Why We All Have To Be Ready To Blow Up Our Own Lives.

Some arguments you aren’t ever going to win.

Sometimes, however right you are, you’re wrong.

There was this girl I worked with. This bitch. She didn’t like me. I had thought she was OK, or at least, I was neutral, but she didn’t like me. Or she began not liking me when we were forced to work in the same team together and she saw me as a threat. Or whatever.

Suddenly every damn thing I did was wrong.

‘I wouldn’t have done it like that,’ she would say. ‘Anyone can see that was the wrong way to do it.’

She would say it publicly, in meetings, in front of our boss. Of course, it’s easy to be critical after the fact. It’s easier to be critical than to come up with a good idea. But if you have a loud enough voice you can damage someone. Particularly in a culture that is theoretically based on merit but is really based on how well you get on with the person who signs off your expenses.

After a while it became obvious that girl was trying to kill me off. But plausible deniability is a great thing. If you’re skilled you can make it look as though you’re not doing anything. As though you’re just trying to help.

I was in a toxic environment. I was hunted. I was scared and humiliated. Every day I tasted fear in my throat and I felt my heart pounding and I wanted to die—anything rather than go into that office and see that girl.

But I had to go into that office. Mortgage. Credit cards. Those things don’t pay themselves you know.

Toxicity had infected my system and, like a real poison, it was killing me. I had to get out of there. But there was no way out . . . or was there?

Of course there was. I’d had options for a number of years. It’s just I’d chosen not to exercise them. I’d dubbed them ‘the nuclear options.’ I hadn’t given serious credibility to the notion the one day I might have to light the fuse wire and blow up my own life.

Until the day I did just that.

Sometimes you have to blow up your own life. And in doing so, you save your life. It’s really that simple.

Think about the effect that stress and anxiety have on a human being. Do you think it’s funny? Do you think it’s something that can be sidelined, that you can just file under ‘oh well, everyone goes through it, don’t they’?

This is your fucking life we’re talking about.

I used to go to Berlin and see the Turkish gangsters hanging around the park drinking coffee all day. And I said to Alicja, my Polish girlfriend ‘I wish I had theirlives’. Somewhere along the line, my life had gone badly wrong. These guys had it better than me. At least they didn’t have to go back to the office after their week’s vacation. At least they didn’t have to put up with that girl. They could stand in the park in their leather jackets and smoke and drink coffee in the sun.

Yeah, there’s always someone worse off than you. But there’s always someone better off than you too—and that is a person who gives less of a fuck than you do.

Sometimes, you have to blow up your own life to get what you really want.

There are times when things are bad enough that you have to take extreme action. The trick is to recognise when that is. You don’t want to take extreme action on a whim, just for the sake of it. But sometimes you have to. Toxicity will kill you.

But there is almost always another way. It just means that you might finally have to do the unthinkable. Take a bus across country by night. Leave the love of your life. No note, no forwarding address. Change your identity. Sail across oceans.

Life is a battle. Sometimes it escalates into all-out war. And when that happens then you have to be ready to fight.

We all have to be ready to blow up our own lives.

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