You Can Be Successful and Still Be Surviving

I knew everything I was doing to protect myself as a child would one day no longer serve me as an adult.

I was just a child, and the only way I knew how to protect myself was to build up walls, repress emotions and try to survive long enough to grow up and find a better way. All of that sadness and anger turned inward over time and became self-hatred, deep insecurity and the belief that I was somehow ugly and unworthy of love.

But at the same time, I was also very clear about what I did and did not want for myself.

I knew what it felt like to grow up without a safe family or home, and I was very clear about what I wanted to be different in my own life. I knew I wanted a relationship where I could be fully seen and feel safe. I wanted to be able to trust someone, feel loved for who I was, and not have to protect myself all the time. But I also didn’t want to lose myself in someone else when I still had no real sense of who I was.

I knew I was independent to a fault and that I had built up so many walls, but I had no idea how to start taking them down.

I thought I knew how to be strong, control my emotions and survive. Those were qualities other people often saw as strengths, and they helped me move into leadership quickly. But underneath all of that, I still felt weak. Eventually I pushed even that feeling so far aside that I barely acknowledged it anymore. I was just surviving.

I knew I wanted youth to feel seen, safe and valued, and to know they were more than what was happening around them. That became a passion in me, and eventually that passion grew into working with adults who had been through every system and still had never really been seen. Instead, many had been met with labels, judgment and more pain from the very people who were supposed to be there for them.

Many had grown up around violence, addiction, abuse and trauma, but their lives didn’t all look the same. Some were successful and, from the outside, seemed to have everything together, but found themselves going from one abusive relationship to another. For others, something happened and the life they had built fell apart around them, and they had no idea how to stand back up when the world they knew suddenly shattered.

So much of who they were had been buried under everything that had happened to them and every label and judgment they had accumulated over the years.

I spent years sitting with people in some of their most painful emotions — shame, rejection and fear — and watching them start to see something in themselves again that they had forgotten was there.

There was something incredibly powerful about watching people begin to move beyond the labels and experiences that had defined them for so long. Not because those things had never happened, and not because their lives suddenly became easy, but because those experiences stopped being the only thing they could see when they looked at themselves.

I could see that so clearly in other people, even though I still hadn’t fully learned how to see it in myself.

From the outside, my life looked successful. I had people who saw something in me and moved me into leadership roles quickly. I was supporting staff teams and clients, and I had great mentors and support throughout my career.

But as much as they could see one part of me, the pain from my childhood was still there, along with the fear and everything I had buried. I was still moving through life feeling like I had to earn my worth.

You can be successful and still be surviving, because survival doesn’t always look like falling apart.

For me, it looked like strength, independence, responsibility and being the person everyone knew could handle things. It meant reading people and situations quickly, believing I had to keep my emotions under control, relying on myself and doing what needed to be done.

Those things helped me feel safe and get through life, and over time they became so much a part of me that I stopped questioning them.

They were also some of the same qualities that helped me succeed.

I had built a career out of some of the worst parts of what I had lived through and found something beautiful in it for other people. I could help someone else see beyond what had happened to them, while I was still living behind many of the same walls I had built as a child.

Then in my thirties, I was diagnosed with pre-cervical cancer. I remember feeling like my world had shattered for that brief moment, just when I thought I was finally starting to be okay. My first thought was, “God, can I just get a break?”

And immediately after that came, “Okay God, I get it. I can’t do this alone anymore.”

After that, I started taking bigger leaps of faith on myself. I stopped running from some of the things within me and started asking the questions I had been terrified to ask. The most terrifying one was asking God, “Who am I?” because for so much of my life, I had believed I was unworthy of love.

On September 1, 2017, I wrote:

“My intent this year was to take better care of myself and stand up for myself instead of protecting myself. To face those fears that I have been hiding behind and holding me back and rise up and have a voice. Let go of comfort and security and put myself out there and live and see where my journey takes me. Life is short...live for the things that matter and let go of all the rest.

So I took that leap of faith into nothing and I'm leaving everything I know and everything I know of how to survive to create something that makes sense to me for others.”

I took that leap of faith and started looking at all of the things within myself I had buried and been afraid to face. I started working through my own healing, asking some of the hardest questions I had ever asked myself, and reshaping the way I saw myself. I started to see myself more authentically as I was created, instead of only through the fear, pain and beliefs I had carried for so long.

The more I looked within, the more I began to understand how much of my life had been shaped by things I had learned simply trying to survive. Some of them had helped me. Some had even become strengths. But they had also shaped the way I saw myself, the relationships I had, what I believed I deserved, what I was afraid of and what I thought was possible for my life.

Our lives can look completely different on the outside and still have things underneath that shape the way we live. We can have careers, relationships, responsibilities and people who see strength in us, while carrying fears, beliefs or experiences we may not even realize are still affecting us. Or something can happen that shakes the life we thought we understood and leaves us questioning things we had never thought to question before.

Sometimes we know exactly where those things came from. Sometimes we have lived with them for so long that they simply feel like part of who we are.

We can become so used to protecting ourselves, being strong, keeping everything together or living according to what we have always believed about ourselves that we may never stop to ask whether any of it is still true.

For me, asking those questions began to change the way I saw myself. I wasn’t becoming someone different. I was beginning to see beyond the fear, the pain and everything I had believed about myself for so long.

And as that changed, so did what I believed was possible for my life.