Hate my life and my choices. Want to end it.

Really brutal but nothing is worth ending your life over. You say you have no friends/relationships but you would leave hundreds distraught and scarred for life. It’s never all over. Possibly go into debt and get your MBA and do it all over again. Network your fucking ass off, you did it once, did it again. You have a resume which I’m sure is solid. It’s never the end of the world, even when it seems like it.

• Can you lay out your career? MBA to Associate to Corporate or what?
• Stop treating yourself like a victim. You are in a self-fulfilling prophecy. "I'm such a loser, I am missing out on so much, fuck my life, I have nothing."
• What do you do outside of work? I'm sure you have free time to do something that will either provide meaning to your life or assist in the path of finding meaning in your life. If you're too depressed to do anything on the weekend, we can work on that. I've been there.
• You realize whether you work in IB/PE/whatever 2,3,4,5,6 years later than your peers - it does not matter at all when you are 60 and your peers are 55. Stop comparing yourself to others. I see the same thing with kids that don't graduate with an IB offer. They work some stepping stone job for 2 years after graduation then go to IB. Yet, they cry as if these 2 years will mean anything in the grand scheme of their career.
• Also, how are you so broke? Are you in debt?
• When you say you "have no money" do you actually have no money or are just so disillusioned that making low six figures is "no money"? 

You have so much left in this life to enjoy and so many fulfilling life experiences yet to live through. None of which are contingent upon you having a massive nest egg or getting "ahead" of .001% of earth's 8 billion people that you consider your peers. I'm sorry for your losses and for the grief you feel right now. Try to take a step back. You got this

Before you do it, sponsor a random kid from Africa to come to the US, transfer everything else you have to that persons name and I mean everything. And when you do it think of your mom, dad, brothers, sisters, cousins, grandparents, old friends, etc. You're in the US, have elite work experience, with optionality to get back on track via an MBA or something. People would kill to get your seat and you don't think its enough. The universe is 5 billion years old, and there's another few billions more to and between all that you get a little 80 year blip to do something. Its already not enough time why are you tapping out like you go something better to do in the next stage? This is what I tell myself at least.

There are hundreds of millions if not billions of people who actively live happy lives. The vast, vast majority of these people never got a shot to make over 60k, much less join banking. There are a ton of ways to be happy in this life that you haven’t even experienced yet. 

This high finance zeitgeist gets so sucked into what’s top 5 vs top 10, counting numbers on paychecks that honestly don’t effect our lives that much unless we are extremely materialistic. Being in this line of work is such an accomplishment as is and the resume bump is real. 

There is nothing wrong with achievement later in life, the only way you’re a loser or a failure is if you stop trying. You clearly have a high aptitude - you built that bag of money up incredibly quickly. 

You will do it again. If you want, lots of ways to be happy. 

Just try to divorce your happiness and wellbeing from the prestige comparison rat race. Bounce back from this, tough lesson to learn and those are often the most guiding.

Others have chimed in with some helpful advice. My suggestion ontop of that is to look into therapy. Betterhelp is great. I'm confident you're a few sessions with a therapist away from at least being able to stabilize yourself mentally right now. It's far from over for you.

All the other comments on here are great. Only thing I can personally recommend is to watch the movie It's a Wonderful Life. Whatever you're feeling right now will go away.

Don’t have much to add here, but there’s a reason why billionaires in their 60s/70s+ say they would give up all their money just to be back in their 20s. Dont give up yet, you have so much more life ahead of you

As others mentioned, while it feels like the walls are closing in, you're going to come out on top. You have plenty of time to rebuild and get back on track. I've made plenty of stupid decisions as well but each has taught me something important along the way. 

I'm currently unemployed with years of IB experience and can somewhat relate to what you're going through. It's been over six months and I still have not landed anything, largely due to the hiring market. It has been the toughest mental battle I've ever gone through, and definitely have had some rough days. For the first few months, I was really hard on myself as it feels like the career I worked so hard to get into is slowly slipping away. Another post made a good point about not comparing yourself to others and understand that your own path is unique.

The best part about being at the bottom, with your back against the wall, is that you've got nothing more to lose and everything to gain. Don't quit, keep the faith, and understand that things WILL get better.

Stay strong brother - happy to chat if you need someone to talk to.

