Collapse. Resilience. Friendship.

At one point, I had it all lined up. Six figure salary. New condo. New car. A relationship that felt solid. I thought I was cruising toward a secure life. Then the floor went out.

The first thing that fell apart was the relationship. I had supported her through school, helped her career get started, but we just wanted different things. Then shortly after I was laid off. When the auto industry imploded in the early 2000s, it wasn’t just the manufacturers that sank. Whole ecosystems of businesses collapsed with them. I was working as a graphic and 3D artist in a post-production house. Our clients started going bankrupt or slashing budgets to the bone. You don’t keep graphics guys on payroll when you’re fighting to make payroll at all. Work dried up. Clients disappeared. My job was gone.

I went from six figures to twelve thousand dollars in a single year. I cashed out my 401K thinking it would just get me through a rough patch. Put my rent and car payments on credit cards. I hadn’t filed taxes in years because how the hell would I pay them? I kept telling myself things would bounce back. They didn’t. I couldn’t afford my place anymore, and I had to move.

I ended up in a shitty Detroit upper flat owned by a friend. The only reason I had a roof at all was because he cut me a deal. Without him, I don’t know where I would have been. Gunfire was nightly background noise. The kind of place where you learn to tell the difference between fireworks and bullets real quick. The ceiling in the living room had a gaping hole, and every time it rained hard, plaster would fall while water poured straight through. The windows and seals were shot. In the winter I lived with sheets over the doorways and a single space heater keeping one room barely tolerable. It was rough, but it gave me a place to reset, and in its own way it opened up opportunities that changed my life for the better.

For a while I still had my Jetta. At one point it was a great car, the kind of thing I was proud to drive when money was good. But with no cash for repairs and German engineering doing me no favors, it slowly rotted under me. The starter went. I had to park it on hills just to bump-start it whenever I needed to drive. Eventually it gave up completely. That was it. All I had left was a beat-up Yamaha from the 1980s. For almost three years that bike was my only ride. I scraped together a few hundred bucks later for a smashed-up car from a friend, but most of the time I was on two wheels. I tried to ride whenever the roads weren’t iced over. More than once I walked out to find a couple inches of snow on the seat, brushed it off, and rode it anyway just to get home.

Money was often thin. I scraped by with the odd freelance job or painting apartments for cash under the table. The only bills I managed were rent, power, gas, and my cell phone. I could barely keep the utilities on, and rent only got paid on time every few months. Sometimes dinner was white rice with hot sauce packets stolen from Taco Bell because that’s what I could afford. My cell phone was the one thing I never let go. It was my tether to the internet. How I ran my computer. How I watched TV. How I worked. How I stayed connected to anything outside that apartment. It wasn’t just a phone. It was my office. My lifeline. My everything. Feast or famine, but never ahead.

The irony is that being broke and unemployed gave me time. Empty days and the need to keep moving. That’s when I started working on projects that ended up shaping my entire life. They didn’t pay the bills, but they gave me purpose. At the time I thought I was just trying to stay busy. Looking back, I can see those years lit the fuse for things I’d never have touched if I’d stayed comfortable. I produced shows, ran events, created art, and made music. Failure gave me that space, even if it came wrapped in fear and poverty.

It took a decade to climb back out. A decade to get even. To pay off the debt. To clear the taxes. To breathe again. But I kept moving. I didn’t fold. Stability came back around in time. Failure didn’t ruin me. It forged me.

That was twenty years ago. Now I’ve been married for ten years to a woman who’s better than I deserve. I own my house. I make a living. And I get to pass on what I’ve learned through the Guild, through brotherhood, through adventure. Teaching men how to keep moving when life breaks under them.

I wouldn’t have survived without friends. A friend gave me that roof. Another pulled me into a job later on with a good word. Countless others kept me sane when I didn’t have much left. I’ve always been lucky enough to have a wide circle of true friends. Most men don’t have that. Most men can count those kinds of friends on one hand. Plenty of men can’t count even one. That’s why we built the Guild. Because not every man has a friend who picks up at three in the morning. But every man should.