, must be brought to its knees before it can rise again. So yes, hitting bottom is as brutal as it sounds, but the feeling after is one of the most powerful perspectives in the world. If you shut up truth and bury it underground, it will but grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through, it will blow up everything in its way. Émile Zola.