Thank you for sharing this. I'm really sorry you're going through something so painful. Please talk to someone. A friend, a family member, a therapist. You don’t have to carry all of this alone. I know it might not mean much right now, but your life has value. One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned is that comparison truly is the thief of joy. I deleted LinkedIn too, because it became toxic for my mental health. Life can feel brutally unfair. My family had to start over from scratch in a new country with almost nothing. It was hell. But we kept going. Not because it was easy, but because we didn’t give up. You’ve worked hard. That effort isn’t meaningless, even if it doesn’t feel like it right now. There’s still time. Things will change, I promise you. Please give yourself the chance to see what’s on the other side. You matter. 

Hey man you're going to pull through this. You're not alone, I've been unemployed a year now, so much to do to get to my dream job and it's been a difficult ride. Moving back in with parents, leaving nyc was super hard for me. Unemployment is hard and it pushes people to the extremes of their mental state, but do not make a permanent solution to a very temporary problem. You aren't alone in this. 

 Reminds me when I blew all my liquid savings as well in my 20’s. I went from 500k to like 20k in 6 months gambling high stakes poker and pit games.

Thoughts of suicide floated in my head daily. But I just couldn’t do it, even though I kinda made a few half hearted attempts. I just couldn’t deliver such pain to my family. If killing myself only impacted me, I would have done it. But the pain I would have wrought upon my family would have been selfish.

So I encourage you to think about your family and the pain they would feel if you hurt yourself.

I lost it all and I was much older than you, meaning I was kind of in a worse spot. You still have your youth and options, like getting an mba and breaking in again as an associate.

And I’ll be honest, for a couple year after I went broke, life sucked hard. But over the next ten years, I slowly came back. I met a great girl, had a million dollar wedding and recently just bought a 4mm home upstate.

And I am the laziest person in nyc, so if I can climb back so can you. Just keep trying to break in. Also, work in regular exercise into your routine.

I won’t tell you to try to forget you lost the money, because you never will. I think about that 500k and what it would be worth today almost every month and it’s been a decade. Just embrace your mistake and use it as fuel to come back stronger.

Life is a gift. Cherish everything that is around you. The sun is still shining, the birds are still chirping, and everything can change in a blink of an eye.

Hey, I just wanted to say I really feel what you’re going through. I’m in a similar spot—did everything “right,” sacrificed so much, and still ended up lost, and behind. That pain of watching others move forward while you're stuck? I know it too.

I haven’t done anything productive since last year myself. I’ve been feeling paralyzed and hopeless. But I’m about to begin my MBA soon, and even though I still feel uncertain, I’m just trying to take one step at a time.

I don’t have answers, but what’s helped me a little is talking to a couple of people who’ve been through it too—just knowing I’m not alone made things a bit more bearable. You don’t need to solve it all today. Just enough to hang on a little longer

OP, have you considered AM at a BB? Way more chill and low stakes below the PM level, less pay than IB but way more chill hours, you have some freedom to choose what you want to cover based on what teams you recruit for (pure equities, alts, etc) so it could be more interesting than just plain corp fin or development. 

You could also try to go for an MBA to re-recruit for IB or something like private credit. It also gives you a couple of years to stall and think about what you really want to do while giving you so many opportunities to engage with all these professionals from different finance industries who will show up to your class every week to speak and enjoy answering your questions. For instance, my school got speakers from KKR, Blackstone, Apollo, all the BBs, Bridgewater, Elliot, OakTree, etc. to come to our classes all the time and they will be frank about telling you why you should and shouldn't consider a career in X. 

I've seen plenty of people at lower M7s go from IB back to IB or PE back to PE, IB to PE, etc. Your work experience would easily qualify you for CBS, Booth, Wharton, etc. as long as your undergrad GPA was a 3.5 or above. Don't bother going to any other school below top 10 unless it's Stern or something since they are finance-focused and in NYC. I've seen people with way shittier and boring background experience (like Big 4, gov't work, teachers lmao) get into CBS and Wharton. You're also around the average age of MBAs, so the timing would be perfect.

