Sharing a story is sometimes hard. Sharing a story about yourself is even harder. You never know where to begin, what to say or how people may react. However, throughout my recovery I found that sharing my story was one way to keep my own two feet on the ground. The school that I was asked to speak at, asked for me to give a title for the talk, which became the hardest part to do. As I began to write, I realized it was hard to find just one heading for the talk. I had to pack my six-year battle into one heading, which was entirely impossible.

Feeling like I wasn’t good enough for everyone was always one problem of mine. Whether it being grades, athletics, or with my family I always felt a little bit behind. I struggled academically, which made me different than all my straight A friends. And being an athlete was a big part of my life, so I always tried to be my best on and off the field. This all changed for the worse, one afternoon when I found out my best friend had committed suicide. I never truly began to realize the impact my friend had on my life until the day I realized I was never going to see him again. There would never be walks up and down the hallway while we were skipping our “academically enhanced” class or swimming and jumping off trees during the summer.

Everything was gone in the matter of seconds and the worst part was, I never got to say bye.

I woke up one morning wanting to be better. To get out of this rut and finally get back to being happy cause I always thought, that’s what my friend would have wanted. First, I couldn’t control my academics because no matter how hard I tried I was always the B-C student. Secondly, I couldn’t control my coach’s thoughts of what boat to put me in, no matter how hard I tried at practice. Finally, I couldn’t control the fact that my friend had died and I would never get to say anything to him again. One thing I could control was my weight.  Somehow in my mind I thought losing weight could get me in the A boat as well as fix my grades and in some messed up way, get my friend to come back, which trust me, didn’t work.

Fast forward a year, my mom came running up the steps to find me laying on the bathroom floor. No child ever wants to see the look I saw on her face that day.  I knew I needed help. Somehow I couldn’t control anything anymore. I got help and slowly began to recover. I gained control over this issue until the day things slipped again.

Fast forward two years, I was sitting in the Renfrew Treatment center, they told me that I would develop heart palpitations or my mom would find me dead on the bathroom floor if I didn’t get control over this.  I was supposed to be graduating high school in four months and they had wanted me to stop everything and go into an inpatient hospital to fix my issue and then move on with my life.

By this time, I was actually getting worse at rowing and my grades slowly began to fall, and of course, my friend never came back. This was also the time I was hearing back from colleges and all I could think about was having to stay back a year to finish high school. My mom gave me the ultimatum of getting help and gaining enough weight to go to college and maintaining it so I could stay at school. My mom never understood what I was going on and her way of fixing it was telling me to “just stop”.

Telling your child to “just stop” is the worst thing you can say. It’s like telling them, mentally they aren’t fine but physically if you stop all your problems go away.

That’s not real life though. If you physically stop, your mental block will be harder and harder to control and ultimately you’ll fail even harder than you did before. My mom had good intentions, she just didn’t understand and I don’t blame her for that. Outsiders looking in thought I was crazy. In some ways I was. Crazy in the sense I was trying so hard to be someone I wasn’t.

Two weeks into my freshman year at college I was rushed to the hospital and was diagnosed with heart palpitations because of this illness. By this point I was still at a healthy weight and I was doing better but my body was tearing apart because of the years of abuse I had given it.

The cycle of relapse and recovery went on for a while. Until recently I woke up and decided enough was enough. All in all, if you’re going through something like this, I can’t tell you how to fix yourself, I can tell you, if you want saving, you need to save yourself.

One day, I opened my bloodshot eyes from getting two hours of sleep the night before and just started crying. Crying because I just wanted this pain over with. Six years of battling and I felt as sad as I did day one. In rehab they tell you “you’ll always have this problem, but learning to deal with it will get easier”. I always thought it was crap because it’s like setting you up to fail, but I decided to say hey let me try it out for sometime and see how much failing I can do.

Trust me, I failed, probably more than the average person. But every time I failed I realized something new about this horrible disease. First I realized that I was hurting my body to try to be good enough for this world.  I tried pleasing everyone so people would like me. I went out of my way to help people before helping myself. Some call it selfish and trust me I thought it was.

Being selfish was what I needed, I spent way too much time trying to please everyone and that needed to stop.

My second fail led me to understand that people are mean. They will judge you, hurt you, and try to tear you down. In the end we are all trying to save ourselves from everyone else. My most recent fail led me to obtaining control back into my life.  I always gave my control away. Giving it away to others to let them control me was the problem. I ultimately needed to control my control and worship it to be something precious. Trying to be alone is hard when you’re dealing with these issues. If you are alone, you usually have 100% control and for someone like me, that is a hard pill to swallow.

