The Moment I Realized, “Oh My God I Can’t Believe This Is Happening”
I went through a very dark moment in my life.
It was an anxiety-driven fear that brought me to the brink of despair, so much so that I did not want to live anymore.
I cried for hours. Nothing made sense anymore.
I had worked all my life to end up with nothing in my hands and with no one around that I trusted enough or that loved me enough to be there for me when I truly needed someone.
Throughout everything I had done, all the work, all the grinding and everything else, I ended up all alone with nothing in my hand.
And it’s one thing to feel like you are alone, but another entirely to know that you are not alone but to know that even though you are not alone no one cares about you at all.
The meaningless I felt that day brought with it a writhing pain, loneliness and despair that I could not bear; I just wanted it to end.
And while the thought was very dark, I was too afraid to actually finish the thought and go through with it.
…
Eventually, I calmed down, mainly because I did not have another choice, and thought about what to do next.
All I could think of in that moment was that I did not want anyone else to have to feel the despair I felt that day; This was the start of my career as a life coach.
Fast Forward 3 years.
During these next 3 years I had come across many people.
I helped millions of people with my writing and coached near to a hundred people during that time, trying my best to do what I could.
Many people came to me and cried their hearts out and many more accomplished more than they ever thought they could.
And while I loved working with every single one of them there is one moment I will never forget.
My client was a student living in New York at the time who had no idea what they wanted to do with their life.
They had been searching for a while but finding nothing and everything tried seemed to break in their hands.
One day, not during our regular scheduled calls, he messaged me saying that he was feeling terrible.
He told me he didn’t want me to worry about, told me that he just didn’t see the point anymore, but that it was fine and he would deal with.
He only wanted to let me know that he felt like life had no purpose so that we could maybe discuss it on our next scheduled call.
I called him immediately.
This was not something that could wait and not something I would allow to linger.
The beginning of the call was rather awkward, as he didn’t know what to do about this random call, so we just chatted a bit.
But the longer we talked the deeper the conversation went, and within the first 45 minutes he started to cry.
He told me about how he felt like he had done nothing meaningful in his life, how nothing seemed to matter anymore and how no one truly understood what he was going through or cared.
He felt like he was living in a world where not a single person cared about him.
And when he said that it felt as though a spear had pierced my heart.
It was a very bittersweet sensation for it was then I realized that this was the exact same kind of despair I had faced three years ago.
But this time I was standing on the other side! I couldn’t believe it and almost started to cry myself.
After 3 years of struggling myself, 3 years of grinding my heart out and doing more than I ever thought I could, I was standing on the other side.
And to hell with me, if I couldn’t be there for this guy right then and there.
It was a very empowering moment but also a situation filled with despair.
I re-focused immediately and dove in with the client.
The call ended up being three hours long and I had to move two other calls.
We talked a lot about everything.
I pushed all his buttons, went deeper and darker than I had gone three years ago, and really forced out everything that I could because I knew we had to hit rock-bottom to get back up.
And when there was no despair left, when he cried all the tears he could and when there was seemingly nothing left to lose, we built back up.
Everything I had done to built back up, all the skills I learned and everything I had worked for coalesced in this one moment and by the end of the call the tears were rolling once more, but they were tears of laughter, hope, and possibility.
Originally published at http://quora.com.