EDIT: I misread your post and originally missed that you mentioned you lost all the $600k you saved up, so now I'd caution against getting an MBA unless you can get a decent scholarship or parents to support you. Not worth going into debt for IMO. 

hey op. if it's helpful, here's how i deal with it. a bit about me: like you, i've had a lot of success (worked at elite boutique, top hedge funds, etc) and pretty much was making like $700K a year but now I've also lost everything by most people's standards (e.g., for a variety of reasons cannot work in industry again and lost much of my savings).

to make matters worse, my life already sucked emotionally. i already was on a fairly high dose of psychiatric meds, saw a therapist each week. what was tough about it was i didn't know what other "levers" I had. the thoughts of ending it had been present, not just recently but on and off for 5 years. i was already familiar with them. but this time they seemed worse, because the situation did seem objective quite a lot worse. 

in my case, what I found helped was sitting with the thought of ending it and appreciating why the thought is there rather than trying to push it out. i have had the same therapist for 10 years and i would say it helps. one way that it helps me is to observe my thoughts. when you observe anything from the outside, it can feel less threatening. in my case, one thing I noticed about the thought of ending it was that other than being scary the thought also did feel freeing. if I imagined my mind as having different parts, there was one part that wanted to assert agency by considering ending it. 

up until this point in my life I don't think i considered how i felt and ever sincerely considered taking an action because of how i feel. weird i know, but if I hated someone or something I still did it always if i feel like if it was what i was supposed to do. the path for me going from those thoughts to feeling better was trying an experiment: what if I just notice how I feel and let myself be guided by that for awhile? yes, ending it is an option, but if that option is on the table, then so is everything else, including caring about how I feel. you might as well try all the things you really want to do but you thought were unwise first and report back. because chances are you will find yourself feeling differently. in my case, i really wanted to study advanced math and do something innovative in the sciences. i always really admired solo scientists that made discoveries outside of academia and i decided that even though it was impractical, i didn't care. i puttered around for a while when i was unemployed but this is what i was drawn to. what i found was that these thoughts went away when i started to do something i enjoyed again. 

one other thing i would say is that one of the hardest parts about this is how it affects other people, not how it affects you. in my case, what was hard was i chose to not go back to making a lot of money again and instead to find a way to work for myself. it turns out this caused me to lose a lot of respect from my friends and family. what's hard is recognizing that they may no longer share similar values. this can feel really isolating but acting like this doesn't happen makes that worse. a lot of why people respect you likely is partly due to your success. it's something to acknowledge, sit with / accept and move on from over time. 

another thing that really helped was to consider the thought experiment the there is a higher power. i am an atheist, but i chose to read the bible during this period because why not. i would say this was a life changing experience that i would also say should be on your list of things to try. i still don't believe in a higher power, but I do find some of these questions helpful "what if this is all part of a greater plan from someone that loves me and humanity?" or "what if this is a gentle sign that my creator wants me to take a different direction?" I don't necessarily have an opinion on whether a higher power exists, but i do personally find these questions to be helpful and they make me feel better. 

what i noticed after I did this, is i'm the happiest i've been in my life. i hope it helps you. i also of course would encourage you to seek professional help if you need it. 

Hey man,

I'm sorry to hear that things have been so tough for you recently. Connect with some other people and talk about it, they will listen. I just want to say you should be proud of all you've accomplished (not just work). Also the prior negative events should be regarded as sunk costs and therefore be ignored on an accounting basis. But seriously, imagine the comeback when you've bounced back from this low. You have a good job, you like your team, you meet a new girl, you've built up some nice savings. You enjoy going to work and feel good about the future. That's a hell of a story and shows a lot more heart and resilience than a predictable cookie-cutter success story. I don't know you, but I have felt what you feel and it's demoralizing, but it is temporary. Head up champ. The only limits you have are the ones you place on yourself. 

I believe in you. Wouldn't have written this if I didn't.

Lot of good comments. All I can add is my deepest sympathy - you're not as alone in your misery as you might think - and a couple of book recommendations. The Untethered Soul, by Michael Singer, and I Don't Want to Talk About It, by Terrence Real. Get them on Audible - listen and take a walk. 

Do you want me to tell you to end it? Do you want me to tell you not to end it?

You‘re saying that you could’ve experienced more of life in the last couple of years. Then you’re thinking about ending your life although that will also take away from you the opportunity to experience life. Makes no sense.

So here‘s the deal. You go for a run. Eat a nice meal with the money you have left. Get some good sleep. Then sit down for a second and understand two things. Number one: those analysts you’re comparing yourself to that are „so far ahead“ have problems of their own and likely hate their lives as well. Number two: I can tell you’re young and likely care a lot about what people think about you. I‘m also young (mid 20s) and have not achieved any of the things you’ve achieved. The fact that you were in Banking at all is something many out there can only dream about and you should respect yourself for that. Not to mention the good reviews you claim you received. Things come and go. That‘s true for all things in life, including money, women, power, and life itself. Some people only ever learn about this when they’re much older so be thankful for this (painful) privilege that I believe will have an overall positive impact on your life long term.

