The Operating Manual for Being Human

I'm Mark.

From the outside I looked like I had it handled. I worked at big companies, then built my own. Bought them, sold them, raised money, sat in boardrooms. I could walk into a business that wasn't working and find the problem, usually fast. People asked me to do that for them.

I could explain a company's cash flow. I couldn't explain why my chest was tight.

For most of my thirties I was convinced something was wrong with me. Not dramatically wrong. Not the kind of wrong that gets a diagnosis or earns anybody's sympathy. Just a low hum of not-okay sitting underneath everything. I could close a deal, run a meeting, make people laugh at dinner. And then I'd be alone, the performance would stop, and there'd be this weight I couldn't account for.

I thought everyone else had figured something out that I'd missed.

That's the part I want to say plainly, because I think a lot of people are carrying it. Not a crisis. Just the sense that there's an instruction sheet somewhere and you were out of the room when they handed it out. So you watch how other people do it, and you copy the shape of it, and you hope nobody looks too closely.

So I went looking. Books, papers, therapists, courses, teachers, anything. I read the way people read when they're trying to solve themselves. I learned a lot. Some of it helped. Most of it explained beautifully what was happening and then stopped right where I needed it to keep going.

Then on October 8, 2021, my closest friend Jonathan and his daughter were killed in a plane crash. He was my business partner. I talked to him almost every day. He was one of the few people I never had to explain myself to, and there aren't many of those in a life.

My body knew before my mind did. For weeks my hand kept moving toward my phone to call him. Not as a figure of speech. My hand would actually move.

A doctor later told me my cortisol was consistent with someone in a combat zone. I wasn't in a combat zone. I was running a business and grieving. My body couldn't tell the difference. I got sick constantly. My memory got bad enough that I started forgetting conversations I'd had that week.

What I remember most clearly is a panic episode in a parking lot. I got out of the car, put my feet on the asphalt, started naming cars by color, put my hand on my chest. About four minutes. I had no idea what I was doing. I found out later that every piece of it has a name and works for a reason.

That's when the reading stopped being interesting and got urgent. I wasn't curious anymore. I needed it.

I'm still studying. I don't think that stops. But somewhere in all that reading I realised I was assembling something that didn't exist yet, and that the book I kept looking for and couldn't find was the one I'd have to write.

This is it. It's the manual I wish someone had handed me as soon as I could read.

I'm not a therapist and this book never pretends otherwise. I'm a person who got very good at fixing broken systems and couldn't fix his own, and then went and found out why.