One Woman’s Problem Is Another Woman’s Superpower
“I’m going to take your vitals and then take you to meet the team,” the nurse said.
I had no idea where I was. The room had a generic wood dresser and desk that looked like something you’d see at summer camp. That is, if summer camp had been on the tenth floor of a building with windows that didn’t open.
Before I could form a complete sentence, a blood pressure cuff was velcroed around my arm, and a thermometer was shoved under my tongue. I was in a hospital gown, and I had a laminated bracelet around my wrist.
“The team?” I asked in a crackly voice that didn’t sound like my own.
“Your doctors will meet you down the hall with your social worker and your attending nurse.”
“But you’re a nurse,” I said deliriously.
“I’m the morning nurse for everyone, but you’ll have a designated nurse on your team.”
I’d determined that I was in a hospital, but the bed I was in wasn’t the big, bulky kind with plastic handrails. It was a normal bed, not quite Ikea quality, with a mattress that felt like cardboard and a super thin, itchy, mustard-colored blanket laid over an even thinner sheet.
“I’m going to walk you down the hall,” said the nurse, prodding me up.
I was so tired. All I wanted to do was sleep—in that crappy bed, on the floor, anywhere.
My eyes were sore and barely open as I walked down the long hallway, lit by blinding fluorescent lights that felt like they might swallow me up. The nurse guided me into what looked like a sterile white classroom, with four chairs arranged in a row like a panel and another chair facing them. I guessed I was supposed to sit in that one, as the four across from it were already occupied by four people with clipboards. They were in normal clothes, and I was in a hospital gown and pink socks with little white treads on the bottom. I’ve walked into some intimidating rooms in my life—boardrooms at Wall Street banks, greenrooms at major TV networks—but none more intimidating than this.
“Hi, Nicole,” said the man in the first chair from behind his clipboard.
“Hi.”
“Do you know why you are here?”
“No.” But, as I said it, I realized I did know why I was there. I looked down at my hands. They were trembling uncontrollably.
I was in the psych ward.
“Actually, yes,” I said.
“And why are you here?” the man asked in a monotone.
Then came the longest pause. They were waiting for me to answer. And I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe how I had gotten to this place.
Oh. My. God, I thought. I’m never going to get out of here.
“I am here because . . . because . . .” I started to cry. I couldn’t finish the sentence. I could only cry and say “because” over and over.
I couldn’t say anything else because I didn’t yet believe the words that were to follow. From what I could remember, I had been admitted to the emergency room around midnight after police picked me up on a street corner. I’d had nothing in my stomach for days except alcohol and coffee. I had no cell phone. No money. No keys. No ID. Just cigarettes in my pocket, even though I don’t smoke, along with matches (because to this day I don’t know how to use a lighter). And a full bottle of Ambien.
“Do you remember what brought you here last night?”
“S . . . I,” I said slowly, remembering the clinical term I’d heard throughout the night before. I had probably talked to ten doctors, nurses, and EMTs between midnight and 4 AM when I’d been taken to my camp-style bedroom. “SI” stands for “suicidal ideation.” Somehow it felt less embarrassing to say the acronym instead of the actual term.
“And why did you plan to kill yourself last night by taking an entire bottle of sleeping pills?” the same guy asked. The other three scribbled notes without looking at me.
At that moment I knew I needed to dig deep, rising above what felt like the worst experience of my life, to show these people that I was okay now and healthy enough to go home. (Even though deep down I knew I wasn’t.)
“I was really sad and really stressed,” I said steadily. “I wasn’t taking care of myself and I slipped. I’m sorry, is it possible to have my clothes back?”
They looked at me like I was a zoo animal.
“Not yet,” the man said. “We need to monitor you for a while.”
“What’s ‘a while’?” I asked, trying hard to sound calm and composed even though I was shivering. I was shivering partly because I was freezing but mostly because I was scared.
“We’ll keep checking in with you, and then make a determination. Do you have any suicidal thoughts right now?”
“No.”
It was true. All my thoughts were focused on trying to communicate with my usual poise, charisma, and energy so they’d see that I didn’t need to be there. But I couldn’t find that Nicole. It wasn’t just that I didn’t feel like my usual self; I felt like a stranger in my own body. I wanted to yell for someone to help me, but I knew the only people who could hear me had a totally different idea of what helping me meant.