Lastly, your post makes it sound like there‘s no way you‘ll make that money again. You did it once already, might as well do it again if that’s what you want. This could turn really ugly if you pursue the goal you’re thinking about or real good. Imagine sitting down at the dinner table with your wife and two kids and telling them this story. They will laugh and then the kids will secretly hate you for it and your wife will have passionate sexual intercourse with multiple oiled up men that are not you (much more attractive and never lost 600K; likely one of those analysts you spoke about earlier that are factually simply way ahead of you).

I love you man. We all love you. And Im sure if you message anyone here, especially people with comments that you find helpful, they'd be more than happy to meet up, buy you dinner, listen to your thoughts, and be a lifelong friend. 

I've always loved the quote "when you focus on you, you grow. When you focus on shit, shit grows."

If you're smart enough to work in banking, 100% no doubt you're smart enough to know that ending it does not solve shit. Don't do it. We love you. 

This is a crazy coincidence since I am currently in class and randomly was thinking about young suicide and how it makes no sense to throw your whole life away over stuff you won't even think about when you're older. And when I was thinking this I felt the random urge to go on wso where I haven't been in ages and came across this post. If you're looking for a sign this is it. Everything is interconnected and there's no such thing as a coincidence. You're young and going through a hard time and not thinking straight. It's easy to feel suffocated like you have no options but you don't even realize you can live life in any way you want and there's so many options out there. I want you to force yourself to list things you're grateful for every day. Reach out to people who have been in same boat. Figure out what you don't like about your life and change it. Go somewhere sunny. You're simply not thinking straight lol. Yes I know it's hard but thousands are in the same boat as you rn. The more you deepen it the crazier you'll get. Stop deepening it lol. Not everything's final. You have to laugh at life sometimes and just push through. Again, don't deepen everything it'll work itself out.

And I was gonna comment watch the movie its a wonderfl life and someone already commented it. In fact the movie randomly popped into my mind and I was mindlessly scrolling thru comments and saw that comment same time. Again nothing's a coincidence. I advise watching it. It sounds cheesy cause of the title but it's not. Also

Hope you are ok, still with us and at least reading a modicum of the support you have. We are all in this spaceship together floating through the universe. It doesn't matter whatever has happened in the past - there is still hope!!! 

Don't do MBA...you are already on the IB/Consulting career path and in this era pretty much the only rationale to do an MBA is to switch into IB/Consulting. It's expensive and you don't learn much besides networking. 

Pain comes from always wanting things…its the wanting (read what Buddah has to say)

You dont need much money to be happy. You had all that money, were you happy? You could be on a beach renting jet skis making jack shit and be happy. 

Dont harm yourself, you have the gift of life in a country where you can do fine. 

Bro listen to me, Im 40+, everything you are worried about right now, you wont care about several years from now. I have money, Im fine, i was happier being relatively broke in college not knowing what would happen. I have amassed some money, in comparison to others its nothing. 

Read the book 10% happier, meditate, read Buddah. 

Its the wanting…

Cry out to Jesus Christ. The Bible tells us that He is near to the brokenhearted.

Seek professional help immediately. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. 

I’d advise a psychiatrist over a psychologist for the time being. I know a lot of people aren’t fond of them prescribing drugs like candy but I consider anyone considering suicide to be an emergency situation. It’s easier to find a more holistic approach when you aren’t thinking about offing yourself. 

Step 1: Don’t kill yourself even if you have to go to extraordinary measures to achieve that goal.

Step 2: Figure everything else out when you’re in a more stable state of mind. 

Not achieving step 1 takes all other options off the table. 

I’m really sorry you’re feeling this way. Please remember that your life and your worth are so much more than your career or financial situation. Many people go through unexpected setbacks, even after working extremely hard. It doesn’t define you. Please try to reach out to someone you trust or a mental health professional — you don’t have to carry this alone. There’s still a future for you, even if you can’t see it right now.

c

Hey man. I just registered to reply to this; I’m not a WSO regular, I was Googling info on a fund closure, wound up in the WSO HF section and saw the title of your post on the main page. It caught my eye to say the least.

