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This blog is a work-in-progress "table of contents," with links to all of the threads I have written on Twitter, from when I started using the social media platform, in October of 2012, through my most recent thread, which, as of today, is August 29, 2021. There are about 1,350 threads listed here as of today.
Every once in a while, I like to do a "thoughts" post, talking about my life experiences over the time frame for the threads I've recently posted links to.
The last time I did a "thoughts" post was on May 6, when I wrote about how I came to post on Twitter and then how I came to create this blog, which I'd started back in 2018.
The last time I really did a blog about my life was on May 1, when I wrote about how my life was during the first three months of 2020, as America and the world headed into the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. So I'd like to do a post right now to catch me up through that time.
This may be a long post. At the same time, just given the way my life is going, it may be a good idea for me to get a long post out. This might, unfortunately, be my last chance to do it.
***
I suppose it's well enough to start with my professional life.
As I've mentioned before, I've been a sales consultant since about June of 2016. So it's really been over 5 years by now. And my consultancy has mostly focused on prospecting, or business development, which basically means doing outreach to new leads and scheduling sales introductions for sales teams.
My financial life has been a roller coaster for a lot of the past five years. And while I've tried to find projects and clients on my own, about two-thirds of the clients I've had have come through a friend of mine named Andy. Andy was part of a family that sold a company I worked for from 2012 to 2015. The company sold itself for $180 million.
Even though I was a part of getting the company sold, I didn't get any financial benefit from the sale. In fact, after the old management team left and the new management team came in, I was fired from the company.
However, Andy knew what I could do to help him. So when his family formed a new company -- doing investments and sales consulting -- in 2016, I ended up helping Andy on a lot of projects.
In May of 2019 I started helping Andy on a project. By December of 2019, it looked like that project was going to end abysmally. Other projects I'd been helping Andy with were all suddenly cutting me off. And I thought this one would, too. However, Andy stepped way back from guiding this company. And he told me that I was on my own with them. Surprisingly, I wasn't let go.
In March of 2020, a marketing firm that worked closely with Andy joined the company and basically took over Andy's role as guiding the company. At the same time, I was allowed to expand my hours with the company.
In August of 2020, the company proposed hiring me permanently. By this time, I was really sick of doing consultancy work. And I had gotten comfortable with the company. So I said I was all for it. But I never heard back from them.
In November of 2020 -- I feel the company may have been doing its due diligence ahead of hiring me permanently. Andy came back into my life big-time. And he was trying to set me up on another project. But the way he did it was really not very cool. So I told him I couldn't keep doing the project.
I think this made Andy mad at me. And I think it made him turn the marketing team -- who, again, were basically his proxy for guiding the company he'd ostensibly stepped back from -- against me. Starting in December of 2020, the marketing team began really sabotaging my work.
In February of 2021, the marketing had taken their sabotage against me to the point where they'd deleted a large amount of leads from my database. And late that month, they'd gotten permission essentially to take total control of my role and decide whether I was even worthy of working for the company anymore.
I told the company that these conditions were finally unacceptable. I'd been letting them know the other things that were going on. I'd also been asking them if my being hired permanently was still on the table. They'd been completely ignoring me.
I asked to take a couple weeks' break at that time, to give the company a chance to reassess the situation with the marketing team and figure out how to give me my autonomy in my role back.
In March of 2021, I came back from my break, only to be told by the CFO/COO -- the same person who'd told me the company wanted to hire me permanently -- that I was no longer needed at the company -- at least for "a few months."
So in mid-March of 2021, I was without a job.
In March of 2020, when the COVID-19 lockdowns started in the United States, I lost all my other consultancy clients. I only had this client left. So in mid-March of 2021, when this client let me go, I had no income at all.
To be honest with you, I was feeling suicidal at that point. I didn't really care whether I had a job. I figured I would just run my money out and then let myself die.
It's hard to explain this whole situation without getting even more long-winded than I already am. But my relationship with Andy was ambivalent at best. Simply put, Andy was using me. He used me from 2012 to 2015 to get his family's company sold for $180 million. And after that he used me to get work done on the companies his family was investing in or consulting for. He didn't pay me very much money in any of these situations. And, when he felt like he was finished using me, he threw me to the wolves and basically let the companies -- whose sales teams seldom liked me anyway -- tear me to pieces and then fire me. When I called him on this in late 2019, he decided to play the game a different way, by pretending to step back from the company I was working for, so that when they fired me, it would look like it wasn't him doing it. But he still made it perfectly clear, from December of 2020 through March of 2021, that his hand was in getting me sabotaged, torn to pieces, and fired.
I had found projects and clients on my own. But all of that work vanished at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns. And even that work had made me jaded enough about the world I was doing work for -- portfolio companies for private equity and venture capital firms -- that I was really hesitant, in March of 2021, to find any new prospects that were PE/VC portfolio startups.
So I felt trapped into torturous positions by Andy. And I felt sort of sick of other PE/VC avenues to finding new clients. I was really at my wits' end, professionally. And that was just compounded by other things going on in my life. I was so dead-set against finding any new work that I really was suicidal. I just wanted to die.