In the three days that followed, I went from despondent and depressed to humbled. I hate when actors say they are “humbled” when they win an Oscar. Um, that’s not “humbling,” that’s fucking amazing. Spend some time in the psych ward with a whole different cast of characters, and then you’ll really feel humbled.
At first, I was that girl sitting in the corner, drinking black coffee by herself. There was no phone or internet; I didn’t remember any of my friends’ numbers so I couldn’t make calls from the communal landline in the cafeteria. Even if I had remembered anyone’s number, I didn’t know how to explain what had happened yet. I was alone and acted like a loner.
Slowly, I began talking to others and signing up for the group classes, like horticulture and music therapy. I started treating it like the camp I never went to. My fellow “campers” ranged from a musical theater star to an eighty-year-old orthodox Jewish man. There were no padded rooms or screaming in the middle of the night, just a bunch of people who were suffering like me and needed to get better . . . as one does in a hospital. There were homeless people and there were CEOs, patients from all walks of life. I came to appreciate the psych ward as a great equalizer, like the subway or the flu.
The day I was discharged, I walked right outside onto First Avenue in New York City, holding a plastic bag of my belongings. No one was there waiting for me, and I didn’t have my phone when I checked in, so I couldn’t call anyone. I didn’t really want anyone to see me like that, anyway.
I was alone. But at that point I didn’t feel lonely anymore. I knew the journey to come would be largely a solo one, so I might as well get down with that on Day 1.
I walked all the way home. It was a few solid miles, but I felt like I could have walked outside forever, more appreciative of being outside, walking, that day than any other. I had no phone to look at like I usually would have, so instead I looked around at the city, grateful for every little thing I saw. I looked at the people I passed like I never had before when I’d walked with my face staring at a screen or my mind obsessing over my to-do list. They had no idea where I’d just come from, and I had no idea whether they might have been there once, too.
SUPER WOMAN, INTERRUPTED
“But you seem so put together!” you might think after reading my story. I know, I’ve heard it a million times.
The thing about feeling crappy on the inside is that you can look totally “put together” on the outside. You can’t see the emotional wounds someone might be carrying like you can physical scrapes or scars. Often, we see someone who looks like a kick-ass warrior on the outside and have no idea of the inner war she has fought—or is still fighting.
I thought I was Superwoman. I’d wrapped up shooting for the second season of my TV show and had just finished touring the country promoting my second book. I was a badass New York Times bestselling author who preached badassery to other women. I was, from all outward appearances, at the height of my career. The top of the world.
And then, I fell.
Trying to be Superwoman nearly killed me. So, I needed to kill the idea of her to save myself. I set out to become a Super Woman, a woman who takes care of the inside as much as or more than the outside, a woman who feels as “put together” as she looks.
YOU HAVE A PROBLEM
The first step to becoming a Super Woman is admitting you aren’t Superwoman, like I eventually did. Embracing it, even. We all have problems. And it doesn’t matter if your problem is feeling depressed or an occasional case of sleep deprivation—if it’s causing you distress, then it’s serious, and it’s time to get serious about taking care of it.
“Wait a minute, Lapin,” I hear you saying, “my problems aren’t anywhere near the Girl, Interrupted level of yours! I’m a little stressed, but basically fine!” Well, guess what? If you don’t take care of yourself, you still run the risk of breaking down like I did, burning out, or at the very least, falling short of the life you want and deserve (and that outcome should be unacceptable to you, too). We all have something going on that threatens to knock us off-balance. So, what’s your “something”?
CONFESSIONS
OF A SUPER WOMAN
I’ll Go First
My “something” is that I have struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
I didn’t even know that’s what it was called until after my breakdown. I met with tons of doctors and specialists and even did an outpatient psychiatric program. I took my recovery seriously and shined a light on some of the deepest, darkest places in me. They weren’t fun places to go, but the trip there was long overdue.
I was always focused on where I was going, so I never truly confronted where I had been, which was a chronically abusive, violent, and unstable upbringing that played out in real time like a Lifetime movie. My mother kidnapped me when I was three years old and changed my name while she was undergoing a nasty divorce from my father. She was arrested and granted monitored visitation with me while I lived with my father—a brilliant surgeon who invented new ways of performing surgery with limited blood loss. He was also an alcoholic and drug addict who hung around a revolving crew of drug dealers, hookers, and criminals. There wasn’t a week that went by that police or social workers weren’t called to my house, nor was there one that he didn’t save a patient’s life. The dichotomy of public success and private struggle is branded into my DNA. He ultimately died of an overdose when I was eleven. Until then, their sordid divorce—fraught with allegations of molestation, rape, and arson—was all over the papers for years and one quote from the Los Angeles Times asserted “neither Lapin is fit to be a parent.”
