My Own Undoing
When running away stopped working - My Story Part 3
So there I was, about to embark on my entrepreneurial journey. What could possibly go wrong with starting a business when I wasn’t even qualified and had no idea what I was doing…
So anyway, I left my job and went self-employed in February 2022 without much work on and without knowing how to get any. Although I did finish my portfolio, I never took the final exam. I was too scared and felt I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to pay all that money and get stressed about doing it, so I decided not to even bother. Instead, I chose to lie and say I was qualified when I wasn’t, which meant I wasn’t legally allowed to do certain jobs and sign off my own work.
Despite this, I still did some work. However, it soon became clear that I would have a lot of time on my hands being self-employed until I grew my customer base. I put this in quotation marks because although this is what I said, I never really tried to do this. I never really tried to grow and work on the business. I liked the idea of running my own business, but the hard work, the time, and the effort that is required to build one—I never did.
I quickly reverted back to past habits of spending most of my time playing video games or watching YouTube. Yet another failure of my own business compounded with the others and reinforced the pattern of escaping and avoiding doing what I needed to. I was avoiding dealing with the underlying fear, the anxiety, the self-doubt, and the loathing.
Anyway, this pattern continued into the summer when I realised I had to do something. Again, that something was not to open up and talk about it and seek help, but to run away. And this time it was a road trip into Europe—to the border of Poland and Ukraine to help with refugees fleeing the country.
I got there and things quickly changed when I realised most people were not, in fact, fleeing but going on vacation. So I found another place in Poland to stay at. I stayed in Poznań in a house with other people from different countries who grew their own food there and practised martial arts and rescued animals, amongst other things.
Again, at the beginning, I really enjoyed it and got stuck in with the work and meeting everyone. I was there for three and a half months in total. And once again, after a few months, I started questioning: What was I doing with my life? Why was I here? Which led me to return home for Christmas of that year.
Spending time with my family after the Christmas period, I had a certain level of self-awareness to the point of realising that if I stayed home for any length of time, I would get caught up in the same shitty cycle of addiction—consuming entertainment to distract myself from the fear and the doubt. But what I had yet to realise was that I kept running away from this.
So wherever I went, it came with me: the same underlying patterns of thought, feeling, and actions. The same behaviour repeated because I couldn’t see what was causing it enough to do anything about it.
Anyway, I knew I couldn’t be at home due to the inevitable, so I booked a flight nearly halfway across the world. A couple of weeks later, I was all packed and ready to go. I first had to take the train to London to then catch my flight over to Hawaii.
And on the train, I had an incident. No, don’t worry, it wasn’t anything like before where I would wet myself—not that I ever did, but that was always the fear. I think I had my first and only panic attack. I don’t think I’d ever had one before. Although I got super anxious in the past, it never caused me to have panic attacks, as far as I’m aware. I don’t know if it was an actual panic attack, but it seems the most appropriate term to use for what happened.
As the train left the station to head for London, a rush of thoughts and feelings flooded my body. I felt like I couldn’t move and was sweating like crazy. I got so worked up about flying to Hawaii on my own, so far away, not knowing anyone or really anything. And I didn’t know what to do.
I tried to calm myself down by slowing my breathing, listening to music, telling myself I’d be okay. But nothing worked. I felt completely overwhelmed, and my body felt exhausted. In the end, I decided to return home.
Whilst it prevented my trip across the world—as I’d also booked a flight from Hawaii to Australia—it did show me that I had to do something about this. It gave me the resolve to really admit to myself and to others that I had a problem. So in many ways, this trip, even though I didn’t reach the airport, changed my life.
I came home and decided to write about my experience and share it online for anyone to see. The response was pretty great, and I was glad to finally start opening up a bit about fear and anxiety. I also started reading a book that I hoped would help me to heal and uncover the root of this fear.
I thought by studying it with a strong resolve to get it sorted—to fix it—would help. I thought this meant battling and fighting the anxiety to make it get better, to make it go away, and to make myself get better. Only then would I finally be free from its grip.
However, a lovely neighbour up the road read my blog and sent a message asking: “Had I tried accepting and letting go instead?” I initially thought this was ridiculous, and I equated acceptance and letting go with giving up and letting the fear rule me.
But after reading a book they kindly lent me, I realised this was not true at all. The book gave an analogy I will never forget. It said the way we’re taught to deal with negative feelings, emotions, and thoughts is a bit like a tug of war, where we’re on one side and the fear (or whatever it is) is on the other. In order to not let fear win and drag us around, we have to pull as hard as we can and keep resisting it and fighting to never give up.
This is how I thought too. There were two options: either be tossed around by the fear for the rest of my life, controlled by it, or fight, battle, resist, and get stronger so I could control it and make it go away.
But what this book introduced to me—which was completely revolutionary—was a third option. This was probably the single most impactful moment of my life so far and allowed me to see things completely differently and transform how I related to fear and anxiety.
The third option it mentioned was to let go of the rope.
It’s very anticlimactic, but for me, it was revolutionary. It meant I no longer had to fight and struggle and try to beat it into submission. But it also meant I didn’t have to be controlled by it and have my life run by it.
It didn’t mean that it would suddenly go away and disappear forever, and I’d be free because I’d never feel it again. But it did mean that I could learn to handle it, and when it did come up, that I could learn to be okay with it—which is acceptance. And to not struggle and resist and try and get rid of it—which is letting go.
I learnt what it really meant to accept and to let go, which led to a real freedom I’d never experienced before. And this was the beginning of my path to learning and practising acceptance and letting go—of slowly becoming more free.
Whilst this didn’t completely change my relationship with fear and anxiety, it meant I wasn’t affected as much by them. I still lived with the same patterns of escaping and avoiding. Despite the power of fear diminishing in my life, the patterns I used to cope with this for so many years were deeply ingrained, and I still acted from them.
These patterns and behaviours were so normal and natural to me because of years of conditioning that I almost couldn’t act any other way. My natural tendency was still to escape and avoid, but there began to be nothing to escape from.
Or so I thought.
I realised that although the fear and anxiety had massively diminished, I still had this deep-rooted self-doubt, criticism, and loathing about myself. I still had the voice of not being good enough and being a failure, which meant I didn’t feel good about myself or about my life, which led me to escape.
It seemed that although the fear and anxiety felt quite deep, this was only the first layer I’d started to peel back. Despite the incredible breakthrough and starting to finally become a little more free, I was still very much stuck in the patterns that I didn’t understand—of not liking myself for not being able to change.
What I didn’t know then was that this breakthrough with fear and anxiety was just the beginning. The real work—the deeper excavation of who I thought I was and why I couldn’t seem to like myself—was still to come...