THE BERBLY PROJECT
About Me?
THE JURY’S STILL OUT
I failed a licensing exam.
Securities law. The kind you have to pass before you’re allowed to do the job I do now. Failing it didn’t feel like getting a few questions wrong. It felt like being told no by an entire industry.
I’d like to tell you I handled that well, but unfortunately, that’s not what happened.
I walked out of that testing center feeling smaller than I had in a very long time.
So I went back, and I took the test again.
And this time…?
I passed.
I felt damn near untouchable. Powerful. Proud. Like I could do anything I wanted to do.
Maybe fly, even.
Believing that feeling was probably one of the best mistakes I ever made. Not long after “Pass” flashed across the screen, that dangerous confidence started bleeding into several decisions I would make next.
I decided the appropriate expression of feeling untouchable was signing up for a hundred-mile race. And… yes. That was the actual sequence of events.
Failed a test. Passed a test. Then…?
Signed up for my very first ultramarathon.
One hundred miles.Because apparently, when it comes to personal growth, my preferred response is escalation.
I can’t tell you exactly what I was thinking when I registered in late 2023.
All I knew was that I’d only need to run one mile one hundred times.Easy peasy… right?
The Hennepin Hundred runs point-to-point beside the Hennepin Canal, from Sterling to Colona, through a stretch of northwestern Illinois.
In the heat, the trail looked less like the Midwest and more like a desert that happened to have a canal running beside it.
Flat, they tell you. Flat and fast.
Nobody mentions that flat also means there’s nowhere for the heat to go.
I made it 65.97 miles.
Not because I quit. Because my kidneys were at risk of shutting down.
Severe dehydration. Rhabdomyolysis. Bee stings around mile three. An allergic reaction I managed until roughly mile 18.
Shots of Fireball at mile ten, because apparently that was happening too.
The whole unglamorous cascade. One hurdle followed by another.
But I had no plans to slow down, and I’d be damned if I stopped that early in the race.All I could think about was continuing to move forward. Somewhere during training, the finish line had become an unhealthy obsession I didn’t fully recognize until my body began actively arguing with me.
All I had to do was make it to mile 80. I’d been told it would be smooth sailing from there.
So I kept moving.
It was hot enough that the trail stopped behaving like a trail and started behaving like a desert.
There was almost no shade, and the sunlight bounced off the canal and directly back at me. I’d prepared for the weather we were told to expect.
Sunny. A high somewhere in the 60s.
And, ‘thankfully’ no sign of rain.
Or, at least, I thought I was thankful… at first. For the first handful of hours after the race began.
But the forecast was wrong.
The race began around seven that morning, before the sun had fully risen. By late morning, the temperature had climbed to a scorching 87 degrees.
And somewhere between darkness and daylight, as I continued moving beside that canal in the middle of nowhere Illinois… my body made an executive decision it did not consult me on.
Sixty-five point nine seven.
I know it to the hundredth of a mile.
You do when you don’t finish.
I had been certain I wasn’t capable of much. Then I became certain I was capable of anything.
Both were wrong. And the gap between them is roughly where I live.
I spend a lot of time asking questions.
Sometimes I’m pulling things apart to find the disconnect.
Looking for the moment when what something was supposed to be and what it actually became stopped being the same thing.
I’ve asked those questions about businesses, families, relationships, and myself.
At mile 65.97, I got an answer to the last one that I hadn’t asked for.
The subject changes constantly. The questions don’t.
They follow me from one thing to the next, changing outfits and introducing themselves under different names. No matter where they begin, they tend to lead me back to the same place.
People. Behavior. Patterns.
I’m enthralled by the strange machinery underneath what people do, what they avoid, and the stories they tell themselves to justify both.
The fractures that form quietly, long before anyone notices something is breaking.
It’s the one system I’ll probably spend the rest of my life studying without ever fully understanding. The older I get, the less convinced I become that people understand why they do half the things they do.
We tell ourselves stories about our motivations because stories are cleaner than uncertainty.
The truth is usually messier.
That’s why psychology fascinates me.
Not because I think people can be reduced to formulas. It’s quite the opposite, actually.
The deeper I look, the more complicated everyone becomes.
Including me.
A lot of my life is spent thinking about questions that never formally introduce themselves as questions.
They don’t arrive carrying question marks.
There is no knock at the door.
There’s just a seat at the back of the room that was vacant before, and now, suddenly…
… it’s no longer empty.
Then it’s six months later, and I realize I’ve been trying to answer the same question the entire time.
It was already in the room with me.
