Eric Oliver

I could barely function in front of my classes.

I wasn't eating.

I wasn't sleeping.

And I have to say that was probably for me one of the kind of low points of my life.

And there was this irony of like, oh my God, I got everything that I worked for and life feels kind of terrible.

Well, I was standing on the sidewalk of a very, very busy street in New Jersey.

And I'm standing there right on the curb.

And I was just carrying around so much pain.

And it occurred to me that, oh, all this pain would go away if I just stepped in front of the speeding truck that was coming towards me.

And then that impulse, I've never had an impulse like that before, scared the daylights out of me.

because A, it was this kind of very strong, self-destructive impulse.

And B, you know, getting run over by a garbage truck in central New Jersey seemed a truly humiliating way to go.

So it was at that moment that I said, okay, I need to fix things.

And that's really when I started pursuing therapy in great detail.

Well, I think in my 20s, like a lot of people, I was chasing this gold star illusion.

I thought, well, whatever dissatisfaction I'm having now, if I could just get that next gold star, so if I could just finish my PhD, if I could just get that great job, if I could just buy the perfect house, all of these things that we think are so important, then all of these problems and discontentment that I'm feeling will somehow or another just solve themselves and go away.

And what I was finding was just the opposite.

The more I was going further down the path of this gold star trajectory, the worse I seemed to be doing.

They really meant something more like know thy place.

And for most of human history, these were probably the best three words you could live by.