Destroy your reputation

For Thanksgiving, I thought I’d pull back the curtain a little on what this year has been like for me.

Let’s just say, I’m glad Thanksgiving isn’t January 5th. Because January was a hellish month after Jess and I were fired from the organization we founded and led for 15 years. I couldn’t find much to be grateful for.

But, by February, we were dreaming about rebuilding, while still mourning our separation from the people we loved.

Then we hit rock bottom. I don’t know when it happened exactly, but one day I realized we weren’t sinking any deeper. In fact, we’d hit the bottom and bounced so hard, we were actually on our way back up.

There were a thousand things we didn’t know as we started rebuilding. And the immediate impulse was to rebuild what we’d lost. But as we started to climb out of the hole, we began to see new horizons.

“What if we rethink everything from the ground up? What’d we learn? Where’d we fail? And what do we keep and build on further?”

Destroy Your Reputation

It’s been 10+ months now, and here’s one thing I’ve learned: acceptance brings gratitude.

At first, I was anything but “zen”. Denial, anger, negotiation. All that.

Once, a public figure who was exonerated in court after being prematurely convicted by the media asked, “Now, which office do I go to, to get my reputation back?” Like him, I cared deeply about my reputation.

But, slowly, then mostly all at once, that changed after I read this poem from Rumi:

“Forget safety.
Live where you fear to live.
Destroy your reputation.
Be notorious.”

For 20 years, I’d been in public leadership. I’d forgone safety. I’d lived where I feared to live. And that had actually built a reputation with a lot of amazing opportunities. But what most founders in humanitarianism, ministry, or nonprofit service cannot say out loud: it was also an unending source of stress and anxiety. The encouragement mattered and made a difference. But the constant scrutiny from those sitting on the sidelines, risking nothing, is taxing. At its worst, it can turn you into a character. My character was always positive and unflappable, and if ever I stepped out of character, it left people confused. We like nuance on Netflix; not so much in real life.

Next Adventure: Be Notorious

The more I thought about the Rumi poem, the more it read like a checklist for growth from one of the great romantics and wisdom thinkers of all time.

If Rumi was right, I was right on time. The next adventure: be notorious.

For someone who’d mostly just wanted to bring light, “be notorious” was scary and dark. But it captured exactly how life has felt this year. In fact, “be notorious” wasn’t a box waiting for me to check off at all. It had already been checked off for us. So we could continue our sleepless nights, rehashing the facts and the sense of injustice it all carried… or we could see if there was any wisdom in Rumi, and just quit fighting it.

I decided to accept it.

I’d taken risks for Love. I’d laid down on the tracks to stop the things I believed to be runaway wrongs. Other people’s opinions are really none of my business.

The hard thing was accepting the feeling of being cast out of polite society over things that I figure anyone would want the benefit of the doubt for.

But there are things you learn in desert isolation that you cannot learn with a team on the top of the mountain. And all I’ve ever really wanted from this life was to keep growing.

Don’t Wallow Too Long

So here we are, to my great surprise and possibly yours—giving thanks for one of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced.

Whatever you may be going through, I wanted to pull the curtain back so I could share this—keep going. Go through it.

But let’s be clear: it’s not guaranteed to get better. And time is not the healer of all things. Healing is 100% up to you.

There’s a crowd of people out there who let their no-good-very-bad feelings of whatever happened define them. They wallowed too long. They fought too much. And they became so deeply identified with the thing itself that leaving it behind became too scary. So they made their home inside it.

But if you don’t get stuck feeling bad for yourself, everything can spur growth. For me, it began with a daily practice of acceptance. There’s no changing the past. Relationships, careers, fortunes, and reputations get blown up every day. That’s life. Why should you or I be any different? But fighting only creates more resistance, in us and in the world around us from which we want acceptance.

Why Not Us?

The way of peace is often upside down. So why not let the acceptance we desire begin in us? Accept the right of others to feel whatever they want. We don’t know their journey. Accept immaturity (which is just a relative capacity for more growth), in ourselves and others. Accept miscalculations, our own and others’. Accept loss. This is the stuff of life… if your goal was to make it through unscathed, this is a chance to rethink that.

But if you’re like me, the goal was never to avoid risk or make it out alive anyway, but rather to live life to the fullest, soaking up and giving back every ounce of joy and love there is until finally sliding into the grave sideways, not safe, but spent—in awe of Love, in service to others, and in hope that all things can really, truly, and finally, be made new.

Thank you for staying on this journey with us. Thankful for all we’ve shared the road with. And thankful for all that still lies ahead.

Never stop growing…