There Was Never a Straight Line

By Deevo Tindall Read time: ~6 minutes

Why You Should Read This

This isn’t a story about career changes or entrepreneurship or even branding. It’s a story about becoming. It’s about the long, messy, ridiculous, beautiful road between who you were told to be and who you actually are.

If you’ve ever felt behind, confused, stuck, pivoting for the fifteenth time, rebuilding a life you never consciously chose, or wondering why the hell your path looks more like a bowl of spaghetti than a straight line, then this one is for you.

Because nothing about my journey was strategic, none of it was neat, and all of it brought me here.

The Script I Was Given

When I left Trinity College-Hartford in 1998, I had no clue what I was supposed to do with my life. I was handed three doors:

1. Travel around the country as an associate producer for ESPN for twenty grand a year.

2. Become a camp counselor in Maine for even less.

3. Or jump into a bank’s executive management development program for sixty grand and a ten-thousand-dollar signing bonus.

Naturally, I took door number three. Because it looked responsible, because nobody ever told me there was another option, because I never had a father guiding me through long, meaningful conversations about purpose during late-night car rides.

I thought life was the script:

Go to school. Get the job. Buy the house. Get married. Build the fence. Have the kids. Take the two-week vacation. Pretend it fulfills you.

For fifteen years, I played my part, and I climbed fast because I’m talented and driven and wired for overachievement, but inside I felt like that Dunkin’ Donuts guy waking up before sunrise muttering, “Time to make the donuts.”

That was me. Every. Single. Morning.

“The truth is, the path only looks straight when you’re looking backwards. Becoming is messy while it’s happening.”— Brené Brown

The Break in the Pattern

Photography showed up out of nowhere after a brutal experience with my own wedding photographer. I thought, “Fuck me, if that guy can charge five grand for this lackluster effort, then surely I can do it better.”

So I hustled. I took any job I could. I even talked my corporate job into letting me introduce digital cameras before digital was even a thing... and slowly, I fell in love with storytelling.

A layoff in 2010 pushed me out of the nest. I built a multiple six-figure photography business from scratch. Traveled the world. Shot destination weddings. Met hundreds of amazing people.

And somewhere in there, I realized my real gift wasn’t the camera, it was the way I could see people. The way I could help them open up, unpack, and actually show up as themselves.

The Hard Pivot: Rebuilding the Builder

From there, the journey looked like a Jackson Pollock painting. A little chaotic. A little brilliant. A lot unplanned.

I tried marketing companies. Brand studios. Creative agencies. Business models that worked until they didn’t. Ideas that felt good until they didn’t.

But every pivot pushed me deeper into the question I had been avoiding for years:

Who am I, really, and what the hell do I actually want out of this life? Surely, this can't be it?

That singular question dragged me into ten years of internal excavation following my divorce. Therapy. Coaches. Shadow work. Jungian psychology. Emotional rewiring. Human design. Epigenetics. Patterns, programming, childhood trauma, the whole haunted attic.

People see the branding work I do now and think it’s marketing, IT IS NOT. It’s identity architecture disguised as business development, it’s psychology wearing a strategic outfit.

Because the truth is simple when you listen... you can’t build a business stronger than the person building it.

And I say that as someone who tried. Multiple times. Two failed businesses. Multiple broken relationships. A lifetime of overachieving, hyper-vigilance, and unresolved trauma from a childhood full of chaos that shaped the way I performed for love, success, and belonging.

I had to break down. Rebuild. Break down again. And rebuild again. Until I finally understood that growth doesn’t just come from reinvention, it comes from remembering and then rebuilding.

“Life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”— George Bernard Shaw

Where It All Landed

Somewhere between raising two daughters [mostly] alone, building and selling businesses, surviving too many heartbreaks, and collecting more emotional scar tissue than I care to admit, I found the through-line:

Personal development and professional alignment are the same conversation.

You can’t brand what you haven’t faced. You can’t market what you haven’t metabolized. You can’t scale what your identity won’t support. Your story is your strategy. Your nervous system is your business partner. Your inner narrative is your marketing department.

Branding became the intersection where all of it finally made sense, the psychology, the creativity, the business acumen, the human behavior, the philosophy, the decades of hard lessons, the pain, the rebuilding, the becoming.

And now, helping others do the same is the purpose that found me.

“Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart.Who looks outside dreams; who looks inside awakens.”— Carl Jung

The Truth Underneath the Messy Middle

There was never a plan, there was never a straight line, there was only curiosity, missteps, pivots, heartbreak, resilience, and the belief that life is too damn short to keep living someone else’s script.

Everything you build is an extension of who you’re becoming. So if you’re in a season where nothing feels straight or clear or linear, good, it means the next chapter is trying to introduce itself.

“There was never a straight line. Just the long, honest road back to myself. And the day I stopped performing the script and started listening to my own life, everything began to make sense.”— Deevo

If You’re In Your Own Becoming…

If any part of my story sounds like the chapter you're in, send me a message. I won’t give you the answers,(my former coach Nick taught me this) but I will ask you the questions that pull the truth to the surface so you can build from alignment instead of expectation.

Because the only thing more exhausting than becoming someone… is pretending you’re already there.