The story
I had the resume everyone wanted. And I was hiding from all of it.
Adobe. Facebook. Speaking on stages. Building a business. From the outside, the trajectory looked right. Behind it: drinking every night, living someone else's definition of what success was supposed to look like.
Getting fired from Facebook was not a plot twist. It was the only honest thing that had happened to me in years.
Getting sober was the first step. Then my wife got pregnant, and I thought I had finally figured it out.
On May 29, 2017, our son TJ died during birth. Standing in that hospital room, holding my son's body, everything I thought mattered stopped mattering. And everything I had been avoiding became the only thing worth doing.
The polished version of your story is costing you the connections the real one would build.
