It was a Friday night in August 2017. I had just poured a glass of cabernet, sank into the couch next to my husband Craig, and without warning, the words tumbled out of me:
“Why do we do this to ourselves? What’s the meaning of any of it?”
I didn’t realize it then, but that moment would mark the beginning of everything changing — from the inside out.
It looked like I had it all
Up to that point, my life had been a masterclass in keeping everything together. I held an executive position, spent 10 hours a week commuting, managed my kids’ needs and schedules, maintained a spotless house and the never-ending projects of home ownership, and plowed through strenuous workouts that matched the intensity of my overloaded nervous system. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the daily 5:30 p.m. glass of wine that “took the edge off.”
Every day felt like Groundhog Day — relentless, dutiful, numbing. I had ignored it for years, spending far too much energy and time looking everywhere outside myself for the answer: the next promotion, the new company, a higher salary, a bigger title, better vacations. I was never satisfied, always chasing something just out of reach — trying to rearrange the external world to make my inner world feel better. Or perhaps by constantly seeking something else, I was unconsciously distracting myself from the truth I needed to face: I wasn’t living my life, and I wasn’t happy living someone else’s either.
What I hadn’t yet realized was how I had trained myself to think about efficiency and effectiveness through the lens of other people’s expectations. And in doing so, I deprioritized myself. Like a fisherman tossing scraps back into the ocean, I was throwing away what truly mattered to me — my time, my energy, my focus — and feeding it to the endless routines and obligations I believed I had to maintain.
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But that Friday night, something shifted. The voice grew too loud to ignore. For the first time, I allowed the question to come forward — and for the first time, I truly listened. Not to the world’s demands, but to my own heart.
Courtesy of Chloe Camille Sheldon via Erin Coupe
I realized I was living someone else’s life
Like so many — though perhaps with an even deeper desire to break free from what I was born into — I set out to create a better life in the only way I thought I knew how: by chasing the version of success that society told me equated to happiness.
I put myself through college —the first generation in my family to earn a four-year degree — with the help of grants, work-study jobs, student loans, and academic scholarships. If there was a will, there was a way. I graduated magna cum laude, landed my first professional role in client service at Reuters, and by the time I was 24, I moved to New York City without knowing a single soul. Shortly after, I was recruited as a business analyst at Goldman Sachs.
On paper, it was everything I thought I wanted: prestige, security, accomplishment. But, inside, a different story was unfolding.
I started trading my well-being for validation
My body became my first messenger. Intense migraines, mysterious rashes, fainting spells, debilitating anxiety attacks — my nervous system was speaking the truth my mind refused to hear. I was still living in survival mode — only now I was dressed in more expensive clothes and dined at real restaurants instead of fast food chains.
Working at Goldman Sachs became an exhausting battle — a relentless grind against a culture that prized micromanagement over humanity. For years, I reported to women who resented me due to their own insecurities. I was a hard worker who wanted to be liked and rewarded for my efforts. I fought to meet impossible expectations, to outpace exhaustion, to silence the quiet panic rising in my chest. I traded intuition for achievement, well-being for validation. I kept pushing, numbing, achieving — that’s just what you do, right? The little girl inside me was convinced that’s how you “make it.”
My well-being suffered not solely because of external pressures, but because I hadn’t yet cultivated the mindset and human skills to manage my time, focus, and energy. I didn’t yet know how to protect my peace, to honor my boundaries, or to lead with peace from within.
Over time, as I stepped into more senior leadership roles in Fortune 500 companies, the pace accelerated. The titles became bigger, the responsibilities grew heavier. But it wasn’t the companies or the increased demands of leadership that broke me. It was, yet again, the way I approached it all: everything and everyone at the expense of myself. I was chasing perfection, craving more, always looking to the next benchmark. Contentment felt like a betrayal of ambition; gratitude felt like complacency.
And then came the reckoning. After getting married to Craig, having children, and moving to suburban Chicago, I found myself one evening standing in the center of the so-called perfect life I had built — the house, the money, the accolades, the social calendar — and realizing I was totally numb and felt utterly hollow.
The professional success I had fought so hard to achieve felt startlingly empty. Each day became a race against chronic exhaustion. The life I was chasing wasn’t mine — I had inherited someone else’s version of success — and living that life left me feeling numb. I had managed to avoid some of the worst fears that my mother’s life had taught me, but in the process, I completely forgot about the promises I made to myself at my father’s bedside.
Excerpted from, “I Can Fit That In: How Rituals (Not Routines) Transform Your Life,” by Erin Coupe. Copyright © 2025 by H2Lsquared Media. Published by TPSA.
