From Bedridden to the Boardroom: Life Beings When You Lose Everything

Some mornings, the entire project for the day was making it fifteen feet to the bathroom.

David Good spent most days of the week in bed. Migraines and neck pain that had not let up in months. A depression that medication after medication failed to touch. A twenty-year software career that was finished. He was thirty-seven years old, and by any reasonable projection, that was the end of the story.

It wasn't.

Eighteen sessions of electroconvulsive therapy did not touch the depression, and they took something with them. His memory became a library with missing books. He lost advanced math. He lost board games. He rebuilt anyway, from a boba tea shop in West Michigan and from his room at night, running virtual events for people in other countries who could not find a room of their own either.

What grew from it became International Friend Connection, a peer-led volunteer community that reached more than fifty chapters in over twenty countries.

Six years into it, after his mother's death, he was diagnosed autistic. At forty-three, he finally had an explanation for the loneliness that had been the water he swam in since childhood, and for why he had spent his life reverse-engineering things other people seemed to receive for free. Two years after that, he was in the boardroom of one of the world's largest community platforms, telling them what he had built with it. The same path carried him to the United Nations.

This book is the honest account of how that happened, including the parts most recovery stories leave out.

What finally helped was not one thing. TMS, experimental psychedelic treatment, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy all mattered. So did a room full of people who were glad he showed up. He is not able to rank them.

The research is only now catching up to how psychiatric medication behaves in autistic bodies, which nobody could have known at the time. Therapy, which he does not dismiss and which he credits with saving his life, was never built to give him the thing he needed most: somewhere to go after the fifty-minute hour ended.

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Bob Burg, coauthor of The Go-Giver, calls David one of his "real-life action heroes." David Siegel, former CEO of Meetup and Investopedia, chose him to represent hundreds of thousands of organizers worldwide. Perry Knoppert, founder of The Octopus Movement, puts it plainly: "He is not trying to fit into the old world. He is helping to create the next one." And Dr. Liliya Bakiyeva Wheatcraft, autistic psychiatrist and author of AUTISTIC First Principles, calls it "a no-stigma, psychologically safe ecosystem" and "a much needed resource."

David Good is a Points of Light honoree and a recipient of multiple Presidential Service Awards for volunteer leadership.

Nothing anyone said to him in that bedroom would have convinced him, so he is not going to try to convince you. He will only tell you this. That bedroom was not the last room he was in, and some of the rooms that came after were good.