Poetic Focus™ — Entry 16: I Still Want to Take Everybody Home 🛒
Empathy can be an extraordinary asset.
Unstructured empathy can eat you alive.
This reflection shows you nine practices that aren’t defensive rules for a fragile person. They’re the operating structure that allows a powerful trait to become an asset rather than a liability.
I am so happy and grateful that I’m realizing that the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life is be authentically me.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have to please no one?
I have.
Because I’m a recovering people pleaser.
I lived most of my life trying to please other people before myself.
And even now, inward self-fulfillment can somehow feel sinful.
I wonder sometimes if that’s where the paradigm began for me—in those early Sunday school lessons of sin.
I don’t know.
But somewhere along the way it became ingrained in me to do nothing out of selfish ambition.
That selfish motives hinder a person’s connection with God.
That we are supposed to serve.
Think of ourselves less.
Treat other people’s needs as important as our own.
Love.
Be patient.
Be kind.
Build up our neighbors rather than demanding our own way.
Those aren’t necessarily bad teachings.
But I have had to look again at what happens when those teachings land on a person who is already predisposed to disappear into everybody else.
Because I think by nature I am an empath—a person who effortlessly and almost instantly, without much defense against it, absorbs the emotions, energy, and sometimes even the physical sensations of other people as if they were my own.
Really take that in.
Imagine walking into a dinner party where there are six guests.
And without defense—without a shield of armor, so to speak—the feelings of five other people come smashing into your body.
Mind.
Body.
Spirit.
You feel them.
You don’t necessarily know the story.
But you can tell Jenny over here is worried about something despite her smile.
Raul over here is wound up about something, about ready to burst with anger but suppressing it for the sake of the party.
Cathy is elated.
Just bubbling with joy.
And Bob is happy he has an audience.
He’s been anticipating the event.
Maybe he has a few new jokes to tell and can’t wait.
🤣
Imagine all of that emotional energy in its various forms colliding inside you like waves hitting a fault line.
And then imagine that, on top of that, you’re a people pleaser.
Someone who has also been taught that goodness means serving others, thinking of yourself less, being loving, patient, kind, and not demanding your own way.
For someone already wired to absorb everyone else, those teachings can make putting yourself first feel not just uncomfortable—
but wrong.
For a long time, that’s how it felt to me.
I walked around assessing what everybody else needed.
And I had been doing it for a very long time.
My mother tells this story about when I was little.
I was small enough to still sit in the front of the grocery cart.
A baby started crying on the aisle over.
Mom says I was crushed.
My heart sank.
And I said:
“Mom, we have to go get her and take her home.”
That little girl is still in me.
Somebody hurts?
Go get them.
Somebody is afraid?
Help them.
Somebody is uncomfortable?
Fix it.
Somebody is disappointed?
Make it better.
Somebody needs something?
Figure out what it is before they even have to ask.
And for a long time, I thought the answer was to become even better at doing that.
More loving.
More giving.
More available.
More selfless.
But I’ve had to look again.
Maybe the little girl in the grocery cart did not need another lesson in selflessness.
Maybe she needed someone to teach her how to defend herself.
How to remain inside herself while somebody else was hurting.
How to feel another person’s pain without automatically making it her responsibility.
How to let someone be disappointed.
How to know where somebody else ended and she began.
How to hear the baby crying—
and remain in the cart.
And let me be very clear about something.
I do not wish that little girl away.
Empathy is a gift.
It has helped me build an extraordinary life.
It has helped me build wealth.
I became a phenomenal realtor for people in duress because of it.
People facing foreclosure.
Short sales.
Death.
Divorce.
Financial problems.
Major life changes.
Situations where the real estate transaction sitting on the table was often the LEAST emotional thing happening in the room.
I could feel what people were carrying.
I could hear what they weren’t saying.
I could recognize fear underneath anger.
Shame underneath avoidance.
Panic underneath indecision.
And I could help people move through something that felt impossible to them.
That is a gift.
I don’t want to lose it.
The little girl who wanted to take the crying baby home grew up and learned how to sit beside people when their lives were falling apart.
That has served me.
