Forever Alone | Chapter 3: Exes & Existential Crisis (Part 3)
In which I get the puppy from hell, quit my job, lose friends, run out of money, get back together with an ex, and clearly succeed spectacularly at adulthood.
I published Forever Alone: One Introverted Millennial’s Half-Agonizing, Half-Hopeful Journey Through Singledom in 2021 as a 7-part podcast miniseries. I’m re-publishing it here on Substack for the first time in written form! Start reading from the beginning here.
Before things got temporarily weird between me and Kristen, she’d started working with a coach while I, in turn, started seeing a therapist. Both of us were struggling under the weight of existential angst, and we knew we needed help. We were also starting to suspect that, if we really did want to build a following and write a self-help book, we might need some more legitimate credentials to back up our self-proclaimed expertise. It made sense to explore the worlds of coaching and therapy more, to see if either appealed to us.
Kristen was having a great experience in coaching, while therapy was making me feel worse and worse. Listen, I know that the range of quality in therapists, and coaches too, for that matter, is pretty huge. There are plenty of great therapists, but mine was not one of them. After about 5 sessions of me doing nothing but sobbing hysterically while she mostly sat there, she declared that I was depressed. When I asked her how you generally can tell someone’s depressed, she said, “Well, we can put you on medicine and if it works, you were depressed!” I stopped seeing her after that.
Obviously, I was depressed—had a history of depression and anxiety, in fact, though I wasn’t aware of that yet. But I wasn’t on board for what qualified as a treatment plan in her book, and I frankly wasn’t yet ready to admit that my problems weren’t mostly situational. I just lacked purpose and meaning in my life—of course I was deeply upset by that. And when I felt more fulfilled, then these feelings would naturally dissipate.
That experience, plus Kristen’s results in coaching, convinced us to turn our attention to becoming coaches rather than therapists. It didn’t take long before Kristen met someone at the chiropractor’s office who, hearing she was interested in coaching, told her she absolutely had to check out iPEC—the Institute for Professional Excellence in Coaching—where she’d just enrolled as a student. We did our research, loved the conversations we had with the Admissions department, and promptly enrolled to start a few months later, in July.
Having coach training on the horizon gave me the excuse I was looking for to quit my job at the investment firm—after all, I was going to need extra time to commit to my new career path. I quickly set up a profile on Care.com, a site that caters specifically to jobs in babysitting, nannying, and caregiving, and within a few weeks I had a part-time job lined up as a nanny to two-and-a-half year-old twins. The job was Monday through Friday, 1-6pm, so I’d have the mornings to walk Scarlett, work on my coach training homework, and start building a business as a coach.
Those of you who have kids, or anyone smarter than I was at 23, please feel free to laugh at me for thinking that nannying 25 hours a week for twin toddlers was going to feel like a break in comparison to my 40-hour per week corporate job, where I mostly messed around on Facebook all day.
I’d thought my corporate job was sucking away all of my time, but I’d actually had way more flexibility there than I had as a nanny. I could have easily done my job, my coaching homework, and taken on some business-building challenges while parked at the investment firm.
But don’t expect a desperate person to make rational decisions. I’d thought I was running toward coaching, but really, I was just running away from a situation that made me feel stifled and suffocated. I wanted freedom, and thought having more time automatically equaled more freedom.
In the early weeks of me and Stephen being back together, I told him about how I’d just quit my job, started nannying, and was about to start coach training—and that I wasn’t going to be making enough money to live off of, but I was going to supplement from my savings for a while because I’d be making money as a coach soon, anyway. He was slightly skeptical, but said, “I’m sure you know what you’re doing.”
Uh, I did not know what I was doing.
Rather than walk you through every painful detail of why 2012 was one of the most challenging of my life, here’s the highlight reel:
Started seeing a therapist, who made me feel much worse about myself
Got the puppy from hell, and everything that ensued after that
Discovered coach training and signed up for the summer session
Kristen started dating Cocky McDoucheFace, triggering some big loneliness
Quit my job, started working as a nanny
Had a series of severe sinus infections that had me laid up in bed anytime I wasn’t nannying
Got back together with Stephen
Began coach training
Started our coaching business and launched our website.
