The Foundation I Couldn't See While I Was Building It

Long before I knew anything about Human Design, Saturn Returns, Uranus Oppositions, or even what kind of life I would eventually live, I had an experience that has stayed with me.

I was probably seven or eight years old.

I don't know exactly what to call what happened.

A vision seems like the closest word.

I had this strange sense of seeing my life ahead of me, not in detail, but almost as a shape.

There was something about the age of thirty that felt like a death.

And something about forty that felt like coming back to life.

I remember feeling that the road between those two points was going to be difficult.

Not intellectually.

I could feel it in my body.

There was almost a dread attached to it, the feeling of knowing that somewhere ahead of me was an experience I would rather not have to go through.

I remember essentially thinking:

Why can't I just stay a happy kid forever?

There was something about childhood that felt light to me.

Love.

Joy.

Charisma.

Curiosity.

A natural ease with being alive.

And somehow, even as a child, I had this strange feeling that I was going to lose contact with that part of myself for a while.

But there was something else in the experience too.

A knowing that I would eventually come back.

I would lose something.

I would struggle.

And then, somehow, I would return to myself.

I've carried that memory for most of my life.

For many years, I didn't know what to make of it.

Today, I look at it very differently.

When the Pressure Arrived

I can remember exactly where I was when the pressure really began.

It was 2014.

I was living in Georgia and working as a reliability engineer at a manufacturing facility. I had recently finished a co-op rotation through the university I attended, graduated, and been hired full time.

At first, I was excited.

I had done what I thought I was supposed to do.

I had gone to school. I had gotten the engineering job. I was beginning a career.

From the outside, it probably looked like the beginning of something solid.

Then something changed.

I began to feel pressure in a way I had never experienced before.

And when I say pressure, I don't mean that work was simply stressful.

I mean I felt physically crushed.

It is difficult even now to describe what it felt like in my body.

The closest image I have is squeezing a balloon tighter and tighter, knowing that eventually it has to burst.

I remember vertigo.

Nausea.

Sometimes high temperatures.

And underneath all of that was an enormous amount of frustration and anger that I had accumulated throughout my childhood and early life without really understanding it.

It started coming out.

At work.

Around people.

In situations where nobody around me could possibly have understood what was happening because I didn't understand it either.

I can only imagine what some of them thought.

This guy is crazy.

What's he going on about?

He needs to calm down.

The strange thing is that I probably would have agreed with them.

I knew something was wrong.

I just didn't know what.

At one point I went to the doctor because I was convinced something physical was happening to me. They ran some tests, and I remember a nurse eventually looking at me and asking:

“Are you just trying to get out of going to work?”

I was shocked.

And offended.

My girlfriend at the time was there with me, but there wasn't much she could do either.

I didn't know how to explain what was happening, so how could anyone else know how to help?

Looking back now, I have language and frameworks I didn't have then.

At the time, I had nothing.

I only knew that I couldn't keep going the way I was going.

Eventually I left the job.

Not in the most professional way, I'll admit.

I went back to school for another degree.

And something interesting happened.

The pressure didn't disappear, but it eased slightly.

I wasn't in a work environment that felt wrong for me anymore.

I was learning again.

And learning has always been something that energizes me.

I didn't understand the significance of that at the time.

I just knew I could breathe a little easier.

Another Round

Eventually I finished school and found another reliability engineering position.

In 2017, I packed my things in Georgia and moved to northern Pennsylvania.

New state.

New company.

New beginning.

And for a while, I really enjoyed it.

It was a good company. The pay was good. The benefits were good. There were plenty of reasons to believe that maybe I had found my footing.

Then, slowly, I felt the pressure returning.

It wasn't exactly the same this time.

Maybe because I had lived through the first round, I had slightly more capacity to recognize what was happening.

But I could still feel it in my body.

And at times it still felt almost unbearable.

My performance at work began slipping.

I could see it happening.

But this time, instead of allowing everything inside me to explode outward, I did something different.

The company offered an Employee Assistance Program, and I used it to find a counselor.

That turned out to matter more than I realized at the time.

For perhaps the first time, I had somewhere appropriate to put what I was experiencing.

I could talk.

I could express the frustration.

I could try to understand the pressure instead of simply throwing it into the environment around me.

I didn't suddenly have everything figured out.

