[BLOG] If you feel defined by/stuck in the bad times, active investment might be the missing link
Storytelling as a way to get some ROI on your troubles
I have begun to think of bad times as investment opportunities.
Everyone can understand the good times as investments—you are thriving in one or several areas of life, you feel good, you look good. Your relationships might be peaceful and honest. Your job might be fulfilling and exciting. Your house might be blossoming into a home. Your health might be back on track. Your friends and family members might be thriving individually, and you have a front row seat to watch it all unfold. It’s not hard to feel like the highlights of life are investments.
But they aren’t.
I would argue that the highlights of life are returns on the bad times.
Stay with me.
Imagine if you had invested in the S&P 500 at the bottom of 2020 (or on Black Monday), forgotten that investment, and opened your account today. Or, if you weren’t old enough to invest in 1987, imagine that you invested a reasonable amount in Bitcoin in 2005 when (almost) no one saw its value, happened to remember the private key, and opened your account fifteen minutes ago. You might still be sitting with your mouth hanging open. Or you might have already quit your job and booked a one-way to ticket to Fiji. You’d think of something.
And I think that bad times present the same outsized potential as undervalued investments.
Because no one sees the immediate value in disappointment. No one seeks grief. No one loves injustice. No one launches themselves into dismal failure. Literally half of our economy is focused on escaping every conceivable discomfort. But the most powerful art, music, stories, writing, movements, heck—human beings, were forged by the bad times. As alluded to in this very famous, very succinct, and very applicable poem, bad times teach you far more and take you much farther than the good times:
I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.I walked a mile with Sorrow;
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When Sorrow walked with me.Robert Browning Hamilton
Ok, but how? How do we “invest” the bad times?
My mom and I were chatting a couple weeks back, rehashing a challenge that has come up repeatedly for her over the course of her life. And we realized simultaneously that her next step was and is to tell her story. To share what she has learned. To actively invest her bad times, by investing in others. To give the grief a purpose.
If, like me, you are an introvert and an inward-thinker (not synonymous, btw), sharing openly with others isn’t the most natural activity. But surely, you might think, I can do all the processing alone and come out on the other end, fully baked! I have tried this and it works, to an extent. But, not unlike the lair of the lotus eaters, inward-thinking on its own can very easily become a labyrinth of over-thinking. That’s when you get stuck, and start to spin, and make prOCeSsiNg the whole story, instead of one step.
The whole turkey, instead of a side dish. If you will.
That’s how storytelling can be a kind of metamorphosis, allowing the caterpillar to become the butterfly.
Humans are made to create and contribute to a community. Without that trifecta—creation, contribution, community—I have begun to believe that every lesson is only half-learned. That’s half the reason I am writing my book and more than half the reason I even created a blog in the first place. I say half a lot.
When you tell your story with the goal of giving back, not to get revenge or show how-well-you’re-doing-in-spite-of-it-all, you will see some amazing returns:
Your bad times—past, present, future—are given purpose. Agency is a powerful drug (one of the good ones). These days, I am just a bit quicker on the draw to realize that life will be all the better for the challenges. If I’m going through it now, it might just help someone else tomorrow.
You get to see how far you have come. Few things are better than reading a bumbling journal entry from high school and chuckling about the lack of perspective, but reading one from a year ago and knowing present-me would react so differently takes the cake. Sharing your struggles, especially if you don’t find journaling natural, gives you a wonderful birds-eye view.
You truly realize that you aren’t alone. Wherever you are and whatever you’re dealing with, someone is three steps ahead of you on the same road and someone is a few steps behind you, looking for signage. Sharing your story introduces you to the good people who left breadcrumbs and gives you a chance to leave breadcrumbs for someone else.
To conclude, the things that change others often require that one willing soul be changed first. Sometimes quite painfully.
I don’t know what you’ve been through. And how we give back is going to differ. For me, it’s writing. For you, it might be hosting a small group or painting or pottery or dance or music or singing or straight-up counseling. I don’t know!
I just know that some people keep running into the same lessons and never shift, adapt, or even pause. They never grow. They are presented with opportunities to invest their bad times, grow exponentially as humans, and let them slide on by. They are forever stuck between who they were and who they could be. I’ve seen it in families, communities, countries, and—most importantly—myself.
But we can choose to be more than the sum of our parts.
There’s no need to fake being OK when you aren’t, when you’re really in the thick of it and you feel like you’re at rock bottom. There’s no need to pretend that something you wrote last week didn’t make you feel like a hypocrite because the samebadactormakesyouwanttoripoutyourhair. I have totally been there!
But you can choose to be a person that endures the bad times (insert a delay), sees their true potential (insert another delay), and finds a way to give them back to the human community with interest. You can develop deeper relationships and deeper character, both of which will stand the test in the day of trouble. You can move forward through storytelling. So tell your story. Get some ROI for your troubles.
And, remember: Everything is always working out for you.
With love,
A.I.A.L.