This is the sixth Captn OffScript bonus, and it’s the part of my conversation with Haraldur “Halli” Thorleifsson that went deepest. In the main episode we covered the agency, the ramps, the tax, the whole remarkable spread of what he’s built. This is the conversation about what he’s been rebuilding underneath it all: himself, in his words, brick by brick.

Before anything else, one thing worth saying. What Halli describes here is his own path, taken slowly, over years, with a lot of professional help. It’s not a template, and neither of us offers it as one. It’s one man being honest about work most people never talk about, and that’s exactly why I kept it for this.

Why he can’t sit still

I opened by asking about something he’d mentioned: that he gets nervous when he doesn’t have something to work on. Is that what pushes him to do so many different things, the music, the charity work, the agency, all of it?

His answer was disarmingly practical. After he sold the agency, he thought it was time to relax and work on himself, and for a while he did. Then it became obvious that if he kept going down that path, it wasn’t going to lead anywhere helpful for him. He needs to be doing things, and a fair number of different things, because he gets bored quickly. If he’s on the same problem too long, especially once he feels he’s learned what it has to teach him, he gets frustrated. It’s part of why agency work suits him. Most projects run six to twelve months, and then there’s a new problem, with a whole new set of people and challenges, and he gets to learn as fast as he can until he’s producing value for the people he’s working with.

Brick by brick

Then I asked him about a phrase he’d used in an earlier interview, that he’d been rebuilding himself brick by brick. What did that actually involve?

He took it right back to when he stopped drinking. The drinking, he said plainly, was a way to numb himself from the world and from himself. And what he didn’t do at the time was go looking for the source of the things he felt he needed to numb. He just stopped the numbing and carried on. It took more than twenty years before he came back to it and thought: now I need to actually start working on this.

The boxes

The image he used for what came next is one I haven’t stopped thinking about. A lot of hard things happened in his life, his disease, losing his mother when he was young, and the only way he knew to deal with them at the time was to ignore them. Put each one in a box, and never look into the box.

He’s honest about both sides of that. It was a survival technique, and it was probably the only way he could move on back then. But as an adult, it stopped being survival and started being avoidance, and it was not a healthy way to keep moving through life. So he opened them. He did a lot of therapy, different kinds, both physical and mental, and over the course of two to three years he worked his way down to the bottom of these things. Not to say they’re fixed, he’s clear about that. There’s still a lot of work to do. But he’s in better shape than he was.

Feeling everything again

The most vulnerable part of the conversation came last. Around the age of 26, Halli started taking medication for anxiety and depression, and at the time, he says, it was necessary. But twenty years later, when he looked up, he felt like he was numb to the pain and numb to everything else along with it.

So, as part of this longer rebuilding, and gradually, he began weaning himself off it. And as the numbness lifted, a lot of the boxes opened on their own, and he had to learn how to deal with what was inside them in a better way. At the time we spoke, he was only four to six months clear of it. I’m holding myself together mostly, he told me, with the kind of honesty that doesn’t need dressing up. But he also said he’s better equipped to deal with it all than he’s ever been, and that he feels grateful to have got here, hopefully able to keep moving forward.

I told him in the moment what I’ll repeat here: it takes real bravery to do that work, and just as much to talk about it out loud. Halli has every external marker of success a creative person could want. This conversation is about the part of the work that nobody applauds, that has no launch day, and that he did anyway.

Why this is a bonus

The main episode is the story of everything Halli built. This is the quieter conversation about the person doing the building, and it deserved room to breathe on its own.

If you’ve ever packed something into a box and decided never to look at it, this one’s for you. Not as instructions. As proof that the boxes can be opened, slowly, with help, and survived.

— Alen