I learned that by being alone you figure out a lot more about yourself. I found that I love coloring, taking walks and dancing in my room alone. I realized, when I was the girl in control, I began begging my friends to go out and dance our butts off for no apparent reason. I started to laugh with my friends till my stomach hurt and say stupid things that made no sense. I learned control is empowering. It feeds my spirit and my personality.

My story with this awful disease isn’t over. I wake up everyday telling myself to smile and keep walking. Smile, because if someone else is having a bad day, maybe there is a slight chance they will be impacted by the smile I bring. I say keep walking because no one should stop their story from growing. Each day we have the power to build upon our stories, make them great and fill them will amazing memories. Stress, work, money and many other things will always be an issue in our lives. Surround yourself with the good people, move on from the bad. Make time for yourself and understand that no one is perfect. We all have stories. Stories that all make us who we are.

That’s why my story doesn’t have a title and why I learned that sometimes not having a title is just where I belong.  I continue to write my story for my friend and for everyone else willing to listen just in the hopes my story will help someone else write theirs.  

As I explored the WishDish site with a friend of mine, she immediately told me, “This seems like a cool idea, but not sure if I have anything to share. I’m not a good writer anyways.”

As I have seen throughout high school and college, many of us have this same sentiment when it comes to writing, talking, or just storytelling in general – we tend to always think that it’s not for us.

The lies we tell ourselves:

1. I have nothing worth sharing
2. I don’t have the time
3. I’m not good enough at it

What we often don’t realize is:

1. Everyone has something worth sharing
2. Everyone can make time for it
3. Everyone has got to start somewhere.

All you have to do is take the time to listen to yourself. Pause. Take a moment and explore your life.

Start with a question, like: What’s something that I’m struggling with?

I don’t feel like I’m doing enough with my life. I feel like I’m unsuccessful.

Follow it up. Ask yourself why and what – and be relentless.

What does it mean to be successful? Why do you feel you’re not doing enough?

Everyone around me seems to be doing twice as much as I am. I feel like I should be doing so much more than I am. I felt like I was pretty successful in high school; everyone used to like me, I was able to do well in my classes, and I felt like I knew where my life was going. I don’t feel like that at all anymore.

Where was your life going? Why do you not feel like that now?

I’m a lot more confused about whether I want to be studying what I’m majoring in. A lot of my classes feel very dull. It can be frustrating because I don’t know what I want to do anymore, and I don’t know if I’m going to be happier by doing what I’m doing right now.

What will make you happier?

I don’t know. I enjoy spending time with my family and friends. Reading books, taking long walks. I miss being able to read books for fun.

What’s stopping you from doing those things?

I’m not good at managing my time. I feel swamped all the time and tired.

Why are you tired all the time? What’s taking up most of your time?

Studying! I’ve got a lot to do. I feel like I’m perpetually playing catch-up. I’m never able to get enough sleep. I’m barely able to keep up my grades.

Why are you spending so much time trying to study if you don’t know that’s what you want to do?

What do you want out of college? What did you expect going in? How has that changed? Why has that changed?

Does being successful only mean social acceptance, academic excellence, and knowing the future? Why do you feel like everybody has that?

Why does it matter that other people seem more successful than you?

Why do you like long walks? Why do you like to read books for fun?

The questions are endless.

Explore them, go down the rabbit hole. Talk to a friend, talk to yourself, or just start writing. Remember, your story doesn’t need a neat conclusion.

Sometimes the best stories are those that just leave the reader thinking – what will happen next? Is there a way to resolve this? Sometimes the best stories are those that let other people know – they are not alone – that you understand how complicated life can become. And sometimes, it’s only when we share our incomplete stories that we begin to understand how we might try to complete them.

So, what’s your story?

On April 30, 2016, after almost a year of planning, I launched @Thursday_Thrive, a web series featuring people’s personal stories of overcoming adversity. Our mission is to inspire people who are going through a difficult season by introducing them to someone else who has been there too.

We launched the site with four stories, including my own.  Even after planning for a year to share my personal story publicly, I still had overwhelming fears about it.

Even though I could have shot my own story months before, I put it off until the very last week because it was just so hard to share my deepest and darkest secrets with everyone.

I really thought the hardest part of this whole thing would be pushing the button on my launch day. There was a lot of anxiety and breakdowns (and breakthroughs) before the launch, but truth is, the hardest days were the days that followed… when I received some backlash for what I had vulnerably shared from some people really close to me.

Since then, we have continued to feature new stories every other week on Thursdays but it is honestly really difficult to find new stories to share.