You’ve gotten some good advice here, and having been in your exact shoes, I feel compelled to add some words that you really need to hear.

My background: graduated Lehigh in 2009 with a 2.9 GPA, got hired at a hedge fund (complete luck/backdoor), worked like a dog for four years, went to Columbia for MBA, worked at another fund, worked at Citadel, worked at Schonfeld, and then at age 32 went off to start my own fund. Born lucky, worked hard and had a ton of breaks go my way both in my career and financially. 

Here’s where our paths align. During the pandemic I broke discipline and traded horribly, going into a steep drawdown and spiraling out of control. My personal dollar losses, and I say this not to dick-size, were quite a bit higher than yours with the added kicker of losing a lot of other people’s money. Until you’ve experienced it yourself, I can only say that the pain of losing other people’s money makes the pain of your own losses feel like a boo-boo from scraping your knee at the playground.

Here’s what our paths (hopefully) diverge. Instead of giving up, I took out millions of dollars of fraudulent PPP loans, put them into the fund and went on operating as if nothing had happened. This action set me up for about a billion different felony charges – Federal charges for the loans, state/regulatory charges for getting the fund involved. I was arrested less than a year later – deservedly so – and went to jail, then a rehab clinic, then another jail, then spent two years in the Feds, and now I’m here today.

So, once again, I am not here to dick-size but let’s just say I have been to the level of hell you currently find yourself in, as well as many deeper levels.

Here’s what you need to hear.

RELATIONSHIPS: You say you have no relationships, which I doubt is entirely true, but either way it shows that you aren’t placing enough value on family and friends. 

When I got arrested and written up in the papers, the immediate aftermath was what you’d expect. Damaged relationships with family and friends. Damaged relationships with investors, with former coworkers and colleagues. The guys who were all over your dick yesterday, today they don't know you. Many others will quietly let you know, look, we’re still cool, but I have to protect my own reputation so I can’t be associated with you. It was a wake-up call in how shallow, transactional and disloyal many relationships really are, but there were also valuable lessons pertinent to your situation. 

For all the broken relationships, a lot of friends came flying out of the woodwork to support me, and straight up, very few of them did it from the goodness of their heart. I heard over and over “you were there for me, so now I’m here for you” or “if the tables were turned, I know you’d do the same for me.” Having these people show up was the difference between “I am so fucked and want to die” and “you know what, I’m actually going to be okay.” 

You never know when you will need a friend, and the hard truth is that if you want reliable friends, you have to be reliable first. It doesn’t appear to me that you are doing that. You reap what you sow, the bad of course, but also the good, and what I take away from your messages is that you have sown nothing. Tough times reveal the truth. You feeling like you’re all alone is the sum-total of your past actions. Use this experience as a sign that you need to devote more time to building and maintaining healthy relationships.

REGRET: This part is very important. You have regrets over your financial loss. Anyone would. What you need to realize is that it was going to happen no matter what – maybe a year from now, five years, ten years, twenty years, whenever, but IT WAS GOING TO HAPPEN. You had some defect of character, or mental weakness, or inability to control your emotions, that was going to express itself through poor financial decisions. 

You are very lucky that it happened at such a young age. If this had happened when you were 50 – which it does to people, all the damn time – your wife would have left you and taken the kids, and you’d be not only dead broke but on the hook for all their costs forever. 

You cannot sit around pining about your bad choices. It was fated to happen, if not now, then later, and that’s just life. What matters is that you use this rock bottom as motivation for it to never happen again. I can tell from your pain that the lesson has sunk in, which is a good thing. Use the pain to remove the defect of character that caused this in the first place. It wasn’t the market, it wasn’t luck, it wasn’t a bad stock pick, it was YOU. Hold yourself accountable or you’ll never make any progress from where you are now. 

SUICIDE: This topic is why I felt compelled to reply in the first place. 

When I was 23, a close friend killed himself. What you need to realize with suicide is that for the next 40, 50 years, whatever it is, all your family and friends will wake up every single morning with an ice-cold dagger plunged into their chest. It never goes away. You think you are ending your own pain, yet you're creating a lifetime of pain for a much larger group of people. It sounds like you believe in the supernatural and in the afterlife but I don't see you thinking deeply enough about the consequences of your actions. 

