How Dan Boettcher Rebuilt His Life After a Mental Health Crisis

00:00 Dan Boettcher was checking every box. Ivy League degrees, a law career, a fast track to the State Department. On the outside it all looked perfect. But on the inside, he hadn't slept in days. And while sitting in an airport lounge, he saw something that wasn't there. A dragon flying through the air. That moment became the unraveling. The diagnosis. The detour that no one expected. In this conversation, Dan shares what it means to lose your identity. 00:27 leave behind a future you worked so hard to build and create something more meaningful in its place. Today, he's a fine jeweler, a legacy storyteller, and a man still in mid-transformation, no longer chasing validation, but rather helping others turn their own stories into something beautiful. I was sitting in an airline lounge, and I started hearing things, and then I started seeing things too that weren't there. And this was a big dragon flying around the roof of the airline lounge. 00:56 And I know that airline lounges don't have big dragons, right? That's not usually. And if they do, you're probably in Hong Kong and it's a very artistic thing. At Dulles Airport, there are no beautiful art dragons. So I'm in trouble. I know I'm in trouble. I'm Maciel Houli, and this is The Life Shift, candid conversations about the pivotal moments that have changed lives forever. 01:32 Hello, my friends. Welcome to LifeShift Podcast. I am here with Dan. Hello, Dan. Thank you for joining. Hi, Matt. Thanks for having me today. Super excited to kind of hear your story today. The LifeShift Podcast, I've told people this before, is like this this journey that I never really anticipated for myself. When I was eight, my mom was killed in a motorcycle accident. And that is like the defining LifeShift moment for me and which there was like a line in the sand, everything when my dad sat me down to tell me. 02:02 everything at that moment, I knew nothing was going to be the same. Like everything was gone. Everything had changed because my parents were divorced, lived states apart. So my whole life was going to change. And I say all that because it was like late 80s, early 90s. And people weren't talking about like how to help a kid through this grief journey. And I just held it all inside. And I wondered the whole time, do other people have these line in the sand moments, these 02:31 snap of a finger, these whatever pivot might happen in their life, in which from one moment to the next, everything has changed. And so now for the last three plus years, I've been able to talk to over 200 people about a lot of different pivotal moments. People have lots of them. I've learned that along the way, but I've got to hear how people are before and then what happens and then how they are changing after that event. Because before we were recording, you were like, you know, we're still kind of in it. 02:59 We're always evolving, we're always changing, we're always trying to find the new version of ourselves. So thank you for just wanting to be a part of the LifeShift podcast journey that I'm on through this platform. I love your trajectory here and I am also a big fan of hearing about people who have had a shift in their life and need to find something else to do because that was certainly my case. And these life shifts that happen don't come with an advance warning. 03:28 They just ring your doorbell and everything's different. And I imagine when you learned your mother died in a motorcycle accident, was literally the doorbell rang and you got something that changed your life forever. I also had some of those moments and I have one of them that I'd love to share with you today. Because of my own lived experience, so many life shifts in my mind are always related to something similar to what I've had, like some kind of sudden moment. But I've also talked to a lot of people who have like made 03:57 these life shift moments in their lives happen as well? Like one day they woke up and decided to do something wildly different and maybe you have some of those in your life as well. I naively went into this thinking everyone has this like traumatic shift in their life and not quite true. Well, you know, I perhaps everyone has shifts in their lives that aren't scheduled, but whether or not they become traumatic is a different question of psychology and 04:26 There are plenty of people that have plenty of awful things happen to them and they don't experience a trauma. And so they don't have to iron it out. It just goes into the normal memory shelf and they move forward and live a normal life. However, I would think that perhaps the guests on your podcast and that especially includes me, some of this stuff is traumatic and there is more here than what happened. And so it becomes a whole recipe for a consideration of a life. And that recipe 04:56 is for me at least, yeah, you're right. I am in transformation and the life shift I want to talk about happened decades ago. And it's not that I've taken a long time to get going or anything like that. It's just, it's unfolding. And so we transform a little bit each day. And there are plenty of motifs out there that show the chrysalis and the butterfly and all of that. And if it were only so easy to come out of the cocoon and fly away in a moment of beauty, 05:26 And that hasn't been what happened to me. As much as that sounds like a beautiful image, I don't know that I would want that at the end of the day. Like, I feel like the unfolding is what makes it all so interesting. Before we get into your detailed story, can you tell us who Dan is in 2025? Like, how do you show up in the world? Today, I show up as a 51 year old. I am very well educated, name brand degrees. I have a Ivy League education. I 05:55 have probably four full-time jobs. I am a fine jeweler. run a jewelry and lifestyle brand that I love very much. I am also the trustee of a large trust. I am a lawyer. I also rehab very old buildings in old San Juan, Puerto Rico, which is a lot of fun. So I wear a lot of different hats and it's not because I don't know what I want to do. It's just kind of these things keep coming at me and as they do, 06:24 assume responsibilities and today I think people look at me and perhaps if they compare their insides to my outsides, I look pretty good on the outside. But if you make a fair fight and you start comparing insides to insides and outsides to outsides, today I'm a man in what I like to call mid-transformation. And it's not that I just started, it's just that I hope I'm