For a long time, I hid from my traumatic childhood by self-medicating—not with drugs, but with work. The more I worked, the more I felt like I was okay and stronger than the trauma. But it was only a matter of time until I couldn’t outwork it anymore. My breakdown wasn’t so much a spontaneous combustion precipitated by a single event as a lifetime of smoldering embers finally catching fire—and incinerating everything in their path.
If you’ve ever thought personal stuff has nothing to do with work—whether it’s a mental health issue, an eating disorder, relationship drama, or plain-old everyday stress—you’ve thought wrong. In the end, what do you think was more detrimental to my career: not responding to every single email within an hour or having to bail on obligations and cancel projects because I was in the damn psych ward? Exactly.
To be clear, the psych ward sucked. It really fucking sucked. But it was also one of the most rewarding places I’ve ever been, because going there forced me to get serious about taking care of myself for the first time.
I used to pretend like my trauma didn’t exist so that it wouldn’t get in the way of my success. I was certain that it would be the kryptonite that would eventually bring me down. But just as I was killing the idea that I was Superwoman, so, too, did I kill the idea that my biggest problem was my biggest weakness.
SO, WHAT’S YOUR PROBLEM?!
Before you can unlock the power of your problems, you have to know what they are. Give them a name and you take away some of their power over you. Are you not feeling like yourself? Are you feeling far from . . . super? How so? Be specific.
If you’re like the women I surveyed who feel like they are on the verge of a breakdown, you might be experiencing burnout-like symptoms. Burnout often coexists with or acts as a “gateway” for other, clinical conditions, namely depression and anxiety.*
• Burnout is a state of physical, mental, or emotional exhaustion—when the demands of your job or life in general have become so overwhelming that you don’t feel like you can cope. It’s often caused by extended stress but feels like its opposite. Instead of feeling “up,” you feel empty and unmotivated. A quick way to tell if you’ve ventured into burnout territory is by noticing how you feel after you go on vacation: Do you feel reenergized and recharged after returning to work? If so, you just needed a little time to step away and rest. But if you still feel exhausted, cynical, and inefficient within days (or even sooner) after your return, you may be experiencing burnout.
• Depression is a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. Some people feel sad and tired if they are depressed, while some feel on edge and can’t sleep, and others just feel flat or numb. One common sign of depression is being unable to enjoy the things you usually like to do. Depression can be situational, like after a bad breakup or a death in the family, or it can be a chronic issue (as in you feel shitty even when things are good).
• Anxiety is a strong sense of worry, nervousness, or unease. You might feel jittery and emotional, or have physical symptoms like nausea or headaches. Anxiety can also be situational, and it’s totally normal to feel anxious about an upcoming event, like a big presentation or a medical procedure, especially if the outcome is uncertain. But if you’re feeling anxious nearly all the time, whether there’s a big project looming or not, you might have an anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental health issues, affecting almost one in five adults, and the prevalence among women is roughly 2.5 times greater than among men.
We tend to use these terms interchangeably. But the words you use matter, especially when you are describing yourself—and especially when you are seeking help, whether by tackling the problem yourself or by getting support from your community or a medical professional. A broken bone shows up on an X-ray, but only you (and your psychiatrist) can tell when something is wrong with what you are feeling inside.
FYI
Everyone experiences situational anxiety or feels depressed from time to time, but not everyone suffers from the clinical disorders of anxiety or depression. Sometimes these are referred to, and feel like, “capital-A anxiety” and “capital-D depression” (even though both the situational and clinical kinds of anxiety and depression are technically capitalized the same way). Figuring out whether the problem you are experiencing is a clinical one is something a professional can help you with.
I know that you are more than a label and so am I. But labeling my problems has allowed me to reframe them in a way that works for me. The label has been a jumping-off point for me to change their narrative and connotation in my life.
Your problems are nothing to hide or be embarrassed about. Nor do they make you weak. Quite the contrary. Your power lies in the fact that no one else is you. And, by “you,” I mean all of you.
