Welcome to the Bipolar Excellence Podcast, Episode 32, My Search For Purpose Draws Harmful People To Me. 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.

This particular topic, these harmful people? Lordy were these exciting times.

I’ll tell you this much, when you launch out into the world with a great amount of energy and a fair amount of desperation leading the way? There are powerful dark forces who look at you like a snack walking onto their dining room table.

Can’t wait to gobble you up and give you a hand. With your search for purpose.

There’s charlatans, there’s people who are just as desperate as you, there’s people who are just as damaged or more than you. There are people who are highly intelligent and unaware of how damaged they are. There’s people that are highly intelligent and have no soul. I seem to cross paths with all of them.

They all taught me hugely important lessons. And I, I pretty much I’m, I’m sitting here trying to think. I had fun with every single one of ’em. In some cases, so much fun that I, I let the pain draw out longer than it should have.

So, when you’re looking for, when you don’t know what your purpose is, you should, you should search, you should seek, you should ask for help. I, I just did an earlier episode on that.

But if you are, if you’re unaware. If you are so wide open that you have that you, you have no defenses up because you’re desperate and you’re hungry. And excitable, you’re gonna be blind to how the wrong people are, are wrong, as they show up in your life. Or it just won’t be, you won’t see the wrongness right away.

Now, again, don’t stop looking. Even if you’re doing this the way I just said and it’s wrong, it’s part of it. Don’t kick yourself about that if you’re already connected to one of these mad men or mad women or, or just whatever, these people that are not who you thought they’d be.

You’ll you’ll know with each one when the time to part has come, cuz it’ll, it’ll become untenable. They’ll either cut you free or you’ll reach a breaking point just like when you quit at a job. Or you might not. This was not the case with me.

Some of it lasted too long, but you might not. You might just hang with someone with that, winning the Lotto mentality, thinking if you just put in the time and be patient, this is gonna bear fruit. It will all have been worth it.

You’re you need to understand yourself as you move along through this process of working with other people, who are also helping you understand yourself. You need to be doing side work that has nothing to do with them to understand yourself fast enough to save yourself from these people.

Some are evil, some are lost and unaware, and some are just confused. Some are just having sport. They’re playing with you like a pawn. You showed up, they can use ya. They’re gonna use you. It’s not even evil. It’s almost like it’s just an efficiency thing.

Some are evil and know it. Some are evil and don’t know it.

The first person that ever landed in my lap solidly, this will all take too long to lay out, but I’ll see what I can do.

I gave an interview on local cable vision, local TV station, about my story. I’d just written my book, It Takes Guts To Be Me How An Ex, How An Ex-Marine Beat Bipolar Disorder. And so this guy’s quizzing me. I’m only a few years out him from safely saying bipolar’s gone. Maybe only a couple.

But I was good. I was sane. I was dealing with some remnants of, of anxiety and mania mostly, but I was healthy.

My physical health was good. I was, I was mostly stable in the ways that I was not stable were just in the high energy of areas. The, the anxiety. and and the mania. But they were tolerable to most people around me. If you didn’t see me much in a day, they were even enjoyable. If you had to spend all day with me, I might burn you out.

That’s where I was when I, when I gave that interview and I had a different purpose then for what it was I was trying to do. I’m trying to sell the book. I’m trying to directly help people defeat bipolar disorder.

They gimme a recording of that interview and I go to. It was in a format that I could not. What do you call? Couldn’t reformat it right on my computer, so I could then put it on the website that I had at the time.

So I had to find someone that could reformat it. I had no idea who that might be. I did a search thinking the yellow pages of all thing, found a company, never heard of ’em before. Drove past them hundreds of times didn’t know what was in that building.

That was really the start. That building was the start of this drawing the mad men and mad women my way. A lot of it was good. Some of it not so much. All of it was fascinating.

So while I’m talking to the, the owner of the building, nice old guy, just one of the best people. He was not one of these people.

The guy that was sitting next to him who was negotiating rental fees for a space in the building was. And he was the worst of his kind out of all the ones that came after. He was, he was king Kong.

This guy sucked me into his web. I went willingly. and he promised that he would turn me into something big. And he worked in a field that dealt with disabled people where he actually did wholesome, awesome, incredible things for the disadvantaged.

He, in this respect, he was an angel. I learned that about him over time through many sources. The projects that were specifically his was where the lunacy came in. And he was charismatic. He was very persuasive.

He was almost like a Christ figure and he could get anybody he talked to, to go along with what he did. He, he was very influential that way. It was, it was, it was unbelievable!