only halfway there because it's going to take this long before I get to the other end of it. 06:53 Perhaps I have another 30 or 40 years ahead of me and it'd be nice if I did. So, you know, today I'm a man from the mainland that moved to Puerto Rico. I moved here because I like living here. I like the tropics. I grew up in Colorado. It was cold and snowy there. It's not here. Winters in Connecticut were also cold and long. And in any case, that's who I am today. And I have some interesting friends. I make beautiful jewelry for people that 07:23 Want to sit with me and tell me their story and let me make their story into a piece of fine jewelry. That's a lot of fun. I get to take very old buildings in the oldest city in the Americas and breathe some new life into them and be just a page in a story rather than sometimes the Americans have this aspect that we're the entire story. And I don't want to be the whole story. I own an old house that 07:48 People were born and died in before I even got there. People have been married in that house. It's got a whole journey and it's just me now and someday I won't need that house anymore because I won't be here anymore, but that house will be. And so I get to do that. That's a lot of fun. I get to use some of my legal training to help friends put businesses together and make their success. And that's a lot of fun for me too. So it sounds like there's a lot of trans... 08:13 Forming and transformation in the work that you do too. So like your life is a lot about this kind of transformation Aspect would you say it is I think that's interesting that you say that and I have considered that not exactly the way you said it but yeah, there is there is a an aspect of taking something that's either being born or perhaps broken and Making a better version of it that I really like to do 08:41 In my fine jewelry, I get to meet people and touch some very unique parts of their lives and memorialize it and golden gemstones or metals and stones. And that's a lot of fun. When I've got a friend who's putting together a business and I get to work with him on that, that's a lot of fun for me. The legacy aspect of running a trust and a foundation, there's, certainly I look at aspects of that and I have. 09:07 You know young nieces and nephews that are having their own children now little babies and i start to think about what authority they might have so yes i think it's not just me who's transforming but i like to think of myself sometimes as a slug in a salt mine because it's dangerous it's dangerous out there but the only way that i can ever transform and heal is if i lose all those protective shells and the assault is a danger to a slug but it's also 09:35 a performative and a curative measure for a lot of things too. So here I am and I offer myself in 2025 to you and to the people I meet with as little armor as possible. And I just want to be out there and be who I am and tell the truth. Yeah. I mean, that's so many of us hope to get to that place in which we can kind of let down some of the armor and 10:04 and take the chances. So I love that that is part of 2025U. Were you always one to kind of drop armor or was this something that you grew into? And you can tell that story however you need to if you want to kind of paint that picture. Well, I had my armor forcibly removed. So it was certainly not always the case that I entered the world innocent and honest. 10:30 And actually that word innocence is kind of interesting to me because one of the things I think in my religious walk and metaphysical journey is that perhaps one day after I'm no longer in this earthly body, I can get that innocence back. The innocence that I lost in my life shift. And in the meantime, I do try and leave the armor behind. But I grew up in Colorado. I was a kid that was talented and did a lot of things. Well, I did a lot of things right. 11:00 Was a struggle for the teachers because my intellect was more than they could handle a lot of the times What even one-on-one and very often in schools, you know, you're not the only student. So my teachers who Got old I don't know how they got old because I certainly didn't get older but sometimes I go meet my old teachers from elementary school and they're old men and women now But I still know them but I I had a lot of a lot of success and I had a lot of charm 11:30 And I had quite a bit of resilience and a lot of doors opened for me. A lot of doors opened ahead of me. And in fact, a lot of doors were opened before I even got to the room that I didn't even realize had been opened. And when I look back at the opportunities I had and the person I was, I wish I could write him a letter, you know, write that 16 year old kid a letter. 11:59 And I have written them, but there's no mailing address that'll get the 16 year old the letter that I've written. So very often those letters either go in the drawer or the fire. But by and large, I was a kid that was doing a lot right. I also had some, some struggles, but when I look back, I had opportunity, I had potential, and I had a huge suit of armor. 12:27 If you'll let me tell a story out of the Hebrew Bible, there's David and Goliath, right? So one of my favorite images is of basically the Hebrew Navy SEALs trying to teach David how to go fight Goliath. And they make him a suit of armor and he can't walk in the armor. David tells them, I can't wear this armor. It's not mine. It's too heavy. Give me a slingshot. I'm good at that. And I don't think I'm David, but I do think. 12:53 you know that I understand when someone else is making this armor for you and you're wearing it and it doesn't fit and you're not activated. So in any case, I grew up and my home life I'm not going to talk about, but I will say that I left home as soon as I could. And I went to college and being in college also gave me an opportunity to live in Belgium and live in Italy and live in France. And I did very well in school. 13:21 which gave me a chance to go to a good law school and I did well in the law school, which gave me a chance to go to a really good graduate school. And I was at Yale and I was working to get my second graduate degree. And what I had wanted to do with my life, I was good at languages. I liked people. I liked to travel. I thought that it would be really fun to work in diplomacy, but specifically in, in advising diplomats legally. 