It’s Not Life That Matters; It’s the Courage That We Bring to It

I took a sip of my morning tea hoping that the new day would be better than any day before. I had somehow tripped over the cracks of life and couldn’t seem to pull myself back up. I had woken up feeling eager to start a new day, but like every other day of my life, within the first few hours, things had gotten off track.

I was stuck in a downward vortex of fear, anxiety, and self-ridicule. I remember reading my Yogi tea bag message, “It’s not life that matters; it’s the courage that we bring to it.” I held back my tears because my courage was feeling impossibly deflated. I was sick of trying so hard just to live my own life.

How much courage do we really need to live our life? I realized that I had felt like a fraud my entire life. I was renting someone else’s story, trying to pretend that it was mine. My only consistency was in not being true and honoring myself. It is exhausting to be someone you’re not supposed to be.

Society conditioned me to believe that if you want something, you have to work hard to get it. I worked really hard, accepting the fact that life was supposed to be an uphill struggle. All of my relationships were superficial. I was in a job that I hated. I felt like a dried-up, bitter woman who married her spouse for the wrong reasons — money, acceptance, and approval — only to be faced with the sinking sensation of being alone and feeling desperation in a loveless partnership. My job in corporate provided me with nothing but a deep dark depression and an avoidance of confronting who I really was. I forced a smile as I masked the inward sinking reality that I felt alone, unworthy, and afraid to acknowledge that fear was my real drug of choice. Addicted to the avoidance of pain and the stories I would tell myself, I stayed stuck for the majority of my life.

For over a decade I lived this delusional nightmare of codependency and the search for security without success. All my romantic relationships were carefully chosen to escape the painful reality of anxiety. I’d pick partners who were addicted to numbing their pain, too. We’d escape life by doing drugs together and drinking over the fear. When I finally got up enough courage to recognize that a relationship was unhealthy, I would end it, only to find myself back in the arms of another addiction; overeating, over exercising, overworking, overspending, more men, and more drugs. I stayed in a constant state of denial consumed by my fearbased mind.

I was always waiting for the next thing to happen, the next promotion, the next boyfriend, the next anything to drag me out of my depression. It never occurred to me that “pushing” was the problem. My inner drive and constant forcing things to happen was really just a cry for help, an outburst, and a need for love. I believed the root of my depression was my job in advertising. At the time, I didn’t realize my source of depression was not my career.

I’ve since learned that depression is not an emotion or feeling, it is an avoidance of feeling our feelings. I was living one big, carefully-crafted lie created to avoid feeling my real truth. Afraid to look at the shadows and nasty cracks in my own personality, it was much easier to get drugs, buy a $100 T‑shirt that I didn’t really want, or gulp down a half-gallon of cookie dough ice cream as I cried hysterically between bites. It was much less painful (so I thought) to exercise for four hours or throw up my 3,000 calorie burrito as if it never happened only to feel more alone and even more empty inside. It was easier to run away and have a temporary moment of relief than to possibly think about what would happen if I addressed the pain. What would happen if I felt the feelings and moved through the depression? I couldn’t ask myself what was on the other side of that pain, because the pain itself felt so drastic; I’d rather sit in a burning fire than face those demons.

I thought it was normal for people to cry themselves to sleep every night. In fact my cry fests crept into the workplace. It was a daily routine to cry in the bathroom at work. The higher I climbed on the corporate ladder, the more alone, empty, and scared I felt. I was living a life that wasn’t made for me. I didn’t relate to anyone in the advertising field, and I didn’t care about selling people things that they didn’t need. It all felt so false and misdirected.

One night, regretting the fact that I had just forced my dinner into the toilet and mad at my friend for refusing to give me more painkillers, I found myself choking on my tears, crying on the cold bathroom floor.

I had hit my rock bottom.

I looked around and didn’t recognize any of my reality. The giant timber beam loft in downtown Chicago, the title of Senior Art Director at one of the world’s top advertising agencies, the giant paychecks — none of it felt real. None of it was what I really wanted. I had carefully crafted every aspect of this life, thinking that it would all make me happy, but with each new promotion and each new “thing,” I came crashing harder to the ground. I had just worked three 14-hour days in a row. The exhaustion, combined with lack of self-care had taken its toll on me.

I was suffocating in the madness because I was trying so hard to be someone I wasn’t. I was pretending to fit into a mold that was so clearly opposite of me. I bowed my head in exhaustion and prayed. I yelled and screamed into the thin air. I pleaded with God, asking Him for help. Within an instant the air stripped down and calm filled the room. The tears immediately dried. I felt something very new. I felt peace come over me. A calm presence filled the space between my neurotic self and the real me. I heard my inner voice gently say, “Follow your heart.”

I stood up, pulled the cap off my overpriced red lipstick and made a master list of what I wanted. I wrote intentions to pull myself to happiness on my bathroom mirror. No longer was it okay for me to focus on what I didn’t want. I was going to get clear and navigate my ship back to happiness. The bottom gave me clarity and an authentic insight into the possibilities of living a fulfilling life. What I wanted was to be a writer, and I longed for exploration, adventure, and to be able to work outside and from anywhere in the world. I made it my full-time mission to become a travel writer.

Suffering through the depression and addictions sparked a deep desire in me to stop holding back and to start living a life that had real meaning. Luckily for me, I discovered the source of my unhappiness was the fact that I was ignoring my inner voice and refusing to ask myself, “What do I really want?”  I immediately took stock and redirected my future. I left my highpaying corporate job, sold almost everything, and moved out west.

At first it was like teaching an old dog new tricks; I resorted to my safety zone of doing what was familiar. I took a job in marketing and the depression crept back in as I rotted under the fluorescent overhead lights. I would gaze out of the third floor window, and the trees that lined the streets would whisper to me, “Shannon, you don’t belong in there, you belong out here with us in nature. Come play with the world.” I started to use the job as a bridge to connect me to my future self. Who I wanted to be was more of a focus than who I was. I allowed myself room to be me, which included spending evenings and weekends with my writing self.

©2013. Shannon Kaiser. The above is an excerpt from Find Your Happy: An Inspirational Guide to Loving Life to Its Fullest.