I had to run from this man. He fired me, but I had a run from him anyway and never have anything to do with him ever again. And it was years ago and a piece of me is dying to know what his, what his story is, where he is at now, what he’s up to.

I do know that he went on to burn his bridges left and right, all over our area. He had a way of getting himself into things he had no right to do. He wasn’t what he said he was or who he was.

It looked real good at first. He’d get a lot of really positive things going and then he’d burn it all to the ground, every single time, leaving pain and bad feelings behind and usually a bill, a debt. It was something else. That was the first one I found.

I could really say a lot more about him, but you know, we, we have timed limits here. There was a guy that came our way through him. Now, I’m in an old Sears building, helping to clear out the fixtures. That’s all the walls, everything they have to, to display their wares.

The, the countertops, the tabletops shelving, portable walls, all of that stuff. Hooks hanging on walls. All of had to be taken out of the building.

Some guy shows up one day, in a really crappy car and he’s in really bad shape.

These things should have been a key, but, a clue I mean, that things weren’t quite what they seemed. He had a big ball of keys on him. To this day, I don’t know what that guy, how he ever got those, that ball of keys or what he had to do with this place. But he was the one to let us in that building.

This is a whole other story.

And a lot happened in that building. I ended up emptying that whole building physically with a, a team of troubled youth and a few felons from a halfway house for felons. That was fine. It was pointless. I didn’t have to do it. A lot of fun came out of it. A lot of work, painful work.

One of the most, one of the worst injuries I ever sustained came from doing that job. Something I got hurt in some kind of way I never got hurt before. And it had nothing to do with like heavy weight lifting or construction work.

And it put something in place that, that almost it didn’t go away for decades. So I got left with physical pain for doing that job. But this guy. He, and I became very close and dear friends for a few years and we got involved with a soup kitchen helping out there.

I had no money. And I was donating my time and my car to pick up food for the soup kitchen. And the deal was I could get first pick as much as I wanted of all the, the food we brought in. And that’s how I fed my family. I had other perks that were connected to that, but that’s, that’s what became the deal with, with this guy.

And I started hearing things. People I was writing about him on a website, my website and the website of the guy I was working with that we first mentioned. And every now and then we’d get somebody from the world would write back about what a dangerous lunatic the other guy was. I refused to believe it, but it turns out it was true.

This, this guy was a, a complete maniac living a fantasy world, but he was stunningly intelligent, and knowledgeable on any topic you put before him. Never was without an answer.

Real real dark messed up sense of humor that only he and I shared back and forth when we were in the car, literally running all over town, doing works of good for all kinds of needy demographic, needy people and groups everywhere.

We were doing the Lord’s work. Not, and I didn’t realize I, I was with a guy that was completely out of his mind. He carried it off too well.

I started realizing he was a big dreamer, huge dreamer. And he would come up with these visions of things we could do and build and grow and connections he had. And somehow nothing would ever quite come together, but he was never daunted by it.

And some of it would come together. So you’d think… we built an art gallery in the middle of this. We hosted meetings of millionaires on a few different occasions, for things I never had anything to do with before or since, but I was in the meetings. Millions and millions and millions of dollars sitting at these tables.

We we moved we, we made a film project happen, a talking history of, of senior citizens in our area, you know, tell their stories before they’re gone. This is all World War II veterans types and, and, and people from the fifties and the sixties. Somehow that happened.

I could go on, I, I. I can’t, I can’t even remember all the things we did that were huge and great and awesome and helpful to the people that we did it for, but we got nothing for it.

Just, just lessons is what I got out of it.

Lot of fun. Met a lot of really great people. Met a lot of politicians, met the heads of a lot of nonprofits. I can’t to get across you people how much of the power structure of my area I got put before and did things with, or for, that served no purpose for me, ultimately. It was just a blast.

I was glad I did it. I’m still glad I did it. But it didn’t get me one step closer to figuring out my purpose or how I could even earn a living from all of this stuff.

Healthier people started showing up though, off the back of this. I started getting closer to my purpose. A little. I started maximizing on all my internet marketing skills and websiting skills and my ability to put together the big picture and figure out all the moving parts .

Find all the services and tools needed. Find the people necessary to run various departments. I had a certain amount of networking skill. I could put people in touch with other people. And this led to me doing almost like an early form of what I, what I do now with high functioning, bipolar people.

This was where I got the closest to discovering my purpose without actually discovering my purpose.

I helped start a lot of small businesses. I worked, I, I worked for a local trooper that ran a gym. I worked with a local trooper, different one, who did web design for a larger gym.

