How a Prison Cell Door Closing Behind Me Taught Me About Reinvention

I reported to federal prison 9 years ago today.

The sound of a prison cell door closing behind me was the sound of my old life dying.

Only through the lens of hindsight, I see that it was also the sound of my new life being born.

There’s a famous saying,

“When one door closes another door opens.”

People love this quote; it’s thrown around in the personal development and motivational space to hype people up.

But it’s an incomplete and empty platitude.

The full quote from Alexander Graham Bell is

“When one door closes another door opens but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

This was me to the T.

I had to let go of the closed door and find the open door; hell, I had to build that new door from the ground up.

That process is the essence of reinvention.

I could (I already have, and there are more coming) write a book on the subject, but I’ll distill it down to this:

Rarely is that new door handed to us on a silver platter.