Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson posted this recently, talking about how a dream of his was crushed but only now many years later does he see what opportunities opened up because of it.
I really related to this because I have a similar story. I file this one under “Hard lessons learned”.
Back in 2000 I was in the peak of my DJ career. I was performing around the world, hundreds of thousands of my CDs had been sold, and for a guy in his early 20s it was a great place to be.
I would regularly accept gigs in the US, and just hop across the border with no paperwork (this is a pre-9/11 world when we didn’t take the border serious at all) to do them.
On one fateful night I ended up getting stopped, questioned, detained, and then banned from re-entering the US because I had not disclosed why I was entering the US truthfully.
The ban was for 5 years, but it essentially became a life sentence, because now there are detailed files on me at the border computers and the last time I tried entering in 2005 I was turned away. I haven’t tried since.
This essentially killed my DJ career and forced me to retire. Without being able to accept work in the States, a huge part of my potential income was cut off.
It forced me to move on. I had a lot of regret with me for many years about decisions I made that led to those events.
Only this year, in 2018, 18 years later, that I now have gratitude for what happened. The chain of events that started from 2000 has brought me to a life I am very happy with. It expanded my interests, I pursued new things, and have had great success both financial and personal. Like The Rock said, this ended up being THE BEST thing that could have happened to me. It was impossible to see that at the time.
There are many of my contemporaries from the 90s that are still out there performing as DJs, and I ponder the life I might have had if I continued with that path, and it’s not a life I would want for myself any longer and not one as great as I live today. The position I’m in to help people today is very exciting to me and I got to here from this path.
It took all this time to have clarity about that. And gratitude. It was impossible to see for a long time, because it is impossible to know where things might end up.
Perhaps with the benefit of time in your life you might also have gratitude for the loss of some of your dreams, which led you to new bigger dreams.
Holy crap, always wondered what happened to you all these years. I’m still a fan after all this years. 22 years ago, decided to change path and joined the military. Recently retired, listening to some random playlist on spotify and Shooting Star by Bang! happen to randomly pop up. Made me look you up and stumbled anabolic-frolic.com, which then brought me here. Its refreshing to see what you’ve been up to after all this years. Now I have to figure out what happened to all my Happy 2B Hardcore CDs.