That shit stays with a man, for real. It will leave him grasping for answers decades later. This isn’t why I'm here but I wrote and published a book with my full story, dedicated it to my friend and donated all the proceeds to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. If any of these words are resonating with you, something in there probably will as well; message me if you want and I'll mail you a copy since you're short on dough, or just Google me and you'll see it. Regardless, I am hoping and praying that cooler heads have prevailed by now, but always remember that there is nothing in life a man cannot bounce back from, and that the way you’re feeling is just a part of the ups and downs of life. As Herodotus wrote, “no person has existed who has not wished more than once that he had not to live through the following day.”

WORK ON YOURSELF: Here is what you need to do right now. Disappear for the next three to six months. They call it monk mode, I say just be an apparition, "lock in," whatever you want to call it – you have to retreat into yourself. Don’t completely disappear; go get a job, any job, which should be easy since you have investment banking on your resume. Doesn’t have to be perfect, it can be a stepping stone for 12 months. Just get a job. 

Next, go to bed at 8 PM and wake up at 4 AM seven days a week. Go right to the gym when you wake up and train as hard as you can. Afterwards, walk to where you can see the sunrise and say good morning to The Man. Go to work and be an apparition in the sense that physically, you’re there, but your mind and spirit are elsewhere. Get as much fresh air and sunshine as you can during the day, then after work, go home, read books, write, and go to bed early. Be ridiculously fanatical about sleep (eight hours), diet (eat clean) and exercise (daily) – this is how you gradually rebuild discipline.

I would strongly recommend getting sober. No more booze, no drugs, no pills. You’re not in college anymore. Grow up. There is nothing more sad and pathetic than a man in his thirties yelling “wooo I’m so drunk” while doing coke in a filthy West Village bathroom. Also, consider leaving NYC while you’re unencumbered. You’ve seen it, you’ve done it, it’s not going anywhere. Move somewhere sunny, move to a mountain, just move, it’ll do wonders to shake you out of the funk you are in.

I see you worrying about women. Listen: don’t worry about women right now. You are in no condition for that. Your energy, your aura, your mindset is all fucked up. The money doesn’t matter, it’s your attitude that ensures no high-quality woman will want to be with you right now.

Socially, you should do the bare minimum. Smile at work, be good to your family and your friends, but say no to everything else. You need to be demonic about fixing your own life right now. The guy in the comments who recommended seeing a therapist, that’s good advice – use this time to sort through all the skeletons from your past, your family history, et cetera.

All the rest of your free time should be spent reading books. For thousands of years men going through hard times have turned to the same texts, the Stoics, the Bible, Seneca, Plutarch. I can put together a list if you want one. History is littered with men who went through FAR WORSE SHIT than losing a few bucks, survived, thrived and then wrote about it. Read biographies of great men. Read history. Study how men not only dealt with setbacks but used them as catalysts to emerge even stronger. All of this will help keep your problems in perspective, because I can tell you are lacking perspective right now.

If you execute on this consistently for six months, you will emerge completely different. You will be jacked and tan and disciplined, radiating the aura and energy of a man who has been broken and rebuilt. This self-reliance and confidence is what will draw women towards you, and all your future relationships will be much healthier – husband, father, friend, son, etc – since you have wrung out all the self-pity and neediness and oh-poor-me and whatever else you have going on right now.

MAKE THIS THE BOTTOM: The next six to twelve months could set you up wonderfully for the rest of your life. When a man is broken, he either remains permanently broken or he emerges ten times stronger. Each day you have to decide which of those two you want to be. 

I believe that every man worth a shit will get completely broken once in his life. I say worth a shit because there are also lots of men who live life in fear, playing it safe, never taking risk, avoiding any path that comes with a 0.01% chance of them getting broken. Their regrets come much later, when they look back and realize that they forgot to live life.

You have to decide that you no longer want to be a boy and are ready to be a man. This has nothing to do with age. I know guys that are 40, 45, good job, wife, kids, house, all of that, but when I look in their eyes I see a boy. They’re soft, scared, never been tested, no backbone and no true principles or values that they’re willing to stand on. Use this time to figure out which you are and then start making changes. "Man cannot remake himself without suffering," wrote Alexis Carrel, "for he is both the marble and the sculptor."

Carve this out as the bottom, my friend. View life as two acts. The first act just ended and your second act is about to begin. 

Good luck, and remember: the floor is no place for a champion.

GB