So, I quit…
One of my goals for 2021 was to write a blog every month. For the first half of the year, I did just that. I made myself proud with my writing. Touching on my expertise as a makeup artist or typing out personal stories of my struggles with mental health.
Halfway through the year, the writing stopped. I was in full blown crisis. I was going through a depressive episode that shook me to my core. I was trying to work on myself, balance a business, market a skincare line, and still deal with personal family matters. I was once again in the throes of burnout and there was no looking back.
July turned to August and August turned to worse circumstances. Still balancing a full plate, by the end of the month, I made the wise decision to enroll myself in graduate school at Purdue University. A masters in what, you ask? No idea. Well, I had an idea, just couldn’t bring myself to put a finger on it. I bought my books, got out my notebooks and prepared myself for a new venture.
Only a day or two after enrolling I received what would be the first bout of bad news: my uncle, who had been sick with lung cancer for almost a year, passed away peacefully at home. Even when you’re not incredibly close to someone, death still takes a toll on you. He had been in my life since I was born and named my godfather at my christening. To not see him suffering anymore was somewhat of a relief, but to see my family in pain still weighed heavy on me.
Starting my online courses went seamlessly. I was aiming for a 4.0 average (because who would I be without holding myself to the highest standards?) and after my first full week that seemed attainable. However, more bad news decided to creep in. My father-in-law texted in our family group text that my mother in law wasn’t doing good and he was teetering on calling 911. Naturally, I rushed over and took her vitals, my healthcare skills jumping back into action, and by the next night, they had taken her away in an ambulance. That would be the last time she’d be home.
The first week of September was a blur. Balancing school, the beginning of fall wedding season, grief, and now add to that, arranging hospice care, we started going through the process of getting mom home to pass peacefully where she raised her family. Like most things in life, things don’t go as planned. My mother-in-law had her own agenda and waiting to get home to pass was not on her schedule. I visited her at the hospital on Thursday morning, September 2nd where I noticed her breathing was labored and she was unresponsive. I called my father-in-law and told him he needed to get to the hospital as soon as he could, I was going to talk to the nurse and the hospice doctor and see what they thought about leaving her at the hospital instead. Moving her already frail body would be too much and she wouldn’t be able to handle that.
By that evening, I had been in the hospital for hours, cried too many tears, and fought my way to get the best care possible for her. We got her into a private room where we could all be with her, no matter what Covid protocol the hospital had in place at the time. My father-in-law was set up to stay the night and be by her side, we would be back in the morning to check on things.
The next morning, I woke up and immediately got dressed and went straight back to the hospital with hot coffee in hand, as if I had never left. Within a couple hours, I found myself crouched down by the side of her hospital bed, rubbing her legs and feet, crying as she took her lasts breaths. Watching someone pass from this world is unlike any other experience. I was officially out of my mind and body. I went into survival mode and made sure I was there for my husband, my father, sister, and brother-in-law. We were all in a daze and in disbelief she was gone so soon.
As we began to plan her funeral, I was officially balancing wedding season, my entire business, graduate school, both sides of my family grieving, and not to mention the friends we had flying in at the end of September.
Once September was over, we were all hoping for a slower life to process everything that had happened to us, but is that what happened? Absolutely not. The first week of October, as I was talking to my mom on the phone, I went to itch my side and rolled my hand over a decent size lump in my right breast. I immediately froze and told my mom what I had found. Within a week I found myself in the waiting room of an imaging specialist getting multiple mammograms and ultra sounds.
This was the beginning of roughly a month and a half of invasive testing and all-around fear that I had breast cancer. This had happened to me before and with my family history, I am considered high risk. I was trying to remain calm and tell myself it was nothing but the voice in the back of my head continued to ask, “what if?”
After all was said and done and my MRI results finally came back, the right breast was fine…However, my left breast now lit up. Would it ever end? Back in for yet another MRI and now biopsy, where they would also place a titanium marker in the left breast so they could keep an eye on the area for future reference.
Thankfully, everything was benign and I just need to follow-up but by this point, I was numb to the world. Still in graduate school, still running a business with a full book, still trying to balance my personal life, and if that wasn’t enough, I hired a business coach and was now working with her. I. Was. Done.
My business coach was slowly helping me realize the impossible standards I held myself to. There wasn’t a human being on earth that would be able to hold themselves to my standards. Everything that had happened to me in the past few months, it was the universe literally throwing anything and everything it could at me to tell me, “STOP!” But did I? No. I kept myself distracted because I didn’t want to face the one thing I needed to work on most: me.
When it comes down to it, I was running from myself and the work I needed to do. I was slowly running myself back into a deep, dark place of depression and anxiety. There are literally moments in the past few months that are physically erased from my memory. Is that any way to live a life? To dissociate so much that you can’t even remember the memories you’re trying to make? Absolutely not.
So, I quit. I dropped out of graduate school, I started to learn to say no, and I prioritized what needed to be done. Most importantly, I quit holding myself to standards that are impossible. I became very guarded with my boundaries and realized that I wasn’t going to get everything I wanted to done in one day. I wasn’t going to get the entire house clean, get grocery shopping done, finish all of my business tasks, and start saving the world within a 24-hour period. There was no possible way. I decided to give myself permission to be who I am in the moment, imperfections and all. Do I still have a laundry list of ‘things’ I want to get accomplished? Absolutely, but when I think about those things the pressure to have them all done at once is gone. If the past few months taught me anything, it’s that life doesn’t ever really stop and if I didn’t stop, I was going to die a very young age from exhaustion.
To me there is a mental version of self-mutilation that happens inside the mind. We try to run so far from ourselves that we do whatever we can to keep ourselves distracted. If I didn’t execute something perfectly, I started to immediately self-doubt, self-loath, to mentally beat myself up, so my coping skill was to run from everything I truly needed to accomplish.
What I found is that mindset is everything. Even through every shitty situation life has thrown at me the last few months, I didn’t truly break. Every time a new problem crept up, I asked myself, “what can I learn from this opportunity?” I didn’t try to repress the emotions that developed from any one situation, I decided to just feel through it, to accept myself as I am, flaws and all.
You don’t have to be perfect, you don’t have to be the best at something, or anything for that matter. The only thing you need to do is be happy. If something doesn’t serve you, don’t give it your energy. Everything that happens to us is an opportunity to learn how to be a better version of ourselves.
Things don’t happen to us, they happen for us.