Welcome to the Bipolar Excellence Podcast, Episode 30. I Love What I Do, But Could Do More With It. This is part of the Life Of An Outsider series. You’ll find a link to the series in the footer of the website bipolarexcellence.com.

Okay, this one’s important. Let me adjust my thingamajigger. All right.

If you love, if you love what you do. And I don’t mean like, some people talk themselves into thinking they love something, cuz they don’t think they can ever do better. They, they accept their fate as they see it. That’s sad. Nothing I can do about that until they open their eyes, but that’s not you, or you wouldn’t be listening to this.

Your eyes have opened to some degree. You’re becoming aware of something about yourself and the nature of life and your place in it. You’re starting to become aware of your greatness.

That is powerful. That’s the whole ball of wax. And once you know this, you’re fucked.

You can’t go back.

You will never be satisfied with just going back to the way things were.

Once you get this, really get this, you can’t kid yourself anymore, and it will bother you not scratchin’ this particular itch.

What, what more could you do with that thing you love? Okay. Now, oddly enough, in my own experience, there’s been, there’s been flavors of what I’m about to speak, speak on through many of my jobs, which it was two where I led with it and, and was even expected to.

One’s my current job where I work part-time at a halfway house for all men.

The job fills an economic need well enough, as I build the business you are soaking in right now. But I would never grow old there. There’s there’s not enough money to stay. But I absolutely love the guys I work with, and what they expect of me, and what I’m easily able to give them. It’s just, it’s pure joy to me.

I’m I wanna completely run my own company and not have a ceiling on my income. And that’s slowly coming true. But while I gotta be somewhere, I wanna be doing something that matches my best parts. What, what it is about me that I enjoy most and am, and am best at doing. That is talking to people and helping them, regardless of topic, really.

But if you’re pursuing something that you love and you wanna do more with it, it’s it’s best if you stay focused on that niche, that, that, that group of people that seems to respond to you the best.

Now I have two sets of people that fit that bill, but they’re not after the same thing. One is damaged people of, of various sorts, but in particular, mentally ill and addicts. People that have either been harmed on their own, through their addictions.

Or they had the wonderful world of mental illness jammed down their throat. And they’ve had to survive that internal battle, something they never would’ve chosen for themselves, and seemingly is out of their, out of their control.

I’m really good with those groups of people. And particularly if they’re dual diagnosis, they have both. Cuz it’s kind of the same thing, really. There’s almost, there’s really almost no separating the two in, in a re in a respect.

But that doesn’t fully scratch the itch that I’m trying to get at with, with my life, with like the title of this episode. "I love what I do, but I could do more with it."

The helping people by sharing what I know and resources I’ve found and perspectives I’ve learned to survive my own shit is the, is the thing. And I get to do that immensely at this job.

But these people are after a goal, which is basically getting back on their feet and restarting their life for some of ’em in a, in a new fashion, never before attempted by them, is not what sings to my heart. I enjoy doing it immensely, but it’s, it’s not the thing.

What I enjoy even more than that is dealing with similar types of people who have a big dream.

I explode when I’m talking about that kind of material with these kinds of people. So to bring it back, you are like me, you love what you do, but you could do more with it.

The doing more with it. Does that mean you need a higher certification? That could be what it means. Does it mean you’ve gotta create something new to fulfill a need in that population that doesn’t currently exist in the system you’re you find yourself in? Could be that as well.

But if you’re listening to me, you you probably want to build something really big, or you want to get found in a big, big way.

And you are… most people you talk to are, regardless of their troubles, quote, unquote normal in respect to how big they wanna lead life.

I wanna lead a big life. I’m hoping you do too.

You’re gonna have to really, or we’re not even gonna work together when it comes to that, that deciding moment. I, I need you to wanna build a big life or I can’t even work with you.

I won’t. It’s not how I wanna live.

The other job where I started learning this thing about me with helping people? I was actually doing security. This Jo job was dark. I was just coming up on being fully consumed, let’s just say to heights never before reached by bipolar. It was right around the corner. I had already crashed and burned brutally once and sort of got my shit together.

And, and during that time I had this job. But it only lasted a couple years. I was starting to sink fast once again, but on that job, I got hired to fight. I was basically a bouncer for an emergency room in a mid-sized city’s hospital.

When I wasn’t busy in the emergency room, I was the only guard that stayed in the emergency room, I’d go up on the psych lockdown ward. I saw things on that lockdown ward and witnessed and partook in violence, the likes of which I’d never seen anywhere outside of that realm.

Not even the Marines, not even in the Gulf War, not even in fucking bootcamp that I faced the violence I faced in that emergency room and on that psych lockdown war ward, and with superhuman strength.

Now I was literally hired to fight and I did well at it. I never knew what an ambulance or the troopers or the city cops were gonna bring up the hill to the back door. And I had to be up for it. It was a violent way to earn an almost non-existent paycheck. And because I was in a very dark place, very mad at life, I love that part of it.

Now as time went on, even with that dark outlook and a disintegrate disintegrating mind, it started bothering me that they just wanted me to yolk up every single person that came through that door that got loud.