But expression had started replacing explosion.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, a Finnish Spitz puppy named Kettu entered my life.

She's still with me today.

I jokingly call her my therapy dog, although there is probably more truth in that than humor.

We've been through a lot together.

That's another story.

A Question I Had Never Asked

Eventually, I hired a life coach.

It was the first time I had ever done anything like that, and I was skeptical.

I didn't really know what a coach was supposed to do for me or whether any of it would actually be useful.

But I eventually found someone who redirected the course of my life in a way I wouldn't fully appreciate until years later.

I signed up for a twelve-month coaching package.

One of the ideas I encountered during that period was remarkably simple:

What if you could make money doing something you actually loved?

That probably sounds obvious to some people.

It wasn't obvious to me.

The idea that my work might actually energize me had barely crossed my mind.

I understood jobs.

I understood careers.

I understood education, qualifications, salaries, benefits, and moving up.

But work that I loved?

Work that felt like an expression of who I was?

I didn't know that was something I was allowed to seriously consider.

That question opened a door.

I started traveling.

I spent time in Europe.

I eventually left the job in Pennsylvania.

I moved back south where it was warm and took about six months away from conventional work.

I spent time working on a farm in Sweden.

And somewhere in this period, another doorway opened.

Human Design entered my life.

The Experiment Begins

After returning from Sweden, I found another reliability engineering position in North Carolina.

On the surface, I had returned to something familiar.

Engineering.

Manufacturing.

A professional career.

But internally, something was very different.

I had started experimenting.

The idea of making money doing something I loved stayed with me.

So I began learning about marketing.

I experimented with affiliate marketing.

I became certified as a life coach.

I studied Human Design professionally through both IHDS and BG5.

I worked with clients.

I gained some.

I lost some.

I tried things that worked.

I tried things that didn't.

I learned a tremendous amount about myself in the process.

And at the same time, I still enjoyed parts of being a mechanical and reliability engineer.

For a while, those two worlds seemed separate.

There was the engineer.

And then there was this other person exploring Human Design, coaching, entrepreneurship, philosophy, and different possibilities for work.

I didn't yet realize that perhaps they were not separate at all.

I was learning something much deeper than how to start a business.

I was learning how to experiment with my own life.

What I've Been Noticing

I've been thinking about this period a lot lately.

From where I sit now, I am nearing the end of what I understand through Human Design as my Saturn Return cycle.

And something has changed in how I remember those years.

For a long time, when I looked backward, I mostly saw the pressure.

I saw the anger.

The physical symptoms.

The confusion.

The jobs that didn't work.

The moments I handled poorly.

The environments that felt unbearable.

The relationships.

The moves.

The questioning.

The feeling of being squeezed until there was nowhere left for the pressure to go.

Lately, I've been noticing something else.

I've been noticing what the pressure built.

It built a foundation.

Not the kind of foundation I would have chosen consciously.

And certainly not one I could see while I was standing in wet concrete wondering why life felt so heavy.

But a foundation nonetheless.

Those years forced me to ask questions I probably never would have asked if everything had remained comfortable.

What kind of work actually fits me?

What energizes me?

What happens when I continually override myself?

Who am I when I am not simply following the path I was told was sensible?

How do I make decisions that are actually mine?

Can I stand on my own ground?

And perhaps most importantly:

Can I trust myself?

Nine Years of Strategy and Inner Authority

I've now spent more than nine years experimenting with Strategy and Inner Authority.

That sentence means something very different to me today than it would have when I first encountered Human Design.

Back then, I wanted knowledge.

I wanted to understand the system.

I wanted to understand gates and channels and centers and mechanics.

Those things still interest me.

But increasingly, the value has been much simpler.

Can I live my own life without constantly handing authority back to my mind?

Can I remain with myself when pressure appears?

Can I make a decision without needing everyone around me to understand it?

Can I trust my own timing when the world seems to demand an immediate answer?

Can I navigate uncertainty without abandoning myself?

Strategy and Authority have not removed the weather from my life.

They have taught me something about navigation.

And that distinction matters.

I used to think the goal was somehow to eliminate uncertainty.

Make the correct choices.

Build the correct life.

Get everything arranged properly enough that the pressure would finally stop.

I don't think that anymore.

There will always be weather.

The conditions will change.

