The Currency of Time

Opening

There is an old, comforting lie that society tells us when everything falls apart.

They say, "Just give it time. Time heals all wounds." I beg to disagree.

Time is not a doctor. Time is not a savior. If you sit in the dark and wait for the calendar pages to turn, you aren't healing. You are simply procrastinating.

When my businesses collapsed, when the people I loved turned their backs on me, I spent days staring at the ceiling with a completely blank mind. I acted like the living dead. I told myself I was just "waiting for the right time" to get back up. I was waiting for someone to walk into the room and lend me a helping hand.

But the right time never magically arrived

In retrospect, I realized a terrifying truth: the "right time" was always there. The time to heal, the time to forgive, the time to move forward is always now. What kept me paralyzed in that bed wasn't a lack of time.

It was fear.

Fear engulfed me. Fear poisoned my perspective. I was paralyzed by the "what ifs." What if I try again and they reject me? What if forgiveness abandons me entirely? Think about it medically. If you are in an accident and you severely cut your head, you don't sit on the pavement and wait for "time" to heal you. You immediately apply first aid to stop the bleeding. The actual healing process might take months, but it cannot even begin until you take immediate action to survive.

I regret that I didn't apply emotional first aid to my own soul right away. I was sitting in a dark dungeon, waiting for someone to lead me to the light, when I had the innate power to stand up and walk toward the exit myself.

When a business shuts down or a relationship ends, people will tell you that you "wasted" your time. They will ask if I feel robbed of my youth and energy from 2020 to 2023.

I wasn't robbed of my time. I simply spent it

Life, love, and trust are all forms of currency. I entered into a trade. I traded my deepest care, my money, and my trust to the people I worked with, expecting they would reciprocate. But there is no mathematical formula for human nature. You can give someone the purest love you have, and because they are operating on an entirely different definition of loyalty, they might hand you a betrayal in return.

Does that mean my expenditure was wasted? No. It simply proved the massive, undeniable capacity of my own heart. I proved that I know how to love fiercely.

Today, standing here in Brazil, I cannot say with absolute certainty that I will never meet the wrong people again. Human beings are a complex, mutable web. You can study sociology and psychology all you want, but the human heart will always be an unpredictable puzzle.

I cannot control how the people in this new land will treat me. But I have made peace with the calendar. I leave the outcome to fate. I am stepping into the next chapter, ready to build new relationships, ready to spend my time, and ready to discover how amazing humanity can still be.

And sometimes... humanity surprises you in the most beautiful ways.