Don’t you know how busy & important I am? Why it’s hard to go home again.

Working as a solicitor and going home for the holidays was often challenging. 

One challenge being, a distinct lack of respect. 

Jack Kornfield writes in After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, that Zen Master Basho warns: “You can’t teach the truth in your native town. They only know you by your childhood names. (...) as it happens, this may be the best reason to go home. (...) because they see us unclouded by spiritual ideals, by image or reputation.”

The point the author is making is that after a spiritual awakening, it can be quite difficult to go home again. Your new found wisdom won’t be respected by your friends or family, because it’s coming from you. But this is exactly why going home is valuable. 

Practising loving kindness, where everyone else is on the same page, is easy. Practising loving kindness in the throws of challenging family dynamics, is more of a practice. It’s challenging because they see you in whatever context they know you in, and if they’ve known you for a long time, that context might be quite different to the identity you hold yourself in now. 

This got me thinking about high achievers going home for the holidays.

When you’re a solicitor working in a law firm, most things in the business are geared towards helping the solicitor utilise their time as much as possible (as they bill by the hour). And with this, a hierarchy is formed.

This can give you an inflated sense of personal importance and subconsciously (or indeed, consciously) you can start to believe that ‘my time is more important than yours’. You become more impatient in queues, can’t bear being placed on hold, and every second it takes to get off the tube and onto the escalator counts.

The 7:30am commute on the London Underground often reminded me of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, striding to work and throwing anyone against the wall who got in his way. It was a battle of who was the most busy and important and there would be hell to pay if a tourist dared to stop to check their phone for directions, even just for 1 second. 

However when you leave the City to go home for the holidays, you’re in for a rude awakening.

 Your family or old school friends couldn’t give two hoots how busy and important you are, or what deals you’ve closed lately. They want to know about what else you’ve been up to. What else have you got to say?

This can actually be a shock to the system, especially if most of your time and energy ……now you’ve pointed it out…..is spent working on deals. 

It can create a self consciousness. A discomfort.

When you step outside your work circle (which has become your comfort zone btw) - you realise you don’t have a lot to talk about other than work….and….people aren’t responding to you in the way that you’re used to…

There is nowhere to hide. You’re fighting for your life to find something else to talk about, something interesting to say.

You might default to talking about sport or what to watch on Netflix, but inevitably, it won’t be long before you start checking your work phone (even if there’s nothing to check) and try to find a way to retreat to your comfort zone.

The defensive parts of self will start coming into play to protect you from this horrible situation. More often than not you’ll spend the next two hours riddled with superior thoughts and feelings of ‘I don’t fit in here’, ‘we have nothing in common anymore’, and ‘they just don’t get it’.

Your ego, particularly disgruntled, may be left spitting “Where’s my respect? Don’t they know how busy and important I am?” and “Maybe I can leave early, get away from these non-serious people”.

These moments of discomfort offer a great learning opportunity to find out who you are outside of work. Because when you put 90% of your energy into work at the expense of everything else, your career will become your identity. And that’s a lonely and unsafe place to be when you leave the office. 

Unsafe meaning that it leaves you vulnerable to the social situation described above, where you feel you’ve got no value to add outside of work, nothing to connect with people on, nothing to offer. In the event of sudden job loss, relationship breakdown or retirement, it can be a disaster. You can be left with feelings of “Who am I without my work?” “What was it all for?” “What is my life all about?”

Going home for the holidays gives you a glimpse of this.

So how can we calm the defensive and egoic parts of self down, resist reaching for our work phones and lean into said learning opporutnity……? The author (from earlier) recounts some advice he gave to a Buddhist nun:

“(...) however hard she tried to teach them about the dharma, it only led to conflict and more frustration. The family evenings were usually given to drinking beer and watching TV. After each disagreeable weeklong visit home, she fled. I had a few suggestions for her. “Why don’t you try going to your parents without your robes, and no teaching. Just be there as a family member and love them as they are. Maybe sit with them and sip a beer and watch the games on TV. (...). She tried it. Next time I saw her she was smiling. It worked.”

So if you’re an entrepreneur or have a busy and important job, perhaps all you need to do is disrobe when you go home. Visit as a family member or friend, not as a financially successful biz wiz or professional. Because they couldn’t care less about your status. They couldn’t care less whether you succeed or fail. All they care about is you. They love you - regardless of job title, income or status. And isn’t that a relief?

And although it may feel uncomfortable at first, if you’re brave enough to drop the pretense and ask yourself ‘Who am I without my work?” and take steps to build and put energy towards an identity outside of work, you’ll be in a much safer (and happier) place in the long run. 

The glimmer at the end of the tunnel is real (not an imaginary carrot).

I was half sitting up in bed with my laptop balanced on my knees speaking to my psychiatrist on Zoom, tearfully asking her “why is this happening?”

 My psychiatrist had been treating me for anxiety and depression for over a year and after taking 6 months off work, medicating and seeing a therapist…I seemed to be getting better. I went back to work, got a new job, and began coming off medication. It felt like I was back on my feet. 