It has served them.
And it has helped me build a great life.
The problem was never empathy.
The problem was having no structure around it.
Because a gift without boundaries can consume the person carrying it.
I do not need to learn how to stop feeling.
I need to know where I end.
I need to know when empathy is information—and when I have turned that information into an obligation.
I need to know when something belongs to me and when it doesn’t.
I need to know how to use the gift without giving myself away.
And that has required me to look differently at some of the religious dogma I absorbed too.
Because what happens when teachings about selflessness and sacrifice land on a little girl who already wants to rescue a stranger’s crying baby from the grocery store?
She doesn’t need much encouragement.
🤣
I have had to read the text for myself.
Think for myself.
Question for myself.
I have had to separate my relationship with God from my instinct to please human beings.
Church and sermons are designed to move people emotionally.
And for someone like me, that matters.
Emotion gets in.
So I have had to learn to ask:
What do I believe?
What do I think this means?
What belongs to God?
What belongs to somebody else’s interpretation?
And what belongs to me?
Because deciding and determining what I need for myself is 100% my responsibility.
And guess what?
Everybody will give me that responsibility.
No one is concerning themselves with whether or not I am standing on the fault line and the wave is coming.
Jenny is living Jenny’s life.
Raul is living Raul’s.
Cathy is inside Cathy’s joy.
Bob is waiting to tell his joke.
🤣
They are experiencing their own worlds from their own perspectives.
Meanwhile, I can be carrying the emotional weather report for the entire room.
That is a lot of work.
And then I have to ask:
What are mine?
Which feelings actually belong to me?
What is authentically me?
How do I feel about being here?
Do I reassure Jenny?
Console Raul?
Engage with Cathy?
Laugh at Bob’s jokes?
Do I actually want to do those things?
Or am I doing them because I can feel what everybody needs and I have spent a lifetime believing it is my responsibility to give it to them?
Because as a people pleaser, that’s what you do.
And it never turns off.
So selfishness, my friends, is survival for some of us.
Yes.
I said selfishness.
Call it something different if selfishness is a sin for you.
But I have had to learn how to FIRST care about my own needs, wishes, and well-being before automatically responding to everybody else.
And after a lifetime of trial and error—
mostly error—
I have built structures around the gift.
These are nine of them.
One. I do not watch the news.
Because I want to take everybody home.
The burdens of the world fall on my heart like the ache of the loss of a child.
War.
Children suffering.
Animals suffering.
Families grieving.
Catastrophe after catastrophe.
I cannot carry all of that every day and function well.
My knowing about every terrible thing happening in every corner of the world does not automatically make me more useful.
Sometimes it simply makes me unable to function.
So I protect the door.
Two. Groups steal my energy. Solitude energizes me.
That’s okay.
I love people.
I’m good in public.
I communicate well.
I can stand on a stage.
I can walk into a room full of strangers and participate fully.
And still walk out feeling like somebody unplugged me from the wall.
The concert may not be my thing.
The football stadium may not be my thing.
The giant gathering may not be my thing.
It is okay to decide not to participate.
I don’t have to prove I love people by exhausting myself around them.
Three. Anticipate the pain of disappointing other people.
When you say you’re not going, there may be pushback.
“Oh, come on.”
“We really want you there.”
“You never come anymore.”
“We missed you.”
If you are wired like me, every one of those sentences can hurt.
Anticipate it.
They will have a good time without you.
They will be okay.
And when they tell you later that they missed you, that may hurt too.
You do not have to fix that feeling.
You can simply say:
“I know.”
Four. Create an emotional environment on purpose.
I have playlists filled with music that speaks to my ideal mood.
Not hate.
Not broken hearts.
Not calamity.
Not drunkenness.
Not despair piped directly into my brain over and over again.
I know that what I consume affects me.
So I choose it intentionally.
Five. Defend your spiritual life.
Read the text for yourself.
Think.
Question.
Decide what you believe.
I have had to look again at teachings I absorbed as a child and ask what they created inside someone who was already predisposed to put everybody else first.
My spiritual relationship is between me and God.
