I had hit rock bottom and I feared for my life every time the weekend rolled around. I knew I needed to make drastic changes or I might not make it.
If it isn’t already, it will soon become clear that ‘making it’ is one of the central themes in my story and body of work.
During this period of darkness, like many others before it, I was convinced that something was profoundly wrong with me. I found myself desperately wishing that one day I would finally ‘get my shit together’ and learn to behave differently. I was so ashamed of who I was and how I showed up in the world, that I was certain the path to ‘making it’ involved becoming a new person.
At the time, I never would have admitted that I felt like a victim, but the truth is that the majority of my mental energy went toward thinking in circles about how unfair it was that I had to spend every waking moment hustling, stressing and struggling to get by ‘through no fault of my own’. I felt abandoned, alone, and hard-done-by. I moved through the world wearing a mask that gave the impression I was a kind, friendly, polite, respectful and agreeable soul’ but really, I was angry.
It seemed so unfair that life was targeting and punishing me this way. I thought ‘good things happened to good people’, and it made no sense to me that in my short lifetime I had experienced everything being taken away: security, safety, connection, traditional family, support, my identity, my voice, my freedom… and now here I was losing control over alcohol and giving my power away in ways I could never admit to.
I couldn’t understand why the universe had it out for me when all I ever wanted was to work hard to become this new person who would finally prove her worth through achievements that would eventually amount to ‘making it’.
Less than a decade later, it’s incredible how much has changed. I know now that the universe takes things away so we can learn to understand their value. We can only truly know what holds meaning in our lives once it’s gone and we value it enough to fight to get it back and reclaim it for ourselves.
When I took a leap of faith on May 18, 2018 and landed in Chiang Mai, Thailand my intention was to stack changes, as James Clear would later coin the term in Atomic Habits. I figured that if I changed everything in my environment, then I wouldn’t confront the same triggers that would lead me to fall into the same habits again.
Some might fear change of this calibre, but I was someone who had changed schools 8 times and moved over 20 times before the age of 30. I recently mapped out my life timeline and was surprised to realize I had moved 9 times before the age of 10, without counting shuffling between Mom and Dad’s.
I was well-versed in adapting to change and I felt prepared for what I was getting myself into. What I didn’t realize was that everything I knew to be true would change forever, and I wasn’t ever going to come ‘home’ the way I figured I eventually would.
My whole world changed in ways I never could have imagined. What began as a period of immense challenge became the beginning of a journey that would ask me to question everything I believed to be true about myself, my story, and the ways of the world.
That journey led me through deep healing and new levels of awareness. And now, I find myself in this new stage I call becoming.
I always thought I would become someone new, but the truth I’ve come to find is that I am becoming who I always have been. I am removing all the layers of conditioning and coming to terms with all the false impressions I came to believe about myself.
What I’ve uncovered underneath it all was always there in the first place: a quirky, sensitive, deep feeling, highly expressive, wise, wild, weird and wonderful being. I was never broken, there was never anything wrong with me.
The problem was what I believed, not who I was.