13:46 So the State Department has something called the Legal Adviser's Office, and that's where they draft treaties. you know, if you'll hear in the news today, the word genocide gets thrown around a lot. Well, genocide actually has a legal definition, and part of that definition is decided by lawyers who work at the State Department. And I thought that it would be a really neat life if I could be a part of that. So I... 14:11 had an undergraduate degree in international relations. My legal focus had a lot to do with learning about legal systems all around the world. I speak quite a few languages. I'm at Yale and I'm studying. I'm in my second year and I'm studying international relations and my life isn't going very well. And what I'm not telling the people around me is that not sleeping at night. And it's not like 14:38 insomnia. It's like, I'm not sleeping tonight, or the next night, or the third night, or the fourth night, or the fifth night. And I'm starting to hear things that aren't really there. And I was at Dulles Airport because I was commuting in a marriage that had me in Washington, DC part time and in New Haven part time. 15:02 I was sitting in an airline lounge and I started hearing things and then I started seeing things too that weren't there. And this was a big dragon flying around the roof of the airline lounge. And I know that airline lounges don't have big dragons, right? That's not usually. Yeah. Not usually. Yeah. So, um, and if they do, they're, know, you're probably in Hong Kong and it's a very artistic thing, right? At Dulles airport, which is one of the nightmare airports in the whole world, there are no 15:31 beautiful art dragons. So I'm in trouble. Like, you know, I know I'm in trouble. I know that it's not going well. I was, you know, right around 30 years old. this the lack of sleep? Was that like for it wasn't for lack of trying. It was just that you could not. Yeah, no, it was just that my my brain had had switched on. And it was it was starting to what the techo geeks like to say overclock. 16:01 And you can overclock a computer for a little while before it burns up and your brain's not much different. So I was taking a class about European Union politics from a man called David Cameron. David Cameron's a very, very famous academic. He's not teaching today. I went to go pick up his take-home exam, you know, these graduate classes, read a whole bunch of stuff. And at the end of it, they shoot a question out and you usually have somewhere between 24 and 72 hours to write. 16:30 know, 10 pages or 20 pages or whatever about what we talked about. And I went and picked it up and I hadn't slept in nine days. And I went, I was living on the top floor of the old Southern New England telecom building in downtown New Haven. had a lovely apartment and I sat down on my chair and looked at my desk and I looked at my shoes and I thought, Dan, you need some help right now, like right now. And so 16:59 I put everything in my bag because I decided what I was going to do was walk from that apartment to the library where I like to study via the student health center. And I went into the, call it the office of mental hygiene, which is a little bit antique, but the staff had me sit down and they had a social worker that interviewed me right away. And the next thing I knew, I lost my liberty and I was put in the back of an ambulance. 17:29 And I was transported to the intensive care unit of the Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital, where I saw some of the biggest darknesses I've ever witnessed. And I spent two weeks at that hospital before a physician who I knew well, negotiated my release to allow me to go to Georgetown, which was a much different experience than the public hospital in New Haven, Connecticut was. And I was very sick. And 18:00 I still wasn't sleeping. And I remember my intake interview with a young medical doctor and she was perhaps my age and I wonder where she is today. And if I could meet her again, I would apologize. But I was really angry because this woman was standing between me and finishing and she was there, you know, because it was her assignment to interview me and I was as crazy as I could be. 18:30 I was in Floridmania and I had learned, well I was about to learn that I have something called bipolar one. And I was about as sick as I could be. An interesting side note from that hospital is crazy gets crazy and when you're incarcerated in a psychiatric institution like that, you get to know the other people. Everyone else that I knew in that hospital is dead. They're all dead. And the kind of diagnosis I get, 18:57 I had gotten and the kind of illness that I had is not typically one that people recover from. And the fact that I did recover is depending on how you come at life, either a miracle or a work of God or an astounding feat of medicine or whatever. But I am not supposed to be doing all of the things I'm doing in 2025. If you would have asked the physician in 2005, what my trajectory was, 19:26 with a straight face, she would have told you that I was going to die. And so I didn't die. They put me in a, uh, in a room, you know, they took my clothes off and, know, did a, you know, it's an incarceration. Yeah. You're, can't leave, right? No, no. Heaven's no. I, know, after they looked in my body cavities to make sure that I wasn't bringing anything illegal into the hospital, which of course I wasn't. 19:53 I was introduced to my roommate who was a young man and he was in there because he had been walking around New Haven with an axe and threatening people with it. And in the intensive care unit where they had originally brought me, there was a man who was tied to a bed and the noises he was making were not human. And I actually got to know him and he died quite tragically. 20:23 But there was a lot of group sessions, you know, in the psychiatry that they were practicing. They did some group sessions and they did listen to a woman talk about starving her children. You know, just really darknesses. Yes. So I wanted to leave. I was very sick, but this is not the part of the world that I knew much about. And I was learning about it and I was learning about it quickly. And the nurses were 20:52 linebackers. mean, they were huge men, you know, and, and I saw them square off with patients. The psychiatric hospital is not a place for healing, but it is a place to contain someone who is perhaps seeing dragons flying around. And there's a, you know, I've heard people joke, you know, no one ever, no one ever died for lack of sleep. That's actually not true. You can die from a lack of sleep. And I was getting there. 