It cannot depend entirely on pleasing or conforming to the desires, interpretations, or emotional needs of another human being.
Six. Be selfish.
Yes.
Be selfish.
If you are wired anything like me, you may not be in enormous danger of suddenly becoming incapable of caring about other people.
🤣
You are going to absorb.
You are going to empathize.
You are going to notice.
You are going to care.
The baby is going to cry on aisle seven and some part of you is ALWAYS going to want to take her home.
That part does not need more training.
But if you add a people-pleasing mentality on top of that without FIRST caring about your own needs, wishes, and advantages—
you are doomed.
Everybody else will get considered automatically.
The person who disappears is you.
Seven. Take time alone to figure out what is really yours and what has been absorbed from outside yourself.
I do it now with meditation.
Journaling.
Long walks on wooded trails.
I ask:
What am I actually feeling?
What did I bring into this room?
What changed after I walked into it?
What belongs to Jenny?
What belongs to Raul?
What belongs to Cathy?
What belongs to Bob?
And underneath all of that—
what belongs to me?
Sometimes I have to get far enough away from everybody else before I can hear the answer.
Eight. Schedule alone time.
Block the calendar.
Know that the pleaser in you will still feel the pull of the group.
You will think:
They need me.
They want me there.
I should go.
They’ll be disappointed.
But they do not need you nearly as much as you think they do.
They may want you.
They may love you.
They may genuinely miss you.
But they will be okay without you.
And you have to learn to be okay with that too.
Nine. Listen—but do not automatically act.
This may be the hardest one you’re going to have to learn.
People often need to be heard more than they need to be rescued.
If you are empathetic, listening can feel like a call to action.
Someone tells you they’re hurting and immediately your mind starts asking:
What can I do?
Who do I call?
How do I fix this?
How do I make this better?
Stop.
Listen.
Empathize.
Let them finish.
And then remember that hearing someone’s pain does not make it your assignment.
Sometimes the gift you have already given is enough.
You listened.
You understood.
You made another human being feel seen.
That is not doing nothing.
That is doing something enormously valuable.
Learn that the gift of listening and empathizing can be enough.
And unless someone is actually asking for your help—or the situation genuinely requires your action—you do not have to turn every emotion you encounter into a problem you are responsible for solving.
Hear the baby crying and remain in the cart.
These nine practices are not about making me less empathetic.
They are what allow me to KEEP the empathy.
To use it.
To build with it.
To make money with it.
To help people with it.
To sit across from somebody whose life is falling apart and say, in one form or another:
I can see what is happening here.
Let’s figure out what to do next.
That is powerful.
But I cannot do that work well if I am carrying everybody home with me.
I am so happy and grateful that I am learning to be authentically me.
And discovering that it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.
Because it is so much easier for me to become consumed with everyone else.
To read the room.
Absorb the emotions.
Anticipate the need.
Prevent disappointment.
Fix the problem.
Take the crying baby home.
That is the easy part for me.
The harder lesson has been learning to ask:
What do I need?
I have literally had to train myself to ask the question.
And then—
this is the important part—
answer it.
Before Jenny.
Before Raul.
Before Cathy.
Before Bob.
Before the crying baby.
Before the person who might be disappointed.
Before the person who wants more of me.
Before the teachings I absorbed as a child tell me that putting myself first is selfish.
What do I need?
And then answer it.
Because I am going to consider the feelings and well-being of other people by default.
That part of me does not need cultivating.
The harder lesson is to train myself to be selfish enough to remain in my own life.
And if you recognize yourself in that little girl in the grocery cart, I am talking to you.
I’m not telling you to become less loving.
Less sensitive.
Less compassionate.
I am telling you that what you may have spent your life believing was a weakness could be one of your greatest assets.
You can use it to help people.
You can use it to build relationships.
You can use it to build a business.
You can use it to build wealth.
You can use it to build an extraordinary life.
But you have to build structure around it.
You have to know yourself well enough to know what belongs to you.
You have to defend the gift so the gift does not consume you.
You have to learn how to care without disappearing.
I still want to take everybody home.
I probably always will.
I just finally understand that I have to take care of the little girl in the cart too.
