Letting Go of the Exit Strategy

I’m the only child of parents who graduated from Stanford University. Growing up, the pressure I was under to succeed was beyond immense. 

That pressure worked in my favor for a while. I got good grades. I had a bunch of friends. I was on student council.

But it all fell apart when I got to high school. When my cousin Jason, who was like a brother to me, died by suicide. When two years later, Jason’s dad died by suicide, too. 

All at once, young adulthood became a terrifying time for me. I started down a bleak path.

Before long, I lost the motivation to do anything for myself or anyone else. My grades dropped. I isolated myself from my friends. As I grieved, I struggled to make sense of my life. I developed panic attacks, chronic anxiety, and severe depression. 

More and more, I thought of suicide as an exit strategy. 

Meanwhile, my parents grew increasingly worried about me, so they sent me to therapy. Though my first experiences in therapy ranged from unhelpful to negative, I eventually found a therapist who helped me heal and connect with my desire to change my life.

But I still kept the possibility of suicide in the back of my mind. If things got really bad, I told myself, I still had the option to end my life.

I had a ready supply of sleeping pills. Just knowing they were there made me feel less trapped.

Exit Strategies Take Many Forms

As a teenager I was using the most drastic form of an exit strategy to cope with the challenges I was experiencing. But we can also adopt more subtle exit strategies when the stress and the stakes are high in our lives. 

What does these other exit strategies look like?

Maybe we don’t give our best effort at work because we don’t like management.

Maybe we don’t fully commit to a relationship because we aren’t sure if we want to spend the rest of our lives with this person.

Maybe we don’t carve out time to go after our big dreams—like starting a business or writing a book—because we’re scared we won’t succeed.

How do these types of exit strategies impact our ability to create the life we want?

Not doing our best at work prevents us from reaping all the benfits the job has to offer. It also keeps us from building good references if we want a different job and/or from moving into management and changing the system for the better.

Not being fully in our relationships prevents us from getting clarity on what potential the relationship actually has. Over time, the other person can sense our hesitation, which puts stress on the relationship. If we want to know whether someone is right for us, we need to go "all in" to see what we can create with them.

Meanwhile, if we half-heartedly chase our dreams, then we’ll never know whether we could have achieved them. Living with that kind of regret is much worse than knowing we gave something our all and it didn't work out the first time.

Ultimately, when we keep one foot out the door in any aspect of our life, we limit our capacity to create all that we desire. We also make it harder to find clarity about whether to make a change.

Facing My Own Exit Strategy

As a teenager with a ready supply of sleeping pills, I experienced that lack of fulfillment and clarity first-hand.

One day during a group therapy session, we did an exercise where we wrote down something we thought each member of the group needed to know to improve their life.

When it came to me, I discovered everyone had written the same thing: “You’re a victim of your own life.”

Those words hit me hard. I’d survived so many painful experiences up to that point! I considered myself strong, not a victim.

I went home that night planning to take the sleeping pills. “They don’t understand what I’ve been through,” I thought. “Now they’ll see how much they hurt me.”

When I went into the bathroom and grabbed the jar of pills, a thought came to me: the people in my therapy group were on my side. And then another thought: maybe they were trying to tell me something important.

I sank to the bathroom floor, closing my eyes, trying to take deep breaths. In the middle of a long exhale, I had another thought: I didn’t need death as an option to be free. I was already free. I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do. 

I stood up and flushed the sleeping pills down the toilet.

Until that moment in the bathroom, I didn’t understand that keeping one foot out the door would get me nowhere.

As long as I held onto suicide as an exit strategy, I would never figure out how to be fully present in my life.*

Making the conscious choice to be in this life didn’t end my struggle with depression. But it did help me baby step my way into a new relationship with my emotions.

Fully committing to my life also freed me up to fully commit to my dreams. Ultimately, letting go of my exit strategy allowed me to re-enter my life and figure out what I needed to do to create the kind of future I wanted. 

Do you want to learn more about how to create the life you want? In my book, Life Launch, I write about how to rewire your relationship with your emotions and move toward your purpose. Download a sample chapter here. 

*If you’re experiencing depression and/or other emotions that make it hard to commit to your life right now, then it’s important to seek out therapy and/or other sources of support until you get to the point where you know you want to be here.