When I was in college, my greatest fear was getting lost on the freeway.
Not getting stuck in a bad neighborhood. Not being attacked. Not failing an exam.
Just getting lost.
Looking back, that fear almost makes me laugh.
Because after college, my fears changed.
They did not simply grow. They became enormous.
After some difficult years, I graduated. Four months later, I lost my job. I relapsed into a darkness I had thought I had escaped and attempted suicide by jumping fifty feet into a storm drain.
I survived.
But surviving was only the beginning.
Without a job, I had no health insurance. I was transferred from Huntington Hospital, where I had initially been admitted on an emergency basis, to USC County Hospital because I could not possibly afford the astronomical medical bills that were coming my way.
USC County was a teaching hospital. Doctors and nurses were there to train for their future careers.
But for me, it was the bottom rung of care.
They bussed in nurses from poverty-stricken places like Compton. The food was horrible. The care was negligent. And while they may have been teaching medicine, empathy certainly did not appear to be part of the curriculum.
A wound that had been patched up at Huntington Hospital was essentially ignored.
No one properly checked it.
I noticed that it was becoming increasingly itchy, and I asked someone to examine it.
What they found was an infection the size of a tennis ball.
Why me?
That question came naturally.
Why, after everything else, did I have to deal with this too?
What followed were some of the worst days of my life.
The infection had to be treated, and the solution chosen by this expert medical staff was to come into my room every night after dinner and attempt to eradicate it by scraping it with medical instruments.
If you have ever had an ear infection, imagine something a million times worse.
As the team of barbarians stopped by every night after dinner, I had a visceral reaction when I saw them and I would instinctively squirm.
My body would tense.
I was terrified.
My mother would go ballistic watching what was happening to her precious daughter, and they would not even allow me to hold her hand.
There was something barbaric about the whole experience.
And eventually, even they had to admit that their caveman attempts to help me were not working.
The infection was surgically removed.
Finally, I had relief.
There is a Whitney Houston song I love called I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.
And I really didn’t.
I had no idea.
I did not know how much pain I could endure. I did not know how much fear a person could carry and still wake up the next morning. I did not know how many times life could knock me down before something inside me finally said,
Get up.
That experience did not give me a medal.
But it tested my mettle.
And it taught me something I have carried with me ever since:
Pain is going to come whether I invite it in or not.
So perhaps I need to learn how to meet it differently.
One of the greatest lessons I learned throughout my healing journey was to say yes to pain instead of no.
That sounds strange, especially coming from someone who experienced what I did.
But I learned it from author Elizabeth Lesser through a teachable moment called Surrendering to Difficult Times.
Elizabeth once worked as a midwife. She explained that when a woman is in labor and a contraction comes, the instinct is often to tense up and resist.
To say:
No.
No, I don’t want this.
No, this hurts.
No, make it stop.
But resisting the contraction can make the process harder.
Instead, she teaches that you must relax into it.
Breathe.
Surrender.
Allow the contraction to do what it came to do.
Because something is trying to be born.
Elizabeth realized that childbirth was a metaphor for life.
Life has contractions.
Grief is a contraction.
Loss is a contraction.
Heartbreak is a contraction.
Illness is a contraction.
Failure is a contraction.
Change is a contraction.
And when the contraction comes, we often respond exactly the same way:
No.
We tense up.
We fight.
We scream internally, I don’t want this to be happening.
But what if we could learn to say:
Yes.
Yes, this is happening.
Yes, this hurts.
Yes, I am afraid.
And yes, I will breathe through it.
Maybe the purpose isn’t to eliminate the pain.
Maybe the purpose is to allow something new to be born through it.
I have studied personal development for approximately twenty years, and one of my favorite books is The Success Principles by Jack Canfield, the creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.
Jack taught me another lesson that completely changed my understanding of fear:
You don’t have to get rid of fear. Take it with you.
I wish I had understood that when I was in high school.
I was terrified of rejection. I never told the object of my affection how much I liked him.
Eventually, my sister told him for me.
And by triangulation, I received my first kiss at fifteen.
But I digress.
Jack compares fear to a two-year-old who does not want to go grocery shopping.
What do you do?
You need groceries.
So you take the kid with you.
They might have a complete meltdown in the middle of Trader Joe’s, but you don’t leave the store because your two-year-old is afraid.
You take them along.
Maybe you use humor.
Maybe you sing Madonna’s Express Yourself while picking up apples and oranges in the produce aisle.
Maybe someone eventually gives the kid a sticker.
The tantrum ends.
And you get your groceries.
Fear is much the same.
We don’t have to eradicate it.
We simply have to stop allowing it to control where we go.
For years, I thought courage meant having no fear.
I know better now.
Courage is having fear and moving anyway.
There is no such thing as a life without fear.
But there is such a thing as “penetrating fear” or what I like to call “Permeating fear.”
Fear that enters you without destroying you.
Fear that moves through you.
Fear that you breathe through.
Fear that you cry through.
Fear that you laugh through.
And eventually, fear that you grow through.
I went from being terrified of getting lost on the freeway to surviving an experience that was infinitely more terrifying than anything my younger self could have imagined.
I went from:
“Why me?”
to:
“I Didn’t Know My Own Strength.”
And now, when pain comes knocking, I don’t necessarily run from the door.
I may still complain.