Wake up.
Build anyway.
Poetic Focus™ — Entry 15: Look Again Before You Decide 🧠
Look Again Before You Decide 🧠
If you're new here... I'm Cary Stillwell, and this is Poetic Focus... a grounded morning practice in gratitude, identity, structure, and becoming.
A few years ago, I lost far more than I ever thought I could. After a misdiagnosis and years spent fighting my way back to myself, I began rebuilding... one habit... one structure... one day at a time.
These reflections aren't from the mountaintop. They're from the middle of real life.
For the ones rebuilding.
The ones waking up.
The ones learning to trust themselves again.
For the thinkers.
The feelers.
The nonlinear minds building a life that actually fits who they are.
I am so happy and grateful for deep breaths.
Honestly, I don't take enough of them.
So I'm breathing this morning.
And I'm going to commit to remembering to breathe when I take my 50-minute breaks and stretch.
Because apparently even after all this talk about habits and structure and taking care of ourselves, I still have to remind myself to do things as basic as...
Breathe.
I'm not perfect.
I know you know that, but I think it's important to say it out loud.
Because I can remember going through hard things and listening to people who were a few steps ahead of me in forming their good habits.
And sometimes, instead of inspiring me, they made me feel defeated before I even started.
They made it sound so automatic.
Wake up at five.
Meditate.
Exercise.
Drink the water.
Journal.
Breathe deeply.
Think beautiful thoughts.
Meanwhile, I was over there thinking:
Good Lord.
Can I just get through Tuesday?
And thinking about that this morning reminded me of a woman named Dr. Lynn Weiss.
God rest her soul.
Dr. Weiss was a PhD and an author who spent decades writing about adults with what was then commonly called ADD. Her books included Attention Deficit Disorder in Adults, The Attention Deficit Disorder in Adults Workbook, A.D.D. and Success, A.D.D. on the Job, A.D.D. and Creativity, and Embracing ADD.
Embracing ADD was the most important one for me.
When I met Lynn on the trail, it had not yet been published. She still had one chapter left to finish.
She finished that chapter, published the book, and that book became the catalyst for what came next.
And what I remember so powerfully about her work was that she wasn't interested only in handing people a list of deficiencies.
She was interested in how people actually lived.
How they organized.
How they managed time.
How they worked with distraction.
How they created structure.
And how people could understand attributes that were causing difficulty without reducing an entire human being to those difficulties.
That perspective mattered enormously to me.
But here's the part I had almost forgotten.
By the time I found Lynn's work, something had already begun shifting in me.
I had been questioning my ADHD diagnosis for maybe six months.
And I remember thinking—and I'm pretty sure I said it out loud more than once—
“If I have ADHD, then everyone in the world must have it.”
I wasn't saying that because I thought nobody had ADHD.
I was saying it because I had finally begun looking carefully at myself and thinking:
This list doesn't describe me.
And yet I had spent nearly a decade believing that it did.
I had learned the symptoms.
I had watched for them.
I had explained myself through them.
And over time, I had begun living inside an identity that had been handed to me by someone I considered an authority.
That realization has stayed with me.
Because when someone with credentials gives us a name for who we are—or what is happening inside us—it can feel enormously convincing.
Sometimes that name is accurate and profoundly useful.
But when it isn't, the consequences can reach much further than the words on a piece of paper.
A diagnosis can influence what we notice about ourselves.
What we expect from ourselves.
What we excuse.
What we fear.
What we believe is possible.
That is why I believe labels deserve both respect...
and scrutiny.
They can provide language.
They can provide access to help.
They can help someone finally understand an experience that has confused or frightened them for years.
But they should never relieve us of the responsibility to keep asking:
Does this actually describe the human being standing here?
Around that time, I happened to pick up one of Dr. Lynn Weiss's books.
I didn't know her.
I had never met her.
I just found her work, and something in it resonated with the questions I was already beginning to ask.
And then, not long afterward...
my dogs introduced us in the woods.
I was walking them through the woods in Houston one day.
They were off leash.
Yes.
I was breaking the rules.