The three of us became a business, an official business to start a third gym, amongst other things. We tripled that the small gym owner, the trooper, we tripled his income, the other trooper and myself. We tripled the second trooper’s income in in about a month and a half, for a very high priced program he offered.

All these things were happening with all these people, that I was getting beaten to death under the workload willingly, gladly, I requested it. It took me forever to realize how none of these people were paying me either what they agreed to, or they couldn’t have pay. They couldn’t keep paying me what we agreed to or they’d pay me very little.

And I kept holding onto the hope that if I just hung in there and did enough work, I’ll get mine. That was a huge lesson I learned that some of you are gonna need to learn too.

I can’t pay you now, but if you help me pull this thing and the once the money comes running in, you’re gonna get taken care of.

Run From That!

Okay. One of the most important lessons I can teach you. Run From That.

Most of these people mean it when they say it from the bottoms of their heart, most of ’em are very good people. And in my case, most of ’em were doing incredibly good things for the societies, in which they were involved.

Didn’t do anything but bleed Kenny dry other than learning the lessons I learned that I am now imparting to you.

So , there’s more. There’s friends I met. There’s other there’s other people I met. I, I, I was involved with inventors. I was involved with MIT engineers. Edged up into some shit unawares with, with the mob. Just a little bit

I ended up at city council meetings. I can’t even remember why.

I had just enough mania left on the, on the tail end of the bipolar clear out years that I got a lot done that I, I don’t even know why I ended up where I was, what I hoped to get. Just trying to make that big dream come true. I got a feeling, a lot of you, are gonna resonate with this.

We have to high functioning, bipolar people. We have to protect ourselves from ourselves.

There’s people out there that will use us. I think largely in, in a, a, a moral sense they’ll use us because we offer to be used. Whether we know it or not. And it’s not, nobody wants to hurt anybody. Some do.

I remember with that first guy, when he. He fired me, actually. I was the last to go. He fired everybody slowly. I watched him destroy everything we had built. And my God, it was a lot of work, physical and mental.

It was a lot of work, what we built together in his space in that building. What we had going on out in the world and the other companies we were actually tied to that depended on us.

He burned it all to the ground.

I was the second to last to go. And even then I reminded him, cuz he was all mad at me. I remember I was shaking because I was about… this guy, meant everything to me.

Everything I was doing, even with most of the other people, was still connected to this one guy. And without him, I was about to be set adrift and I was still not ready to figure out what my true purpose was. And I desperately wanted to know.

And I asked him that. I was like, you remember when we started, you were gonna make me huge. You were gonna turn me into something. I was gonna let you take whatever you wanted from that cuz I knew you would achieve things I couldn’t on my own.

We never took one step towards any of that. It was all you. After that first conversation, it was all you and how I could help you.

And now you’re sitting here telling me I took from you. How?

And then I was like, if I’m not working with you, what am I supposed to do?

And this was where, to his credit, the part of him that was a teacher, he was an actual teacher as well. And a caregiver to the disabled. He was that. And again, he did incredibly good things for people that really needed help.

And he was like, I don’t know what your purpose is. That’s for you to decide. I can’t help you with that. And then he gave me a hug, cuz my hands were shaking. It was like this anxiety reaction.

Here I am like, what was I? Mid thirties, war vet, had already done that bouncing job at the security guard that you might have heard in the, in one of the earlier episodes where my life was violence.

I had no fear compared to most people. And I was riddled with fear at this moment because I was about to cut free from the only thing I knew how to do, which was help this guy to get me where I wanted to go.

And it was terrifying to me. And he saw that. And he got up and he hugged me and he was like, you’re gonna be all right.

And all the bullshit was let go for a second. And the part of him that was good, eased me through that moment that he’d created and that I let happen and, and his empathy and his, his heart led me out that door in the right way.

So. I don’t want any of that to happen to any of you guys. It’s probably happened already to some of you. If you would like to know what I did in a little bit more depth and a quick read, go to bipolarexcellence.com.

You’ll see my gift or you’ll see my offering there. Is Bipolar Disorder A Gift? It’s an 11 page PDF. Sign up for my newsletter and you’ll see a little better on what came out of everything I just shared with you.

It’s, it’s more briefly outlined over there with some really poignant facts highlighted. And a lot of resources that I can lead you to immediately, so that you can understand, if you’re in this situation, how to get out of it and possibly how to never fall into it in the first place.

I need to know I’m doing right by you guys. And that Is Bipolar Disorder A Gift? PDF is my first step in doing so. I built that thing all with heart, and years of of hard earned wisdom and experience. I want you to have it, go get it. Alright. See you guys.