In 2007 a flood wiped me out completely. I lost my home, my studio, everything. I went to work that morning in a state of order...and came home to chaos... The house was condemned by the insurance company. I was homeless.
I knocked the house down and rebuilt another house in situ 20 feet higher and with flood defences. That took 8 years of hard work and pain and ups and downs....
13 years on...I have no mortgage, I have just quit my job after 15 years teaching TV and Film production to 16-19 year olds due to the UK government crushing the education system with nonsense bureaucracy, Bloat and a pure toxic working environment. This caused me nothing but stress and anxiety.
From the 18th December I will be jobless... That 2007 flood that was beyond my control was the best thing that happened to me. It made me wakeup and realise what meaning was. Success is not money, or fame or adulation...These are all illusion. Success is internal. Its meaning from within. Its getting a text from your 19 year old daughter telling you she loves you. Its building a pond for 3 years by hand to save and protect your mental health. Success is to love and to be loved.
New challenges await me...I'll need to find another job at some point...But 2007 taught me that the only way to true meaning is ,Like Camus puts it. "Is to embrace the absurd".
Glad to hear you rebuild your life and found true meaning. I experienced something similar, but on a much, much smaller scale.
I was working as an orchestral musician in Sweden, fresh out of conservatory, and eager to do well. I was working an opera orchestra job and doing auditions all the time, so some days I was playing violin close to 10 hours a day - a few years in and I had constant and severe shoulder pain, but kept playing, out of fear of losing my contract and the social stigma of being "one of those" who complained about the pain that almost all classical musicians live with. Needles to say, that was the dumbest thing I have ever done. When finally the pain was so severe I couldn't even lift my instrument up to play without tears, it was too late. It took almost a year to get a proper diagnosis (chronic bursitis and biceps tendonitis, due to a massive shoulder blade dysfunction). In that year I tried to return to work many times, which just made it worse and worse. When I finally got the proper diagnosis, I realised I would probably never play again.
In the end it took 18 months of intense daily physio therapy, and I suffered a massive depression along the way. I couldn't even stand to listen to music for almost a year, because it reminded of the one thing I wanted to do, but couldn't. Despite numerous testaments from expert that even office desk work would cause chronic damage to my shoulder, the government insisted I wasn't eligible for any sickness cover, and I damn near became homeless. The only reason I didn't was a sympathetic social worker, who understood and kept putting my case file at the bottom of the pile.
In the end though, it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it set me free as a musician. When I was finally able to return to playing I now longer felt the pressure of having to be successful. I returned and rebuild because I wanted to, not because I was driven by my previous mad ambitions. That eventually led me to discovering that I loved playing viola more than violin, I switched and had a good career as an orchestral viola freelancer for many years. Then one day I realised I wasn't creatively satisfied by that, moved to Vietnam and now I write music and make sample libraries. That would never have happened without my injury, I was so blinded by my ambition I missed all the peripheral opportunities - there's a French expression I think - "idé fix"? Sometimes I miss playing orchestra, but I'm much happier now exploring my own creative instincts and experimenting with sampling, synths and new kinds of music, than if I had stayed in an orchestra job for the rest of my life - and I have experienced cultures and parts of the world I would probably never have seen otherwise.