Most people picture a crisis as one thing at a time — one phone call, one letter, one bad stretch you have to get through before life goes back to normal.
Mine didn't come like that. In 2019, they arrived together. All four of them at once.
The legal one: a court case with my freedom on the line. The financial one: a debt from a divorce that was supposed to be finished, dragged back into the open. The relational one: my marriage, fractured beyond repair. And the chemical one: addiction — years of it, hidden underneath a working life.
Every piece of the pie was poisoned.
Here is what I need you to hear about that year. Each one of those, on its own, was survivable. A legal fight is survivable. A money hit is survivable. A marriage ending is survivable. Even addiction — men come back from that. What nearly took me out was not any single one of them. It was all four standing in the room at the same time.
I had built my whole identity around protecting everyone. That was the job. That was who I was. And in 2019 I found myself unable to protect anything — not my family, not my future, not myself. When the person whose job is holding the line cannot hold anything, there is nowhere left to stand.
So how do you survive four Godzillas at once? You don't fight four. You can't. Nobody can. You go back to what was true before they teamed up: each one, in isolation, is survivable. You take the one in front of you and you survive that one, and then you turn to the next. Survival stops being a feeling and becomes an order of work — what is in front of me today, and what do I do about that one thing today?
That is the part I teach now, and I teach it because I lived it. A crisis feels annihilating when you look at all of it at once. It gets survivable when you refuse to fight it all at once. One Godzilla at a time, one day and one decision at a time. The pile does not shrink because you got stronger. It shrinks because you stopped swinging at the whole pile.
Q&A prompt: Have you ever faced multiple crises at once? How did you prioritize survival?
