COMING UNDONE
This time in my life began with a move to Japan from Hungary, a place I loved and felt at home in. A place where I’d begun to establish a community of friends, a network for my business and a life I really loved. Basically, I wasn’t all that keen to leave so arriving in Japan, for many reasons, was something I was reluctant to do. We’d bought a hotel in a ski region and were fully renovating it ready to open for the upcoming ski season. It was a massive undertaking.
I didn’t know it at the time, I didn’t understand, but my experiences were triggering my inner critic, a voice I’d managed to live with in a somewhat symbiotic way up until this time. It began as simply as being stressed by our budget getting tighter and tighter, finding qualified workers, all under the pressure of time to get renovations completed before we were scheduled to open, meeting the requirements of health and safety regulations that seemed to change each time someone came by, and doing all of this in a foreign country in a foreign language with so much being “lost in translation”.
It was intense. There was so much pressure, not a lot of sleep, a mountain of worry, stress, anxiety and for me, fear. Fear of the massive unknown in front of us and how we would pull everything together to open on time for the winter ski season. We managed, but having never run a hotel, a café or a restaurant (both of which we added to the hotel), it was a steep learning curve and the most intense four months of my life after an already intense year.
I ended that first season feeling like I’d been chewed up and spat out! I don’t really know how else to describe it. I was a fragile mess and the time between winter seasons was not enough for me to fully recover before we were back at it again. By the end of that second season, I had fallen into a deep state of depression, fear, and constant anxiety. My life felt awful, my relationship was suffering, I was in tears any time I was alone and the noise in my head was incessant. Something had to change!