But they were extraordinarily obedient dogs, which is why I noticed when they suddenly stopped listening to me and headed directly toward this gray-haired woman walking along the path.
They didn't jump on her.
They didn't bark.
They just gathered around her feet.
Hovered there.
Like they knew something I didn't.
And maybe they did.
Because that strange little meeting in the woods became one of the early turning points in the way I thought about labels, habits, identity, and the possibility that there may be more happening inside a human being than a list of symptoms can explain.
Much later, I would come to understand that ADHD was not the correct explanation for what was happening to me.
And I think that actually makes this story more important.
Not less.
Because I studied that diagnosis.
I studied the list.
I learned the symptoms.
I recognized myself in some of them.
Of course I did.
And somewhere along the way, without consciously deciding to, I began incorporating some of that language into the way I understood myself.
This is who I am.
This is why I do that.
This is what my brain does.
This is what people like me are like.
And that is where I think we have to be very careful.
I'm not saying diagnoses are bad.
I'm not saying ADHD isn't real.
I'm certainly not saying people shouldn't seek professional help or take medication that is appropriate and helpful to them.
I am saying something much narrower.
And, I think, much more important.
A label may describe something about a human being without explaining the whole human being.
And a list of symptoms should never be allowed to become the entire architecture of someone's identity.
Lynn and I eventually became friends.
We started a group called RADD — Rethinking Attention Deficit Disorder.
It grew out of the work surrounding Embracing ADD.
We held meetings.
Made slides.
Gathered people into a little conference room at La Madeleine.
And talked openly about things people were often ashamed to say out loud.
She had this idea about people helping people.
Someone who had figured out a useful habit or structure reaching back toward someone one step behind them.
Peer to peer.
Habit to habit.
Human to human.
Not becoming the label.
Not gathering around indefinitely to recite everything that was wrong with us.
But asking:
What helps?
What structure supports me?
What environment brings out the best in me?
Where am I struggling?
And is there also some capacity inside this trait that I haven't learned how to direct yet?
Those questions stayed with me.
Because sometimes a trait we experience only as a problem in one environment may also contain a capacity worth understanding.
Intensity can be exhausting.
It can also fuel extraordinary persistence.
Sensitivity can hurt.
It can also allow us to notice what other people miss.
A mind that moves rapidly between ideas may struggle enormously in some environments and make connections no one else sees in another.
The existence of capacity doesn't erase difficulty.
And difficulty doesn't erase capacity.
Both can be true.
That distinction matters to me.
Because I do not believe we are served by romanticizing struggle.
But I don't believe we are served by assuming dysfunction before we have bothered to understand the person carrying it either.
Before intervention comes understanding.
Before deciding what something means, get curious.
And before allowing a diagnosis, a professional opinion, a school report, a difficult season, or anyone else's interpretation of you to become your identity...
Look again.
What else is here?
What support is needed?
What structure would help?
What habits make life work better?
What environment allows this person to function well?
What needs treatment?
What needs accommodation?
What needs accountability?
And what might simply need somewhere useful to go?
That, I realize now, is part of what Lynn gave me.
And in a very real way, some of what she was trying to do all those years ago is woven into the work I am doing today.
The Wake Up movement isn't about ADHD.
It isn't about convincing people that diagnoses are wrong.
And it certainly isn't about positioning me as the person with everybody else's answer.
I'm a writer.
I'm a storyteller.
I use the specificity of what happened in my life to ask people to look again at theirs.
To make room for psychology.
Psychiatry.
Research.
Lived experience.
Habits.
Structure.
Environment.
Responsibility.
And human individuality...
all in the same room.
Because the question should not always be:
How do we make this person more normal?
Sometimes the better question is:
How do we understand this human being well enough to help them build a life that actually works?
That's the conversation I want to help bring into the mainstream.
Not the worship of labels.
Not the rejection of them either.
The understanding of people.
Whole people.
Complicated people.
People whose struggles are real and whose capacities are real too.
And maybe that's why this came to me while I was thinking about something as simple as taking a deep breath.
Because this morning I need structure too.
I need the timer that tells me to stand up.
I need the break.
I need the stretch.
