About

Everyone loves a good comeback story. The bullied kid who takes a stand and wins, the underdog sportsball team that shocks and amazes everyone by winning the shiny statue thing, the nerd with an early receding hairline who builds the first Martian colony… We eat this stuff up, don’t we?

Well, I do. I always have, but I was especially interested in comeback stories when I found myself living one out in real time. The super short story? I fell into small business ownership when my emergency side hustle had to become my full-time job. It was a moving company, of all things. In DC. I’d moved to DC from the glorious wilds of Montana after 9/11 to become a journalist. But I met and married a local girl who didn’t want to live anywhere but there, and so as our lives merged into one, and journalism turned out to be a really bad thing with which to raise a family, I started that moving side hustle to “temporarily” support us.

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I ran it for ten grueling years. Seriously, it was the hardest work I’d ever done, but often, the most glorious. It even made millions of dollars over the years, although costs always rose commensurate with the income. It was an exquisite mix of manual labor and high-tech marketing. I tried to get out during the last five years or so, but nothing could replace it, and nobody wanted to hire a “mover” who thought he had some marketing chops.

Eventually, marital strife and the weight of all that overhead brought it crashing to the ground. I went from making two cubic boatloads of money per year to less than an eighth of that slinging LEGO parts in exchange for marketing know-how, among other things.

After four years of struggling to dig out, with fresh new horrors stopping by every week, (“Welcome to the neighborhood,” the creature around the corner said, “I brought you some homemade fruitcake!”) I took up this Substack blog/newsletter/stream-of-consciousness as a sensible alternative to eating a bullet.

More than that, it was about time that I stopped seeking happiness in shadow careers and quasi-truthful ideologies. For reasons that are probably still too idealistic, I knew it was time to do what I always thought I should do, and the only thing that made sense to me - putting words to page and making sense of the worlds, both this one and the one beyond the Veil.

As of this writing, I’ve written almost 40 posts. Most of them are too long by about 500 words or so. Most of them veer too closely to parroting the bad advice from the Manosphere or #MoneyTwitter. But all of them are my way of examining what went wrong - my decisions, my assumptions, my thoughts, etc. And all of it documents how I’m learning to “rise above” the troubles of today and live in truth, confidently and with grace.

Notice: I’m not just trying to “build a life I don’t need a vacation from.” I’m not trying to just “live intentionally.” I believe there’s an order to life. It’s about truth, goodness and beauty, and these things, sought humbly, will unlock the transcendent. Here’s a spoiler alert: I’m not speaking New Age here: I’m an Orthodox Christian who believes in God and the Creed - I’m just not very good at it yet, and fudge it a bit to mitigate accountability.

See that? You get truth here.

As this little project grows, a somewhat broader mission emerges: this thing can’t just be about my stories all the time. I want to hear the crazy, heart-breaking, impossible stories of loss and redemption that everyone has. We hear plenty about the bad - I want to hear the good. I think we all do. We need it.

Speaking of which, do you have a story of rising above? Leave a comment below and let’s hear it. If it hits certain buttons, I’ll write a post about it.

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If you’d like to tell me your Rise Above story in a more private milieu, send an email to cjolma@gmail.com.

Welcome. I hope you find something good here.

-Chris

Why subscribe?

We need more positive in our lives, don’t we? More than that, we need inspiration and practical ideas, strategies and tactics to overcome and, well, rise above the day-to-day battles we fight. That’s the idea here, and that’s why I post pretty frequently. As of right now, target publication days are Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

This publication is currently 100% free, although I will write content exclusively for paid subscribers at some point in the near-ish future. However, if you choose to support this project with a paid subscription, I’d be exceedingly grateful! It’s $5 for the monthly subscription, $50 for an annual subscription, and “up to you” for the Founder’s subscription (arbitrarily set for $100 on the subscription page).

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Stories from the front lines and the other side of the suck.

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Rise above the noise, doubts and fear. Live free and strong.