21:19 And so they needed to stabilize that. They also needed to keep me safe. The irony is they put me with some of the most dangerous people I've ever experienced in order to keep me safe. Were there classifications in that space? And what I mean by that is like, were people grouped in any particular way? It doesn't sound like you were placed with people facing similar situations. No, but I did wind up in a space that I don't think fit me very well. 21:47 And some of that had to do with the attending physician who didn't particularly like me very much. You know, I know a lot of people in the psychological medical complex fight against the one flew over the cuckoo's nest. you know, that's- That's what comes to mind. It's what comes to mind. The thing is, is there's a reason that story hit so hard. And- 22:11 I will remember the physician, the attending physician for the rest of my life. And I have written her letters too, and they all go straight into the shredder. But you know, it wasn't all bad. And there were quite a few wonderful nurses and doctors who had my interests at heart too. It's just, you know, one really sour person. I'm curious. I mean, it sounds like you had all the intellect. You knew something was up. You knew something. 22:37 and then you advocate for yourself, which then puts you in a position where now you feel kind of imprisoned, incarcerated in a way. Was there like this battle, just for my own curiosity, a battle of like, you know you should be here, you know it's maybe not the right place, you know it's safe, this, this like counteracting feelings about that experience? Well, so yes, first of all, I will couch all of this and the fact that I was crazy. You know, I was, I was crazy. I was insane. 23:07 literally insane. So the judgments I was making were not the kind of judgments that people were comfortable allowing me to make for myself. That includes the judge. You know, we all saw during the pandemic that the medical community can control everything if they choose to. The level of quote unquote lockdown that they enforced on everybody during the COVID situation. Well, they literally locked me down. You know, I was locked behind locked doors and the word incarceration is not inaccurate. 23:35 You know, I was there on a judge's order. But the thing that did make this particular physician so angry with me and the irony here is my very first exercise in law school, like brand new 1L, my first week of law school. And we did this out of the books when I was in law school. They don't use books in law school anymore. It's all on the computer now. But the exercise was to use the law to get yourself out of a psychiatric hospital. 24:01 And so I knew exactly what to do. And I sat down and I, you know, I asked for my, you know, my legally required stamp and my legal, you know, all the stuff. And, and I wrote the, you know, signed the form and they can hold you legally only for 72 hours before they have to either go in front of a judge and get you committed or, know, and really take your rights away or release you. And I did that. And it made the, the, the physician felt like I was interfering with her authority. 24:30 She actually said to me, if you file this paper, I will go in front of the judge who knows me and I will own you. That's maybe not the best. Well, you know, what's therapeutic about that? There's no, you know, there's no therapeutic there. Oh, I feel so safe. Thanks. Yeah, I feel so safe. Yeah. Happily, that woman doesn't work at that hospital anymore, but she's been long gone. In any case, no, I had to go finish my grad degree. And you're yeah. In my mind, you know, in my. 24:59 Yeah, in my mind, I had to get out of there because, you know, I've got to go finish. Were you someone that was very I was very much like this. Were you someone that was chasing the next like checkmark, the next success, the next thing on the ladder to get to where you think or knew you wanted to be? Well, yes. And the reality of all of that is where I thought I needed and wanted to be were really prescriptions that were made by other people anyway. 25:27 Right. So I had, you know, I was this kid with a huge intellect and good at a lot of stuff and other people started putting their needs and wants into what I was doing. And that might in fact be part of the reason why I lost my sanity was I wasn't going the right direction. But anyway, at a point I left that hospital and went to another hospital and I spent some years recovering. 25:55 One of the things that happened to me while I was in that hospital, and I'm going to get a little bit religious right now, is as I was standing watching the sunset through a little tiny gunnery window, you know, the kind that you would imagine in a psychiatric hospital, I was absolutely convinced at that moment that if I could be there at that moment, that there would be no God. God had abandoned me. And then I realized that, there's no God at all because 26:23 where I am right now can't exist in God's world. And so as soon as I decided that there was no God, I turned around, I stepped outside of this little cell with the axe kid and a woman in a clerical collar walked up to me and said, I've been looking for you. And she held out a loaf of bread and she said, would you like communion? divine timing? Yeah. 26:51 The interesting thing about her is no one in the hospital had ever seen her before. so what that did is gave me a reason to believe in angels. And perhaps she saved my soul that day. I wept. I wept. 27:08 And that weeping, I think, was the beginning of my transformation. Yeah. mean, like boogers on my feet, kind of, you know, just like it's all coming out. Was that the armor kind of sloughing off? Well, it was it was someone that saw me through the armor. She said, you know, it was someone who walked in and said, why don't you just leave the armor? Did it create like a feeling of maybe it is safe to let go of that armor to? 27:39 Uh, well, I don't think it is safe. I don't think it's safe to walk through the world without armor at all, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Okay. Fair. Yeah. Maybe it's not the right word. It sounds like that shedding, uh, it feels like there was like a weight or... Well, you know, the fact is, you know, in 21st century, America wants things to be safe, right? And it's not safe. The world's not safe. The world... 