Learning to BE MIGHTY — Chapter 1
“There is something wrong at the factory” was the subject line of the email but the message only said “sent from my iPhone”. It left me wondering what the hell could be going on halfway around the world in China as I was sat teetering at the edge of my bed drowsy from another sleepless night.
I had been up several times comforting my girls from their own nightmares since my wife moved out a couple weeks ago. I was just hoping to get an extra 30 minutes of sleep before starting my day at work but I couldn’t lay down until I knew what that cryptic message was all about.
The next email that came through was in the form of a short novel that described how the factory where my products were being produced had been seized by the Chinese government. Apparently the owner had taken all of the money out of the business and disappeared overnight without a trace. As I was reading the email the workers and staff were being forced out as the government took possession of the property. Meanwhile somewhere inside that factory my entire Holiday sales inventory of Mighty Wallets was boxed up and ready to ship.
Just like that the product that got me onto the Inc’s Fastest Growing companies list was gone, or at least 3 full months of inventory was gone. I had built my business from $300 I borrowed from my Dad with my own inventions and innovative marketing but recently the dream that I had been living was starting to falter and now this. If I didn’t fix this quickly it could lead to a huge drop in sales and with our pending divorce I could not afford any shortfalls.
What followed in the next few weeks was a ricochet of personal crisis’s that started to unravel my world in a seeming chain reaction one after the next; first my Father found out he had throat cancer, then my Mom’s hip replacement developed a Staph infection and my dear Grandmother, Rose Nell, who had raised me passed away all within just a few months and it did not stop there.
One evening I came home to a street lined with fire trucks and flashing lights - there was a gas leak in our building from an illegal gas connection and we were forced to evacuate our apartment in the East Village. Just months before a similar leak in the village had destroyed an entire street corner so we rushed out grabbing only essentials. We got back in after 24 hours but the work required to fix the gas would take six months to complete. Our landlord had lent each tenant two tiny electric hot plates to cook with in the interim. Cooking everyday for two girls on hot plates was perhaps the easiest of the problems I was facing.
All the apartments in the building had to have new gas lines rerouted through our ground floor apartment leaving construction debris in our apartment everyday. For six months as my family and business was in crisis I came home to a scene of trash bags taped to the ceiling around all the holes and pipes to prevent the dust and god-knows-what that exists between a NYC apartment ceiling and your upstairs neighbors floor from falling into our space.
In the mornings I would sit at the edge of my bed contemplating the calamity around me it felt like the world as I knew it was unraveling. My family, my business, my kids all needed attention and I was most terrified of what might happen next. At night I would sometimes escape the anxiety through my dreams only to have everything come rushing back in the morning just moments before opening my eyes. The fear was paralyzing leaving only a numb dull tired feeling as I went through the day.
My feelings would fluctuate rapidly between pity, blame and self doubt. The self doubt would pull out a highlight reel of bad memories and play them on rerun for the 100th time in my mental cinema. The narration sounded something like this: “SEE! I told you — who do you think you are kidding!? You’re just an artist from a broken family not a business man! Now look what’s happened. You’re never going to get out of this.” All of these emotional triggers were not helping.
The truth was that things had not been perfect for a while despite the awards, magazine covers and incredible Facebook posts of our dream Summer vacation. It was just months before that I took the “family vacation of a lifetime” renting a house in the South of France for a month where my wife and I met to hopefully rekindle a connection between us in the warmth of the Mediterranean.
However fate was not meant to take us in that direction when the night before our arrival my wife’s best friend committed suicide. Over the next weeks she withdrew further and further from me on the trip and returned to NYC alone a week before me and the girls. The night before our departure she emailed me to say she wanted to move out when we got back to New York.
Why was all of this happening? My mind kept trying to find some rationale, something to put my finger on to make sense of it all. It’s human nature to seek out the meaning in everything that happens to us even in chaos. But the idea that everything could be coming undone for no reason at all was even more terrifying. The lingering unanswered “why” left me struggling to have any perspective on the pain.
Sitting on the edge of my bed those morning felt like sitting at the edge of an abyss. The gravity of these events felt like a massive black hole of depression was pulling at me, tugging and gently teasing me into feeling all the pity, self doubt and blame that I needed to just give up. I realized that I was living dangerously close to the edge of an event horizon and that any step towards the darkness could lead me to a point of no return. I had to find something to hold on to.
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