I have had so many people reach out to me who are excited and want to share their personal journey through life but end up canceling the shoot because as it turns out it is REALLY hard!

Truth is, I get it. I rescheduled my own shoot about 12+ times before I actually went through with it! Being vulnerable is one of the most courageous things you will ever do.

This chair, those cameras and lights aren’t for everybody. For those that are willing to share, my hope is that everyone else will rally behind them in support because being vulnerable deserves the utmost respect.

Will you courageously help to break chains for others by vulnerably sharing your #HalfTheStory or at the very least, tune into @thursday_Thrive bi-weekly on Thursdays to watch our stories unfold?

Life is all about perception, and the ever-increasing usage of social media continues to obscure the clarity between reality and fallacy amongst our peers, colleagues, friends, and family.

You’ll rarely ever see the guy who works a dull desk job 40 hours a week post about how miserable he is at the office, but your timeline will surely be filled with his weekend trip to Vegas. I think this notion of augmented perception holds especially true for entrepreneurs.

You’ll see the entrepreneur’s Facebook status about their feature in TechCrunch accumulate nearly 600 likes – but it doesn’t show the number of sleepless nights they experienced testing their product tirelessly, the weekends they spent working rather than seeing friends and family, their deteriorating bank account from investing into the company rather than their paycheck, the emotional stress of repeatedly being rejected by incubators, accelerators, and VC’s, their declining relationships with those who they were once close with, and the volatility of their livelihood with the potential for failure at any given moment.

Now if you could excuse that run-on sentence, I’d love to tell our journey beyond what is shown on the surface.

My co-founders and I began working on VentureStorm towards the end of our sophomore year in college in 2014. (Quick shameless plug: VentureStorm is a web application that helps entrepreneurs and startups connect to talented software developers to advance their venture. VentureStorm provides opportunities for developers to gain experience, earn money/equity, work with promising startups, and get recruited for their dream job.)

We were each committed to bootstrapping a sustainable and profitable business while balancing an extremely challenging and time-consuming engineering workload at the University of Maryland. Although I will admit, we still managed to have plenty of fun at school- we each made tremendous sacrifices during our collegiate years to bring our business to where it is today.

During the semester, we developed a schedule in which we met 8-11pm each night at the very minimum. Although more often than not we ended up working well into the night, this ensured several hours of building the business each day to continue to advance our mission. After we began to really accumulate a community of users in the DMV area, we began to sponsor university hackathons all along the east coast to attract top developers to join our platform.

Just in the past few months we’ve spent weekends traveling to Michigan, Harvard, NYU, Georgetown, Drexel, Princeton, and several other universities. In fact, during our senior year of college there were very few weekends we actually spent in College Park.

On the surface, it may seem glorious being official sponsors and seeing our logo next to Google, Facebook, Uber, and other huge tech companies.

What others don’t see are the 10 hours a day of standing and networking with student developers, sleeping on friend’s couches in crammed apartments, spending 16+ hours in traffic, skipping out on happy hour and fun weekends with friends, draining your bank account…and in return not getting paid for any of it.

As of May 2016, my co-founders and I began our postgraduate careers going all in on VentureStorm. We have since worked around the clock developing an updated version of our platform, marketing to expand our brand awareness, networking to develop strategic partnerships, and responding to emails from users and affiliates 24/7. Building this business to be successful has become priority number 1, 2, and 3…and requires an almost unhealthy amount of sacrifice and commitment.

In fact, it’s a sunny 85 degree Sunday afternoon as I’m writing this piece, in-between testing the updated payment transactions on the site, all while a group of friends are BBQing a few streets down.

This post isn’t meant to be full of complaining, and I’m certainly not asking for any sympathy. My co-founders and I work tirelessly on VentureStorm because we absolutely love it. Because rather than working on someone else’s corporate schedule and building their vision, we’re building ours. We profoundly believe what we’re building can innovate the entrepreneurial and technology communities, change people’s lives, and build a better future for everyone.

Our platform helps bring people’s ideas to life, new innovations and technologies to market, and provides various opportunities for others to gain experience and grow as individuals.

In the cut-throat sport of business, there’s really only one option to be perceived as, and that’s successful.

I believe that holds true for any business at any stage, but even more so for early stage startups and entrepreneurs.

Failure is so common amongst startups, entrepreneurs are forced to filter any speck of negativity and instead magnify each and every success. Similar to any other sport- it would be foolish to display any sort of weakness to your competitors and fans.

Just know behind every success you see on the surface, there were countless hours of work, sacrifice, and failure before getting there.

VentureStorm