A Story I'm Never Ready to Tell... Mine

I sat down and wrote this after sitting in on a session with Newton Cheng at the Health Enhancement Research Organization (HERO) forum that I was fortunate enough to attend as a speaker as well. That night I had some great discussions with likeminded attendees, including sharing my own mental health journey with them. Bright and early the next morning , I woke up and ran the beach on Amelia Island and just as I had finished, I was lucky enough to sit and watch a beautiful sunset, all alone without sitting on my phone and to just reflect. I've never even thought about sharing what I've written on social media it was just a healing exercise for me, but with all the recent #worldmentalhealthday post I thought why not. I’ve been sitting on it for a few days, very tentative to share it but sitting in lonely silence is part of what got me to the point that I did so here it goes, raw and unedited.

“Why would you suffer from depression and anxiety? You have a beautiful family, you’re healthy, you always act so happy and funny.” This is the voice that was on repeat in my head, and of course I just knew people would think that as well if I shared my truth with them (or thought I knew). These thoughts were also supplemented with the negative and self-sabotaging thoughts “What is wrong with you, just snap out of it!”

It’s hard to pin down when I started battling deep depression and anxiety. Was it in back in college when I went through a personal traumatic experience? It could be easy to argue it was when I lost my dad and best friend to cancer in 2017 all while trying to build a family myself and dealing with infertility and IVF with my wife…could it be then? Quite frankly I could care less when it started, because I do know when I finally admitted to having a problem. Many things contributed to it, including circumstances that I'll most likely mention in this post and some I’ll probably leave out. Though I am doing much better now, I still have an internal monologue that will continually ask “why?” but I now refuse to have a victim mentality and it’s a great reminder to fight for me and my family and to manage those feelings in a healthy way.

When I talk about my story, I’ve noticed I get immediate sympathy, but this is not why I share it. I share my story for two main reasons:

1. Talking about my story out-load helps me accept it’s reality, the reality that it has and is happening to me. How many times have you heard “it could happen to anyone”, have you ever stepped back to think of that anyone is you? The more I accept this is something that I have in my life that I need to keep in check, the healthier I become, and I stay. I’ve also noticed that talking about it has improved the quality of people who have stayed in my life as well as the new people who have become a regular part of my life.
2. I have and always will love to help people, no matter how big or how small it is. I know how crippling mental wellbeing can be not only for oneself but for anyone and everyone who is connected to them. If telling my story and giving it first person context can help even just one person, then I will continue to do it.

If there were ever a year, I experienced the lowest of lows, and the highest of highs it would be 2017. After years of trying to conceive unsuccessfully with my wife, Natascia, and 4 emotional and painful rounds of IVF we were finally expecting. I felt so much joy, excitement, fear, disbelief that it was happening. Included in those expected emotions were guilt, sadness, that I was a failure, and the list could probably go on and on. For those of you who have dealt with infertility it is a beast, physically and emotionally for both individuals and as a couple. To me this was all my fault you see, yup, male infertility factor… talk about a blow to the male ego. That wasn’t what was getting to me though, it was the unnecessary pain I was putting my amazing wife through as if she hadn’t been through enough already. All the poking and testing, 176 injections from yours truly (I’m no Dr.), cramping, bloating, and you try telling a runner that they’re not allowed to run. And after going through all that, seeing what it does to a person when they are told that round didn’t produce any viable embryos and they are not going to be a mom yet. This can be enough to break a person or a couple and quite often it is, but we made it and in February of 2017 we couldn’t wait to tell our families. Remember those lows I talked about, let’s not forget those. It was just 3 months before we found out the good news that my dad told me he was stopping his cancer treatments and entering hospice, the Dr. had given him just a couple of months but my dad being the strong stubborn guy he is made it to June. He was so supportive during our IVF and so understanding, and now I finally got to tell him I was going to be a dad, but all I could think was how he wasn’t going to get to see me be a dad or be the amazing grandfather I know he would be. I lost my dad in June of 2017; my son was born 4 months later.

Now that I can look back with a clear view, I can see this was the beginning of a long painful downward spiral, maybe my pathetic attempt to run away or hide. I did anything I could to just not be present, to hide from any sort of reality. I had just become a new father to the most amazing little boy in October of that year and I couldn’t allow myself to enjoy it, I didn’t think I deserved it. My relationship with Alcohol took a whole new role in my life to numb myself, I made shallow friendships so I didn’t have to show my real self, it was a very dark and lonely time when it should have been the opposite. It got so bad, and I needed a change so much that I quit my job with Ovia Health , a job I was great at, a solution I was passionate about, and with some of the most amazing people I’ve ever worked with. This only made it worse and lead to more rock bottoms than I can count but it must have been necessary.

I really believed that next job would be a great new beginning for me. A new start with a cutting-edge technology and leadership I believed in, if only I could get out of my own way. It was less than a month into my first day that I was let go, and it was 100% self-inflicted. I’m still embarrassed and ashamed to this day, even though many people who were there are supportive. I was still trying to hide from reality and be someone else, and it was alcohol that I thought was helping me do that still. After a terrible night while attending an event in NYC, I acted in a way that change the course of things dramatically. A week or so later, I was about to board a plane for another event when I got a phone call from that new boss and our head of HR. I was fired right there on the spot; I remember it like it was yesterday and will never walk-through terminal C of Logan airport quite the same again. Do I agree with how it was handled, no, but that is out of my control, and I should never have allowed myself to be put in that situation. So, I had to come clean with my family and I couldn’t try to “protect” them from my reality anymore. We’ve all heard these stories though, right? And I thought this was the end of mine… I had hit my rock bottom, and I was going to pull myself out, I was going to be a hero.

