Every Sunday night I took inventory. Counted everything. Food cost was the number that told you whether the week had actually worked.
The answer was never on a clipboard. Took me years to figure out the same was true of myself.
I had my first son at nineteen. Opened Boston Chicken stores at twenty. Ran a Hooters. Got divorced at twenty-three. Had my second son. Got a DUI. Built a career. Got another one a decade later, when things looked more put-together from the outside. My sons and I lost each other for a while. I was busy building things I could control because I couldn't lead the one thing that mattered.
Fifteen years in SaaS. Go-to-market organizations, emerging tech categories. I got good at the measurable stuff. What I didn't track was the cost.
The ayahuasca came first. The first ceremony taught me to let go. To relax into myself. To stop performing the identities I'd spent decades constructing: Chris the father, the leader, the husband, the ex-husband, the entrepreneur, the savior of the world, the medium. When you strip those away, something remains. Not a role. Not a story. Just: I am.
Three and a half years ago I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was forty-nine. The diagnosis didn't excuse anything. It explained everything. So much lifted. There was nothing wrong with me. I belong here. I chose to be here.
That's the thing I'm still learning to live from.
I work with information that comes from outside ordinary perception. I'm writing a book with Dr. Carlos Warter about what that means at the level of teams, organizations, and human systems. Park Street Press, spring 2027. Field Notes is where I'm working it out before I have the answers.
I've been with my wife fifteen years. My sons are thirty-three and thirty. I have three granddaughters — four, two, and one — and a grandson on the way. On Sunday nights I still take inventory. Different ledger now. Where I'm truly embodied. Where I'm still learning how to show up.
Also an ordained Dudeist priest. Takes it exactly as seriously as it deserves.