I created This Way Here to share strategies and ideas for starting over after failure. I spent most of my life, energy and money pursuing heartfelt passions only to have them not work out as planned. The aftermath of passion’s pursuit left me feeling lost, adrift, and alone as I looked at the fragments and pieces of shattered dreams. How to make sense of it? How to move forward again?
I believe sharing our experiences helps us regain our esteem and dignity and brings connection and kinship for others who have experienced loss and defeat. It’s in this messy milieu we learn to scrape together the courage to begin rebuilding our lives again, but in a different way. We begin to uncover who we are at a deep level. This is the other side of pursuing passion.
This side of passion is not about success, achievement or personal fulfillment per se. It’s about collapse, falling apart, and defeat. Finding yourself in ruins. Having the blinders pulled off for how life works. In this place, we learn to face the reality of life’s challenges and the struggle to find footing to start again.
This is the special, almost spiritual place, where pursuing passion led me. My life’s no longer about pursuing passions to find fulfillment. It’s about learning how to get back up again and paying attention to what’s in front of me. Being present to my life as it is and not how I hope it would be. ThisWayHere is about getting back to living again.
Rick Youngblood
Riverside, California