28:09 It's terrible a lot of the time, but it's still even here. Wonderful things happen and it's not safe. There is nothing safe. And so if we go through expecting to have safety that we provide, our spouse provides, the government provides, someone provides the safety, a church or whatever, it's not safe. But you can't wear the armor anyway because then you're David in the 28:38 armor and you can't fight Goliath in the armor it doesn't fit and we all have a slingshot of our own and so so did she make me feel safe no not at all i was in a psychiatric hospital with criminals i mean you know people that have done horrible things and i was there and i couldn't leave and no it wasn't safe but it was also exactly where 29:07 a woman in a clerical collar with a loaf of bread would come look for me. And I don't know why. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot there's so many different pivots that come into this moment of bringing you to like, would you describe it as like a close to final break that brought you you said it was the start of your healing. So it was some kind of shift there. But like you had this this moment of like awareness early you had the advocacy you were moved 29:36 from all these places, you knew you didn't wanna be there, you knew maybe you should be there, and now you have this moment that kind of like is the another final turn. You know, they fed me a lot of pharmaceuticals, you know, it's called psychiatric chemotherapy for a reason. And it had some profound impacts on my body. There's parts of my body that don't work super well anymore because I took a lot of drugs. 30:02 Happily today, I don't need any drugs. And that's also not what anyone would have predicted because they would have thought that I would have died already. A side note about that, that's kind of ironic because I was seeing an orthopedist recently here in San Juan and he said, we know all about why this happens, but we never treat it because people that have this happen to their body don't need the medicine to fix it because they're either, you know, not participating in life or they're dead or, you know, he's like a sports medicine doctor doesn't see people like you. 30:32 And then I said, you know, let's write an article about it. Let's make the world better. What can we do? You know, the shining night is not when everything is healed. The shining nights in the recovery. Because it's not safe. It is scary. And, you know, they fed me meds, right? I got a lot of medicine. But with the woman and the loaf of bread, I started finding. 31:00 a way to feed myself meaning. And I realized that what I was doing was not what I wanted to do. But even more than that, with the stroke of the psychiatrist pen, I can't get a security clearance. You can't work at the State Department without a security clearance. Everything that I had stacked one thing on the other for my whole life, you know, the Jenga board came down. 31:29 I had to do something else. And it was all of that happened in an evening in a psych ward. In that moment in which you boogers. That's boogers. Yeah. Boogers on the feet. You know, cause I, know, if you've never cried that way, you haven't ever lived, but I think most of us have, you know, where the only thing you can do is put your hands in your face and lean over and, you know, it just comes out. 31:58 And you know, I still cry like that sometimes. And it's okay, because... Did you cry like that before? No. So this was like new? Yeah, and if I ever... Well, I was contained, right? I was safe. When you're safe, you don't have to cry. Yeah, and you were living your life in the way that you thought others wanted you to live it. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I call that... I call mine my version society's checklist. I was doing all the things that I thought... 32:28 was supposed to do or that my father wanted me to do. So I totally get that. now, but you have these like, these medical pieces that intervene in a way that ultimately bring you to this space in which you're like, I can't do what I thought I wanted to do for so long, or what other people wanted me to do. And now you have to do start from nothing. Well, how do you how do you come out of this boogers at the feet kind of moment? Like, how do you move forward to be who you are today? Because it's quite different than what you're describing. 32:58 Yeah, I started over. I had to heal for a while. So the kind of psychiatric interruption I have is not unlike someone that has a massive heart attack or a big stroke or, you know, has has a car accident that takes three years to recover from. So I was hospitalized for a while and the hospitalization as I look back was necessary. I still have an issue with some of the 33:25 people I cross paths with, but you know, that's life. And I can also carry those things around as long as I want to. And I've chosen to leave some frankly mean psychiatrists by the side of the road and walk on. You know, I don't want to carry that. But so there was a period of hospitalization that was, you know, if I ever see another bologna sandwich on white bread, I'm probably going to run away. it's, you know, like you're not... 33:55 Everything is everything is contained and do you see it as a necessary period? It was necessary and I look back and and I got out, you know, I made I made my way through and and they told you that people in your condition the way you came in were not going to do that, right? But you know, I stopped trying to be liked and I started trying to be aligned with my purpose and 34:23 I stopped taking advice from people who weren't qualified to give it. And the number of people who were actually qualified to give me advice is really pretty limited. I did, I had to start again. So after I got out the hospital, I spent quite a bit of time at home recovering, finding little things to do. I'm a voracious reader, reading a lot, sleeping an inordinate amount. Then I realized that I had to find some purpose in my life. 34:52 and I was 32 years old and I wasn't ready to just give it up. I don't have an addiction. A lot of the people that I was in the hospital with do have addictions and sometimes they find the medicine that the psychiatrist gives them to be not nearly as fun as crack cocaine or something like that. So I don't have any of those problems. But I did have to find something to do and I... 35:20 considered quite a few different things. I, you know, I have always been creative. And one of the challenges of my own intellect is typically someone is either creative or replicative in their intelligence, but I'm both. And I decided that what I was missing out a lot of in the graduate school at Yale and 35:43 being a lawyer, which was actually a terrible fit for me, was the creative aspect of it. So I started looking at creativity and creative careers. And