I woke up and realized that I was in a personal development space. 

The thought occurred to me as I was on my morning Sunday walk with my Pomeranian, Luna. First block in, I looked up and saw a house that I had walked past dozens of times and yet had never truly noticed. It was out of place from the Spanish style bungalows in the neighborhood. It was Colonial style, Southern perhaps. It was quaint, but different. 

I asked myself how I had never noticed it. If my attention and sight had been so selective, what else had I not been seeing?

As I turned the usual corner, it struck me softly: my career is in the personal development space, supported by the entrepreneurial lifestyle. 

To most, that statement is obvious. I launched my bestselling book, The Emotional Entrepreneur, based upon those two exact things: personal and business development. What started with me painting an honest picture of what living with bipolar disorder looks like on podcast after podcast and within my long-form captions on Instagram became emotional entrepreneurship. Emotional entrepreneurship was and is the air I breathe, the form I have chosen to take. 

I woke up one Saturday morning and every single one of my muscles was plagued with stiffness and joint rigidity. I couldn’t get into a child’s pose or a comfortable rag doll. My body remained clenched up for days, the tenseness became a permanent physical sensation. My mind entered into a two week long catatonic episode which ebbed and flowed, flared up and calmed down. 

Once the catatonic episode took its place, the depression took over: a new hue veiled over my eyesight as I drove down Del Mar Heights Road and met the vast and classic view of the Del Mar ocean ahead. It looked dark and bleak and dull. 

The decline of my physical mobility and additional mental and emotional suffering had me questioning things: What was I moving through? What new, profound realization will be waiting for me on the other end of this episode? What was I being called to examine and understand?

I took action immediately, a muscle I have built after years of suffering from deep depression, psychosis, and anxiety flexed. After prioritizing my mental space for over half of my life, I knew it was my body’s turn: she was begging for alignment. 

I swapped out my eating habits for an anti-inflammatory diet, saying goodbye to sugar, gluten, dairy, and alcohol. I upped my meditation game, a practice that had started solidifying into my routine about a month prior to this flare up. I stretched sparingly at first until my body became more nimble and then I committed myself to a brief daily Pilates session. Once my body could handle that, I added in morning walks. 

While the fog was lifting and my muscles became more lubricated, I started feeling deeply drawn to my creative well which I repressed, stashed for later. It found me in an unassuming moment: watching Jenna Lyon’s new HBO show. 

Suddenly and then all at once, I was being called to my old stomping grounds: prose, poetry, design, architecture, fashion, and luxury goods. I started browsing $300 sweaters versus the usual $70. I allowed my imagination to run wild with future home dreams, the ideal closet, the books that would occupy my mind. I consumed every Architectural Digest and Vogue article that reminded me of old media.

About seven years ago, I cast off my creative world. It was where I once lived. It was a deep dwelling. The outer picture matched my inner world: second-hand Doc Martens from the Melrose Flea Market, vintage dresses, an abundance of cigarettes, coffee shop visits to write poetry, impulsive tattoos, a world of indie magazines, a Tumblr filled with Fall collections, late night, full-body bawls as my friend held me in my tears. 

This is not an essay about my depression. This is an essay about what I traded in for healing. 

Some sell their souls to the devil to achieve perceived greatness. I sold my creativity to arrive at my inevitable healing. 

It was the right exchange at the time. I said goodbye to my Moleskine notebooks filled with lyrics of Bright Eyes, Fleet Foxes, and Something Corporate. I stopped writing poetry and short stories about women who were used and abused. I stopped going to that tender spot which screams emotional confusion at life’s complications. I stopped smoking cigarettes. 

In the selling of my creativity, I found the structure that worked for my healing. I found entrepreneurship. It was the thing that built up my arsenal of self-confidence. It was the thing that allowed me to create instead of wallow. It was the thing that provided a framework in which I became something, in which I created something.

As I have so deeply, willingly, and passionately followed the entrepreneurial scavenger hunt, and have so poignantly, divinely, and patiently healed, I have found that I arrived at success. Upon that arrival, I soberly met the thing I sold to get here. 

My creativity is a beast. Within that beasthood lies a power that has real potential for destruction. It never occurred to me that if this force within had such power to destroy, it also could have immeasurable power to create. I cast it aside abruptly, ending a love affair I had spent years chasing.

At times, I can get fascinated with how the outside world views me. If one was to title me, it would read The Emotional Entrepreneur. I chose that label with a clear understanding of what my “brand” was as a digital avatar. And yet, the second I labeled myself as that, the beast awoke and was angry at my neglect of it. It started seeping through my pores, it clenched my muscles up, it made my cognitive ability go hazy for weeks, it reminded me of its power with my depression. 

My creativity’s desperate plea was an angry one. I had, after all, sold it in pursuit of a different life path, casting it aside like an old romantic partner who I knew was not good for me. It was coming for vengeance and it wanted to move back in. 

I am coming to terms with the fact that its integration back into my daily life is coming. Or rather, that it is already here. My story with bipolar disorder and my experience being an entrepreneur are trivial and easy to document. The narrative that lies within the lens of my creativity is more complex. 

I am known for one thing, but have another, truer side of myself that is having its homecoming. I am softening it’s plea and acknowledging its greatness. 

As this all came flashing into my peripheral, I picked up my walking pace. I had to get home. I cursed myself for not bringing my phone because sentences were forming in my head at such a rapid pace. I knew I would lose some of them by the time I got to my keyboard. As my heart race increased and my breath became shallow, I asked myself: How did I get here, trading off parts of myself to live within another? If the parts are coming back together to create my whole, can I live with them all? 

Can I embody my truest expression without selling aspects of my soul for my sanity?

Can I be all of me and survive?