Waiting…
The questions rarely sound like the ones that came before them.
Why do some people become softer after loss while others become harder?
Why can I remember a conversation from fifteen years ago word for word but forget why I walked into my kitchen?Why am I willing to attempt a hundred-mile race through the middle of nowhere, Illinois, but still occasionally feel anxious walking into a room full of people?
Why do some moments stay with us forever;
…while entire years seem to disappear all at once?
They don’t always feel like thoughts.
They’re more like a voice-over where a voice-over shouldn’t be. A setting I accidentally turned on somewhere around adolescence and never figured out how to disable.
Most people seem to have an internal monologue.
Mine appears to have hired a production crew. Sound. Lighting. Narration. Occasionally, a guest lecturer.
Nobody involved seems to understand the budget.
That tendency to pull apart complicated things eventually followed me into my career.
I work in finance, which still surprises the hell out of me, sometimes.
Because there was a point when I found the entire subject intimidating.
It felt like a world built out of unfamiliar terminology, unexplained acronyms, and people who spoke with enough confidence that asking a basic question felt like admitting you didn’t belong in the room.
Eventually, I realized that finance is largely a language, and most people are never formally taught how to speak it.
The words can sound scarier than the concepts they describe. People hear them, decide the subject is beyond them, and stop asking questions at the exact moment they need the most clarity. Or, maybe, don’t even know the questions they need to ask. And that’s what shaped how I approach my work.
I care about making complicated information understandable.
I want questions to be taken seriously,
and I want people to feel like they can keep asking until an answer actually makes sense.
For a long time, I thought I would eventually figure myself out.
Not perfectly. Just… enough.
Enough to answer basic questions about who I am and what I want without feeling like I was constructing a well-organized approximation of a person instead of describing one.
Five years used to sound like forever.
Now, five years feels like enough time for life to rearrange all the furniture while you’re distracted in another room.
Five years ago, I would have described myself with confidence. Maybe even certainty. A lot of those answers have changed.
Not necessarily because they were wrong. They were just incomplete. Temporary. Built from information that no longer exists in quite the same form.
That’s why I’m careful with guarantees now.
Life has consistently delivered on exactly one of them:Everything changes.
People. Relationships. Plans. Entire versions of yourself.
One day they’re here. The next day they’re memories.And somewhere in between, if you’re lucky…
…you get enough time to pay attention.
I’ve lost people I loved.
I’ve watched certainty disappear directly in front of me.
Some of my plans bloomed beautifully.
Others were already rotting at the roots before they had a chance to grab onto anything promising.
I’ve started over more times than I expected to. More times than I wanted to.
Also more times than I thought I could.I’ve discovered strengths I didn’t know were possible and weaknesses I would have preferred to leave undiscovered.
I’ve been humbled repeatedly.
Because apparently once wasn’t enough.
Somewhere along the way, the detours stopped feeling like detours.
They became the road.
The grief that rearranges your life.
The mistakes that make you question your character.
The risks that paid off.
The risks that absolutely did not.
The random Tuesday afternoon that meant nothing until years later.
None of it feels disconnected anymore.
An idea. A memory. A decision. A belief. A loss. A lesson.
One thread connected to another.
A giant web of cause and effect that only becomes visible when you look backward.
I think that’s why I write.
Not because I have answers. I don’t.
If anything, I have significantly more questions now than I did when I started.
Writing gave me somewhere to put them. It gave me a way to pay attention and create meaning in the middle of chaos.
It’s how I identify patterns. How I connect things that originally seemed unrelated until I realize they were standing beside each other the entire time.
It’s how I understand other people.
It’s how I try to understand myself.
Or at least perform understanding convincingly enough to feel like I’m making progress.
Every experience leaves fingerprints behind. You rarely notice them while they’re being left.
You notice them years later, when you look backward and realize parts of your life have been shaping you the entire time.
Every version of myself I once believed was permanent eventually turned out to be temporary.
A rough draft.
A stepping stone.
A plot twist.
So who am I?
Honestly, I’m not completely sure.
And I think I’ve finally made peace with that.
I love deeply.
I ask too many questions. I find humor in places where it probably shouldn’t exist.
I believe people are usually more complicated than they appear.
I believe small moments matter more than we realize while we’re living them.
I believe paying attention is an act of love.
Despite everything I’ve lost, everything that has hurt, and everything that didn’t go according to plan, I still look toward whatever comes next with a ridiculous amount of curiosity.
Which is either optimism or poor pattern recognition.
THE JURY’S STILL OUT.
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