I had a friend who was actually my friend's friend. He was the bartender at Morton's on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. And it was a lovely guy. We went to Antwerp together on a guy's trip just to have Belgian beer. I had lived in Brussels. I liked 36:12 I like Belgium, and a cigar. And we, I think, had just like looked at the Rubens in the cathedral and, you know, just doing touristy stuff. It was February. It was bitter cold. I just, the wind off the North Sea in February in that part of the world is just cold, cold, cold. And so we found a cigar shop and we walked in. We each bought a challenging cigar. were 36:39 big and long to smoke. And so I said, you know, can we sit down and smoke these? And she said, I'm closing. And I, you know, I thought, well, we can't sit outside. It's too dang cold. And, and so I, my Dutch is passable. And I asked her if we could, you know, what we should do. And she said, just a minute. So she went upstairs and came back down and it turns out there was a gentleman's club in the upstairs of 37:05 of guys that get together and as you know, one of these European style membership clubs and all men and they invited us up for the evening. And so I walked in and shook everyone's hand and they wanted to get to know us and were very friendly, but one of the men was a diamond dealer. And I had never thought about that really before, but I spent the evening, you know, they were, they were generous with the Cuban rum they had, and we had our cigars and conversation and 37:35 At the end of it, he told me he didn't have a legacy to pass it on to because like me, his faith tradition is in Judaism and his sons weren't particularly interested in what he did. And he said, do you think you might like this? And I said, maybe. And he said, why don't you come to my office tomorrow morning? And so I found myself in the diamond district in Antwerp the next day. And so, you know, perhaps that's a life shift. You know, we talk about life shifts. Now that's one that's, that is perhaps the life shift that I made rather than the one that 38:05 made me. But there were a lot of happenstance things that came to that, right? Like, had you gone to this car shop earlier and she allowed you to smoke low, you know, like, right, could play that game all day. For sure. As I got into it, I kind of liked it. And I realized that all of that beautiful jewelry gets made by somebody. And I have since learned that I don't have any particular talent as a goldsmith, but as a designer, I do. And I from there, I 38:34 changed and I got a trade degree. know, someone went from the Ivy league and got a trade degree and now I'm a gemologist. So I went to the GIA and got a graduate gemology training and that took me longer to get than my law degree. And I, you know, people talk to me about the bar and is that a hard test? And I say, you know, the way you get your graduate gemologist degree is they give you 20 small Ziploc bags with 20 unidentified stones in them. And you have to tell them, 39:02 what the stones are, if they've been treated, if they're manmade, if they're from the ground, where they might've come from. And the only passing score is perfect. Challenge accepted. Yeah. And so, so I got that and I started building, uh, started building my jewelry business and my health is also starting to recover at this time. And I'm not so worried anymore about whether people like me or not. 39:32 Because you know what of the world's great life hacks that I think most people learn is that what other people think of me is not of my business. And I don't need to be seen by anybody. I just need to be seen by me and apparently some lady with a loaf of bread in hospital. that's that's you know I started you know building this business and from the man who was once curled up on the floor, psychiatrically sick. 40:01 I like to think that I help people stand in golden form today and literally with precious metals and gemstones and, I hear beautiful stories from people and my special talent that I have in jewelry and it's probably because of the education I had before is that I can listen to people and hear their stories and in words begin to represent their life in a, in a, in a ring or a pendant or whatever. And 40:31 that kind of creative work, and the spiritual clarity that goes along with it is kind of the ointment I put on the scar tissue. This is a way of thinking. I think of these moments and the way you describe that, like, could that previous version of you like ever imagined like this as a career or this as like a life fulfilling dream or whatever any anything that you could even imagine like it feels like it's not even something that anyone would think about. 40:58 No, and the thing is that previous version of myself was too ashamed to do myself. Fair, because you thought you'd get the recognition as a lawyer or working in the state department or whatever. and maybe someday I would be the Secretary of State someday or be the ambassador to the United Kingdom or who knows what. I'm going to do these things. 41:22 And I look at that version of myself and it always makes the letter that I write to 16 year old. You know, I, and I tell myself, you know, Dan, you're in the world to make beautiful things. You're not in the world to sit in an office on 23rd street in Washington, DC and pour over a stack of documents that someone else is going to edit. My life is unedited by anybody but me. Yeah. And the life that I. 41:52 planned on living was just a series of edits by other people. And right and wrong answers, right? That's the law, right and wrong answers. and here I am. Or how to manipulate the black and white to be right or wrong. Exactly. And, you know, how to convince people that I am right. I don't have to convince anyone I'm right. Because I am. 42:18 I think a lot of people, whether they've gone to Yale or a community college, whatever it may be, I think a lot of people live or have lived a version of that earlier Dan. Like that kind of living to the expectations that everyone had of us or what we thought other people thought we should do. And then we need that recognition. We need to be seen in whatever way that is. I think it's such a relatable story. 