Latest / Through the Sh#t with Jen McDowell / 11 Stories, One Truth: What Going TTS Teaches Us About Losing Ourselves and Finding a Truer Version
Transcript
- Albie Burdge: Welcome, I'm Jen McDowell, and you're listening to Through the Shit, a podcast for anyone going through the shit and the people who love them. And every episode we'll hear a new story of loss, hope, and resilience, and how going through the shit led to something greater. So if you're in the shit now and feeling lost or alone, disconnected from your badass self, or in need of an ember of hope to keep putting one foot in front of the other, you're in the right place. So settle in, prepare to be moved and inspired, and welcome. to the shit. Welcome everybody. You're listening to Through the Shit. I'm your host, Ched McDowell. Over the summer, I'm working on some changes to the podcast based on feedback I've received over the last several episodes. So I'm putting together this recap episode to highlight some of the the amazing stories of our guests and to highlight one surprising takeaway that's emerged from this first batch of episodes. When I started Through the Shit, I thought I was creating a podcast about loss, hope, and resilience. I wanted to showcase the remarkable ways that humans can adapt and grow from things like grief, burnout, illness, betrayal, and seemingly insurmountable challenges at work. All of the 11 conversations have stayed with me, and from each guest I walk away with some nugget of wisdom that inevitably comes up again, whether it's in a conversation with a client or in a casual context. So after sitting with these 11 remarkable stories and reviewing every conversation again, I've realized that while grief and sadness play a prominent role in each of the stories, there's another consistent thread among them that's worth talking about. It involves this idea of reinvention and the realization that the narratives and the identities that we build for ourselves. ⁓ maybe no longer serve us in this next phase of life. Sometimes it leads us to ask questions like, Who am I now? What do I want for this phase of my life? And how do I even begin to answer these questions? I I a question I asked myself constantly is, Well, who am I without the hustle? ⁓ yeah. Cause it felt like a void. If I stop the hustle, what do I have? Yeah. So who did you find when you stopped the hustle? I think it like dimmed the hustle, and that gave me at least enough permission to look inward to really appreciate where I was. ⁓ what I found were public libraries. The one of the cafes or the cafe I was working with was connected to a public library, and that became a place where I spent a lot of time. I ended up working for the library, going back to graduate school. getting my master's in library science. And what I loved about the library as a gathering space is, well, one, the library is for everyone, but is this inspiring place of exploration where people come for all sorts of information needs. And you as library staff get to help ⁓ help connect that. But also the library is just really creative for people. You know, you walk through the stacks and think differently about your life, whether you're diving into a memoir, fiction, whatever it is. ⁓ so I found the library. Yeah. And that changed my life. I love that. I was just at a library over the weekend. There was like a fundraising book sale type thing, and like there's a sense of like exploration or hope in the shelves of a library, because you never know where a book is gonna take you. I so premonition in 2021 and then it was a series of years. I will tell you I knew it was deep into it. It would have been August of 22. So that's the time frame. And it was a loss of and a gain. So I I left my professional home. I left a law practice. I left income. I was the primary income earner. ⁓ I lost the stability of my home. I became a founder, which is its own sort of very difficult entrepreneurial journey. lost connections to friends and some very significant family members. I remember thinking, and I've told you this, I was driving in my car one day. I was surrounded on a busy highway and I'm like, I'm driving from a place where no one wants me. And I have no place to go where I'm expected. And I was surrounded by cars on the highway. And I thought, how long is this going to last? I am completely untethered, without any any support, any money, any direction. I thought I had lost everything, or almost everything. My children are still healthy, so that's good. They're alive and healthy. That that tragedy is I I can't imagine that. I'm dealing more with a a complete collapse of my work and my identity and my family structure all at once while I was recovering from a moral injury. So the way I would just it's almost as though if you're you're injured in a hospital and then someone comes and undi unties the tubes and then prevents anyone else from plugging them back in. That was sort of the level of shit that I was in. I'm no best selling author, but I I see a story art here emerging. And it's told time and again in each of these 11 different stories. It generally starts with this idea of certainty. ⁓ we've planned our life, we've curated this perfect image of ourselves. ⁓ but sometimes there may be some warning signs. It might be a whisper, it might be a feeling of discontent sort of deep in our in our gut, or it might be even a premonition that something's about to happen. As you kind of reflect back on your story of shit. How does that definition of through the shit apply to you and your story? It was a series of events. And so the first, I will start off. I, of all things, had a premonition that it was gonna