I may still curse.
I may still wonder why the hell this is happening to me.
But eventually, I take a breath.
I straighten my shoulders.
And I say:
“Tennis, anyone?”
Because after everything I’ve survived, I don’t need to pretend that I’m fearless.
I just need to know that fear doesn’t get to decide whether I step onto the court.
There is another piece of this story that matters deeply to me.
Elizabeth Lesser wrote a book called Broken Open.
It is one of the books that changed my life.
It is also where I found the inspiration for the name of my business, Phoenix Coaching.
The phoenix is a mythical bird that rises from its own ashes.
That image has always resonated with me because I understand what it means to stand in the ashes of your own life.
Sometimes life burns things down.
Your plans.
Your dreams.
Your relationships.
Your identity.
Your sense of safety.
Sometimes it burns down the person you thought you were going to be.
And when you’re standing there, surrounded by the ashes, you may wonder:
What the hell is left?
But the phoenix story teaches us something powerful.
The ashes are not necessarily the end.
They can be the beginning.
The phoenix doesn’t rise because it avoided the fire.
It rises because it went through the fire.
I am not romanticizing suffering.
I am not saying that what happened to me was good.
It wasn’t.
Attempting suicide wasn’t good.
Being treated negligently wasn’t good.
Having an infection the size of a tennis ball wasn’t good.
Being subjected to those nightly scraping sessions was not good.
There is nothing inspirational about suffering while you are in the middle of it.
But I can choose what I do with it afterwards.
And that choice has changed my life.
For years, I asked:
Why me?
Now I ask a different question:
Who am I becoming because of this?
That question is much more powerful.
Because healing isn’t always about becoming the person you were before the fire.
Sometimes, healing means becoming someone you could never have imagined before it.
Someone stronger.
Someone more compassionate.
Someone who understands pain differently.
Someone who can look at another person’s suffering and say:
I understand.
Someone who can look at their own scars and say:
I’m still here.
And perhaps most importantly, someone who understands that fear can sit in the passenger seat without ever being allowed to take the wheel.
So if you are standing in the middle of your own fire right now, I am not going to tell you not to be afraid.
Be afraid.
Cry.
Get angry.
Ask why.
Say that this isn’t fair.
Because sometimes it isn’t.
But then breathe.
Relax into the contraction.
Take your fear with you.
And keep moving.
Because something may be trying to be born on the other side of this pain.
You may not see it yet.
You may not believe it yet.
You may not even want to hear it yet.
But one day, you may look back and realize:
You didn’t know your own strength.
Now you do.
56; LOVE
This is why I am offering a live nine-week online course inspired by Broken Open at a rock-bottom beta testing price of $56.
And yes, I am calling it:
56; LOVE
There’s a reason this 9-week course is $56.
It’s more than a price. It’s a reminder.
On April 5, 1995, I tried to die. Somehow, I woke up alive on April 6th.
Five became six.
Those numbers became a quiet symbol of survival—a reminder that sometimes, what looks like the end is only the beginning of something we cannot yet see.
Now, 31 years later, I’ll turn 56 on October 31st.
5. 6. 56.
Once, they marked the space between life and death.
Now, they mark life, healing, survival, and becoming.
That’s why I chose $56.
Because I’m still here.
And if you’ve survived something that tried to break you, I hope this course reminds you:
You’re still here, too.
56; LOVE.
Because after everything—
we’re still in the game.
In tennis, love means zero.
But I have learned that zero does not mean nothing.
Sometimes zero means you get to begin again.
Sometimes zero is the place where everything changes.
And sometimes, zero is where you discover who you really are.
There is a Katy Perry song called Roar that I absolutely love. In it, she sings about finding her voice, getting back up, and discovering her own strength. One line especially captures what I have come to believe about the phoenix process:
“I went from zero to my own hero.”
I love that.
Because isn’t that what healing can sometimes look like?
Going from zero to your own hero.
Not because someone else came along to rescue you.
Not because the fire never happened.
Not because the pain magically disappeared.
But because you got back up.
You brushed off the ashes.
You found your voice.
You discovered strength you didn’t know you had.
And you became the person who could finally save yourself.
I went from asking:
“Why me?”
to discovering:
“I didn’t know my own strength.”
And now, I can say:
Maybe I was never meant to be fearless.
Maybe I was meant to become courageous.
Maybe I was never meant to avoid the fire.
Maybe I was meant to learn how to walk through it.
Maybe love—zero—isn’t the end of the score.
Maybe it is the beginning of the next game.
So here is the score:
56; LOVE.
From zero.
From the ashes.
From fear.
From pain.
Toward something new.
Toward something beautiful.
Toward becoming your own hero.
Because sometimes the person you’ve been waiting for to rescue you…
is you.
And maybe, after everything you’ve survived, it’s time to hear yourself roar.
Bring it.
Continue Your Journey of Growth 💗
Sometimes, facing our fears becomes easier when we know we don’t have to do it alone.
Through our Broken Open Book Club, we create a welcoming space for meaningful conversations, personal growth, and the kind of transformation that happens when we allow ourselves to learn, reflect, and grow alongside others.
If you’re ready to explore your own journey of becoming, we’d love to welcome you!
📚 Join the Broken Open Book Club
Learn more and sign up here: https://brokenopenbookclub.com/
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