I can only speak for myself, but my life has been like the stock market—full of extreme highs and lows, yet still moving forward. The stock market constantly has peaks and valleys, but it never disappears. There’s never been a time when it didn’t recover after a major downturn, and the same goes for life. This is the core of life: despite hardships, you must keep moving forward to rise.
A Series of Mini Crashes Preceded “The Big One”
There was a time when my vices were out of control, and I couldn’t hide it, no matter how hard I tried. Very few people ever dared to say anything, but the cracks in the mask were there. Eventually, it caught up with me, marking the beginning of the entire mask crumbling. Even as I was given a slap on the wrist, I still blew the layup. The subsequent loss of trust in my integrity was another step toward the eventual erosion of the face I presented to the world.
After that, I was waist-deep in my newfound love for powerlifting and gardening. However, a door was left open. I began substituting vices. Like all sins, it started off great, with no aftereffects; it didn’t affect my love life, and I could still partake and complete my lifting sessions. It seemed perfect. What started as an occasional pastime to feel something became a habit to escape the lack of fulfillment I found in my career. Even though I was progressing and successful on paper, I felt empty inside.
Percieved Value and Actual Value Become Distant Relatives
Nobody knew this but me, but I wasn’t fulfilling my life’s calling. I was becoming a robot. Everything in my life was systematically organized to produce satisfactory results for others at that point. Get up and lift, go to work, make phone calls for the first half of the day, then do field work for the second half. This routine became ruthlessly efficient, producing excellent results both at home and at work. Behind all of this, I still felt like I was going through the motions in life and wasn’t utilizing the best coping strategies to fill the immense void that was growing behind the mask.
I became brutally pragmatic about my time. Life was divided into eight-hour chunks in my mind: work, home, and sleep. As stated earlier, work was first half phone calls and the second half fieldwork. To the chagrin of my coworkers, I rarely worked longer than my eight-hour shift. It seemed that they worked long hours to be seen rather than doing any meaningful work. The name of my game was efficiency, not glory. Unbeknownst to me, I consistently got the same amount of work done in my regular shift, that they were burning the midnight oil to complete. What I realized over time is that their hearts were in the work. They wanted to be there, while I was simply filling up eight hours of my day.
The Void Deepens: Too Big to Fail
As my occasional substitute became a fully blown replacement, I became anxious and nervous at work. Ruminating over the day I’d be called in for a test that I didn’t study for. Every request to a supervisor’s office brought an overwhelming fear that what I was doing in the dark was finally being brought to light. Despite the fear of being found out, I got bolder in my undercover activities, loosening the separation between church and state that I had carefully crafted. Then came the day that the mask was ripped off.
Downturns are the Perfect Time to Seize Opportunity
My worst nightmare finally became reality, the test I hadn’t studied for. The chasm between the mask and the persona had gotten so vast that I couldn’t face the light as it was shown on my darkness. After an unprecedented bubble created inconceivable wealth, it popped, and with that came the Great Recession.
The thing about stock market “crashes” is that they never happen in one day. There are always preceding cracks in the mask that the perceived value and actual value of commodities are out of alignment. We call this a bubble. The perceived value of something, or the mask we wear, becomes vastly detached from its actual value, or who we truly are. When that void becomes too great to bear, we experience a proverbial and literal “crash”. The mask and the persona close the gap that has separated them for so long, and they become one again, just as when a stock bubble bursts, perceived and actual value become one and the same. Although there is a great deal of loss in both instances, the truth is shown.
Why It’s Called That: Crash vs. Correction
Truth is neutral. It provides the freedom for self-reflection and exposes those not strong enough to weather the storm. Getting back to the stock market and economic downturns. The media tends to place a filter on these occurrences to induce fear and panic; that is why it’s referred to as a “crash.” This negativity-laced word “crash” is meant to weed out those who aren’t strong and faithful enough to stay the course. Unable to stomach the uncertainty, droves of people begin withdrawing their money. Their inability to persevere creates a vacuum of opportunity for those willing to weather the storm. This is how people emerge wealthier on the heels of economic downturns. These people don’t refer to stock market drops as “crashes”; they call them corrections.
Correction is neither good nor bad; it’s realignment. A restoration of the balance between perceived and actual value. It is simply the market balancing itself out after the chasm between the mask and the shadow has become too great. This is what happened to me.
Course Correction
As I’ve been picking up the pieces and rebuilding myself, I’ve realized the strength that was breathed in me. The resilience to face failure so publicly and not break is a testament to God’s strength. So, as I embark on this new journey, I feel like Bitcoin in 2009. Bitcoin was underestimated and even dismissed because few understood the magnitude of what was happening behind the scenes. Almost 20 years later, those who bought Bitcoin have gained immense wealth, due to having the foresight to recognize opportunities and take risks. That is where I feel I’m at right now, on the cusp of breakthrough.
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