Frank's Story

Childhood — Learning to Breathe

“To be nobody-but-yourself,” wrote E. E. Cummings, “is the hardest battle any human being can fight.” My first battle was simply learning to breathe.

I was a sickly child with severe asthma, frequently hospitalised and physically constrained by illness. My parents—Italian and Croatian migrants—did the best they knew, relying on traditional remedies and hard-earned resilience. We lived differently. We ate differently. I learned early what it meant to stand out.

At school, difference is rarely invisible. I became acutely aware of being watched, measured, and judged. Over time, strength became my strategy. If belonging felt uncertain, toughness offered protection.

Looking back, I see a boy not just struggling for air, but for identity. Childhood teaches us our first masks. Adulthood, if we’re willing, teaches us how to lay them down.

Addiction — The Illusion of Escape

Philosopher Iris Murdoch observed that “the self… is a place of illusion.” I came to know that illusion intimately.

In my teens and early adulthood, I sought escape through altered states—believing that relief, clarity, or freedom lived somewhere outside myself. Work took me across continents and into environments where excess was normalised and reflection was optional.

For a time, it worked—until it didn’t.

What began as escape slowly eroded direction. Success followed in external terms: business ventures, financial gains, professional momentum. But internally, purpose thinned. Relationships strained. Health faltered. I was busy, productive, and fundamentally unanchored.

Eventually, the bill came due.

I found myself stripped of certainty—divorced, unwell, financially exposed, and without a clear set of values to stand on. It was the end of a strategy that had never truly worked.

Transformation — Stepping Out of the Fog

“For many years,” Werner Erhard once said, “the truth believed is a lie.”

I had believed that changing circumstances—or chemistry—would change my life. But clarity doesn’t come from escape. It comes from seeing.

In the mid-1990s, I encountered a self-development framework that shifted everything. For the first time, I understood that the leverage I had been searching for was internal: how meaning is made, how interpretation shapes experience, how responsibility restores agency.

I stopped running. I stopped numbing. And I began the long work of living deliberately.

That moment marked the beginning of a life oriented around clarity, values, and conscious choice. Over the decades since, I’ve built a practice dedicated to helping others do the same—without shortcuts, dogma, or illusion.

The workshops and frameworks I now teach are practical, experiential, and grounded in psychological and neuroscientific principles. They are designed to restore internal authority, not dependency.

If they help you lead with greater clarity, steadiness, and purpose—then they will have done their job.

— Frank Marinko