(Friday afternoon 4.27pm sat at my desk in my beautiful, wonderful office a couple hours after Chris Barrow had been for the day).
In my mind all these writings about all this stuff would have been structured and well organised.
It’s an ebook which is published on The Campbell Academy website and is downloaded by 50,000 people and someone nominates me for a knighthood and a party into the night with rockstars and lady tennis players.
In reality it just comes out like pus from a wound, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes when I squeeze it.
If you follow Chris Barrow on any of his social channels (and I think you probably should), you probably know that he was here on Friday just for us to catch up and for him to see the clinic where his influence from 10 years ago still reverberates.
And when I picked him up from the station (and it is a meeting of very old and battle born friends) I was a bit speechless as he spoke to me about PTSD part 1.
I think if there’s one thing I’ve learnt throughout the past 2 years, it’s humility and so I would never imagine that writing anything here would have any significant influence on anybody else and I certainly wouldn’t take it for granted.
So, with that in mind and if you’re reading this, then I promise you have my permission to be sad and upset and broken and stressed and hurt and damaged and worn out and all of the other things that so many of us have been and are and battle against all the time.
Chris did that thing last week where he said “even Colin Campbell…”.
I didn’t pull him up for it but it’s a frightfully ridiculous statement, it should be replaced with “especially Colin Campbell”.
Just because I will write (much to the annoyance of my wife) about how hurt I've been over the last 2 years doesn’t mean it’s worse for me or better for me, it just means that it’s the same for me as it is for so many other people.
Much of the conversation that we had on Friday was about the brokenness all around us and the people who talk to us about their brokenness and how people are trying to navigate through a world in which they were perhaps already broken but now where their brokenness has been amplified and magnified to a degree which makes it almost impossible to conceal it anymore.
There is not a week that goes by in our organisation where we are not helping someone who is broken.
It’s actually every single day but I am so protected by Hayley that I only probably hear about it weekly or even less frequently than that, but when we catch up properly it’s obvious that it’s all through everything.
In the conversations with Chris it lead on to how we help and how we take away the pain for other people and how that might become the biggest part of our work. We discussed ‘infecting people with possibility’ which is a blog post that I will not steal from Chris but it's definitely one that he will have to write.
We stood in the Academy space in the building and wondered how we could use it to inspire people to be positive and to help them to understand that in reality we have always been broken and we have always been up and we have always been down and we have always been punched in the face and hit in the head with a plank on a daily or weekly or monthly basis, it’s just that now, with the lack of human contact and the amplification of other peoples ‘perfect’ through social media, we feel that we’re failing and letting people down.
The urge to crawl away and hide under a stone in retirement or career change or dull day-to-day monotony is simply not good enough for any of us who are anything other than completely and utterly down and out.
For the rest of us we must dust ourselves down, lift our heads up and help wherever we can.
It’s not in the doing for ourselves that we will win and it’s not in the accumulation of stuff and more stuff and working seven days a week to maintain a lifestyle which is false, it’s in the helping someone else.
Blog Post Number - 2786