You know how much we hear these heroic stories of somebody who’s a nobody, an average person, and then they do something great.
This rise from being average to being great.
It’s a wonderful story.
You have great inventors.
Somebody starts a business.
Somebody runs an ultramarathon.
Somebody climbs a mountain.
All these kind of wonderful feats.
And you imagine these great people, people who are great successes, and we look at the story of how they travelled from just being an average nobody, just like anybody else, and now they’ve become this great, successful, powerful person.
And the story of that journey, it’s an amazing thing.
These are amazing stories of people going from average to extraordinary.
But what’s a little bit less celebrated is this journey just to get to the middle, just to get to the point of being an average “nobody”.
From somebody that is in a very, very low place, simply to come up to the middle.
Being a broken person, being deep in addictions, deep in cycles of destructive behaviour, deep in depression, deep in mental hole.
I mean, it’s possible to be so far down from this middle average nobody level that to go from that low dark place up to medium is as big a thing, it’s as epic a journey, and as grand an achievement, as going from average nobody level to the heights of greatness.
Now, of course, the best storyline of all is to go all the way from the bottom, below normal, below medium, and all the way up through medium up to level of outstanding greatness.
But those stories, still, we tend to only make that the story if these people achieve the level of greatness.
Then we can look back and celebrate how they came from a very low place to shoot up to greatness.
But what about somebody that comes from the low place and just makes it up to medium? Maybe not as great a story, and certainly a story not often told with as much pride.
You don’t see this exuberant proclamation: “I have achieved average! I am medium! I am normal level!” I mean, the typical reaction might be “Good for you.
You’re average.
What kind of achievement is that? There are lots of average people around.” But of course, the public that is seeing the end result, seeing the surface of an average person, would not automatically know everything that went into making that ordinary-level person.
So my thought for today is that this journey from the deep, low, dark places, from the bottom, up to the level of an ordinary human, is a great project.
It is a great adventure.
It is a great journey.
And that anybody who is struggling to make it out of the depths and simply have an ordinary life, that this is a wonderful thing to be working on.
Maybe not easy to be proclaiming this in the streets, but I think it’s something that we can be proud of.
Every little gain that you make, you can be proud of it as if you were the great titan, the great tycoon, who is making big moves and taking his billion-dollar business to the stars.
Well, if you are somebody struggling with addictions and dark, destructive behaviour, and you have a day where you simply go for a walk, make a nice meal for yourself, watch a movie, and go to sleep, without doing anything destructive, that could be a magnificent achievement for somebody who’s in a dark place.
So these simple wins, these most basic gains that an average-level, functioning person would assume is completely unremarkable: for somebody struggling.
these can be great achievements, and I think it’s OK to celebrate them.
I think that we can have this kind of feeling of pride.
If you are coming from a dark and low place, you can really have the feeling that you are working on something grand.
And I know it’s easy for this to take on sort of a mocking tone, and be like yeah, you know, “Good for you.
You brushed your teeth today.
Yay.” But nobody really knows what’s going on inside each of us.
And for some of us, simple things can be a great challenge that really is on the level of climbing a high mountain.
So let’s not take anything away from these simple things.
If they are achievements, let them be achievements, and let’s be proud of each step on a journey.
That wherever we are, we have to start somewhere, and it’s a long way up.
#startfromthebottom #recoveryjourney #longwaytogo