Found out I had a brother I didn’t know I had … sorry to just drop that bomb and walk away, but that’s a story for another time! Suffice it to say, all is fine now and I have way more nieces than I ever bargained for.
Scarlett got hit by a car. She ended up being OK, but it was incredibly traumatic for both of us.
Broke up with Stephen, again. Except this time, he broke up with me.
I ran out of savings, ran up my credit card debt, and quit my job as a nanny to go back to work full-time as an admin at a law firm.
A few weeks before Stephen broke up with me we took a long weekend trip to Philadelphia. I’d never been, even though I grew up and still lived only a few hours away. We had a decent time eating cheesesteaks, walking around the city, and checking out the art museum with its famous steps.
The last afternoon we were there, I found myself scrolling through Stephen’s phone while he napped. Listen, I don’t condone snooping—if you can’t trust someone without having to spy on them, one or both of you has issues, and you probably shouldn’t be in a relationship. But something was nagging at me, and my stomach dropped when my suspicions were backed up with proof—there was a pretty incriminating text chain between him and his co-worker.
Needless to say, he wasn’t happy to wake up and find me snooping on him, but his righteousness didn’t have much of a leg to stand on when I threw the text messages back at him. If it’s possible for someone to look both dumbfounded and guilty, then he did.
He assured me he’d never cheated on me, and frankly, it wasn’t hard to believe him. He wasn’t the type to physically stray. But emotionally, he already had. The nauseating intimacy of the texts with his co-worker were proof of that. I don’t think he consciously knew, until that moment, he was doing anything wrong—though he looked guilty enough that on some level, he’d clearly sensed it had crossed a line.
You’d think our relationship ended right then and there, but I held on for a few more weeks. It’s a testament to how lonely and lost I was that that revelation wasn’t a dealbreaker. In the short span that followed, I became even more clingy and needy, which made him more distant and avoidant. Eventually, one afternoon while I was nannying, he texted to tell me he wanted to come over that evening to talk. I don’t think six hours have ever passed so slowly—I knew what was coming, and I spent the whole day trying to figure out how to stop it.
I couldn’t, of course. I wish I could say I let him go gracefully, but I was about as graceless as you can imagine. I screamed and cried and lashed out like a toddler losing her security blanket, as he sat there quiet and solemn.
It was insult to injury when, after he left, I repeatedly called Kristen—who was with Cocky McDocheFace—and never got a response. But you know what? Sometimes the Universe takes, and other times she gives. It turns out that the night Stephen broke up with me was also the very last time Kristen ever saw or heard from Cocky McDoucheFace. He completely ghosted her. I lost my boyfriend, but I got my best friend back, and there’s no question which was more valuable.
In AA meetings they often talk about the “god-shaped hole”—an endless abyss in the human heart that addicts will try to fill with drugs, alcohol, money, sex, love—but that can’t be filled by anything other than God, itself.
Right up until the end of my second relationship with Stephen, I’d spent every waking hour for years trying to fill my own void—it’s the same compulsion that made me transfer colleges to be with Patrick, and why we persisted in a toxic on-again, off-again relationship for years. It’s the same compulsion that made me get a puppy and quit my job without any solid plan. Time and again, I chased things and clung to people—oftentimes people I didn’t even feel that attracted to—because I thought they would make me feel a certain way: Loved, wanted, accomplished, successful, impressive.
And, unsurprisingly, like anything addictive, when the high wore off I was left more lost, lonely, broke, and depressed than I’d started … which meant I needed something else to ease that feeling.
The year between my first and second breakups with Stephen was complete chaos, and also the best thing that could have happened to me. It wore me down and made me question every single thing I was using to form my identity. I guess I’m dense and stubborn enough that, had I not gotten hit over the head so many times, and then hit some more while I was down, I might have kept trying over and over and over again to fill a void that nothing external was going to satisfy.
I was going to have to rebuild an identity on something far more substantial than my career, or my relationships with other people. But in order to fill a God-shaped hole in the human heart, you’ve got to first believe there is a God, or something like it. And I was far from a believer. That’s next time, on Forever Alone.
This was Chapter 3: Part 3 of Forever Alone. Read on for Chapter 4: Part 1!