Poetic Focus™—Entry 13: Regret as a Lifeline 🎭

I am so happy and grateful for regret.

Once, I lived in an attic. I was broke and needed a place to live that I could trade time for instead of money. The outdoor shed at an assisted living facility had an attic space, and my ex-husband and I made it a home.

I worked nights and went to school during the day. I have never felt exhaustion like I did then.

And yet—it was fun.

It was the days when phones had cords, and we strung a very, very long one from the facility into the attic. It barely reached. So when we talked on the phone, we had to sit at the very edge. It was an A-frame room, so our heads had to tilt. It was actually better just to lie down. Graduation was approaching, and I wanted something to wear besides hiking pants and Birkenstocks. I didn’t know where to shop, so I called a professor.

Not because they teach.

Because I loved how she dressed.

She was from New York, so I was certain she’d have the skinny. But when I called, I was derailed. She answered crying. She was one of the founders of a salon theater in town—and it was going under. I couldn’t bear to see that happen. But more than that, I needed to stop the tears from falling. So I offered to help and set out to do the impossible: bring a 49-seat theater in a small town in Colorado out of the red and set it up for the future.

It still thrives today.

But when I think about that year, I think of failure. Because at that time, I didn’t know how to regulate. I didn’t know that high performance meant starting a day with Poetic Focus—giving gratitude and making sense of things that don’t. I didn’t know that alcohol depleted me of positivity. I didn’t know that sleep enhanced cognitive performance and flushed out metabolic waste—the unusable, often toxic byproducts created by cells during normal metabolism. So I exhausted myself. By the end of the year, I could barely function.

Total burnout.

Total collapse.

I had gone to college for a communications and theater arts degree. I had the best job in town. And I lost it. I don’t believe we should avoid regret. I believe regret is a powerful tool for enhancement—the part of life that gives us the most perspective. It leaves a hole in the heart that is never fully filled—except by knowing you’ve become a better person because of it.

Regret didn’t ruin me.
It refined me.

And today, I have a vision: to return to that theater and speak.
To spread the message that rebuilding after collapse is possible.

And perhaps that will be the ultimate moment—
when I string the cord from that assisted living attic
and it becomes a lifeline to possibility.

A metaphor made real.

📸 Different phone. Same lifeline.
#WakeUpBook

Poetic Focus™ — Entry 12: Peace Under Pressure

Peace is not the absence of fear.

For high-capacity leaders, fear is often the signal that growth is near.

Right before expansion, there is turbulence — not because something is wrong, but because something consequential is forming. Most performance models don’t account for this internal threshold moment. They measure output. They don’t measure integration.

Some people are built for repetition.
Others are built for pattern recognition, calculated risk, and systems under pressure.

That wiring carries adrenaline.
And adrenaline carries fear.

The shift is not eliminating fear.
The shift is learning how to interpret it.

Fear becomes data.
Pressure becomes information.
Turmoil becomes a doorway to higher responsibility.

What changes the game isn’t avoiding hard decisions.
It’s refusing to abandon yourself inside them.

Slower trust thresholds.
Clearer boundaries.
Stronger pattern recognition.
Deeper consequence awareness.

Peace, for leaders, is not stillness.

Peace is self-trust under pressure.

And when you understand that, you stop trying to escape the threshold —
and start building through it.

Wake Up. Build Anyway.

— Cary Stillwell

Poetic Focus™ is an ongoing series of reflections on identity, leadership, and the practice of building a life that holds.