Mark Schaefer lost his career, marriage, and health in 2006-2007. Blogging through it lowered his blood pressure, built a community that valued his ideas, and deepened his empathy. He learned that suffering, as Viktor Frankl wrote, can become a gift.
Chapters
Foreign. The topic of my talk today is how blogging saved my life. Not in a figurative way, but in a literal way. And so I'm going to talk about three different ways that the act of creating content really saved my life. And who knows, maybe you'll find something that can help you along the way as well. So to understand how blogging saved my life in the first place, you have to understand the context of my life. In the time frame of 2006, 2007, this was the darkest time of my life. It was a very, very difficult time. In a period of about 18 months, I successfully satisfied all the requirements to become a blues singer, basically. Thank you for laughing, Tom. So every, really, about every part of my life had been rocked in some way, beginning with my career. I had a successful career with a Fortune 100 company. And like so many of us at certain times in our lives, I. I came up against this immovable object. I had this boss who was unethical, some would maybe even say evil. His nickname was Beelzebub. That would give you some idea of what this guy was like. So I had to make a difficult choice. Do I continue to operate in this environment or do I find some way to get out? And after months of deliberation, I decided to go on, start my own thing. And it's worked out very well. But I was through this period of transition where a great part of my identity had been associated with this role in this company. A great part of my support system had been associated with this company. And about the same time, I went through a horrible divorce. My alcoholic, drug addict wife, who I had supported for many years, decided to run off with her drinking buddy. And when she did that, she also took with her her children, her two children, which were my two stepchildren that I raised as my own for eight years. And when she left, I never saw them again. Stepfathers have no rights. At this same time, I had a very serious injury. I had a spinal cord injury. And when the neurosurgeon looked at the MRI and he saw this fluid seeping out of my spinal cord, and he wondered aloud how I could walk, how I could be walking. And I was sitting right there, and he demanded that I walk across the room. He said, I want you to show me that you can walk. That was unnerving. And then he said, are you having any problems with your cognitive abilities? And that was terrifying. Now, with all this change and with all this upset, comes a lot of financial problems. So I was starting this new job. I was Starting a new company. I had to give half of everything I owned to this person. And if you take one lesson from today, it would be this. Never get divorced in your peak earning years. And I had health. I had medical bills of my own. And if you can believe this, I still had to pay off her bills from rehab after I was divorced. So I had these financial issues as well. So this was a very, very dark time. At times, I felt hopeless. I felt in despair. I felt that I lost so much, and the stress I was feeling was so severe that it raised my blood pressure to very unhealthy levels. The doctor said, you need to measure your blood pressure every hour because we're afraid it might get too high and some bad things would happen. When I started measuring my blood pressure, I found out something amazing. One time a day, every time during the same period, every day, my blood pressure was below normal. This is when I was blogging. The act of writing, the act of creating content, put me in this zone. It put me in this Zen state where I was focused and I was concentrating and all this bad stuff went away. The act of creating content literally was healing my body. The second thing that happened was something really miraculous occurred. I think people started reading this thing. They started reading this blog. And some of you are in the room today. I know. And this was a new community of friends who didn't care about these problems that I had. They didn't know about the problems, and I didn't want them to know. I was sick of my life. I was tired of this pain. And I just wanted to find people who would see me for who I was, who could see me for my ideas, for the content I was creating. Maybe they could even see me as the person I was becoming. And I really needed this. This helped heal my mind and my spirit to be rewarded for my ideas and my content, not for people feeling sorry for me. The third thing that happened that was very interesting is, is I didn't realize it at the time, but as I was going through this pain, I was being given this gift. It was a gift of this cape of new superpowers. That might seem strange, but let me explain what I mean. During this time, I felt emotions I had never felt before. I had felt these very deep, dark emotions. I felt hopelessness. I felt utter despair. I felt uncontrollable rage. I wanted to kill somebody. I wanted to hurt somebody. Not in a metaphoric way. Luckily, I didn't much. But what I realized later, I couldn't realize at the time. But What I realized later was that exploring these edges of emotion, these deep, dark feelings, it made me a larger emotional being. It pushed me into new places. In some ways, like I said, it almost gave me these new superpowers. And this has helped me be a better person, I think. I think it's helped me become a better friend, a better leader, a better content creator, someone who can manage a community in much better ways. Now, when I sense that someone is suffering, when they just can't take anymore, I can say, you know, I think I know how you feel. And it makes this new, amazing connection with myself, my readers, my community, and my friends. There's this book that I love, Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl. It's barely a book. It's almost like a pamphlet, if you're familiar with the book. And in the book, he says, to be human is to suffer. And maybe there are some of you here, even today, who are going through some of these dark, dark fears, some of these very deep emotions. And maybe your time of suffering is ahead of you. And what I'd like for you to take away from today is that when it's happening, you can't know this. But just keep in mind that down the road, you realize that this is a gift, that you are being awarded superpowers of your own. Thank you very much.
