What the wins and losses actually taught me. With the fear included.
By Mark Munroe
I remember the feeling more than anything else.
Not the specific day, not the exact sequence of events that led me there, but the feeling of being completely on the outside of my own life. Like I was standing in the cold looking through a window at everything I was supposed to have, everything I had somehow lost, everything that felt impossibly far away. I was homeless. I was lost. And somewhere underneath the numbness and the shame and the exhaustion, there was this desperate, almost animal need to get back in.
I wanted so badly to start over. To find my way back to something that felt like mine.
What I didn’t know then, what I couldn’t have known then, was that the very thing I was living through was teaching me the most important thing I would ever learn about myself.
I was more resilient than I had ever allowed myself to believe.
* * *
Here’s the thing about resilience that nobody tells you. It doesn’t feel like strength when you’re in it. It doesn’t feel like anything noble or admirable. It feels like desperation. It feels like having no other choice. You get up because the alternative is staying down, and staying down doesn’t feel like an option your body is willing to accept.
When I was homeless, when I had lost almost everything, when I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognise the person looking back at me, I made a decision. Not a grand, cinematic decision. A quiet, exhausted, there’s-nothing-left-to-lose decision. I was going to pick myself up and start over.
I had no idea what that meant. I just knew I had to try.
That was the first time I consciously chose to try when every reasonable part of me was telling me it was too late, too far gone, too broken to fix. It wouldn’t be the last.
* * *
I started a blog. Then a magazine. The magazine initially failed, so I went back to the drawing board, brought on collaborators, shifted the focus to things that genuinely brought me joy, and tried again. Over the next three years I worked relentlessly, and ADDICTED Magazine became something real. Global readership. Fortune 500 brand partnerships. A team. A publication I was genuinely proud of.
And then, slowly, it began to feel like it was failing again.
I remember that feeling too. The specific weight of watching something you built start to slip, the way success can quietly become something you’re just trying to hold onto rather than something you’re actually living. By 2024 I found myself in a familiar place, not quite at rock bottom this time, but standing at the edge of something that needed to change.
What I’ve come to understand, looking back across twenty-odd years of highs and lows, is that nothing was wasted. Not the music career that burned bright and faded. Not the entertainment work that did the same. Not the magazine that succeeded and then struggled. Not the homelessness, not the addiction, not the business failures, not the moments when I was absolutely certain I had run out of road.
Every single one of those things was teaching me something. I just couldn’t always see the lesson while I was living it.
* * *
The thing I was most afraid of, I realised, was never the failure itself.
It was not trying in the first place.
That fear, the specific cold dread of reaching the end of my life and not being able to say I gave it everything, that I tried every version of myself that felt real and true, that I followed every dream that called to me even when it seemed impossible, that fear drove me more than anything else ever has. More than ambition. More than the need for validation. More than the desire for success.
I was terrified of a version of myself that played it safe and stayed small. And so, again and again, I chose the harder thing. The scarier thing. The thing that required me to stand up and try when everything in me wanted to stay down.
When I left Canada in 2025, my business was already struggling. I was packing up a life, selling most of what I owned, moving to a country where I didn’t speak the language, with my partner and our dog, on a kind of hope that I had learned to trust over the years. The hope that starting over, really starting over, is always available to you if you’re willing to do it.
And somewhere in the middle of all that packing and letting go, it became clear to me. This was the pattern. Not failure. Not success. The pattern was trying. Always, relentlessly, sometimes foolishly, sometimes brilliantly, trying.
* * *
I think about the version of me that was homeless and lost and couldn’t see a way forward. I think about what I would tell him if I could.
I’d tell him that the resilience he doesn’t know he has yet is going to be the most important thing about him. That every time he gets up, even when he has no idea why, he is building something inside himself that no circumstance can take away. That the losses are real and they hurt and they matter, but they are also teaching him things that success never could.
I’d tell him that his greatest strength isn’t the magazine, or the brand deals, or the following he’ll eventually build. It’s the fact that he keeps trying. That he has never, not once, let the fear of failure be bigger than the fear of never trying.
I’d tell him that one day he’ll be 43, living in Valencia, Spain, learning Spanish badly, building something he’s genuinely proud of, and he’ll look back at all of it, the whole complicated, painful, joyful, messy arc of it, and feel something he might not expect.
Pride.
* * *
Not pride in the successes, though those matter. Not pride in surviving the hard parts, though that matters too.
Pride in the trying. In every single moment he chose to get back up and go again. In the fact that when he reaches the end of whatever this is, he will be able to say, honestly and without qualification: I tried. I tried when I didn’t believe it was possible. I tried when I wasn’t sure I’d have a roof over my head. I tried when the world told me I couldn’t, and I tried when I told myself the same thing.
Some of it worked. Some of it didn’t. Most of it didn’t go the way I thought it would.
But I tried.
And sitting here now, in the life I built by trying over and over again, I can tell you with complete certainty that it is enough. More than enough. It is, actually, everything.
What’s the thing you’re afraid of not trying?
I’d love to know. The door is always open.