42:45 and then your medical experience, maybe not as relatable, but hitting that point in which you have this moment in which you realize that you have to live the rest of this life for you. I've talked to lot of people that have hit this moment in many different ways of like, no, really, I'm gonna just start doing things that interest me or bring me joy or fill my cup or whatever it may be. Does this fill your cup? 43:16 It's not even about my cup anymore. Okay. It's the cup. You know, why does it have to be my cup and your cup? Why can't it just be the cup? Part of that old version of myself was selfish. Why did I want the glory of the State Department Legal Advisors Office? Because it's glory. I probably taught to do that. 43:40 Yeah, but well, because you know, then I'll have, you know, a legacy family of origin that's going to be happy with me and they can tell their friends that I'm doing the thing and but you know, does any of that add any, you know, any joy to the world? No, not really. And what I'm doing today. 44:03 is healing. You're also giving joy, right? Like, does it feel like when you're presenting a piece that you've designed, does that bring them joy? Do you feel that exchange? Absolutely. If I can tell a little story about a client I have right now, and I checked in with the client just to be sure it was okay. There was a Bitcoiner from Los Angeles and a woman from Guam who arrived in Kansas City and they were each unhappy and they each 44:31 Had bad marriages and had never planned on getting married again and they met each other in a September sunflower field in the in the edge of Kansas City and so I met them and they started telling me their story and she was even wearing a dress with sunflowers on it and so they went away and I wrote a design brief about the sunflowers and She is going to be married with a ring that looks like a sunflower and so 45:01 Being able to tie that in gives me a lot of joy, but also the miracle of these two people meeting each other and getting to be together, getting to know each other. And the ring will be beautiful. It will also be a statement, but it'll be beautiful. Invites people to ask. And so for the rest of her life, if she chooses to, she can say, I know, isn't it neat because I met my husband in a sunflower field. And the sunflowers come back every year. 45:30 They always do. know, some flowers are ubiquitous, especially in Kansas. But there's a very special connection they had. And I get to represent this in a ring and she gets to wear it. And does that fill my cup? You bet. It fills their cup. It fills a lot of cups. So let's just fill a cup. It doesn't need to be competitive joy. Right. That's and that's the healing. And I, you know, at the beginning of our talk, I made it very clear that I'm not transformed. I'm transforming. 46:00 And in the 20 years since I've been in the psychiatric hospital, I have gone through all different forms of brokenness. And I will go through more forms of brokenness before I finally break and leave. But I don't think that I will ever have an aha moment when I can just figure that I'm transformed. And it's okay. It's okay. I'd like to read a poem. 46:29 And we talked about this a little earlier and you said you'd never had anyone do that before and I'm pretty literate and I like poetry. So this is a poem that a lot of people have heard. It's by James Agee. It's called Sure on this Shining Night. And it was very famously set to music by Aaron Copeland. Sure on this shining night of star-made shadows round, Kindness must watch for me this side the ground. The late year lies down the north. 46:58 All is healed, all is health. High summer holds the earth, hearts all whole. Sure on this shining night I weep for wonder, wandering far alone of shadows on the stars. 47:18 I think that's a really beautiful poem and my very favorite aspect of it is weeping for wonder. 47:27 Not weeping for joy, not weeping for pain or tarnish or anything. Weeping for wonder, even here. Even here. We can weep for wonder. And I try and hold that in my heart. Wandering far alone. 47:46 And I feel alone a lot. And it's okay. Because beautiful things happen even here. And so my life shift from the smart kid that did everything right, won all the awards without trying, went to all the name brand schools, got all the good awards, and collapsed on the floor in front of a woman and a loaf of bread in a psychiatric hospital to here. 48:16 It's a journey and I'm going to keep going because it's all I can do. 48:22 but I left the armor behind. Does it feel lighter walking through the world? I know it's still scary and it's not safe, but does it feel lighter for you? For sure, absolutely. Do you still have inklings of any kind of performance? I mean, feel like creating for other people in hopes that they like it. Is there an element of performance in that? 48:48 Well, sure, you know, I People won't pay me for the jewelry if they don't like it, you know, if there's you know, it's it's a it's as simple as that but Performing is not wrong You know, it's it's not wrong to want to You know jig my jig exactly so someone else sees and likes it, you know, that's 49:12 One of the modern myths that I think is incorrect is that I should be able to dance my dance however I want and make other people like it. And that's not, I don't think that that's true. I think that if I want to increase the joy of the world, hearts are whole. We need to inculcate a sense of fullness. And so, 49:41 Yeah, mean, yes, there is performance. I hope people like my things. I have a podcast of my own. I hope people like my podcast. I hope people like your podcast. I hope people like this conversation. Yeah. But if they don't, it's not in my business. Right. Fair. I have another question about healing. Do you find by listening to your clients' stories and kind of creating something, do you find hearing those stories? 50:09 help heal you in other ways? Absolutely. Because I feel that with this podcast, like strangers. Yeah, I imagine you do. And you know, you and I have never met except for right now. And we're having a very intimate conversation. And it's awesome. You know, and that intimacy, which is often hard to find, I find to be to be incredibly healing. But there are clients who come in and tell me 50:38 incredibly difficult stories about things that have happened to them. And I haven't had the same story, but I may have had another short story in that same bound volume that sounds a lot like the story they're telling me. so when I begin to represent the story, you know, first in words and then in gemstones and metals, I can certainly put a little bit of salve on some of my own injuries and 51:06 When you walk through worlds without the armor on the injuries or You know, sometimes they keep coming but it keeps tearing open sometimes. Yeah, they keep tearing open It's like, you know playing football