The Long Way to a Simple Thing

For most of my life, I was better at achieving than at being honest with myself.

As a kid I felt like an outsider — the one who never quite belonged, who stayed quiet unless spoken to, who would rather disappear than risk being rejected. When things got hard, I escaped into my head: planning a better future, somewhere else, later. I got good at imagining, and good at hiding. What I wasn't good at was simply showing up — being in my own life, with other people, as myself.

So I did what a lot of capable people do: I built an identity around being good at something. For me it was film and television. I started in a local youth club making short films and worked my way up, with no formal education, to some of the biggest productions in Norway — editing, colour grading, finishing, delivery. I was the one who made things look right at the end. And for a while, being useful felt like being enough.

It wasn't. I worked too much for too long, chasing significance, until I burned out — and had to admit I'd built my whole life around my work instead of around actually living it.

The turn

That was where the real journey started. Around 2010 I stumbled into personal development, terrified — I spent the breaks of my first seminar hiding in the bathroom so no one would have to talk to me. But something cracked open. I began to take small steps toward showing up: saying what I thought, connecting, letting myself be seen. The same energy I'd spent on anxiety slowly became available for curiosity, for other people, for life.

Over the years that followed I kept working in film — but something quietly shifted. I started teaching: postproduction, colour, the craft. And I noticed the part I loved wasn't the technique. It was the people. Watching a student stop doubting themselves. Helping someone unblock, find their voice, believe that what they had to say mattered. That pulled me further — into mentoring, and eventually into work with young creative talents in Kenya and East Africa, helping them find courage, direction, and the means to make their own work.

Somewhere in there I realised this had been the thread the whole time. Not the footage. The person in front of me.

The same idea, from every angle

I explored it from many directions. I ran online meditation gatherings. I held courses for men looking for clarity about who they are and what they actually want — purpose, direction, putting down old weight. I made a podcast that was spiritual and experimental, an early coming-out of a more searching part of myself. The spirituality is still part of me, though I've never fit neatly into any of its boxes. What stayed constant underneath all of it was one interest: helping people get out of their own noise and hear what's true for them.

I'd been circling the same idea for years without quite naming it. More than a decade ago I wrote a line on an old blog that I still stand by.

I think I'd been trying to live my way into that sentence ever since.

What I actually learned

Here's the hard part: you can read every book, do the therapy, understand your patterns perfectly — and still feel stuck. Insight alone doesn't move things. What moves things is having room. Being seen. A space large enough that the thing which felt cramped and contradictory finally has somewhere to breathe. In that space you stop needing the answers, because you can see clearly — and from clarity, direction becomes steady, even when life is changing fast.

I also learned you don't have to reach that space alone, or through a crisis. (I once had to get a concussion before I'd put everything down.) You can step into it on purpose, with someone whose only job is to hold it with you.

That's what Finding Rabbe is. It brings together everything that came before — the years of creative work, the teaching and mentoring, the long road back to myself — into one simple thing: a steady, honest place where capable people who carry a lot can set it down, think out loud, and finally hear themselves.

If any of this sounds like where you are: you're not as stuck as it feels. And you don't have to find the way out by yourself.