How To Catch Yourself When You Fall?

A story of seeking support, and finding strength in the face of adversity.

@teddykelley unsplash.com

When I was in my mid-twenties, I just came back from working overseas in Japan. After a year in the U. S., I was still trying to assimilate back into the American culture. As a programmer, I was working long hours trying to make myself worthy of the internal transfer that allowed me to move back to NY. Overnight, I received calls from our overseas support team frequently. I was not sleeping enough or enjoying life.

Then, there came this feeling: the feeling of “emptiness”.

It felt like a warning. This feeling persisted for the next year. I lost interest in the people in my life. I lost interest in the life I was leading. I needed a change. My instinct told me that I was going down a rabbit hole.

After many nights staring out of my apartment window and thinking about what I should do, I finally decided to change my life completely.

I ended my relationship. I moved out of my apartment I shared with my ex. I even tried to quit my job.

In other words, I fell. I fell off the cliff I was standing on.

My life at that point looked so perfect from the outside. I had a great job. From the outside, I looked like I had a great relationship. We had a group of friends who came over regularly to socialize. We were on the verge of settling down to buy our place. We vacationed. We had a plan for the future.

But, all of that wasn’t enough for me. None of that was what I needed at the time. So I chose to fall off the cliff completely.

I didn’t even look to see if anyone was going to catch me.

I closed my eyes, simply surrendered to the unknown, and fell backward off the cliff.

Up until that point, I was never allowed to fall. Away from the rat race, I was going to be a “nobody”. My family supposedly “gave up” everything to see to it that I never fell. My family needed me to be “somebody”.

But, I knew that internally, I needed to fall. I needed to go through this process. I wanted to be a “nobody”. A “nobody” was freeing. Being a “nobody” meant that I could finally find myself and be just “me”.

The Loneliness

The problem with falling without having support is loneliness. People who are going through life changes know that when people around you don’t agree with your choices, you pretty much feel like an island. This feeling of loneliness can make you feel “crazy”. My feeling of loneliness quickly made me feel like I was not “good enough”. This feeling of inadequacy quickly spiraled out of control and led to depression.

Seeking Help

It didn’t take long for my depression to feel like a psychotic break. A friend gave me the number to a psychologist. I called. I made an appointment with her and it changed my life. I grew up with such stigma around mental health issues. I was working in an unforgiving industry. If someone suspected that I had depression, I might not be able to get another job in the industry again.

But, I picked up the phone anyway. I decided that I had enough with the current state of my life. I decided that “I” was more important.

It didn’t take long for my psychologist to help me get to the root cause of my issues. She helped me understand the repercussions of my upbringing, the effect of the abuses from my childhood, and my immediate state of mind. Then, after a few weeks, she stopped our sessions. She told me I was well enough to deal with the rest on my own.

Taking Care of Myself

I still remember the day that my psychologist stopped our sessions. It was painful for me. I wanted someone to be there to cushion my fall. I needed someone to hold my hand and tell me it’s okay. Instead, she told me to lean on my friends and sent me away.

This was the critical moment when I decided to take care of myself.

When you’ve been completely shattered by the fall, you feel completely depleted emotionally.

All you want is a helping hand. Yet, you receive half of that hand. What do you do? You’ve got to continue on your recovery. So, you invent your own hand.

I started to run. It all started in the gym. I started running 20 minutes on my treadmill. Then, I extended my running time as I gained stamina. Soon, I was running for an hour at a time on the treadmill. After a few weeks, I started to run in my local park. Then, I started running with a buddy. Soon, I was learning to pace myself on long runs. Over time, I completed a 6-mile run every day.

The act of running helped me imagine the scenario of “running away” from my life.

By imagining this scenario, I didn’t physically act on “running away” from my life.

It didn’t take me long to reflect on my problems during the runs. It also didn’t take me long to meditate during my runs. I was running to heal my pain.

Climbing Back Up

People talk about “man up” during these kinds of falls. Well, I kind of “woman-ed up”. I didn’t know that climbing back up would take me a decade or more. The fact that I couldn’t see beyond the immediate year helped me with the climb. I simply focused on my immediate needs, the immediate goals, and the immediate path.

It turns out that untangling my relationship would take 2 years or more.

It turns out that my family who insisted on my “specialness” refused to help me pay for my MBA.

It turns out that I couldn’t just quit my job. I had to change my job to a more difficult one in the same industry just to support myself.

It turns out that I had to deal with my “toxic” family because they were still my family.

It turns out that most of my friends thought I was heartless to leave my relationship.

No one ever said that the climb back up would be easy. It’s hard. It takes grit. It takes perseverance.

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Finding My Strength

Faced with difficulties, I started to find my strength. People talk about self-care as if overnight I can just slap a face mask on, put on high heels and call myself okay. It doesn’t work like that.

Looking back, self care was more about reflecting on my issues, finding the root causes of them, being compassionate with myself, and then finding the strength to deal with the root causes of my issues.

Over a long period of dealing with the root causes of my issues, one day, I finally saw improvements in myself.

When these issues were resolved, I noticed that I was making better choices in my life, taking better care of myself, and inviting more positivity into my life.

One day, after a long period of dealing with my issues, I finally sat down with a notepad and put down the list of my issues.

I was amazed that the issues were a mile long. It took me an hour to go through the list and check off the ones that I felt I made improvements on.

I realized then, that I was already half way through the climb back up.

Finding Second Wind

After I realized that I was almost halfway through the climb back up, I decided that I was not going to quit this journey. This was the moment when I finally opened the pandora’s box to try to make sense of my toxic family relationships.

I postponed doing this until 10 years after my initial fall. By then, my self-esteem had recovered. By then, I understood my own “identity” issues. By then, I wanted to open my eyes and see the people around me more clearly.

I wasn’t afraid anymore.

It took many more years for me to see my family more clearly. Then, it took many more years for me to figure out how to deal with them. Finally, it took many more years to grieve the loss of them.

My second wind allowed me to go through all these years with grit. I knew that if I didn’t weather these storms, as a person, I would not be “whole”.