A few days ago, I reconnected with a good friend of mine. Some months had elapsed since our last conversation, and as we spoke, he shared with me that he had listened to one of my podcast episodes, where I chronicled my experience with mental illness and dealing with suicidal thoughts.
He then told me that he had recently experienced something similar.
Here he was, an extremely talented person, who is also one of the smartest and kindest people that I know, and he was pondering whether to end his life.
But contrary to me, who only got so far as to contemplate jumping from the edge of my balcony, my friend, in a drunken haze, actually cut his wrist and started bleeding before he became fully aware of what he had done.
Fortunately, he regained consciousness fast enough that he was able to call his neighbour and ask for help. He was rushed to the hospital, and as it turned out, he was saved.
As I would learn through our conversation, my friend’s struggle with mental health largely mirrored mine.
We both had put our value elsewhere: a successful business, a seemingly-perfect relationship, brands, names, appearances, a present brimming with success and a future full of promise. But because we had given this external power so much weight, we feared what would happen if we lost it. We feared what would happen when, as it does with the nature of everything, the whirlwind we were in came to an end.
Since those external factors were what gave us identity, and power, and worthiness, we feared they would be gone, because, with them, we’d be gone as well.
And so we became obsessed with preserving them.
But because our actions to preserve them were fear-driven, they drove us crazy until we could not keep a grip on things anymore. We could not handle ourselves.
Five years apart, my friend and I reached the same conclusion. That type of life — in the perpetual chase of external approval, of the appearance of success, and the fear of losing it — was not worth living.
Like everything in nature, we needed to change — evolve — or else, die.
I sat at the edge of the balcony of my forty-seventh floor flat on a day with no wind. My friend was blessed his neighbour answered the phone. For both of us, a higher power made the choice, and that gave us the chance to change.
This past week, I have been going through The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, Debbie Ford’s book as to how to get in touch with our dark side, and the importance of learning to accept it through love and compassion.
For most of my life, I had trouble integrating the different parts of myself. As a result, I did what I was trained to do: compartmentalizing. I did what would bring me approval or make me look good depending on where I was and who I was with, and I hid what I felt wouldn’t be acceptable. Even if I knew I was acting out of fear, there was, always, an endless flurry of reasons to justify it.
Going through all the integrative — and incredibly healing — shadow work was rough. For a couple of days, it was loathsome — it filled me with rage and anger that I did not know I was still carrying. I did my best to find healthy outlets to release these stored emotions, my most recent tennis match being one of them.
But to do this work was also fantastic: a liberating experience that resulted in streams of tears and a considerably heavy weight lifted off my shoulders, accompanied by a quiet and joyful sense of peace.
In his book Radical Forgiveness, Colin Tipping tells the story of a woman who sought him out for therapy.
Jane came to one of our five-day retreats in the north Georgia mountains. She had had a mastectomy and was awaiting a bone marrow transplant…On the second visit, she arrived in a distressed state, because a routine MRI scan had that day discovered minute spots of cancer in her brain.
Jane was an attractive woman in her early forties who had not been involved in a romantic relationship for about seven years…As I probed further into her relationship situation, she got in touch with some incredible grief she still felt around a relationship she had ended a number of years earlier. This eight-year relationship had been extremely passionate and intense…Four years into the relationship, which she believed was soon to be consummated in marriage, she discovered that he was married already and had children. He had no intention of leaving his wife. Jane was devastated but could not stop seeing him. It took her another four extremely painful years to extricate herself from the relationship.
As she was going out the door at the end of our session, Jane said in a whisper, “I put him in the attic…Everything I had accumulated over the years that had any connection to this man, or that would remind me of him, I stuffed in a box. I then put the box up in the attic. It’s still there. I haven’t touched it since.”
For me, the attic is where I had stored everything related to my shadow. The attic was where all my fears resided: the fear of being found out — of being whatever would be unpleasant to the other person, as senseless as that may sound — the fear of not being enough, and with it, all the stories that could relate a sentiment of guilt, or shame, or insufficiency.
