I got lost. And now I found my way back.

I was lost in myself, but what happened and how did I get back? (Annecy, France in July 2019)

I last wrote on Medium in 2018. But today, I got an email that told me someone started to follow me on here. It was one of those moments that suddenly alerted me to why I started writing here, and what I had lost since then.

2018 was meant to be that new start, breaking away from the comfortable and known and with open arms, embracing what I really wanted to do with my life — set my own course, write, speak and help others overcome their own hurdles.

I then got swallowed up by that comfortable life in September 2018, having moved from the things I now understood I had cherished, into the rat-race once again. I re-joined the much loathed commute, hierarchy and standard ways of doing things — all so humdrum when compared to the time I spent before talking to others — talking, sharing ideas, talking about those deep topics that mattered to me.

That was all replaced with the usual back and forth of meetings, projects, and dealing with colleagues across many different levels of thought and personality. I made head-way within 2019, having moved across into a different department, to explore new opportunities to learn and do things. Personally I had also tried to forge friendships and relationships but nothing came out of it, instead I felt inadequate and responsible for the way they all ended.

My life auto-pilot was now in control, having taken right back into the corporate world and I felt many emotions around that — joy, happiness, recognition, despair even. Looking back, I had set aside the time to build my dream life and cultivated every small sapling to inch it forward, day by day, word by word.

Corporate won in the end. I thrived on the thrill of being able to pick up things others didn’t want to do and get shit done. That is what I thrive on, the path of learning and development. Yet, a lot of decisions were not up to me in the end, and I constantly had to keep my head above the water-line so that I could get everything (and more) done each hour, day and month.

When I am now seems to be a carbon-copy of earlier places I have been — companies trying to turn the corner and invest in technology and the people behind it. My auto-pilot had latched onto the coordinates of the job role when I first saw it, and I went over and beyond…