Field Note #1: The Life I Thought I Had to Earn

Twenty-seven years ago, I was in a fiction writing workshop. I had been heavily influenced by a news article I’d read all about Subcommandante Marcos, the leader and spokesman for the Zapatistas in the ongoing Chiapas conflict in Mexico.

The first lines of my piece were: “San Cristobal de las Casas, city of my dreams…”

A place I had never been to and a place — I seemed to think at the time — I would never see. I had already decided it wasn’t a life people like me got to have.

Non-work travel was not something that fit into my very busy agency life where any Fortune 500 client could have a crisis at any moment and require me to drop everything to address it.

I wanted to make good money and I was really good at helping big companies and start-ups grow. And so I worked and worked and worked. 80+ hour weeks for many years in high-stress agency jobs and then for my own agency. No room for real travel. Certainly no room for travel and work and play all at once. No room for slow mornings or days that followed the flow of my own natural rhythms. No room for living in a more meaningful way, full of rich experiences I had always hoped to one day have. And certainly no room to be present for friends and family during important life events because I was always getting on a plane to sort some client something and always pretty exhausted upon my red-eye returns.

I just couldn’t imagine a world in which I could do some of the best work of my life and do it while showing up in my life the way I wanted to. To have time for friends and family. To have time to hear myself and my own thoughts and needs. To have time for creative pursuits, to experience other cultures, other ways of living and being. In short: I didn’t think that kind of life was something I could have.

I mean, who did I think I was?

I was miserable. A wreck every Sunday evening. Spending my big paychecks on designer shoes and bags and things. So many things. I bought beautiful things because I couldn’t figure out why the life I’d worked so hard for didn’t actually feel beautiful.

I had so intertwined my sense of self-worth with being needed, that I could not see a way out for a really long time. The urgency and stress of big clients acted as a “we need you, you’re the only one who can fix it” treadmill that was tough to get off.

Being needed is a powerful drug.

Especially if it’s the source of your entire personality and all of your self-esteem. You arrange your life to work harder, work longer, become yet more indispensable. You convince yourself that you need to earn that future life you want and this is how it’s earned. 2am calls from Germany. A red eye to New York. A client screaming at you while you hide in the pantry at a family dinner on a weekend.

Over time, I got so tired of being so tired. I began to see that if I wanted to really live a different kind of life, I was going to have to make different decisions. To stop saying yes. To stop hiding my own needs. Look honestly at the patterns I’d built my life around. And perhaps hardest of all, I was going to have to become someone who could say no.

That’s surprisingly difficult when the life you’re trying to leave behind is the very one everyone keeps congratulating you for. I’d become so accustomed to responding to everyone else’s urgency that I’d stopped hearing my own. It was time for me to slow down enough to listen.

That was when I began to question almost everything. What I thought I wanted. What I believed I owed other people. What I thought success was supposed to look like. What I was willing to sacrifice to feel needed. I learned how to get quiet long enough to hear my own voice again.

Little by little, I started making different decisions. Not dramatic ones. Small ones. The kind that, over time, change everything. I began saying yes to things that moved me toward the life I wanted, and no to the things that kept me living the one I already knew. Even when saying no did exactly what I’d always feared it would: disappoint people.

This is how I came to see so clearly that all my work with Fortune 500 CEOs and Silicon Valley’s start-up darling founders wasn’t just about the business structure, product/market fit, COGS and shareholder value. It was also about leadership and leaders are not built in spreadsheets. They are built through thousands of thoughtful decisions. And every one of those decisions passes through a human being.

It’s why I work with every client on both levels: the business and the human running the business. It’s the very foundation of what I do and how I now operate. I understand the burned out entrepreneur, the stressed executive, the harried start-up founder who is not fully in touch with who they really are and how they really want to live (and how to get there). Because I was one.

So imagine me, arriving in San Cristobal de las Casas four years ago to work and travel and play all at once. I have been returning every year — and this year, I made it official. I live here now.

I am doing my best and deepest work with clients while also showing up deeply for myself. While living in a way that lights me up, that allows for my own natural rhythms, that allows me to be fully me in all the parts of my life and show up for the people in my life the way I want. No more missed birthdays, anniversaries, big life moments. I can now be present for it all.

IT IS ALL POSSIBLE. All of it. And we are all capable of creating the exact life we want to live. I see now that all of this wasn’t waiting for me at the end of working so hard I made myself sick. It wasn’t earned by doing work I hated and neglecting my health and family and friends. I didn’t have to suffer first to get this second.

I created this through a thousand micro-decisions, each one bringing me closer to an entirely different kind of work: work that builds a life you very much want to live. The key was not simply believing that I deserved a different life, but that I was allowed to build one. Allowed to let it look different. Allowed to disappoint people. Allowed to define success differently. Allowed to become someone who could finally hear herself.