So, how did I end up doing the work that I do now? This is my story. Settle in, because this isn’t the short version. It’s important to me that I share the whole thing with you, not just the highlights, or the parts that are the most flattering to me. My hope is that you find some comfort and connection in hearing about my experience.

My brother Dominic was exuberant, complicated, intense, wildly funny, and one day in December 2012, he was gone. He committed suicide at the age of 21. When I look back, I see my life in two distinct parts. There’s everything that happened before Dominic died, and everything that has happened since. His sudden and tragic death blindsided me with grief and rattled the foundations of my faith. It was also the catalyst for personal growth and transformation that I never could have imagined. The life I live now—full of clarity, purpose, love, glorious imperfection, meaningful work, and fulfillment—took root in the darkness of loss, and my desire to uncover the unique meaning it had for me.

I wish I could tell you that I woke up one day, in the midst of the mess, driven to gather up the broken pieces of my life and create something beautiful and new, and that the rest is history. 

But that’s not how things went. My story of life after loss isn’t a magical or mysterious one, and that’s a good thing. Stay with me.

In the months leading up to Dominic’s death, I had just started testing the waters of uncovering my life purpose. I had spent two tedious years working long hours as a graphic designer at a corporate job that I tried hard to love. My chronic dissatisfaction made me furious at myself. A full-time design position had been my dream throughout my school career, and there I was, spending my lunch breaks wandering the Self Help section of Barnes & Noble, with no idea what I wanted, except that it wasn’t what I had.

I felt frustrated and alone, but God was paying attention. Right around that time, my perceptive mother gifted me three months’ worth of weekly sessions with a life coach. She had won the sessions in a raffle, and something told her that I needed them more than she did. It just so happened that this coach’s specialty was helping his clients discover their life purpose. 

Well played, God.

My new coach was really, really good at what he did. So good, in fact, that it only took a handful of conversations for us to uncover more about me than I had learned in all my 26 years. I finally came to the conclusion that I am motivated by two things that, at first glance, seem contradictory: altruism and personal responsibility. Shouldn’t they cancel each other out? No. In fact, as my coach and I dug deeper, it made more and more sense.

My life purpose is to help and serve others, specifically, in a way that enables them to tap into their own strength, and improve their own lives. Because I have this simple but unorthodox belief that, if we really want to make the world into a better version of itself, we need to become better versions of ourselves.

No wonder I was so unhappy where I was! There’s nothing wrong with graphic design. In fact, I still do quite a bit of it (like this website and the snazzy logo at the top of the page, for example). But I had built a whole career on the erroneous idea that creativity alone would fill my soul. The fire inside me that burned to serve others was stifled, with nowhere to go.

My coach and I had just started to make inroads into what my newfound discoveries could mean for my career, when I got that terrible phone call from my mother to tell me that my brother, Dominic, had taken his own life. He was so young. The youngest member of our family. It was almost Christmas. His mental health had seemed better for the first time in months. It was all so wrong.

The weeks following Dominic’s death, while surreal, are still vivid in my memory. I took a leave of absence from my job, and flew home to grieve with my family. As we moved through the stream of well-wishers, the funeral, the periods of emotional freefall followed by peace, and laughter alternating with tears, I observed myself and others around me very closely. Perhaps it was my way of trying to find some kind of order in the chaos, but I was riveted by the variety of ways that grief was showing up, in myself and in those I came into contact with.

The darkness of those early days was punctuated by fleeting but powerful flashes of clarity, when I could glimpse the “bigger picture” in which my experience of losing Dominic was full of meaning, and could transform me, if I gave it permission to do so. The sessions that I had done with my coach felt like they had happened a lifetime ago, but in those raw early weeks of grief, my newfound life purpose echoed over and over in my mind: I want to help people. I want to help people. I want to help people.

“Have you ever considered becoming a life coach yourself?”

My coach posed this question to me as I sat in his office, days away from flying back to my “old life”. It had been about a month since Dominic’s death, and it felt like the dust was finally starting to settle. I seized the opportunity for an in-person session with my coach to help me figure out my next steps. I had told him that I couldn’t stop thinking about my life purpose.

But…me? A life coach?

“Your purpose—to help others help themselves—that’s what coaches do, and I think you’d do it very well. Your experience with loss could help people going through the same thing,” he said.

