Pivoting From Blue

When life throws everything at you at once, you learn to turn into the wave.

You know what it feels like when the storms pile up. The marriage crumbling, the parent dying, the career unraveling, the identity you built for decades dissolving into something unrecognizable. You tell yourself you can handle it. You tell yourself it will pass. But then the next wave hits before you recover from the last, and suddenly you are treading water in the dark with 3,000 feet of nothing beneath you.

Pivoting From Blue is the raw, gut-wrenching, and often hysterical story of Skip Van Gardner, a man who endured a year in which life seemed determined to break him completely. Facing the simultaneous collision of personal upheaval, a dying parent, an Alzheimer's parent, a crisis of faith, and the terrifying phenomenon known as Psychological Death, Van Gardner found himself in a place so empty he no longer knew who he was or what he was in this world. Written with the unvarnished honesty of a man who has nothing left to lose and everything to find, this story moves between the harrowing and the absurd with startling agility. From a life-threatening Atlantic crossing to hospice hallways, courtrooms of the mind, and the strange grace of painting with a keyboard, this is a story about what happens when you stop trying to outrun the storm and choose to face it head-on.

Inside these pages, you will discover:

• How turning toward pain, not away from it, becomes the unlikely path to healing

• Why humor, faith, and music can hold you together when everything else falls apart

• That surviving the unimaginable is not about being strong; it is about being willing to keep going

For anyone who has ever wondered if they could make it through the worst chapter of their life, this book is your answer.