happen. I can't describe the experience of it. It was about a year before. It was almost like a download of information at the time that I don't know if it was a I had a visceral reaction to it. And it's not a panic attack or anything. It was something like all of this information came at me all at once. And I knew that my life was going to change. I was married at the time. I remember thinking and telling my then husband, my marriage may not survive this. I don't know. I can't describe what is going to happen, but it's going to be an intertwining of my life, my personal life, and my professional life. And then almost a year to the day of me having that premonition, it It happened. I'm discreet about this sort of all of the circumstances surrounding it, but I would describe it as a moral injury, both an act of omission and act of commission that occurred to me and struggling through that. And some systems and people that I had historically and for my life thought I could rely on for care was not there. And not only was the care and the support not there. there was elements of harm that occurred. And since a lot of this experience, I've run into others, yourself included, that there's a similar pattern. So people who are going through it, there is and it's not just we all have bumps, we all have traumatic, you know, life and death. People die, people come and go, there's a job loss, but it would be something like all things all at once. I mean, you the catastrophic This is a hypothetical. You lose your job, your house burned down, there's a death of a family member, and your spouse leaves. All things all at once within six months. And it completely shatters your understanding of your life. And then the support system that you go to is withdrawn and/or sometimes actively harming. So those are sort of all of the elements. And it it doesn't just change how you think, it changes the experience. It's survivable. So people who are in the depths of it think, maybe I can't survive it. You can. It you're right on the edge of I don't know how I'm gonna make it through this darkness. And it lasts for a while. And it doesn't change how, again, how you think. It changes also, well, for me, it changed how my body moves through the world. What feels safe and what feels possible is completely changed. And it is a symbol symbolic. Death of an old story and a truer one beginning. Sometimes we're so good at deceiving ourselves, though, that we think everything is fine. And so when some sort of catastrophic event or rupture occurs, we actually find ourselves sort of knocked on our ass and surprised by what's happening. We're also cut off guard because life no longer looks the way we expected it to. And when that happens, we tend to fall back in patterns that we've historically relied upon to get us through. We work harder. We double down on trying to control the situation. We sort of cling to the course that we've initially charted for ourselves. And we even deny that things are wrong. My husband, my mom, my kids, my brother, they took me to every appointment. They picked me up. They my brother sat in these appointments. Some of these appointments with the liver doctors were five hours. And my brother would sit there and listen. So my husband would drop me off. My brother would meet us. He'd listen to everything. He'd come report everything. And one day, this was before I was on the list. He says to the doctor, So what happens if she doesn't get a liver? And the doctor looks at me, looks at my brother, and I said, Just say it. And she goes, We're gonna make her as comfortable as we can. Well. And my brother said, Sue, you know, she just said you're gonna die. I said, Brad, I'm not gonna die. I will not die. Sometimes we don't even know that we've hit rock bottom, but eventually you get to the point where you start to feel disoriented. Maybe you go into survival mode. You're doing the bare minimum just to get by, without even thinking, like, how can I thrive in this situation? You might have feelings of hopelessness or helplessness. You might get to this sense of things are never going to get better. I am never going to get out of this hole. You can also experience this sense of disappointment because the life that you're living isn't the one that you charted for yourself, or you feel betrayed or let down by people or systems who who you thought were always going to be there for you. And you start to realize that the foundation on which you've been building your life. is starting to crack and fall apart. The way that I deal with a very high stress situation is maybe different than most people. Like I don't deal with it right away. I'm not a paniker. I will process information. It's a delayed processing. So in the moment I am dealing with the the like the factual information, but processing that information hits later. ⁓ everything's fine. You know, I had to deal with Christmas. That was the deal. Like I had to deal with Christmas. Nobody needed to ⁓ you know, do anything. I have also not had anyone in my immediate family with breast cancer. So I didn't really had any had have any kind of experience. I knew nothing about breast cancer. I knew nothing about anything. Zero information. And And all of my appointments with my doctors, my surgeons were going to be after the holidays. So I had literally n I could not deal with any of that until ⁓ you know, the holidays were over. There was very little self-blame. It was more bewilderment, disorientation, cognitive dissonance of wait a minute. I thought now that I'm older, this wouldn't happen to me again. And here it was happening to me again. And I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe I was having to go through this yet again. I didn't know how many more times this was going to happen to me in my career. And I absolutely believe that those two and then third experience were fodder for me becoming self-employed was I did not want to even give myself the opportunity of being potentially being in a situation like that anymore. As you go through this period of disorientation, it it leads to the sense of hibernation of drawing inward because you want to protect yourself. ⁓ it looks like I can't take one more disappointment. I can't take one more bad thing happening. And so we go inward, we avoid risks because it feels safe to be out in the world. You might even feel like you are angry as you look around and you see people living their lives and having fun and enjoying life and And you are mad that the world has continued to spin, even though your life seems like it has come to a screeching halt. It really means having to do a lot of introspection. it means having to be real with yourself and really understanding the truth of the matter. I think there's so many times that we all hear stories of our past or from others. And then I finally had to take a moment where I'm like, I don't think that's really the truth of what's happening here. And so when I really started to tune into myself as part of this, the truth or that little thread started to come through a little bit more for me. And that's what I started following. It's kind of my little lifeline and my little rope that I started to hold on to. That helped me. Wow. Okay. So it's this idea of following your own truth and abandoning the stories that maybe you've been telling yourself that you picked up from other people. Right. Okay. Wow. That's ⁓ that's a new one. But I can relate to that because I think about going through my own shit. And there was like this little sort of pull that I couldn't ignore. I couldn't explain it. I couldn't articulate it. It was just this pull. ⁓ and I think that's what got me on this trip around the country is like I can't explain it. I just need to be outside. And so I'm just gonna do it. So ⁓ So thank you for that ad to our ongoing evolution of what it means to go through the ship. Yeah. You'll find it's not a voice. And it's really not. I mean, sometimes you hear like one or two, but you're right. It's just a feeling and it's that pull. And I mean, I we'll talk about energetics a little bit later, how of it, but sometimes it's like where it feels that. I mean, for me, it's like when I get something goes behind my neck and I get that cold feeling about it, I'm like, mm, better pay attention. Eventually you get to the point where you start to get some distance. Where you can start to feel like you can breathe again, but you have this sense of stuckness and you ask questions like, why can't I just move forward? Why aren't the old tools and things that I used to do working anymore? And I don't even know where to go to figure out how to make things better. We also start to double down even harder on some of these narratives, like I've got to work harder, I've got to maintain this persona, this facade. And we have sort of a new wave of grief that hits us when we start to have these setbacks occur. ⁓ it might also be the period of time when you start to come to terms with your own relationship to the situation and the events that have occurred. Maybe you chose to put yourself in some of these situations. Maybe you are starting to understand that you have some narratives that you are telling yourself that are boxing you in. maybe you're also starting to sort of really sit with those deep-seated emotions that you've been avoiding. And through that process, it s shines a light on what it is that you need and what's important to you. Eventually you get to the point where you realize that the only person who can get you out of this situation is you. And you know that you have to start loosening the grip on that old identity. In engineering design or an aircraft design, if you're testing your beta testing, you'll have failures, things won't work, things won't operate. And the engineering mind is good. Let's see where we need to fix it. We have to change everything. I don't know why we don't adopt that same philosophy to our life is things are not working, things are falling apart. ⁓ good, what does this mean? Let's explore it. And if you look closely at something, what looks like failure and destruction is just prepping for growth. So My my consulting company that I founded, I use a maple key or sycamore, you call it sycamore in the US. Or we call them little helicopters that fly. And there's a bit of a aviation engineering aspect to the reason I chose the maple key. But also as it flies through the air and lands on the ground, if you take a microscope and you look at it, it looks like the seed is destructing once it hits the soil. It's falling apart. But it's not a failure of the seed. It's not, it's not a destruction of the seed. It's it's a tearing away of the seed so it can plant in its roots and then grow a sycamore or maple, maple tree. Yeah. I mean, the most important thing is to stop powering through. Powering through will not help you. If there's a small ripple, a small upset, we sort of think, I'll make myself feel better if I can have some control over my day in my life. Let me plow through this to-do list. Let me get things done. Let me achieve to satiate this feeling. That doesn't work. What you have to do is you have to stop. That's the most important thing. You have to stop. Stop. Stop what you're doing. Stop writing. Stop texting. Stop, stop trying to achieve or or accomplish and go inward. Go