Here we go, how are we going to dig out, I have that motivation now, right? I quit drinking and started my job search, let’s find that actual new beginning that my little boy deserves. The next 2 years are almost a blur, if I didn’t live it, I wouldn’t think it would ever be true. To really make this a new beginning I’d have to go big, why not move my entire family across country?! So that’s exactly what we were going to do. I had found a job with a small wellness company that had once been a competitor to come in and head up their sales efforts. They made me feel wanted and gained my trust. They made an impression on my family as well, I needed something and this felt like it, so why not. We sold our first home in Natick MA, that we loved and put a lot of work into, and found a rental in San Diego, which I have still never seen to this day. That’s when something changed, something in the people that I just decided to trust with my life, and it just didn’t feel right. I had become withdrawn, sad, empty but what was I going to do now? I’d gained weight, lost interest in things and just wasn’t pleasant to be around. Then something happened and on another terrible phone call with them one evening I just quit! No job waiting, no house for my family anymore, and oh, by the way Natascia was pregnant again (2 for 2, I give all the credit to that amazing wife of mine). After I quit, instantaneously, I felt this immense weight come off my shoulders, this was extremely confusing to me since I felt that I should feel the opposite. It’s so easy for me to look back now and understand certain feelings I had and things I did, and I’m so thankful now to have a much better relationship with myself to react to these feelings and emotions unlike I did back then.

In the next year and a half, I would have another 5 jobs, which I worked from home in our rental we hastily found so we wouldn’t be homeless. That’s right, 5 different companies, now you try explaining that to a hiring manager or recruiter. It was a perfect storm at times, and I have many different reasons for the short tenures and being the startup junkie that I am this can happen but not like this. It wasn’t all terrible, things seemed to be starting to go in the right direction. During these transitions we found a beautiful new place to call home in Mount Pleasant SC, a decision that would prove to be the best thing we’ve ever done. This is turning into a short novel so to sum it up, I continued the trend of trusting the wrong people, I was quite broken so I was most likely looking for any shred of compassion I could get. Some of these jobs I had left my own, there was one company which I just happened to find at the wrong time, and we had to dissolve my position due to Covid. I still think so highly of this company and founder and of all the negativity I may have had during these couple of years this was and still is a bright spot. It was one experience that finally woke me up to how people should be treated, how I even deserve to be treated. During this time, I had finally given in to my wife’s loving suggestions to get some help, I had finally admitted that I had been struggling with my mental wellbeing and intervention was needed. It was also during this time that I realized I had been trusting and investing my time with the wrong people, but I think I needed this experience to push me too how happy I am today. Surprisingly, before any of this had happened, I had never been let go from a job before, I thought I was invincible. These experiences had however made me realize I wasn’t and with some acquisitions, and new management and more things not in my control, I could see that I was at risk with the last of those 5 jobs. At this point I had nothing to lose anymore, so I spoke up for the first time about my mental health. I told my boss that I was struggling with severe depression and anxiety, it was a pleasant conversation, and I was honest about sensing something was happening. I asked her nicely to just give me a bit of a heads-up if that were the case, for my anxiety and because I was closing on our new house in just a few days. She was actually pretty good about it and said I had nothing to worry about and to just focus on my current pipeline, I trusted her. The following week during our 1-on-1 sure enough it wasn’t only her I saw on zoom but also someone from HR, I was angry. That conversation was not a good one and I didn’t take it as sheepishly as I had in the past. Quite frankly it was not handled well on their part at all, my computer and all associated applications were shut off midway through them laying me off with no warning. I don’t share this in a vengeful way, I share this story for anyone in a leadership capacity or just anyone who is fortunate to have another person confident in them enough to be completely vulnerable with them. By seeing how this can affect them I hope that it will prevent a similar situation to someone else. Anyways, here we are again, jobless (and potentially homeless)… the only difference this time is I’m not thinking “oh poor me, poor me” I’m thinking about my family. I recognize this, I recognize that my thoughts and priorities are where I want them to be. I now had to focus hard, I was about to move my family 2,000 miles away, and now I needed to find a new job too, uh oh, here comes the anxiety. I would have two more awful events that I consider my tipping point and to this day those are the last two regretful actions that I have done that I had control over.

I turned to a “friend” again, one that I now have a much healthier relationship with… Alcohol. Without going into detail, I let down my family, the ones that mean the most to me and the ones that I’ve always thought I was protecting by keeping my struggles to myself. These events happened exactly a year ago this week, I still think about them daily and I am still hard on myself about them only now I am the one in control and rather than needing to hide from them I embrace them and use it to heal. As I said before it’s been a year since I hit my actual rock bottom, and I am the happiest I have ever been in my life. It’s been a year since we’ve started a new life in South Carolina with no job, no friends, and no idea how I would provide for my family now. Given my history this is something that could have stressed me so much before that I would have gone back to my old habits, this would have been the easy way out.

The worst time in my life has helped me be who I am today, a present father, a loving husband, a caring son. I’ve never been happier in a community that I’ve lived in and in just a year I have met some of the best forever friends I could ever ask for. I’ve found a role with a company that has some of the most wonderful people who appreciate what I have to offer, and I couldn’t ask for a better culture. Sure, I’ve also lost some friends, or people who I thought were friends, but I’ve kept close ties with many people in this amazing industry and am happy to call them friends, acquaintances and at times they feel like family.  I’m not sharing my story for sympathy, honestly, I’m not entirely sure why I’m sharing it publicly since it’s more for myself than anything. All I know is I don’t need to hide; this is who I am, and I am proud of how I came out on the other side. I guess my hope is that I can help at least one person, whether it’s someone who hears my story and finds a way to get that control again, or if this gives someone the ability to reach out to someone, even me to get help. I know that I am not alone, and you aren’t either. Take a chance and open to a loved one, if it’s too hard then please know that I am here for you I don’t care if we know each other or not.

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