Two weeks later, dialing

Two weeks. That is how long it took to get from a psychiatric ward to a phone.

I know how that reads, so let me take the inspiration out of it. It was not discipline and it was not a recovery arc. It was arithmetic. The minute I give up is the minute I die, and I had just spent a week finding out precisely how true that is.

So I did the only thing I have ever known how to do from zero. I picked up the phone and started selling marketing services to small businesses. No list worth the name, no funnel, no brand, no case studies. A script I wrote myself and a number of dials I had to hit before I was allowed to stop.

Cold calling is the most honest work in this industry. Nobody is impressed by you. Nobody has heard of you. You are a stranger interrupting a Tuesday, and the only thing you have is whether the next sixty seconds are useful to the person on the other end.

Somewhere in that stack of dials, a business owner said this to me. I think the agency I'm working with is selling me my own leads.

He was not angry. He was embarrassed — the specific embarrassment of a man who suspects he has been played and cannot prove it, and half suspects he is being paranoid for even bringing it up.

I could have moved on to the next number. That is what the job was. A quota does not care about somebody else's agency, and I was two weeks removed from the worst night of my life and needed money more than I needed a cause.

I looked into it.

Three words. They cost me the next two years, a levy on my parents' house and a day in a jail cell. I would spend them again tomorrow.