How I Held Myself Together When My Multipotentialite Life Fell Apart

Three years ago, I went through a major traumatic episode that changed my life—I was laid off from my day job. For me, the “Einstein Approach”—having a day job that left me with time and money to pursue my passions on the side—had been the key to my multipotentialite lifestyle. It kept my side hustle going! When my work came to a standstill, it felt like my whole life was cut short.

That wasn’t it. Months preceding my lay-off, I had spent my new year’s eve in the hospital, fighting an arm infection so severe that the doctors recommended amputation of arm and breast. In the months after losing my job, I faced several personal tragedies including losing my grandparent. And, before I could recover from that, the next setback was knocking on my door. In April of 2021, I found myself on oxygen support during India’s severe COVID crisis. 

As someone who has been living with chronic illness and repeated hospitalizations, I am adept at dealing with medical emergencies. Yet, it was really all the other things that got to me—the grief of losing a family member and the humiliation and panic at losing my job sent me over the edge. 

Within a year, I had accumulated trauma from different events and my multipod life, as I knew it, had fallen apart. After all these difficult life events, I was crumbling. My hobbies and personal projects were all at a standstill. I could barely look for a job, since I was struggling physically more than I ever had in my life. My finances were in ruin, since I had been unemployed for over a year. I was draining my savings to keep up with the passion projects that offered me some semblance of multipotentialite normalcy. For several months, I really questioned what it meant to be a multipod who—at least for the time being—just could not do all the things.

Trauma activates flight, fight or freeze responses for most of us. Accepting trauma-induced changes in our behavior is a challenge, perhaps an even harsher challenge for multipotentialites. Since our lives are full of things to do and our schedules are usually overly packed, accommodating the traumatic response and living with its repercussions can be complicated. The experience of any disruption in our lives is amplified. I found myself in the deep end of my problems without any easy fixes. However, living through traumatic episodes has shaped who I am today. Here are three things that helped me cope through living in the aftermath of trauma.

1. Acknowledge your setbacks so you can free yourself from them

As an overachieving academic, I had never truly experienced failure until I lost my job. After the initial shock of being laid off wore out, I had fallen into the next traumatic episode where I was spending all my time at the hospital with my grandfather on life support. Between January 2020 and May 2021, I had undergone several stints in the hospital, including being on life support myself and losing a family member on life support. Even before the grief and the shock of one episode could wear off, the next one awaited me. Within each of these traumatic episodes, and during the time that followed, I was operating on autopilot and had no bandwidth to comprehend my desires for my life.

I was privileged enough to fall back on my savings and schedule therapy. While speaking to a trained counselor was helpful—I would highly recommend it!—it was not enough. Living through these traumas meant navigating dips in my mood and energy levels and a constant sense of negotiation with myself to attempt a piece of a task—whether it was personal or professional. Every task was an uphill battle since wanting to do everything and having the energy to do nothing were always at odds.  I wanted to continue releasing my weekly entertainment columns, but I found no time or mental peace to get writing in front of a laptop. Even something as basic as applying for a job seemed like a huge task, since I struggled to  collect my thoughts. How could I hold a job when I could barely string together a sentence in my cover letter?

It took a long time for me to realize that I was struggling badly because I had feared failure all my life. Now, that possibility of failure was in the room with me all the time. Eventually, I just had to acknowledge that life rarely goes according to our best crafted plans. Embracing the setbacks felt liberating. Vocalizing that I was struggling and admitting that I needed down time to bounce back from my situation was powerful.

If you find yourself undergoing a life-changing event—or several such episodes in succession—it is important that you stop and acknowledge your fears. Be mindful that you might experience failure through your healing journey. It is okay to go through it, without shaming yourself or forcing yourself to believe everything is fine when it’s not. Bottling up our emotions, especially realizations that our plans are not going to work for us, can be deeply troubling. Facing them head on helps us release the fear of failure and disconnect from the victim mentality that can be debilitating in the long run.

2. Trust that recovery will not be linear

As I found the courage to embrace my setbacks, I restarted my previous stint at highly functional multipotentialite life in baby steps. Every day meant picking one thing from my life as I had known it, and telling myself to sit through it and do it. No two days looked alike—and some days meant falling back down and finding the courage to stand up again.

If you have ever experienced burnout, undergone long periods of anxiety or lived with depression, you know that life is not as straightforward or simple as it seems to be on social media. As a grieving multipotentialite, I was challenged to reclaim my old life by finding the strength to be there for myself every day—through good, bad and ugly mental health days and physically challenging days. There were days when writing a single email to a freelance client meant pushing demons out of my head and scheduling grieving time for after the email was sent. Some days, even sitting through a film I wanted to review was hard, since I was battling brain fog with Long COVID.

It was hard to accept the reality that no two days looked alike. I could plan for the smallest activity, but be unable to follow through on the day of, due to physical or mental health challenges. My biggest takeaway in overcoming the setbacks and reclaiming my multipotentialite life was rooted in the understanding that recovery will never be linear. My road back to a high functioninglife was not going to be straightforward. My trauma experiences may not define me, but they shaped my life as I know it today. I now know that recovery is a long, drawn out process—one not achieved by a couple of small tweaks.

The minute you find yourself accepting that effort alone cannot “fix” your situation, you will be at ease. Perseverance, along with effort, is the key to life after challenging personal or professional setbacks. Today, as I juggle my projects (both personal and professional), I feel empowered in my grief and my healing alike. But that is not something that I achieved in a day. This particular road is not as straightforward as it seems.

3. Return to your source(s)

In coming face to face with traumatic and challenging life experiences, our ability to follow through on our projects is usually at an all-time low. Though we may want to do everything, we struggle with the inability to do anything. Getting out of that cycle is critical. The middle ground for me, during my setbacks, was falling back on activities and hobbies that I dearly enjoyed as a child. When I felt alone and miserable, I found myself reconnecting with the music I used to listen to. I also deeply enjoyed binge watching old TV series and films that I had seen during happier days in film school. These activities served as a constant reminder that tough times don’t always last and that the phase I was in, too, would pass.  

Setbacks are not ideal and they can impact both our immediate lives and our long-term functioning. Making time for hobbies and setting aside down time are incredibly powerful tools to combat the disorientation that comes with major life changes or setbacks. Childhood hobbies have an intriguing way of kick-starting and nurturing our interests. We can regain a sense of hope by going back to the drawing board and looking at what we pursued as our younger selves. Seeing our journey through the prism of historical memories, we are reminded of how far we have come—and the time it took for us to nurture a particular skill required to pursue a hobby.

Reflecting on things we loved to do in the past can also help us remember the people we were prior to experiencing the trauma and setbacks. It acts as a reminder that life is full of surprises and that the journey ahead means learning about those surprises again and again.In going back to the drawing board with my old hobbies, I learned new things about the craft of writing. Somehow, it built a new sense of confidence within me. I had revisited something I was actually good at. In true multipotentialite style, I was creating a brand new journey along an old path. Today, I look back fondly at the time I spent in isolation in the hospital fighting COVID, because I was able to spend a lot of uninterrupted time with films that I had seen ages ago. Revisiting them at my difficult time gave me strength to fight for another lease on life.

Your turn

Has a traumatic episode ever impacted your life experiences as a multipotentialite? How did you heal and move forward? Share your journey with the multipod community so we can all learn and grow together.