So I, too, decided to empty the attic.
And I discovered that when we decide to do so, we begin to make peace with whatever was in it. We learn to be grateful for it — for how it has guided us, and as we do that, we take long strides on our way back home.
Ford’s work in The Dark Side of the Light Chasers, too, has to do with learning to thank our shadow side for playing its role in what we have become. When we deny certain aspects of ourselves, she says, we overcompensate by becoming their opposite.
Here is one of her illustrations:
Norman is a perfect example of this phenomenon…I asked him to tell me two words he wouldn’t want said about him in the newspaper. He replied that he would not want to be called dull or stupid. I laughed out loud. “Exactly,” I said. “No one who knows you today would ever say you were dull or stupid.”
Because he’d always put his family first, Norman had never taken the time to finish his education. But after the death of his wife of more than thirty years, Norman had gone back to school to get a master’s degree. He had enrolled in a program at a university near his home and had ridden his bike to school daily. He graduated with honors and is now working toward his PhD.
When he is not in school, Norman is travelling all over the country, going to conferences and lecturing on physical health and the ageing process. He recently went to a Buddhist retreat for a month to get in touch with his spirituality. Would anyone meeting Norman consider him dull or stupid? Everyone I know would call him courageous, interesting, and bright.
But Norman’s decision not to be dull and stupid actually runs his life, and results in his always competing with himself, to prove that he’s not dull or stupid. No matter how hard he works he always has to do more to make sure he’s never exposed, and show the world that he’s smart and interesting.
It was fairly easy for Norman to recognize how his life is run by the words dull and stupid. He always feels that whatever he achieves is not enough. The irony, of course, is that “dull” and “stupid” have given him his enormous drive and determination. They force him to seek out interesting people and places. If he didn’t have this terrible aversion to these two words, we don’t know if Norman would have had the drive to do everything he’s accomplished in the past four years. Norman perceived the gifts of these two aspects and understood that he is everything. How can we know smart unless we know stupid? How can we know interesting without becoming dull?
For me, the two traits that I resisted the most were being unlikeable and oscillating in the balance between perfectionism — to the extent of OCD — and messy. But the desire not to be unlikeable led me to be friendly, kind, and compassionate, to be genuinely interested in people. And when I embraced the unlike-ability in myself, it gave me freedom. It gave me freedom from whatever people could think or say about me. And therefore, it allowed me to change the potentially-damaging behaviour of people-pleasing.
At the same time, as I stopped being afraid of being a perfectionist, I could own those parts of myself that were more organised and disciplined, and as I stopped being afraid of being a mess, I gave myself creative freedom, and also, much-needed self-compassion and love — especially when things don’t work according to plan. I gave myself permission to flow with the plans of a higher power, instead of trying to control everything.
How much time do we waste trying?
And how much of this trying is to be worthy in the eyes of somebody else? A desperate attempt to secure somebody else’s approval and love?
The good friend of mine who thought about ending his life is a gifted painter, and a very skilled architect, landscaper, and singer.
But his issue was the same issue that for years plagued me as a writer and at many of the other things that I do.
He tried to paint, and I tried to write. But what we were really striving for was to be liked, to be praised, to be acknowledged — we were aching to be somebody. And in this pursuit, we forgot that we already were somebody.
And so our work was mild, dull, aesthetically beautiful — or in my case, with flowery words — but shallow, ultimately people-pleasing, like a film director’s attempt to get the much-coveted Academy Award, prioritizing recognition over impactful and compelling storytelling.
In our call, my friend told me how, since his failed suicide attempt, his painting work has flourished like never before. In his words, this happened because he simply stopped trying to paint, and focused on painting his heart out. His work, now, is more unique, more ambitious, more original. Yes, it has its fair share of detractors too — but people can now see his soul and spirit reflected on a canvas.