inward with yourself. If you want to reset ⁓ this day and this series of of of happenings, you've got to be able to stop when it's small and go inward and and just pause with yourself. I think this was a really hard moment. I'm bringing you a little bit of my my view of universe. I'm like, ⁓ God made me this wife. Or I chose this, which is an even more powerful way to do it. Like, I before I came in this lifetime, chose to be an addict, and I had something to learn through that. that is hard to say away because that is one of those things like you have to take full ownership of this. This didn't happen to me. This is me doing this. And that is one of the harder points of what the shame is out of it. You're dealing with this is like, okay, wow, I really have to own my shit to get through my shit. I talk a lot with with my coaching clients about, you know, we are not products. Right. We we go out and read the Amazon reviews, you know, four point seven out of five stars for this thing. Cool, that's really good, right? We are not an iPhone. And, you know, so so when we talk about doing our best, especially in hindsight, you know, we start to woulda, shoulda, coulda. Cause it's hindsight, right? In reality, as human beings, best is a moving target. Mm, right? Like on a day where like you had a great date last night and a really good night of sleep and you just finished a project successfully and all the things, your best today might be a 10 out of 10. Right. If you were up with a sick child all night or you had a a a fight with a person with your person or you know, your project's going south, your best might be a two out of ten today. If your company just got breached, your best is probably a minus ten out of ten, you know. Right. So so in those situations, right, that recovery might be getting you from a minus ten out of ten to like a zero out of ten. Right. And and even getting to like a two out of ten is miraculous. There is no 10 out of 10. And through this process of reconstruction, you start to realize that your healing is not a destination or an endpoint because you are still have these moments of ups and downs. ⁓ the the the process of reconstructing your life, building the new foundation brick by brick is slow. It's gradual. It's trial and error. You start to get glimmers of things getting better, but then you slip back into the old patterns when you encounter a setback. Eventually, though, things do start to click, but you can't necessarily see it until you've gotten enough perspective, whether through the passage of time, distance from the situation, or you've done enough healing to see that you are on the other side. Anytime you look back on something, you can see. The trajectory, right? You can see the beginning, middle and end. You don't know when you're in it. And I think that's a learning, a lesson, right, is is that anything can happen really at any moment. ⁓ and when you look back, you also have the appreciation of seeing the other side of things. Like you can see both sides of the mountain. You can see the, you know, the positives of that. You know, it's really interesting because I had a conversation with a client recently about this very topic where they asked, How do I know when I'm on the other side? And I think it's really subtle. It's this idea of the peaks and the valleys that you've seen, these emotional highs, the low lows, they don't feel so extreme. And it starts to feel more like a smoother wave that ebbs and flows rather than sort of these storms and troughs and valleys that you find yourself in. Another thing that tends to come up is the idea that ⁓ the time between these rough patches gets longer and longer. And when you do get into a rough patch, your recovery time is shorter. And so you're able to kind of get back to a place of functioning sooner. I think during this time of reconstruction, you also start to feel more comfortable hoping and having joy and allowing joy and embracing it, even though it feels foreign still. And I think you also see this level of comfort with taking more risks again. You want to reengage with the world. You begin to get curious about it. And as I think about sort of these different stages of the reconstruction, it kind of feels like the stages of grief that Elizabeth Kubler Ross first started talking about back in the late 60s. But the other thing that I think is important to know is that. Much like we've come to know about the stages of grief, this isn't linear. ⁓ it's not sort of that smooth curve that sort of dips down and then gradually goes back up. It's more chaotic. It feels like this squiggly line that sort of doubles back on itself and you have these highs and lows and loop-de-loops, but eventually you do start to see that sort of upward trajectory, even if you continue to have waves and peaks and valleys going forward. Ultimately, in the long term, You can see the upward trajectory. The last thing that I think is really important is this idea of integration. And that occurs when people start to feel more confident again. They feel anchored in what's important to them. And this next this this last phase or this next phase of their life, they see that their identity in this new way that they've reconstructed it has a real tie to their purpose. When I got sober, I felt like it was important to kind of get through the trenches and then turn back around and help other people through the trenches. And that is very important. But I let it take up more of my life than it should have because I stayed in the trenches and I never walked out of them and into the light. And now I feel like I can stand in the light and enjoy the light. I can come back to the