I’ve always had this deep compassion for people struggling with addiction or mental illness. We are all struggling with something, at least they have the courage to live their struggle out loud, for the world to see. Most of us just secretly struggle. Putting on a pretty face and underneath the fakeness is the acuteness of our pain.
Everyone has a secret pain.
Everyone is addicted to something. Maybe your addiction has a prettier colour to it or looks more appropriate in social settings, but addiction is addiction nonetheless. How we judge one as better or worse, as hierarchical to another matters not. Who are we to judge that one person’s pain is worth more or less than another? Pain is pain and addiction is addiction. Addicted to vanity, praise, constant stimulation, ego, work, working out, anger, drama, consumerism, the perfect house/life/mate, gambling, drinking, drugging. The list goes on and on.
We seek out antidotes to our pain – anything to make it go away. Addictions. Ways to not have to be fully present. Ways to not have to feel.
The difficulty of it is that the only real way out, is through. Trying to outrun yourself never works – because everywhere you go, there you are. If you really want to transform it, whatever your addiction is, you have to do the thing you are most inclined not to do. You have to choose to feel, choose to be uncomfortable, choose to go deeper and connect further and be vulnerable and conquer yourself. You have to retrain your brain, and make a different choice and be willing to face yourself and tell the truth and fight your way through to a new normal, a healthier normal.
Struggle can be an addiction, too. And as we crest out of what has been an arduous, challenging and unbelievably difficult journey for the past 18 months to build this company and right this ship and we are moving into a new dimension of stability, I can feel my own inner conflict around it.
Truthfully, I don’t know how to be in a place of stability. I’ve been fighting and struggling and working hard my whole life to get to this place. I know how to fight. I know how to work hard. I know how to conquer insurmountable odds and maneuver through crisis after crisis. I know what it feels like to be struggling to get somewhere, to be constantly at war and to never be at rest.
And I see myself, here, at this place I have been pushing to get to my whole life, and unable to fully be here. I am afraid to let go of struggle. Afraid that if I relax, if I trust, if I let go of the fight, something will come and hit me like a freight train. I have to keep my guard up. Struggle is an environment I have swum in, drank up and slept in the nook of. Struggle has felt normal, oddly, safe.
Adrenaline my constant companion, suffering always at my side.
Now I have to let it go. I have to get uncomfortable again and face myself again and find a way to recontextualize what normal is and redefine myself.
Who am I now?
It feels shameful to say it all outloud like this. I don’t know why. Maybe I think as a CEO I should have it all together all the time, or that I’ll be crucified on someone’s cross who thinks I should. But as one of my favourite mentors and coaches says, “leaders are easy to recognize, they’re the ones with arrows in their backs”.
The truth is, none of us has it all together. And until we start telling the truth about what it really takes to build Greatness, I truly believe we are doing our younger generations such a disservice. 10% of the challenge is having a good idea, the rest is building who you are as a leader and your leadership – and that means constantly redefining yourself, being willing to go first, being brave enough to tell the truth and pivot and go to the scary places to be completely uncomfortable and have to let go of everything you think about yourself and everything you define yourself by, through or from.
All we can do is get up each day and give our best, be our best, strive for our best and forgive ourselves when we mess it up, do what we can to make it right, course correct and keep going. Letting go of anything that no longer serves us, like shedding layers of inauthentic self in a lifelong quest for who we really are.
I feel the freedom in my heart as each layer fades away. Sometimes that freedom is close, sometimes it is just a whisper calling me to be brave enough to let more go. Let struggle go. Embrace stability. Find a new normal. Redefine, recontextualize, renew. Start again.
Krystine McInnes is CEO and Project Director of Athena Farms and Grown Here Farms. Stewarding purpose-driven, change-making projects with a focus on Planet, People, Profit and a commitment to Sustainable Business models.
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