Building a New Life Takes You to a Dark Place (First)

Is ‘sad’ my new forever feeling?

The author on a bike tour through Albufera National Park, near Valencia. Picture by the author.

I just had a random cry on the way home from the supermarket.

In the sun.

Under Spanish palm trees.

Given that situation, how could anyone feel so damn sad?

Did I take a break from my job… to become depressed?

I’m on a four-month sabbatical, during most of which I live in Spain. My original plan was to build a business here that would change my life.

It’s funny. I haven’t found a business.

I found something much more valuable: The insight that first, I have to change from within. Second, I can change my outer world and build the things I want.

This introspection may take way longer than four months.

I am just not the salesy personality type who can confidently build a business, sell things to people, and succeed. I feel some barriers here that I have to resolve first.

And that’s okay.

For the first time in my life, I really start to feel. That’s good and bad news.

I think the phase I am in right now is the best, the weirdest, the worst, and the closest to a breakthrough.

I have never experienced something like this in my life. All the time before, I numbed all the voices that called for real change by radical busy-ness.

I didn’t have time to feel.

And now changing something means I cannot tiptoe around my inner voices anymore.

Confrontation hits hardest

Choosing to confront myself tosses and turns all my emotions. And what I feel more than ever is a great sadness.

Deep, nagging sadness.

So technically, yes: I took a break from my job to become depressed. Or much more to finally make the time to feel all my feelings.

Outch.

My baseline feelings have changed

One that screams at me to deal with it and process it, somehow. But I don’t know a tool or process to… process.

In the absence of my corporate job and my usual environment in Germany, all typical structures of my life are missing.

So I have to face the things that are within me instead of those around me. I really have to face my true self.

That’s deep pain. And it feels like it was my new baseline feeling — which, for a long time, was happiness.

Going through it

The pain I feel now points me to my own limits that are between the person I want to be and the person that I am.

I am pretty much in the ‘waiting room’ of my own life. I know I am about to initiate a change — professionally, geographically, and emotionally.

That’s hard stuff.

But to get to the good side, I have to go through ‘hard’.

The room before having built a new life is no comfortable place

So, where I’m at right now is definitely not a flower meadow. But it’s maybe the most important place I’ve ever seen.

If you don’t master your emotions, they will master you.

So I will go through the hard stuff.

I will feel the pain.

Until my baseline emotion is positive again.

Have you had similar experiences?

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