with stitches on you know, it happens but It's okay and The thing is is it's not sentimental It's actually a blessing Right. It's not this 51:36 hallmark tear moment because if I were to manufacture tears about my life, they wouldn't be beautiful tears. it's not on the shoes moment again. But instead it's a blessing and it's a blessing that I have lived longer than I perhaps might have. It's a blessing that I get to walk through very old houses that other people have had entire lives in and fix them up. It's a blessing that 52:05 I get the responsibility to tend some material things that perhaps can be used to, again, fill the cup and bring joy. That's... It's a blessing to be able to hold all that too, because I think that maybe the earlier version of you wasn't as equipped to hold those blessings. No. And the thing is, is the earlier version of myself was perhaps trying to manufacture blessings out of line, because I'm just a man and I don't... 52:34 get to make blessings. That's not how blessings work. yeah, no, think there's so much power in in your story. I, and, you know, I think we all should be transforming, not transformed, right? Like, feel like when we're transformed, maybe we're just dead. At that point, we're done, you know, we've, we've transformed to the next part. But I think, you know, I think there's, there's so much importance and that people, like you said, we don't have to walk the same path to be able to understand 53:03 your journey and relate to it and empathize with certain parts of it or feel validated in our own experiences because someone else on this earth has felt the same thing. And sometimes that's all it is. For me, at least. I am absolutely with you. And you never ever know. I'll tell a small story about a client that I had one time where the client had a ring 53:32 And the diamond came out of her ring and she lost it. And her husband approached me and he was quite pointed and said some things to me that were not very friendly and I had to absorb them. And when I met them to begin the process of making it right, I could have walked into the room with my armor on and told the man that he can't talk to me that way and that, you know, I have a good brand and blah, blah. 54:02 But instead I decided to walk in with my armor outside and sat down and just started to feel the energy in the room. And after about 40 minutes, what I learned was that the diamond came out of her ring the same day their baby died. 54:20 And I had the opportunity to be wrong because I was unhappy with the way that they had talked to me, the opportunity to find a way to transform into a better version of myself. And I also had the opportunity to use my technology and find jewelry to meet them in their grief. And, know, grief is one of those things that you just have to metabolize it. Grief goes through you. And some people never metabolize the grief. There's a. 54:50 The book Man's Search for Meaning written by the man whose name I can't remember right now, but a lot of his life's work was metabolizing the grief of being in Auschwitz. And, you know, maybe that's too much for one lifetime. But anyway, with my armor off and outside, it's lighter and I'm able to meet them where they are. And again, the cup, not my cup, not their cup, but the cup. The cup. Gets full. I know you've written letters to your 16 year old self. 55:19 Is there anything if you could go to the Dan that was seeing that dragon in that airport and if you bumped into him, is there anything you'd want to say to him at that point about this journey that he was about to go on? Oh, I would say, Dan. You don't know it, but you're in the dark. Sit still and wait for the light. It will shift. 55:46 Do you think he would have listened? No. 55:51 Not at all. Man, those future selves can't help us anyway. No, and, uh, and. But you need the journey sometimes. You need the journey and there's an 80 year old man in the future that wants to write. Yeah, exactly. And, uh, and if I live that long, um. I'll ask you that question again. Yeah. Ask me that question again. And I hope that man, I hope that man is proud of the life he's had. I bet he will be. 56:21 Thank you for coming on this journey and sharing your story in this way and letting me ask the questions that I do. I'm wondering if people want to like learn about what you do, connect with you, like what's the best way to find you? Is there a way to find you? Are you in hiding? What's happening? No, I'm not in hiding at all. The best way to find me is to, you can send me an email and my jewelry brand is called the Intrepid Wendell. And it's kind of a fun name that I named after 56:49 my company after a little stuffed animal. part of my transformation is letting go of the need to have my name and my brand be associated directly with one another. So you can find me at The Intrepid Wendell. We've got a website, theintrepidwendel.com. You can find me on Instagram. I also have my own podcast and my own podcast. I am not always able to share the stories of my clients, so I've done some interviews. 57:16 of 10 interesting people on my podcast and designed a piece of jewelry around each of the stories that I had with them. So if you would like to find me for any purposes at all, even just to chat, the best way to do that is to reach out by email or by the internet. Perfect. Well, with your permission, we will put those links in the show notes and people can easily access them and do what they will with them. But I hope that I encourage them to reach out, even if just a part of your story resonated. 57:45 with them in a way that made them feel seen or validated in any kind of way, I would encourage them to do so. Absolutely. And if any of your listeners have an experience in the psychiatric hospital or perhaps a family member, I'm happy to take those calls. Yeah. I've talked to a few people that have had similar experiences to you in the way that they feel about that time spent there. So I think it's unfortunately common. 58:15 Well, thank you, Dan, for being a part of this. Thanks for making it happen. I was super glad to meet you in this way and learn about you in this way. Well, I appreciate it. And I'm so glad that we finally got this chance to sit down together. For sure. And you would think after 200 and something episodes, I would know how to end these, but I don't. So I'm just going to say thank you all for listening. Thank you, Dan, for being a part of this. And I will be back next week with a brand new episode. 58:52 For more information, please visit www.thelifeshiftpodcast.com