Huh.

That’s a crazy idea, I thought. Yet it felt so right.

And it was right. It’s still right. But, as you’ll see from the rest of my story, obstacles don’t magically vanish from our path when we finally find direction. I was about to learn some hard lessons. 3 hard lessons, to be exact.

In January 2013, I tried to throw myself back into my life, job, and routines as they were before Dominic died. I tried really hard. I believed that the quickest way out of the career that I hated and into my new life as a coach would be to get things back to “normal”, and keep my regular paycheck coming in while I put all my remaining energy and time into my life coaching studies. I enrolled in a well-reputed coaching certification program, told myself that I was fine, that I had made it to the other side of my grief, and got to work.

The thing is, I wasn’t on the other side. Not even close. I had simply shoved the mess of my unattended grief into a neat storage tote in my mind (spoiler alert: that doesn’t work). I managed to white-knuckle my way through life for almost 3 months before a nervous breakdown forced me to admit that I couldn’t continue.

Hard lesson number 1.

In my haste, I brushed aside the fact that the emotional and physical toll of grief had changed my basic self-care needs, and my old routines were no longer meeting them. In short, I was run-down, and without the quiet time I needed to rest, recharge, and process what I had been through, my chronic anxiety morphed from a nuisance in the background to a center-stage monster. Add to the mix the fact that we were entering our busiest season at work, and…well, things weren’t pretty.

My husband and I sat down and worked out a budget that would allow us to get by on just his salary, so that I could leave my design job, take the time I needed to attend to my grief and the issues that had arisen as a result, and work on my coaching studies. It was going to be tough, but we’d make it work.

I remember leaving the office after my last day at my design job, feeling like an anvil had been lifted off my shoulders. Finally, finally, I felt like I had caught a break. After everything I had been through, it was only fair. Right?

Hard lesson number 2.

Less than 2 weeks after I left my design job, my husband came home with the news that his position—the one we were counting on to keep us afloat financially—was being eliminated. We had a mortgage. Bills to pay. I had a new career to begin. We had a plan.

Seriously, God? Seriously?!

As I lay awake that night, crying and unable to sleep, I realized that what I was feeling was betrayal. I had just lost my brother to a tragic death. Weren’t things supposed to start looking up? Why were they getting worse? Was I cursed?

Somewhere along the way, I had internalized the belief that life followed a pattern: highs followed by lows followed by highs, and on and on. Of course, no such pattern exists, and I was mortified to discover just how much trust I had placed in it over the years.

I was also angry. At God. At life. At myself. I had finally figured out what I was supposed to do with my life and career, but it felt like my progress was being sabotaged at every turn. How was I supposed to become a successful coach, helping others through their grief, when my own mental health and financial situation were in a shambles?

Hard lesson number 3.

Renowned life coach Martha Beck famously said, “The way we do anything is the way we do everything.” She’s spot-on.

In my mind, I had isolated Dominic’s suicide from my other life experiences. Because it was, without a doubt, the most tragic thing I had been through to date, I had placed it on something of a mental pedestal. I told myself that if I was going to experience my own story of grief and growth, it only made sense for that story to revolve around the loss of my little brother. Everything else felt like it was on a different plane.

As a result, I met the other challenges that cropped up in the wake of Dominic’s death—my anxiety disorder roaring back to the forefront of my life, my husband losing his job at what felt like the worst possible time—with anger and resistance. They felt like foreign objects being thrown into my path; a cruel joke from a cruel God who wanted to watch me stumble.

But they weren’t a joke. They weren’t foreign objects. They were part of the same story. My story. Incidentally, it was the work I was doing on myself as part of my life coach training program that helped me to shift my perspective, and realize that, just like Dominic’s death, each of these experiences was an invitation to respond, to find meaning, to grow, and to take steps toward the better version of myself that I so wanted to become.

It’s this perspective that has led me to where I am today—striving to answer the daily call to become better than who I was yesterday, and feeling my brother Dominic’s presence close to my heart as I continue to learn and grow from losing him.

What a wild, amazing ride.

I want to help you do this work, too. Are you ready?

CLICK HERE TO LEARN ABOUT HOW TO WORK WITH ME.