Antonio Neves - Take Responsibility for Your Life and Rediscover a Bolder, Happier You

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HOW THE HELL did I end up here?

This is the question you might ask yourself when you look in a mirror and attempt to evaluate where you are (or arent) in life. If youre honest with yourself, you can acknowledge that things havent felt right for quite some time. Kind of like a shoe that fits but is half a size too small. Its very possible that youve been in a funk far longer than you care to admit.

Maybe youve found yourself at the metaphorical fork in the road of life and when you evaluate your options of going left or right, youre strongly starting to consider plowing straight ahead instead.

At times like these you might ask yourself:

Why am I so unhappy?

How did I gain all of this weight?

Why didnt I ever move to another city?

How did I end up in a marriage where all we do is argue?

Why am I still at this job that I hate?

Why are my kids behaving like jerks?

How did I end up living check to check?

How did I end up divorced and a single parent?

Why did I buy that time-share?

When did I start collecting fast-food condiments in my glove compartment?

Or if youre anything like me in 2016when things were allegedly going great in my lifethe question could look more like this:

How did I end up successfuland yet Im still miserable?

If you Googled my name back in 2016, the results wouldve made it seem like I was living my best life ever and that I had it all figured out. According to the Internet I was:

• A leadership speaker who delivered keynotes across the globe at top companies like Google.

• An award-winning broadcast journalist who spent more than ten years working with major television networks, including NBC, Nickelodeon, and BET.

• An Ivy League graduate.

• An executive coach to business leaders.

• An author of three successful self-published books.

• A former kids television show host.

• A social mediaverified public figure with that little blue check mark on Facebook and Twitter.

• A contributor to major online business outlets, including Inc.com and Entrepreneur.com.

• A former Division I NCAA student-athlete.

• A husband and father of healthy boy and girl twins.

All of those things were true. It may have seemed like I had a storybook life and career. But heres the thing: Google and social media only tell part of our story. The Internet can never tell the whole story.

The real story, the one I didnt talk about or publicly share, was that I was at a low point in my life. I was regularly experiencing more failures and setbacks than I cared to count.

What Google wouldnt have told you in 2016 was that:

• After just a year of marriage, my wife and I were knee-deep in marriage counseling.

• Our twins arrived at thirty-two weeks and spent a month in the neonatal intensive care unit.

• Due to emotional eating, I had gained nearly thirty pounds and grew a big beard to hide my weight gain (which didnt disguise it one bit).

• After one too many visits to the hospital emergency room, I was wearing a heart monitor and undergoing cardiac MRIs and stress tests.

• My evenings were spent wallowing in self-misery, drinking tequila, whiskey, and wine (thankfully not at the same time).

• I started buying and carrying pocketknives for absolutely no good reason at all.

• I had a ridiculous amount of graduate school debt.

• I started avoiding family and friends, not returning their calls, texts, or e-mails.

• When I delivered keynotes, I was going through the motions on stages in front of hundreds and sometimes thousands of people.

• At times, I found myself behaving like a child, based on the whims of my emotions, instead of like an adult, based on standards and values.

• My fathers dementia was quickly advancing and we could no longer have those father-and-son conversations that I previously took for granted.

• To top it off, I regularly smoked Camel Crush Menthol cigarettes (yep, the ones where you click a crushable capsule to activate the menthol) in street alleys while wearing a bright green gardening glove so my wife wouldnt smell the stench on my hand.

Yeah, the Internet didnt tell the whole story. Not even close. At the time, I was living two livesone of outward success and the other of inward turmoil, anxiety, and fear.