And most of the people, not always, I sometimes I just dealt with gang members, or sometimes they’d bring in prisoners from even super max, we got a super max prison not far from here.

Like I said, I saw violence of a sort the Marine Corps didn’t even come close to showing me. The violence became very manageable to me. I thrived on it even, but only when necessary. I started realizing most of the people they brought in that door were just having a bad night.

Maybe they’re on dust. Maybe they’re on some other fantastical new designer drug, or they might just be completely insane or they might be bipolar just like I was. And the illness was having its day with them. Whereas I hadn’t quite reached that moment yet. I would shortly.

But what happened was I started feeling a lot of empathy eventually, for these people coming in that I didn’t have initially. I had to grow into it. Keeping in mind bipolar was having its way with me. And I was a, mostly a dark thing.

The fact that I was able to pull some empathy outta myself in the middle of this constant rage that I felt and, and, and the disintegration of my being is, is amazing.

And I became, without realizing it was a thing, a patient advocate.

I started looking for ways to take care of people before I had to go be a security guard on ’em cuz it simply wasn’t fair. I got so good at it, it became expected of me, which in itself made me a liability to the hospital, because now I’m basically giving healthcare is how they saw it.

So I was not allowed to do it. Yet was fully expected to do it. Got a reputation for it. Cops loved it when they came up and saw that I was there. And I frequently would get called up. I’m making $9 and 25 cents an hour with no benefits, completely risking my life multiple times a night, every night.

I’m getting called up to the psych lockdown ward to deal with the worst of the worst, because it was known that I had a certain connection with certain people and could deescalate them without it going bad. Had sometimes it was just cuz I could yoke ’em up, because I could, but it became more of a thing that "Kenny knows how to talk to Melissa. Is he down there? Bring him up here."

That woke me up to the fact that there was something about me for helping people that was good and that I enjoyed. The guard job only let me do it periodically. I fought less and less, the longer I was there. It just became, I’d just fight the assholes or the completely deranged where they were in a combat mode, the end.

And so that’s where I had to meet ’em and deal with ’em to protect everybody else in the hospital or even themselves. I saw things. I saw people eating themselves. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not laughing at them either. I’m just laughing at this is how insane my life was. This is how insane this job was.

I never even yeah! Never even saw that, I never saw anybody trying to eat themselves in the, in the Marine Corps, even in a war zone. That’s what I was up against in the middle of that I’m helping people.

Now I deteriorated rapidly after that job. And I got way worse. And the rest of my bipolar story kicked in. You know, died multiple times, two week coma. I was always in handcuffs. I became the thing that I used to meet at the back door. And I was one of the worst versions of it.

I beat bipolar the way I did. I come out of it. I still want to help people. That’s what led to now. Now I share all that with you to say, you wanna do more with what you love. So did I, and you should.

Right now, the world is going through a sea change.

Globally, everything is disintegrating. Systems are disintegrating. The old ways are disintegrating kind like I was at that hospital job. The things that are in charge are fighting back even harder, in more deranged ways.

People are against each other. They got us split down the middle, on every single topic you can imagine, which doesn’t help any of us solve anything.

I’m against all that, and we need a way out of it. And if you’re listening to me, you are one of the people that are gonna help lead some portion of the world out of the crash we are currently in the middle of.

You are gonna do something that’s healthy. You are gonna change lives. You’re going to brighten days and brighten moods.

You’re going to do things through your work that just like me, you’re never gonna know certain people or hear of ’em, but they heard you. You said something or did something, shared something that inspired them to go do something big, like what I’m doing. Like what you are doing. And you will have helped change the world.

You gotta know that. The fact that you want more with what you love? Perfect.

But the world needs you to do it. It isn’t just what you want to do.

You’ve awoken to something… awakened? Which one is that? You become aware that you have more to give in an area that you want to give it in. I’m telling you, you have to.

The world needs people like you and me to do what they’re doing, and I want to help you do it.

The way I start to help you is over on bipolarexcellence.com. Go get that free 11 page Is Bipolar Disorder A Gift PDF by signing up for my newsletter. And then I I’ll give you updates on when I have new podcast episodes.

When I’m done with these series, I have a few more series planned. There’s gonna be. Every now and then I I’m, I’m gonna go back to writing as well. I love writing. I used to do it quite a bit. I got away from it doing the podcast.

But I’m just gonna share helpful things on how you can do more with whatev what it is you love and why you should. This is bigger than just you.

I’m glad you found me. We’re in a sweet spot in the journey of the human race, not just where we are as individuals. We have caught a wave, me with what I’m doing, you with what you’re about to do.

We have caught a wave. I don’t know how long it’ll last, but the world is destabilizing in such a way that good things attempted to, to be done will not meet the resistance they would have just a few years ago.

When shit’s unsettled, is not only when violence happens and there’s blood in the streets, it’s also when the really good things can happen. Because the people that would’ve stopped you from doing it are too busy with all the other shit.

We have caught a wave. I wanna ride it with you.

Go connect with me on bipolarexcellence.com. We’ll see what we can build. See you guys.