What I did when I felt like I'd lost everything
I made finding happiness my full-time job. It was the most productive thing I'd ever done.
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When everything in your life feels out of control, the most counterintuitive thing you can do is stop trying to fix it.
I know. Bear with me.
So many of us fall into this trap — I’m not going to rest, I’m not going to have fun, I’m not going to let myself breathe until I figure my life out. Like we need to punish ourselves into solutions. Like suffering is productive.
I was re-watching House recently and Dr. House said something that stopped me: “Pain makes us make bad decisions. Fear or pain is almost as big of a motivator.”
He’s right. And here’s what that actually looks like in real life.
When we’re operating from pain or fear, we don’t make wise decisions — we make fast ones. We take the job that isn’t quite right because we don’t trust that the right one will come along. We stay in the relationship that’s wrong for us because we’re scared to be alone, or we don’t believe we can do better. We grab at the nearest exit, not the right one.
Pain is loud. It drowns out everything else — including your own instincts.
And that’s the real problem. When we’re being controlled by fear, we can’t access our intuition. We can’t hear ourselves. We’re just reacting. And if we can’t hear ourselves, how are we supposed to know what to do next?
To take the next right step, we need to not be in pain. We need to find joy, stillness, peace. We need to be able to look at the future without fear. And that clarity only comes from one place: a deep inner connection with yourself.
Which brings me to what actually changed things for me.
After I left my career and shut down my first startup attempt, I had nothing to do but be alone with my thoughts. Just me, my spiral, and absolutely zero answers. So I did what most of us do: I beat myself up. I obsessed. I tried to think my way to clarity.
It didn’t work.
At the same time, I was reading self help books (as one does when they feel like they’re at rock bottom) and something I read resonated with me: we don’t control what we want, we attract it. And we attract from a place of energy, of positivity, of happiness.
If that was true, I was in trouble. I was so far from happiness that it felt like an impossible starting point. And besides — how could I be happy if nothing in my circumstances had changed?
For so long, my career, my relationships, my external circumstances had defined my happiness. My mindset was: once I fix those things, then I’ll be happy.
But that wasn’t working. So — out of logic or sheer desperation — I made a decision. I was going to make finding happiness my full-time job.
I mean that literally. I had unlimited time on my hands, and for once, I redirected it entirely toward myself. I started asking one simple question, moment to moment: What would feel good right now?
It started with long walks, baths, cooking. It evolved into writing, reconnecting with people I loved, spending time outside. Small things. Unglamorous things. Things that had nothing to do with fixing my situation.
I stopped waiting to feel better until after I figured it out — and started figuring it out by feeling better.
And here’s what happened: clarity came. I met my cofounder. The next step showed up. And it actually felt effortless because instead of forcing, I had learned to get out of my own way.
The most tangible thing you can do when life feels out of control is to make yourself feel good. Make that your top priority. Treat yourself like the golden retriever of a wealthy suburban family. Take all of the energy you are spending worrying about what will happen, and redirect it — to your energy, your happiness, the things that fill you up.
Because when your energy is good, you attract. This isn't woo — it's nervous system science. When you're in pain or fear, your body is in survival mode, and a body in survival mode can't access the part of your brain that makes wise decisions. When you're not in pain, you have clarity. You stop grabbing at the nearest exit. You can actually hear yourself again. You wait for the right job instead of taking the one that's almost right. You leave the relationship that isn’t working instead of staying out of fear. You stop making decisions from scarcity and start making them from trust.
Think about the last time you walked into a room and just felt someone — their heaviness, or their warmth. We perceive energy constantly. When yours is good, people feel that. Opportunities feel that. And more than attracting the right things — you’ll actually recognize them when they show up, and you’ll have the patience to wait for them. Taking care of yourself is one of the most productive things you can do. Full stop.
If you’re in it right now and you genuinely don’t know what lights you up anymore, start here:
Date yourself. Ask what you want to do today. What would feel best. Then do that thing — with no agenda attached.
Go back to childhood. What did you love before it had to be practical or monetizable? Before someone told you it wasn’t a real thing? Start there.
Go deep within yourself. Journal. Look at the parts of you that are hurting and lean into them — don’t look past them. Where are you blocked? Where are you telling yourself you’re not good enough, not worthy, not ready? Those places aren’t obstacles to the work. They are the work.
Read. For fun. For inspiration. Both.
Get off your phone. And if you can’t, at minimum unfollow everyone who makes you feel bad about yourself. You are curating your inner world every single time you scroll.
What I know now — and what I wish I could have told myself in that apartment, spiraling — is that you don’t need all the answers. You just need to know how to come back to yourself.
That’s the skill. That’s actually what resilience is.
This is, basically, the work I now do all day. The whole thing Annie and I are building at Shift is a structured version of what I figured out the messy way: how to interrupt the spiral, expand the gap between trigger and reaction, and choose something other than the panic.
And I’ve also learned not to rush these moments. They’re the most magical and transformative seasons of life, if we let them be. If we can trust that the suffering is temporary, that we can always come back to joy — we will always attract what is ours.
Every hard season I’ve moved through has taught me I can handle hard things. And I’ve been able to come back stronger not by white knuckling it, but by returning to myself. To what felt good. To what made me feel like me.
And from that place — not from fear, not from pain — the next right thing always showed up.
With love,
Marissa