And apparently...
I need to remember to breathe.
That doesn't make me defective.
It makes me a human being still learning how to build a life that supports the person I actually am.
So today I am so happy and grateful for deep breaths.
For habits I haven't mastered yet.
For strange meetings in the woods.
For extraordinarily disobedient obedient dogs.
And for Dr. Lynn Weiss.
God rest her soul.
A woman who helped me begin asking a question I am still asking today:
Before we decide what something means about a person...
have we taken the time to understand the person?
Breathe.
Get curious.
Look again.
And build from there.
Wake up. Build anyway.
Poetic Focus™ — Entry 14: The Spirit of Meadow House
Saturday Smiles: The Spirit of Meadow House
Saturday Smiles: The Spirit of Meadow House
I am so happy and grateful for Saturday Smiles — the one day a week where smiling is required by law.
My law, of course.
Saturday is the day I try not to take myself too seriously. The day I revisit the chaos of the week — or honestly, the past decade — and attempt to see it from a humorous angle.
I’m not a negative person.
I’m an intense person.
An intense high performer. A recovering perfectionist.
And somehow I got into the business of building… where perfection goes to die.
Actually, no. That’s not why.
I think construction was already in my bones.
My dad was in construction, and growing up, we never lived in a finished house. Ever. The moment one was finally done, he sold it and we moved into the next unfinished one. At one point we even lived in half a duplex while he built us a house from the ground up.
So I grew up seeing the bones of homes.
Electrical. Plumbing. Gas lines. Framing. Mechanical systems.
I learned early that water under pressure can carry things very far away.
Yes.
Plumbing too.
What I didn’t understand as a child was the magnitude of logistics involved in restoring a home. Now that I do this work myself, I realize logistics is an art form.
Or maybe a science… depending on how much caffeine and financial risk is involved.
But right now I’m restoring a home built in exactly 1970, and the second I walked into the sunken living room with the parquet floors, I immediately imagined OU students sitting barefoot around a conversation pit after a football game.
Cigarettes. Whiskey on the rocks. Walnut paneling. Low amber lamps.
Somebody says, “Put Dylan on.”
Cool people who think they’re philosophers having conversations nobody remembers.
Girls in suede boots pretending they’re Indian.
Back when the country still called Indians “Indians.”
Now we say Native Americans.
Which is funny, because when I picture my own parents in that setting, it couldn’t be further from reality.
My dad — straight out of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation — looked more like Elvis.
And my French mother’s beehive hair and pencil skirts would’ve never touched the shag carpet of a sunken floor.
They were closer to “Southern Cross” and the silent majority than Woodstock.
So maybe my fascination with bell bottoms and hippies is just my own delayed rebellion.
Either way, I’ve had my work cut out for me trying to bring this place back to life while still honoring what’s in the bones.
And I took on the challenge.
Now here’s the funny part.
Six months after we started this house, I’ve completed THREE massive commercial projects by comparison… while my contractors on the 70s house seem to have spiritually drifted into another dimension.
Like Judy Blue Eyes stole their tool pouches and raising the floor required a pilgrimage to the moon and back.
Meanwhile, I’m losing money nightly and drafting legal arguments in my head involving punitive damages because apparently I’ve decided I’m going to sue my own contractors and start over.
Full courtroom scenes.
Opening statements.
Cross examination.
None of which are ever actually going to happen, by the way.
But here’s the conundrum:
The place looks phenomenal.
Fucking phenomenal.
Excuse my French.
My mother absolutely would not.
In fact, I’m pretty sure I could still get grounded at 58 years old.
But the house is becoming so beautiful that now I’m intimidated to decorate it.
And that’s when it hit me.
Maybe the spirit of Meadow House isn’t speed.
Maybe it’s pace.
Maybe slowing down actually is part of the design.
A retreat.
A reset.
A conversation pit for the nervous system.
And honestly… pace might be the only thing capable of negotiating with my perfectionism.
Patience, however?
We’ll leave that one for another Saturday.
Smile.
It’s the law.
And —
Wake up.
Build anyway.
🏡 The house is the story. The lesson is pace.
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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.