trenches and maybe come help out a couple of people and then I can run back to the light where I live. I no longer live in the either in the trenches or in the darkness or on the edge of either one. I live in this light and this joy. And I can I can go back to what feels safe enough to try and help people, but it isn't my whole existence anymore. The joy and the sparkle and the glitter is my whole existence now. And that's what I fought like hell for and that's what I deserve and that's what everybody deserves these days. The darkness is no longer my existence, no longer defines me. Right? Yes. Yeah. You do not have to do this alone. There are times you have to do the work alone, but you do not have to be alone to do it. Yeah. And I have friends and family who have gone through shit with me. And them just knowing that they're there to sometimes to either catch myself, to let me process it, or just to be myself. And I think that was really other resources that I've done. I mean, I've kind of got back into yoga, meditation, somatics. I mean, I can go on and on about all the things that I've kind of tapped into out of it. But the one actually for me right now is just a really more intuition and kind of like what are my talents around psychic abilities, which is things like out of it. Like I just feel things and I'm like, Okay, I can say that now. I used to never ever say that. ⁓ totally. It's just more of like trusting myself. Hmm. Yeah, I know that. The tools will come to me. And sometimes I didn't know what the right tool was. And I'd be like all of a sudden like they talk about manifesting and just plop in your life and you're like, ⁓ well, appreciate it. Thank you, Universal. And let's l I learned something new today. But Totally. Looking back in the situation and you said earlier like you're still not glad it happened. Is there anything you would have done differently? Mm. Yes, a hundred percent. Okay. I would have allowed my dad to be okay with dying. Every time he would mention it, I'd run in and say, That's double talk. I did not want to hear that from him. He knew it. And I feel bad now that I didn't allow him the opportunity to communicate that and for that to be okay. Yeah. So not only did he have to deal with being sick and dying, but he had to deal with not disappointing his family. Yeah. And I wish now that I would have given him the grace to say that what do you want and whatever you want and whatever you feel that this is what God does for you, that I'm going to support you in that. ⁓ but I was kind of selfish. Yeah. And I wanted him to be with me. And I just couldn't see anything other than that. Yeah. I I think that's a really common thing is just people, you know, love so much and they want to be supportive. ⁓ and even their best of best intentioned efforts can fall flat sometimes. And being able to at least see the other person person's perspective, ⁓ I think is part of the process of Building a bond that helps you go through it together rather than something that you endure sep separately. A hundred percent. Yeah. And I think that takes a a level of spiritual and emotional maturity that I just didn't have at that time. ⁓ yeah. I just didn't have it. Still working on it. Still working on it. Still working. Still working on it. Okay. Listeners, as I leave you with some closing thoughts, I I want to sort of reinforce the idea that healing is not a destination. Some events that we go through in life are not things to get over or to just put behind us. They're experiences that you start to carry with you and that become part of you. Through my own experiences and the experiences of my amazing guests, some universal truths have emerged. One is this idea of even if it feels insurvivable in the moment, you can survive it. Second is this idea of small, consistent acts matter in the long run. Another thing that comes out of these amazing stories is this idea of reinvention and that you can rebuild your identity and you have choice and how you respond to the situation, even if you can't control or didn't choose the circumstances that you find yourself in. The last thing that I'd say is this idea of finding the balance between grief and growth, because they often have to coexist in order to transform. If you're listening today because someone shared this episode, I welcome you. I hope you'll go back to the and spend time with each of my remarkable guests because every conversation has something different to teach. If you've been with me since the beginning, thank you. Thank you for trusting me. Thank you for trusting my amazing and brave guests. Going through the shit will change you. It strips away your certainty. It forces you to ask what feel like impossible questions. It might even break your heart. But if you stay with it, if you let yourself grieve, if you open yourself to being helped by other people, if you keep taking the tiny steps, you'll eventually discover something remarkable. This isn't about rebuilding the old version of yourself because that version is gone. It's about becoming someone you could have never imagined before. Listeners, thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you on the flip side. That's it for this episode of Through the Shit. Thanks for listening. If you liked this podcast, like, share, and subscribe, and maybe send it to someone who needs a boost because they're going through the shit. While you're at it, tell them how important they are to you. If you have a story of shit to share or you're in the shit now, I'd love to hear from you. Email me at through the shitpodcast at gmail.com or go to our website at throughthe shit.com. I'll see you on the flip side.