Читать книгу Directions - Randy Beal - Страница 4

I've been working on the railroad . . .

Or at least I used to. It was a family business, so I grew into it slowly. My dad was a machinist for as long as I could remember, managing a plant that re-manufactured railroad parts. He started me out mowing the front lawn, and I would come in and talk to the shop guys during coffee breaks. By the time I was in high school, my dad had bought his own refurbishing business and I started part-time while I finished my senior year. One week after graduating from high school, I was working there full time. Before long I fell into a comfortable rhythm of faking my way through the ins and outs of helping to run a small family business. Managing payroll, taking customer service calls, keeping the shop guys in line: all this fell to me in some form or another, and I pretended to know what I was doing. "Fake it 'til you make it," I would say.

When my dad passed away, things became even more real for me. I had to step up my game and take on more responsibility. I was the man of the house now. I could do this. I had to do this to make my dad proud. So I settled back into a regular routine of splitting my time between the office and the shop, trying to pick up the slack, and trying to grow a new part of the business. Everything was moving along just swimmingly. It wasn't necessarily my dream job. I often thought there was something missing. But it was comfortable.

Two letters changed everything: MS.

You can read about my journey through illness in my first book, unDIAGNOSED. I gradually found myself in a place where my declining health stripped me first of the ability to walk, then of the power to work. It was debilitating. It was humiliating. It was devastating.

But I couldn't stay in that desolate place. I had to do something. My sister and I started documenting the illness, at first just to make sense of all the medical hurdles on the road to a diagnosis of my condition. Soon it became more than that. I felt there was a story here that needed to be told, that could help someone else who might be going through something like this.

So I started writing. There were many challenges, not the least of which being that I had no idea what I was doing. I never let that stop me. The "fake it 'til you make it" mantra rang in my head. There were plenty of challenges presented by MS. It was a long road, but with support along the way from family and friends, a new me emerged at the end of the tunnel. Randy, the author. I never would have thought I would call myself that ten years prior. (Nor would my poor, poor English teachers through the years!)

I had reinvented myself.

Or so I thought.

The thing is, once wasn't enough. And twice wasn't enough. I wish I could say it were, but over the years I discovered I had to reinvent myself in numerous areas, multiple times, continuously.

As I dove into the topic of reinvention, I discovered a lot of existing material already out there. It was almost overwhelming.

This is not a self-help book to add to the collection. I will not be giving you step by step guidance on how to reinvent yourself.

But this is an honest account of my journey of reinvention. Everyone has a path to travel and a story to tell. I hope your path is made clearer by having travelled mine.