After my breakdown, I finally confronted my PTSD diagnosis and all of the symptoms—good and bad—that came along with it. The truth is, I wouldn’t be who I am today without dealing with the depressive episodes or times of hypervigilance and arousal (not the sexy kind) that came from the diagnosis. Without them, I probably wouldn’t have worked so hard and might never have had the opportunities I received as a result, including being able to write this book for you now. And if that part of me is what got me to where I am now, then I have to consider the possibility that it might just be the last thing I ever expected it to be: a superpower.
My mission was to find the power in facing my problems, not to change myself or be problem free (problems are a game of whack-a-mole anyway: as soon as you tackle one, another pops up for you to attack). You can do the same thing. Lots of the issues and personality traits we view as holding us back can also push us forward.
Take a problem we’ve all had: stress. I don’t need to get all clinical on you here because I’m pretty sure you’ve been in (and might even currently be experiencing) a state of stress, where your emotions and adrenaline are in overdrive. We tend to think of stress as bad, and it definitely can be, like if you’re stressed because your boss is yelling at you or you’re worried about making rent. But, physiologically, stress is neutral. What makes it positive or negative is how you respond to it. Just like there is “good” fat (like avocados) or debt (student loans) and “bad” fat (like fried food) or debt (credit card debt), there is good and bad stress. There is actually a word for good stress: “eustress.” It’s what makes working on a big-deal project you are passionate about so exciting. You can’t get rid of all stress, and you wouldn’t want to. Life without stress would be pretty boring. Plus, you wouldn’t want Tom Brady to block out his eustress during a big game and be super mellow, right? No. (Unless you’re not a Patriots fan.)
And because you’re the quarterback of your own life, it’s up to you how you play a “problem” like stress, or perfectionism, or sensitivity. It can drive you down the field or it can make you fumble. So, what’s the call gonna be, QB?
SOMETIMES PROBLEMS ARE SUPERPOWERS BY ANOTHER NAME
Our brains have a “negativity bias” that predisposes us to focus on and feel the bad more than the good. This may have been helpful when we were cavewomen, but it’s up to us Super Women to actively reframe the default negative and rewire “problems” positively:
I have problems; you have problems; we all have problems. The point is, the only problem that truly is career kryptonite is the problem of ignoring your problems. So look those babies right in the eye, give them a wink, and make them your new best friends. A mental health professional once put it to me this way: If oysters can take the sand that creeps into their shells and turn that into something as beautiful and valuable as a pearl, then so can we.
PROBLEM-SOLVING 101
We learn how to solve for the angle of a triangle or the speed of a train in school, but we don’t learn the skills we need to deal with our personal problems and take care of ourselves, which will get us a lot farther in life than the Pythagorean theorem ever will. Once I taught myself personal finance, I thought that it was the number-one thing I would have kids learn if I were in charge of the world. That’s until I learned about the importance of a set of behaviors and qualities I call “Emotional Wellness.”
Let’s run a quick equation:
Emotional intelligence + Mental wellness
= Emotional Wellness
where emotional intelligence is your capacity to be aware of, control, and express your feelings and manage relationships, and mental wellness is your mental, social, and emotional health.
You’ve likely heard of emotional intelligence, or EQ, and its effect on getting ahead in your career. It is connected to both better workplace performance and higher salary. People with high EQ excel at perceiving, understanding, using, and managing emotions. Studies show that when people have roughly equal IQ and skill, EQ accounts for 90 percent of what makes some of those people more successful than others.
You also likely know that mental wellness is a state of psychological health and well-being. People who take care of their mental wellness are able to sustain a baseline of contentment while creating and maintaining healthy relationships. They also have the ability to cope with the demands of everyday life, and are resilient when shit happens.
High EQ and stellar mental wellness are each important on their own. But to be the most successful Super Woman you can be, you really need both. And they need each other. For instance, emotional intelligence gives you the ability to recognize that your emotions are heading downhill before they get out of control, while mental wellness makes it easier to access that awareness and gives you the resources to act on it. The stronger each of these pieces are, the stronger your resulting Emotional Wellness will be (just like how when you add two big numbers together, you get an even bigger one).
To use finance terminology, Emotional Wellness can be your greatest asset or your greatest liability—especially when it comes to your career. In other words, having it can foster your success and lacking it can destroy it. It’s what welcomes balance and wards off burnout.
MAYBE SHE’S BORN WITH IT (BUT PROBABLY NOT)
We are not born knowing how to cultivate Emotional Wellness or how to use it to crush life. These things are learned. Yes, changing the IQ you were born with is hard, but upping your EQ and mental wellness is absolutely doable.