This isn't to say, though, that I didn't try to find other jobs. And through March and April, I actually was looking for other clients. In fact, I had one prospective client I was in discussions with in April of 2021. But they ended up getting shadier and shadier through April, until in mid-April I decided that working for them would put me in some considerable legal trouble. So I decided to let them go.
It really was at that point that I completely lost hope. And in late April I stopped even trying to find new consultancy clients. I really was just planning to burn through all my money -- not recklessly, but just living my life -- until it was gone. After that, I would die.
But in late May of 2021, something happened to change my mind. I'm not even sure what it was. But suddenly, I went back to my old method of prospecting for new clients in the PE/VC space. And by June 1st, I was re-engaged with prospecting for new clients as a part of my daily routine. I was back to thinking of prospecting for new clients as part of my work, as part of my business -- because, after all, my consultancy work was my work, and it was my business.
In mid-June of 2021, I started discussions with a new client. However, that client had been battered by the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdowns, and the shortage of employees that occurred following the lockdowns. I could see before I'd even started working with the client that things were not looking good. But the client wanted me and, more importantly, wanted to pay me.
In late June, I started working with the client. I started by working for the client at a paid rate of 15 hours per week. But, in order to scrape by even a little bit of success for the client, I had to work 30 hours per week. So I was working twice as much as I was getting paid for. And I still wasn't driving even 25% of the success I'd have liked to see.
At the end of July, the success level was so low that my client decided to keep me on, but to decrease the hours I was getting paid to work from 15 to 10 per week. At that point, I couldn't keep working 30 hours per week. I couldn't go from working twice as much as I was getting paid to work to working three times as much as I was getting paid to work. So I reduced my hours of actual work to something more like 15 hours per week. As a result, my productivity plummeted.
At the end of August -- i.e., only a few days ago -- my client decided to let me go. We'd had barely any activity. So it totally made sense.
But by this point, my bank account was empty. The pay I was receiving from my client wasn't doing much more than helping me take care of some really immediate bills. Everything else in my financial life was falling to pieces. My bank account was pretty constantly negative. All my credit cards were maxed out. And I was even starting to have trouble paying the loans I'd gotten in 2018 (and, when I thought I was doing well enough to want to build up some more credit toward buying a house, in 2020).
So, when my consultancy project finished, on August 27th, my financial condition completely collapsed. It was an immediate thing. It's to the point right now where I'm not even able to pay my rent. I might possibly have enough money right now to pay for about seven more days of food. And with no rent and no food, I am completely doomed on every level.
I had been working to find new clients. I actually have one client secured, as of today. But, again, they only want to pay me for 10 hours per week of work. And they're having me do work that isn't sales related. So I would only be getting my base pay and no commission. And the work doesn't start until September 7th. So any pay I would conceivably get from this work (I accepted the client, obviously) wouldn't reach me until way after I needed it.
So I am at the worst point I've ever been at financially in my entire life. I don't see any way through this situation. This is why I say I think the end has come for me. I could easily lose my place. I could easily not have food and starve to death. If death was what I was looking for in April and May of this year -- I'm sorry to say, but it's quite possible, now, that death is what I'm going to get.
But -- if I can be honest -- this is a reason I made such a push this year to finish this "table of contents" blog for all of my Twitter threads. I was feeling pretty strongly that I had set myself up -- and that I had been set up, because I had -- in such a way that my life was just coming to an end. And I wanted to make sure that before my life did come to an end, I at least had all of my Twitter threads -- and Twitter had become like a diary for me -- systematized, so that they could all be located, and so whatever this statement was that I've created on Twitter could be accessible to anybody who cared to access it.
My Twitter threads have essentially become the definitive statement for the last decade of my life.
***
There is, honestly, a lot more to be said. But I think I'll leave things here.
At the end of the day, I've been at the mercy, for years, of other people. I've worked myself to exhaustion, trying to appease those people. And, at the end of all that work, I've really experienced nothing other than hatred, hypocrisy, sabotage, and time after time of being thrown out the door and into the gutter. It was a foregone conclusion that I would eventually end up in a position where I simply couldn't afford to keep myself alive any longer. If there's any surprise here, it's that I've been able to keep myself alive for as long as I have.
I'm sure that, for as long as I can keep myself alive and housed -- i.e. for all the time I have before I either starve to death or get kicked out onto the street -- I'll be doing more Twitter threads. So you might see some more posts on this blog. But this is almost 100% likely one of the last posts that will be on here.
I feel defeated. I know I'm not alone right now, in the world or in America, in feeling defeated -- defeated to the point of death. Many people feel the way I do right now. But it's true. I feel defeated. I feel hopeless. I feel I'm at death's door.
So, at this point, I won't try to cheer things back up. But I will make sure that anybody knows who wants to know, that I'm thankful for your having visited this blog. And I hope the stuff I've written over the years has been entertaining for you.
Thank you for reading. Please enjoy.