In my case, even though it took me slightly longer, I began to write and stopped trying to write The Next Great American Novel. I became myself. I gave a voice to those all unexpressed aspects of me, and also, to all the wonderful stories of the amazing and inspiring people that I’ve met through the years. I started uncovering my golden Buddha and remembering the road back home.
So now, I write. I am not scared of people knowing anything about me. If they find out something that they don’t like, I’m okay with that. Because I’ve experienced it for a reason, and by sharing it — as it happened with my mental illness and how it helped my friend who was going through the same — I can help somebody heal. I can help somebody feel less alone, and remind that somebody that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
So, I’m okay. I’m okay if people find out that for many years I was an outright liar, partly because I had not learned to handle conflict. I’m okay with people knowing that I blew hundreds of thousands of dollars at twenty-five in — as investment bankers would say at the time — models and bottles. That I cruelly laughed at colleagues who graduated from the same schools as me and didn’t earn as much as I did. That I dated a stripper. That my family had to bail me out on numerous occasions. That, as permanent traveller and immigrant, I have helped people to get into a country illegally.
Also, that there were many times where I could not stand up for myself, being a sensitive soul in a cutthroat culture, and I simply withdrew. And that, like my friend, I’m living here on borrowed time.
Because being aware of that, I can share, through my experience, that in that borrowed time, anybody can change. Anybody can transform him or herself in a force for good. And we can all help each other heal, and grow, and love, and walk back home together.
All of my experiences have made me stronger, and if you are open to it, your experiences can do the same for you.
Another book I’m reading at the moment, Becoming Dr. Q. by Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa, an astonishing chronicle of the author’s journey from migrant farm worker to brain surgeon, explains it well — and how it happened to the author after a near-death experience:
Whoever once I had been — seeking to prove myself by material means in order to go home a conquering hero — was no more. Instead, I had to go where the path didn’t lead and see where it took me, using unprecedented levels of energy to reinvent myself, to move farther and with more passion in order to be who I was and to become who I was meant to be.
Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosa became a prominent neurosurgeon and neuroscientist even when he was told repeatedly while growing up that he would never leave the fields.
And if he had tried to please others, and to conform, he might have never left them, and would still be picking cotton.
If they had listened to the critic, Michael Jordan would have quit basketball in high school, Lionel Messi would have never played soccer because he was too short, and The Beatles and U2 — both initially rejected by labels — would have never inspired us with their music.
A report on Fred Astaire once read: Can’t act; slightly bald; can dance a little.
But we know very well how those stories unfolded.
As Yoda said, do, or do not. There is no try.
Trying is about pleasing other people. Trying assumes we need to convince, to persuade, to prove our worthiness instead of knowing that we have it in us to do what it takes. Trying gives our power away.
Trying assumes we are not enough. Doing shows that we are.
Doing and being are about the heart. About walking the road back home with confidence.
And while we walk it, we might experience, at times, that feeling of worthlessness, but it is okay. It will pass. Just by being aware of it, we will be able to let it go.
So, do.
Stop trying to be the best in the class, and focus on learning everything you can about that which makes you tick. Devour books for passion, not for duty.
Stop trying to be the richest person in the world, and build a business that positively impacts millions of people, one person at a time. Riches will come as a byproduct, and you’ll be so fulfilled, that you won’t need them, and you’ll gracefully share them with those you care about with an open heart.
Stop trying to prove yourself, because there’s nothing to prove..
Sing. Write. Trade. Hit baseballs. Build spreadsheets. Bartend. Cook. Collect precious artifacts from abandoned buildings. Start a family. Enjoy your solitude. Whatever you came to the world to do, do it with all of your heart, one moment at a time.
Ride the wave. As Kerouac said in his final letter to his ex-wife Edie Parker, You’ll be okay.
Love life, and accept yourself in all your wholeness, and life will love you in return.
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Previously published on medium
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Photo credit: by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash
