#7. You know that there are things much more important than money.
Have you ever felt the ground disappear beneath your feet?
I’ve spent 20 years with that feeling, permanently incarnating Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas.
Twenty years of punishing myself through multiple addictions and bad decisions.
The nightclub where I worked to afford that life (if you can call it a life) was called Dreams, but it could have been called Nightmares.
And today — fortunately recovered — I can differentiate those who have walked through hell from those who have not used these seven signs.
1. You are grateful because you know what having nothing is like — not even hope.
If you’ve been f*cked up, you’re able to go to a coffee shop, sit alone, and stare at your cup of coffee — or whatever your favorite drink is — while you hold it in your hands and smile as if you’ve smoked a joint (even though you haven’t).
If you’ve been f*cked up, you know that having money to buy that coffee, time to relax drinking it, health to enjoy it, and a place to feel safe for a while is something to be thankful for.
If you’ve been f*cked up, you’re thankful to have a fixed place to sleep.
If you’ve been f*cked up, you don’t take your health for granted, and every day you eat healthy because you don’t want to go back to feeling like a truck ran over you.
If you’ve been f*cked up, you probably won’t have many friends, but you’ll value the ones you have and let them know it. Because when you’ve been f*cked up, you also know what it’s like to be f*cking lonely.
Which brings us to the next point
2. You don’t trust anyone, only yourself.
If you’ve been through hell, you know it’s full of devils who look like (or think they are) angels.
If you have been through hell, you will have been one of those devils, much to your regret.
You will have been the bad guy in many people’s movies if you’ve been through hell.
And as selfish as it sounds, you don’t want to be dragged back into the hole now that you’re out of the shit.
It’s not that you’re distrustful; you know that people are self-deluded and think they’re all saints when they’re not.
You know this because you’ve been on that side of the street before.
3. Your fragility is your strength
If you have come out of hell, you will have discovered that evil acts like a corporation: it is organized.
You only have to visit a convenience store to see for yourself.
They sell you anything that has the potential to enslave you — alcohol, junk food, energy drinks, tobacco, sleeping pills — because the best customer is the repeat customer, and there is no customer more repeat than the addict.
That’s why if you’ve spent a long time in hell and returned, you don’t watch much TV. You don’t like advertising to eat your head off, and you use the internet cautiously because you don’t want algorithms to manipulate your decisions and unleash your self-destructive impulses again.
You know you are fragile, and you humbly accept it. And that’s your advantage: your strength against the system.
You know there is no last drink, no last cigarette.
That’s why when you come out of hell, you focus on controlling your emotions so they don’t control you.
4. You help those who allow themselves to be helped
When you have been in hell and come out, you make your disaster your message. And little by little, you preach without words: by example.
And for that, you focus on being an agent of change, an inverted hurricane that builds instead of destroying everything in its path.
You have realized that being a good person and being beneficial to society go hand in hand. And so you undertake and try to make things work.
When you have been in hell, you have accumulated a lot of bad karma, and now you try to repair somehow the damage you have done by being helpful.
5. You are a giver instead of a taker.
In hell, you learn important things. One of them is that you don’t give what you ask for, so you don’t get what you need.
When you get out of hell, that revelation haunts you like a mantra that goes on and on in your head, “If you don’t give what you ask for, how do you expect to get what you want.”
And that shit doesn’t stop until you start taking action.
If you want love, you focus on giving love.
If you want more money, you focus on learning new skills to monetize your talents better.
If you want more friends, you focus on being there when someone needs you.
You no longer look for bargains; now, you want to pay the price and have the universe reciprocate your efforts.
6. You focus on cultivating your spiritual well-being
You have discovered that war is spiritual. And that bad decisions corrupt your body, your psyche, and your soul.
You now know nothing is free in this world, most minor of all pleasure.
Now you know you must protect your body, mind, and spirit from anyone who wants to corrupt it (candidates are not lacking).
Someone is always interested in making you fall back into old addictions and behaviors.
But you do not let yourself be tempted.
Now you know that hell is not your place, and you don’t want to go back there for anything and anyone; your peace is not negotiable.
7. You know that there are things much more important than money.
A person who has been through hell and back can open your eyes with brutal reflections like this,
It’s amazing how everything is designed to make you believe that material things will make you happy, when happiness is immaterial. Happiness is invisible and is felt inside. It is normal to want to get what you need materially to live, but then you have to invest in immaterial things like: love, friendship, gratitude. Because maybe this world of shiny and visible things is designed to distract you from what is really important. And that you do not discover, that the intangible is what really has value: like time, health, attention or values.
You can’t give people who have been through hell a pig in a poke because they have already paid the price for falling into the trap of materialism, and now they live by and for their values.
A virtual hug
AG
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