I started therapy two years after graduating college. I realized that I needed help as my feelings of hopelessness and frustration reached new heights. I broke down after a client meeting and ran to the car crying. My project manager pulled me aside with concern.
I was traveling for work those days and felt so lonely. Week after week, I woke up at 4am on Mondays to catch 2 flights to Kansas City (no direct flights) and then drive 90 minutes out into empty fields to work in a windowless room in a trailer. (Who knew management consulting looked like this?)
I was never good at reaching out to friends and catching up remotely. It just felt like everyone had their own lives in their own corner of the world. They had better things to do than to chat with me on the phone and listen to me complain about work. (I know now that that’s what friends are for. If I was only brave enough to ask, they would listen.)
Looking back I guess I needed help in college, too. But who didn’t? We were just young and dumb, hiding behind cheap vodka shots, numbing ourselves from seed of emptiness inside.
So, I went to my primary care doctor, who prescribed me a couple of doses of Xanax, told me not to make a habit out of it, and sent me to find a therapist. What she didn’t know was that I had already been self-medicating with benzodiazepines for years at this point.
With my first therapist, I started to discover that I lacked identity. I didn’t know who I was outside of my anxiety. I only knew how to describe myself through my demographic, my job, or my location. I didn’t really have any hobbies, outside of eating brunch or going to new bars featured on The Infatuation SF, Eater, and the like. My decision-making process was an internal tug-of-war between the different people in my life.
I should go home this weekend, or else Mom would be disappointed. I should meet with this student who reached out to me on LinkedIn because I am a good person who helps others reach their career goals. I should work on this report rather than that project because I know that’s what would make my manager happy. I should reach out to my friends for brunch this weekend or else we won’t be friends anymore.
I recall recounting a specific case to her.
Before the pandemic, I packed my weekend agenda. As someone who traveled for work, I was deprived of any meaningful social interaction during the week. On weekends, I’d bounce from brunch, to an afternoon in the park, to drinks at a rooftop bar, to dinners with friends. I wasn’t seeing my partner seriously at the time, and didn’t particularly enjoy being in the apartment I shared with my roommates, where I slept in a converted living room without a semblance of true privacy.
This particular weekend, one of my college buddies was in town, visiting from Chicago. He asked me to hang out with some of his other friends (not mutual) at a bar in the afternoon. I had a brunch planned for that morning and some errands in the evening. I told him I’d try to make it.
When the time came around, something was telling me I didn’t want to go. All the voices in my head started talking again.
I don’t really want to move from my bed. I really should go because I haven’t seen him in months and I might not be able to see him in years! But if I don’t go will he think I’m a bad friend? What if he doesn’t want to be my friend anymore? What if they don’t have any fun because I’m not there? What if they do have fun and I miss out? What if I make a fool of myself with his other friends? What if I don’t have a good time and I wasted my time?
I ended up going and having a good time. But the internal personal conflicts happened almost every time I was making any decision. My therapist told me maybe I should think of it from a values perspective. Does this serve my values? Does it go against them?
I shrugged. How was I supposed to know what my values were?
The concept of values wasn’t new to me. Theoretically, I knew what values were, what they meant, and how they were supposed guide my decisions. My real problem was that I didn’t know what my values were and how to uncover them.
And it wasn’t for a lack of trying. I had Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead List of Values in hand, trying to prioritize and narrow down which ones seemed like me. I took the VIA Character Strengths Survey and tried using that to make decisions for a week before giving up. I devoured anything related to personality tests, from taking every personality quiz I can find to lurking in Personality Cafe. And horoscopes. Duh.
I didn’t know who I was and what I cared about. In some ways my obsession with personality tests was a reflection of my desperation to find the answers of who I was. I needed that blueprint to know how to act. After years of suffocating my internal voice, it stopped speaking up.
Recently, I could see the progress I’ve made in the little things. Like listening to myself when I needed rest — Hey, I want to just stay in today and sit on the couch and do nothing. And that’s ok.
This might seem like a simple thing, but old me would tell myself — What a waste of time. You should be making plans with your friends to forge deeper connections. Or you could do something productive, like building a side project? Or maybe go to the pottery studio. Make use of your time!
So, with my Development Dollars (money that my employer gives us to spend on career development), I bought myself a deck of value cards. I thought it was a good time to revisit the values exercise 3 years after it first came up in my therapy. I’ve been working hard to coax that inner voice to come back and I wanted to give it another chance to speak.
I sifted through the cards and pulled out some that resonated with me before picking my top three. It wasn’t easy to let go and prioritize. I had a hard time letting go of efficiency — something I leaned on for so many years to go, go, go. And leisure — that was something I craved for and dangled as a carrot for myself to work harder. Self-Reliance was something I used to escape my parent’s grasp and gain freedom.
Letting go was the nature of the exercise. I identified with these values because were forced on me by circumstance or by society. And I now had the power to notice that influence and cast away the values that didn’t represent me anymore.
I end up landing on these three core values: Authenticity, Peace, and Abundance.
Isn’t it interesting? That what I value most ended up being what I was missing all along: being true to myself.