whatever happened to that benny lewis
guy
some of you may have known me from my
intensive three-month language missions
or my books
my blog my videos or some other work but
you've likely
only seen that stuff years ago today i'm
going to share with you
why you haven't heard much from me in
recent years
in a very personal update
this video is for the context around the
theme i'll be covering in
upcoming videos where i'll share how i
worked through these
major life challenges so while this time
i don't have any
actionable advice i will soon and this
particular update is an important part
of my story
opening up and being vulnerable about
some
pretty big challenges that i wanted to
share first
by the way this actually has nothing to
do with the dumpster fire that is 20 20.
my personal rock bottom was actually
2018.
fortunately things have been seriously
turning around for me lately
so as miserable as everything i've been
through
is i can learn a lot of lessons from all
of this
maybe grow as a person to be stronger
moving forward
and hopefully use this platform to
encourage
others who themselves may be struggling
burnout the first thing that happened
which was less serious than the other
things i'm about to mention but
a big catalyst in causing everything
else
was that i burnt myself out more than i
ever imagined possible
i took on the most ridiculous work
project of my life
writing four academic books
simultaneously
this was about a year and a half of work
so
intensive that i neglected my core
business
it was immediately after and right
before other intensive projects
so i had no recovery period i was only
getting about
two hours sleep for several months in
this process every night
and the worst part of it was that
it included a big learning curve for me
compared to the non-academic work i had
done before
so i actually spent most of that year
and a half feeling
like a complete failure no matter how
hard i worked
that was years ago but i'm still
recovering from it to this day and i
haven't really been able to focus on
work quite the same ever since
it also created some serious self-esteem
issues that i mostly ignored only until
recently which planted the seed for some
other huge problems
debt the next big problem i've been
dealing with
was very poor financial planning as bad
an idea
that taking on so much work with those
books was
if i had gone to a cheap cabin in the
mountains or something to do it
it would have been a damn sight better
than moving to
downtown manhattan right as i started
them
i was staying in the most expensive
places i've ever lived in in my entire
life
they were tiny and i actually really
hated them
i never felt at home at all in these
places
i had so much work that i never even
left those small apartments
with the crappy views and constant noise
from the traffic
to even go out and appreciate new york
and one way that i
dealt with the stress was to order food
delivered all the time and to splash out
on expensive things as a distraction
i burned through all my life savings and
i needed to take out loans and keep
dangerously close to my credit card
maximum limits all the time
when the book writing project was
finally done
i had an extravagant wedding to plan
with a lot of unnecessary expenses
after this i stayed in the new york area
for several years
still wasting a lot of money to be in a
city i never truly got to appreciate
because i didn't have the energy to
and since i was burnt out the time away
from my core business
was followed by time not being able to
give it my all which is why i never
really got back to making content like i
used to
but this meant that as well as my
personal debt growing
my company suffered financially too
i'd be forever appreciative to my team
who stuck through
very tough times because they were the
ones keeping flu in three months alive
when
i couldn't fortunately i've been able to
turn things around both in my personal
and company finances
and i'll talk about that in a future
video also
i moved to austin which is much cheaper
and less stressful to live in the new
york
divorce so guess who became a statistic
lauren and i are divorced the lucky part
is that there was
no infidelity or abuse and it was a
mutual decision and no children were
involved
serious personality clashes that we had
ignored in the first years
combined with life getting more
difficult had shunned a light on issues
we were never going to be able to solve
being stuck in a tiny apartment and
working on the academic books intimately
together
accelerated how aware of these clashes
we were starting to become
we both truly loved the other person but
we were toxic for one another
we both thought we could eventually
solve these problems
which is why we went ahead with the
wedding but even many
couples therapy sessions combined with
that couldn't help us
and we've actually had to part ways
the divorce itself was just a legal
process that happened this year
and the separation at the end of 2018
was the right choice
but the part that really hurt was um
watching a love that i truly thought
would be there
for the rest of my life very slowly die
right in front of my eyes it's the
most heartbreaking thing i think i'll
ever experience in my life
we ended on friendly terms but we cut
off almost all communication for a clean
break and this dramatic change has made
it so i'm
i'm dealing with this weird grief and
all this time like
the most important person in my life
suddenly died even though she's fine
and even though i've moved on from her
being my life partner
i'm still dealing with that grief and
sadness from so
many regrets to this day but i am
definitely a lot more comfortable in my
current situation
now and i'm relieved that i i do get
this fresh start
i've had some time to heal which has
been the most important thing that i've
needed more than anything
for depression
this one was hard for me to recognize
because i pride myself
in being an optimist who always tries to
see
the silver lining in situations
ironically my
generally positive personality made me
ignore this
for much longer than i should have but i
think i presented enough context to make
it clear that this
wasn't really about me feeling a little
blue
dealing with crushing dash failing to
keep love alive
my ego taking serious blows from feeling
like a failure every single day i was
writing the four books
and being exhausted from all of it meant
that i had reached
a very very low point psychologically
i had a professional assess me for
clinical depression
and i was given medication to help me
deal with it
i have mixed feelings about that
solution but
i was at the strongest dose when lauren
and i decided to separate
which ended up being a very big help
since i didn't
feel nearly as miserable as i could have
at that time thanks to it it
kind of dulled the pain of that
transition
but i also spent most of last year
trying to get off that medication
because it made me feel a lack of
interest in anything
and that was its own separate struggle
fortunately i have professional
supervision to help me get to a safer
place
and if any of you think you might be
suffering from depression too
please talk to a professional or at
least confide in the people who care
about you part of the process
can be very very frustrating
but i'm very glad i was able to get help
to work through the worst of it i'm
actually dealing with the feelings that
got me down
in the first place and i've recognized
the importance
of honest and open communication which
is
the reason i'm sharing all of this with
the world i can still be true to my
optimistic natural personality while
also not
forcing a brave face for the sake of
for lack of a better term toxic
positivity
and that's my story there are other
challenges i've faced in these years too
like obviously putting on weight having
my residential status put in doubt
at a time i wasn't up for moving my
entire life to another country
and some other things i haven't
completely solved or gotten over
everything i mentioned today but i am at
least
safely on the road to recovery
i know 2020 has been a really rough year
for many people so i by no means think
i've
had a harder life than other people this
is just my story
since i wanted to be open about the
struggles that i've been
through please go easy on me in the
comments because i've had to work up
a lot of courage and motivation to be
able to
record and post this video and i
actually wanted to do this a whole year
ago but i recognized that i was still
too far from a place to talk about these
things publicly back then
and i feel like i am ready now
and like i said in upcoming videos i'm
going to talk about
these specific challenges in more depth
and discuss
how i've worked through these issues in
case any of you might find that helpful
so to make sure you don't miss those
don't forget to subscribe
if you haven't already and um i'm also
posting a lot more regularly again
on my other social media so you can
catch me there
too if you want hopefully this is the
first of many more consistent videos
you'll see on this channel both
to address the lessons i've learned from
this experience but also of course to
get back to the content that i used to
enjoy making previously
that a lot of you probably subscribed
for in the first place
so until then thanks so much for
watching and
take care of yourselves