Jobs change.

Relationships change.

Bodies change.

Plans change.

We change.

I don't need the ocean to become calm before I can trust myself to sail.

Standing on My Own

When I think back to the person sitting in that doctor's office in Georgia in 2014, I feel a lot of compassion for him.

He knew something was happening.

He could feel it with extraordinary intensity.

But he had no language for it.

No real tools.

No framework.

No way to articulate what his body seemed to be screaming.

And when I think even further back, I feel compassion for that seven- or eight-year-old boy too.

The kid who somehow felt that there was a difficult road ahead of him.

The kid who didn't want to leave the warmth and simplicity of childhood.

The kid who seemed to know, at least in whatever language a child has for these things, that there would be a period when he would lose touch with himself.

I understand his dread now.

He wasn't imagining a difficult afternoon.

He was sensing something that, from where I stand today, looks remarkably like a long season of real struggle.

There were years when I did not feel like that happy child.

Years when the pressure, anger, work, fear, ambition, confusion, and responsibility seemed to cover him completely.

But I also remember that the childhood experience didn't end there.

There was a return.

Something around forty felt like coming back to life.

I don't know what that experience was.

I don't need to turn it into a prophecy.

I'm more interested in what it means to me now.

Because today, I can feel something returning.

The curiosity.

The creativity.

The love.

The charisma.

The sense that life is something to explore rather than something I am constantly trying to survive.

Not because I am becoming a child again.

Because perhaps I am finally returning to something that was already there before the pressure convinced me I had to become someone else.

The Foundation Beneath Me

Today I sit at my computer and feel very different from the person I was in 2014.

Not because life has become easy.

Not because I have everything figured out.

And not because I believe nothing difficult will happen again.

I feel different because I trust the foundation underneath me.

I have lived through enough changes now to know that I can move.

I can change directions.

I can leave something.

I can begin again.

I can learn.

I can ask for help.

I can make mistakes.

I can recognize pressure.

I can wait.

I can listen.

I can experiment.

I can return to myself.

That, to me, is what standing on my own has gradually come to mean.

It doesn't mean isolation.

It doesn't mean refusing help.

It doesn't mean proving that I don't need anyone.

It means that underneath everything else, there is an increasingly reliable relationship with myself.

The reliability of being human, as I understand it today, is not about being dependable for the expectations of the world around me.

It is about operating reliably as myself.

And after all these years, I finally have evidence that I can.

The Weather Ahead

I'm about three years away from my Uranus Opposition.

Within Human Design, I have often heard this next cycle described through the image of a shell beginning to crack.

I like that image.

A shell has a purpose.

It protects something while it develops.

But eventually, what was once protection can become confinement.

I don't know exactly what this next cycle will bring.

For once, I don't feel a strong need to know.

I mostly feel curious.

Maybe that is one of the greatest differences between who I was then and who I am now.

In 2014, uncertainty felt crushing.

Today, uncertainty feels increasingly like open space.

I can look backward now and appreciate the struggles without pretending they were easy.

I will never forget those fifteen years.

I don't want to.

The jobs.

The pressure.

The anger.

The physical symptoms.

The counseling.

The coaching.

The travel.

Sweden.

Kettu.

Human Design.

Engineering.

The clients.

The failures.

The experiments.

The things I handled well.

The things I didn't.

All of it is part of the foundation beneath my feet now.

And I think that matters.

Because a foundation isn't something we build so we can stare at it forever.

We build on top of it.

The struggle is not where I want to live for the rest of my life.

But I will build the rest of my life on what it taught me.

Maybe that is what the child in me could somehow sense.

There would be a road.

It would be hard.

Something would be lost along the way.

But I would come back.

Today, I feel close.

Not to some perfected version of myself.

To something much more familiar.

Something lighter.

More curious.

More creative.

More loving.

More alive.

Something that feels strangely like the kid who wondered why he couldn't simply remain himself forever.

Maybe I couldn't.

Maybe I had to leave him for a while to understand what it meant to return.

Whatever comes next, I know in my body that I can meet it.

Not because I can control what the universe throws at me.

Because I no longer believe I need to.

I can navigate the weather.

The foundation is there.

And somewhere underneath everything I've become, that kid is still here.

I think we're finally finding each other again.

And maybe now I'm ready for the shell to crack.