But after a few weeks without medication, I relapsed. I couldn’t get up in the mornings and was crying at work again. I thought it was just withdrawal from the medication, but it didn’t pass. My psychiatrist recommended taking more time off work. I agreed, I thought maybe work had just got on top of me again and I just needed a little sleep and reset and I’d be back. 

But I didn’t end up going back to work until 7 months later.

 I was completely crestfallen; I didn’t understand why this was happening. Everything in my life was good. I came from a good family, had fantastic friends and a really good job in law (that I’d intentionally worked very hard to get). I just didn’t get it and I was about ready to give up.

 I asked my psychiatrist why this was happening – why had I relapsed when I was doing so well? She explained that coming off medication doesn’t always work the first time. 

In layman's terms she said the idea with SRRI anti-depressants is that it stops the brain from re-absorbing serotonin in the brain, so you get a nice healthy reserve of feel good chemicals. 

When you stop taking SRRI’s, you start to re-absorb serotonin again and the hope is that your brain realises this and starts producing more of its own serotonin to counter-act the drop. She reassured me that even though it hadn’t worked the first time, it didn’t mean it wouldn’t work in the future – and I’d just go back on medication and try again later.

 She sensed my anguish and that really – I was asking her a larger question – why am I anxious and depressed in the first place? Why isn’t it going away? Will I need to be on medication for the rest of my life? I don’t understand.

She said it depends where your baseline is and gave me an analogy. She compared it to being diabetic: if your baseline mood is low, you might always need medication to bring you up to a functioning level, just like a diabetic needs insulin. Her message was that there’s no shame in taking anti-depressants. If you need them, you need them, just like a diabetic needs medication.

I was comforted. It felt good to hear that it was okay to be where I was at and to not beat myself up or blame myself for not ‘getting better quicker’. And it really was okay if I needed medication long term. It didn’t mean anything was wrong with me per say, maybe it’s just the way I am. We agreed to change the medication and try again. 

But at the same time….something didn’t feel quite right to me. I didn’t fully accept that depression and anxiety were just my baseline.

 Even though I’d been struggling with depression and anxiety for most of my adult life, I’d always had a knowing that a better life was out there - a light at the end of the tunnel. Even though it was dim at times, I could see a glimmer at the end of the tunnel and this gave me the drive that if I worked hard enough, if I kept going, I could change my circumstances. 

But by this point I’d tried so many things, I’d read all the self-help books, seen therapists, exercised, changed my diet, changed my job, improved my sleep hygiene, meditated, done yoga, went for reiki treatments, seen a numerologist, went to sound baths, saw psychics and even had my akashic record cleared. In short – I’d looked inwards and I’d looked outwards I’d made change and I was doing everything I could to help myself. 

I was tired. Not the kind of tired a couple of weeks of good sleep can fix. 

It was a deep tiredness. I was at the point where I was just at a loss - why was it so hard, so much effort, such a fight just to keep my head above water - if this is normal, why would anyone live like this? It didn’t make sense. 

I was starting to think “maybe you’re just expecting too much from life.” Maybe this was just it and that glimmer at the end of the tunnel was nothing but an imaginary carrot. 

So after my Zoom session with my psychiatrist came to an end, shutting the lid on my laptop – I wondered whether it was time to just accept this is just the way I am, this is just it, there isn’t anything more. 

I decided to go to a therapist for a second opinion. A last chance saloon before I give up and stop fighting. 

I found a new therapist, and in our first session, she asked me the usual intake questions. When she asked what had brought me to therapy, I told her very directly: “My psychiatrist has more or less said that depression and anxiety might be my baseline and I may need medication long-term (and that’s okay). I’m here because I want to know if that’s the case or not.”

 She paused for a moment and then said “I don’t believe that babies come out of the womb depressed. I don’t accept that. It’s not good enough”. And in that moment, that faith I'd had, that glimmer, gave a little fist pump. 

I looked at her pointedly and said, “Right, you are. Let’s start there.”

Over the next year, we worked together to uncover (and process) the underlying causes of the depression and anxiety—things that I hadn’t quite gotten to before with other therapists. 

I began to heal. I started to feel different, the underlying sorrow and weight that I felt I was physically carrying, started to dissolve. I returned to work again, the depression lifted, the anxiety eased, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt - happy.

And when I came off medication again, it worked. This time, I didn’t relapse.

It’s been 18 months since I finished therapy, and I can honestly say “I’m a happy person now”. That doesn’t mean life is perfect—I still have ups and downs, just like everyone else. But there’s an undercurrent of happiness now that wasn’t there before.  Now, even when things are hard, part of me still feels happy. 

Life feels good in a way I never thought was possible. And I don't say that to sound cliche, I say it because it’s true. I really didn’t know that life could feel this good. 

If there’s one thing I want others to take away from my little story, it’s this: you don’t have to accept that this is just the way life is. If  you’re dealing with depression, anxiety or feeling hopeless or stuck - I just want you to know - it’s not normal. 

It may have become normal in our society to feel depressed, overwhelmed and stressed. But just because it’s common, doesn’t make it normal.  

I want you to know that change is possible. Healing is possible. And even if it feels like you’ve tried everything, there is a way out. It does get better. Life is good.

The glimmer at the end of the tunnel is real (not an imaginary carrot).