You’re still here. Honestly, I’m impressed. I figured the unsubscribe button would have done its job by now.

Apparently, you’re either a glutton for punishment or genuinely curious. Either way—you’re getting more.

Sunday is when this thing runs without guardrails. No PR polish. No handlers hovering with “brand-safe” edits. No marketing team pretending this was focus-grouped. Just the truth, or at least the version that hasn’t been trademarked yet.

This is ADOTAT Unfiltered—the edition that never makes it into the pitch deck.
Where buzzwords are deleted on sight, spin gets shredded, and “authenticity” isn’t a KPI.

What you’ll find here are half field notes, half confessions—dispatches from the messy edges of media, tech, and whatever’s left of honesty. I didn’t plan to write this. But after one too many “thought leadership” panels and performative LinkedIn sermons, someone needed to say what everyone’s thinking but too polite—or too funded—to admit.

This newsletter costs less than a seasonal cup of overpriced coffee foam.
It also contains more truth than any RFP you’ll read this quarter.

Your Sunday inbox could be full of motivational quotes and “grindset” nonsense.
Instead, it’s this. A little chaos, a little clarity, and maybe something real.

You’re welcome.

End transmission.

Saturday night, my body betrayed me with the quiet confidence of a coup.

No alarms.

No swelling music of impending doom.

One moment I was standing — the hum of my computer still in the air, the half-finished thoughts of another overworked night lingering in my head — and the next, my right leg simply opted out of existence.

No strength, no signal, no negotiation.

Just absence.

The fall wasn’t cinematic. There was no slow motion.

Just a sickening thud, a bright flash behind my eyes, and the cold realization that gravity has a cruel sense of humor.

And as I lay there — half-conscious, half-angry, fully stunned — I thought: So this is it. This is the punchline.

I texted my wife, the message simple and pathetic: “I fell. Not sure how bad.”

She ran from the other building — our new office, a work in progress like everything else in our lives — and found me on the floor, limbs splayed like punctuation marks in a sentence I hadn’t meant to write.

That’s when it hit me: this wasn’t a random fall. This was my body filing a grievance after decades of unpaid overtime.

I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, a genetic condition that turns the body into an unreliable narrator. My collagen — the stuff that’s supposed to hold the show together — is essentially cheap glue from a dollar store, and it’s been peeling off in slow motion for years.

Every joint has its own agenda.

My hip occasionally decides to vacation outside its socket.

My feet feel like cracked glass. My fingers bruise from typing too much.

But this week, something new crept in: the sense that my mobility was slipping into memory.

It’s a strange thing, realizing your body has become a poorly coded app — glitching, lagging, refusing updates. Every step feels like negotiating with a bureaucrat who’s lost your file.

You plead for stability, and your joints answer, “We’ll get back to you in 6-8 business months.”

And beneath all that pain, there’s an even more sinister whisper: You don’t control anything anymore.

That’s when I understood — maybe for the first time in my life — that the body isn’t a vehicle; it’s a mirror. And mine was reflecting back decades of arrogance, exhaustion, and denial.

I wasn’t always this fragile. Once upon a time — a phrase I can use without irony — I was made of steel, caffeine, and unchecked ambition.

By 24, I made my first million.
By 30, I made twenty-five more.
Cash. Real, untraceable, ridiculous money.

I lived like a high-frequency trading algorithm disguised as a man.

Advertising was my temple, and I was both rabbi and golden calf.
I didn’t sell products — I sold belief.
And like all false prophets, I confused worship with respect.

People weren’t people; they were metrics.
Clients were leads.
Employees were throughput.
Money was proof of existence.

My faith wasn’t in God. It was in conversion rates.

You tell yourself you’re “building something.” But what you’re really building is a beautiful prison, gilded with success and lined with fear.

And when it starts to collapse, you realize: all the while, you weren’t climbing. You were digging.

When the noise stopped — when the money slowed, when the admiration curdled, when the phones stopped ringing — I was left alone with the person I’d ignored for thirty years.

And I didn’t like him.

He was brittle.
He was furious.
He was lonely in a way that luxury can’t anesthetize.

Most of the people I thought loved me were seasonal employees of my fortune. They clocked out when the cash dried up. Girlfriends saw me as a wallet wrapped in opinions. Business partners saw me as a logo with legs.

When I fell this week — literally, violently — I saw every one of those falls replayed in my head.

Not as a montage, but as an indictment.

Because falling doesn’t just humble you. It introduces you to the version of yourself that success had been shielding from view.

There’s an intimacy in falling that’s almost sacred.

When you’re sprawled on the ground, bleeding or broken, there’s no posturing left.

You can’t network from the floor.

You can’t perform authenticity for LinkedIn.

You can only exist — stripped of narrative, stripped of spin.

Pain has a way of erasing the scaffolding of pride. It forces you to confront how much of your identity was built from scaffolding in the first place.

Now I limp through days with a walking stick, sometimes none, sometimes two. I catch myself staring at wheelchairs online, the way some people browse new cars. It’s both horrifying and oddly practical.

I wonder how much longer I’ll walk.

How much longer I’ll pretend this is temporary.

How much longer I’ll fight the inevitable truth: that the person I was — the one who ran toward every deal and sprinted from every feeling — is gone.

And maybe that’s okay.

Maybe learning to not walk is learning to stop running from myself.

This isn’t a redemption story. I’m not healed. I’m not Zen. I still get angry. I still curse at pain that doesn’t care. I still offend people when I’m trying to be funny.

But there’s a strange kind of clarity in disintegration. The more I fall apart, the more human I feel.

For years, I thought success made me solid — but it only made me heavy. And when you’re heavy enough, gravity always wins.

Now I’m learning something new: how to exist while falling. How to find grace in the collapse. How to love the wreckage.

Because in the end, we all fall.
Some of us just get there faster.