I did it. And I’m going to share everything I’ve discovered—through research, and a lot of trial and error—along the way. But mastering and maintaining your Emotional Wellness is up to you.
I’m not gonna lie—it’s work. Every. Single. Day. But I can tell you this: Even though it’s basically free, this knowledge is worth more to your success than anything you’ll learn in grad school or any of the countless professional seminars on getting ahead you might take. Yet we often ignore these skills entirely in professional development. Instead, we take out hefty student loans, study, and network our booties off, even though those efforts don’t correlate directly to success like working on your Emotional Wellness does. This book is a crash course in the most important subject that none of us learned in school.
But let me be super clear before we do this: I am not a shrink. I am not a scientist. I have no formal training in the brain or mental health. I wasn’t sure I would ever become mentally healthy myself, much less be in a position to teach anyone how to do it. You might be thinking: then why are you teaching this—you’re not an expert!?!
Believe me, you’re not thinking anything I haven’t thought myself. I’ve had many long conversations with myself about whether or not I had any business writing this book. When I quieted the mean girl inside my head, though, I realized that I’m exactly the person who should be writing about Emotional Wellness. I’m not an expert in self-care and self-love just yet, and I’ll never claim to be, but I am an expert (or as close as you can get) in self-harm and self-hate, and having worked my way from the latter concepts to the former makes me the perfect guide for anyone trying to do the same. I understand how precious Emotional Wellness is because I know what it is like not to have it, and for me, figuring out how to develop it, and then maintain it, wasn’t just some academic interest—it was a necessity. My expertise is my experience: living it and making it through—not just in one piece, but stronger than ever.
After finishing the otherworldly walk home to my apartment from the hospital, one of the first things I did was cut off my white hospital bracelet with a huge sigh of relief and gratitude. Relief for coming through that experience, and gratitude for the chance to get on a healthier path. As the bracelet came off, I was surprised to see another band underneath it that I hadn’t even realized was there. This one was yellow, and all it said was “Fall Risk.” I’ve since Googled it and learned that everyone gets a “Fall Risk” band in the psych ward because, unlike patients in other parts of the hospital, most psych patients are allowed to walk around freely within the ward; changes in medications, however, put them at greater risk for falling. Those two simple words—“Fall Risk”—would go on to become a phrase that had great meaning for me.
I keep that yellow band in a frame on my desk as a daily reminder that without the right care and maintenance, I am a “Fall Risk.” Not physically, but mentally. Of course, I’m going to do everything I can not to slip again—by harnessing the power I’ve developed as a real-life Super Woman. And by the end of this book, you’ll have that power, too.
BOTTOM LINE*
Conventional Wisdom: Having a breakdown means that I’m weak.
Having a breakdown is not fun. I’ve been there. And BTW, tons of high-powered people I know have, too (and you’re gonna hear from some of them throughout this book). It doesn’t mean you’re weak. The best way to avoid another breakdown in the future is a combination of compassion and tough love. First, give your former self empathy for what she didn’t know. Then, learn that. Grow. And don’t go back.
Conventional Wisdom: Problems are bad.
The way you view and talk about your problems can make all the difference. Unlocking their power requires that you first identify them. Then, reframe and manage them. It means harnessing the good while recognizing what is difficult for you and where you might need support. Often the only thing standing between distress and success is asking for help. And in order to do that, you have to identify just what it is you need help with in the first place.
Conventional Wisdom: If I just work harder, I’ll get ahead.
It’s easy to de-prioritize yourself in favor of working harder. But not taking care of yourself is not helping you get ahead; it’s holding you back.
* While burnout has been studied and treated as a clinical condition by psychologists for years, it was officially recognized by the World Health Organization just as this book was going to print. The WHO added it to the International Classification of Diseases alongside other mental health issues—a big deal when it comes to diagnosis and insurance coverage.
* PS—Because this book focuses on how prioritizing yourself will make you more successful, I want to debunk some conventional wisdom about Emotional Wellness and your career. I include a “Bottom Line” at the end of every step in my books because a) a little review never hurt anyone; b) it’s a finance term (swoon!) that just means how much you or a company is making when all is said and done—always important information to have; and, c) the best success strategies are ones that come from unconventional thinking. After all, “self-care” is not just a buzzword or a luxury, it is a tool for achieving more success than you ever imagined. While it’s all too easy to put yourself at the bottom of your to-do list, your bottom line takes a hard hit when you do.