“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” ~Nelson Mandela
First, I slept in a snow shelter at -20°C.
Second, I was standing alone on a stage in Montreal trying to make strangers laugh.
Third, I put my thumb on the side of a highway with nothing but a bag and hoped a stranger would take me home 1,200 kilometers away.
I did all of these things knowingly, on purpose, as part of a project I called My Year of Fear. The idea was simple: Face a new personal fear every month for a year, write honestly about it, and see what came out on the other side.
What I didn’t plan for was the month when everything fell apart.
how it started
I was thirty-three years old and I was afraid of almost everything.
Not in an obvious way. On the outside, I looked fine – a successful engineer, a long-term relationship, an apartment in Montreal, a life that looked like it was going somewhere.
But underneath that, I was carrying a bag full of fear that I had never seen before. fear of rejection. Fear of conflict. Fear of giving your honest opinion and people disagreeing. Fear of being alone. Fear of big changes. Fear of strangers.
And most of all—the one that colored everything else—the fear of not being enough.
I grew up with a lot of fear. It was not natural for me to move towards difficult things. I was that kid who avoided confrontation, who changed his opinions to suit the room, who kept himself small so no one would have any reason to reject him.
At the age of thirty-three I looked back at my life and realized that for as long as I could remember, fear had been making my decisions for me. It had diminished my potential, stifled my flexibility, and quietly limited the size of the life I wanted to live.
So I decided to do something about it. One month at a time.
year of fear
January: I snowshoeed into the cold wilderness of Canada in the middle of winter, built a snow shelter with my own hands, and slept in it overnight. I didn’t sleep much. But I woke up.
February: I performed stand-up comedy in front of a room full of strangers at an open mic night in Montreal. Some of them laughed. Most of them did not. I survived anyway.
March: I traveled 1,200 kilometers from Halifax to Montreal, trusting strangers for my safety for three consecutive days. Every single person who raised me was kind.
April: I spent the entire weekend in a silent meditation camp—no talking, no phones, no distractions. Just me and my own thoughts for forty-eight hours. It was harder than a snow shelter.
May: I went bungee jumping. Before I jumped, I felt as if I stood at the edge of that valley for a long time. But I jumped.
By May I started feeling some changes inside me. A quiet confidence that was not there before. There is a growing sense that I can do hard things – that discomfort is not something to run from but something to walk towards.
I was building muscle I didn’t even know I needed.
And then June came.
The month when everything fell apart
In the span of six weeks, three things happened that I never saw coming.
1. I got fired from my high-paying corporate job.
2. My grandmother died.
3. And my girlfriend of six years and I broke up.
All this. six weeks.
If you had asked me a year ago how I would deal with losing my relationship, my income, and one of my favorite people on Earth all in the same month and a half, I would have honestly told you: Not okay. I would have told you that I would probably break down. Crawl into a hole. Wait for someone or something to come and fix it.
But this did not happen.
Don’t get me wrong—it was brutal. I took everything I had to my friend’s couch in the Montreal metro and cried. That first night away from the apartment I had called home for years was one of the loneliest nights of my life.
But I pushed forward with more determination than I ever thought possible.
And since then I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand why.
What Five Months of Facing Fear Really Creates
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: The fears I deliberately faced in those first five months of the year created something in me that I couldn’t have created in any other way.
He created resilience – not as a concept, but as a lived experience. Every time I went towards something that scared me and came out the other side, I added another data point to the growing body of evidence: I can do hard things. Anxiety doesn’t kill me. Fear is information, not a signal to stop.
So when unexpected fears came – ones I never chose, that just showed up and demanded to be dealt with – I had the strength for them. Not quite right. There is no one who has made any of this painless. But one is enough to keep going.
The breakup was the hardest of the three losses, as breakups often are. When you’ve lived with someone for six years, when you’ve woven your routine, your future, and your sense of home around another person, losing that relationship isn’t just losing a person. It’s losing a version of yourself.
And, I think, that’s what makes breakups so uniquely terrible.
It’s not just loneliness. This is the question of identity underlying loneliness: Who am I now?
fear under fear
One reason my relationship ended was something I had known for a long time but was afraid to confront directly: I wanted kids, and she didn’t.
I had kept that truth aside for years. Not because I didn’t know it was there, but because I was scared. There is a fear of losing him. Afraid of being alone. It’s scary starting over at thirty-three, with no guarantee that the life I wanted is still available to me.
Pleasing people is just fear wearing a friendly mask. And I was a people pleaser in that relationship – and in most of my relationships before that – for a very long time.
When the breakup happened I took a decision. I had allowed fear to dictate my decisions.
From that point on I was exactly who I was. I wanted kids, and I said so early, clearly and without apology. I stopped softening my edges to be more acceptable. I stopped changing my story to fit what someone else wanted to hear.
And when I approached someone new and was rejected — which happened several times — I learned to reframe it as useful information rather than evidence that I wasn’t good enough. If someone is not interested in the real me, then he is not the right person. Easy. Clean. Nothing to take personally.
Rejection stopped being something to fear and started becoming something to learn.
What letting go really looks like
In the years since that breakup, I’ve thought a lot about what it really means to let go.
I have realized that letting go is not even a moment. This is an ongoing practice. I have to let go of the high expectations of others. Let go of embarrassment about professional failures. Let go of the need for closure from people who were never going to give it to me. Let go of the idea that I can control things I never had control over.
It never ends completely. The job is to let go.
But the common thread through it all is this: Almost everything that hurts us is something we can’t control. A relationship is ending. A job is disappearing. A person we love to die. The only thing any of us can really control is how we react to what happens to us.
Waiting for closure – waiting for your ex to say the right thing so you can finally move on – is to cede that control to someone who has already left. Real closure is not something that someone else gives you. It’s something you decide to give yourself.
I know this isn’t easy to hear when you’re in the middle of it. I know because I was in the middle of it too. And even after knowing it intellectually, it still took me time to actually feel it in my body.
But the moment I stopped waiting for permission to move forward was the moment things really started to change.
what do i know now
Now I am married to an incredible woman who loves me just the way I am. I have the two children I always wanted. A life that I am truly grateful for every single day.
None of this would have happened if I had allowed the fear to continue in the show. None of this would have happened if I had stayed in a relationship that didn’t respect what I really wanted because I was so afraid of being alone. None of this would have happened if I had kept waiting for the world to settle down in a way that I would finally feel safe enough to be myself.
The breakup I never saw coming was one of the most important things that happened to me. Not because it was easy. But because it forced me to stop running from fear and start learning from it.
If you are reading this in the middle of your heartbreak let me tell you this:
You are not broken. You are not behind. You are too much or not enough.
You are someone who loves another person despite everything they have. And you’re the one who is going to figure out what happens next – not because it’s easy, but because you are more resilient than you know.
That fear you’re feeling right now? This is not a sign that there is something wrong with you.
It’s a sign that you’re paying attention.
And this is exactly where the work begins.
About Eric Ibe
Eric is a professional engineer and breakup recovery coach based in Canada. A decade ago she wrote honestly about her toughest breakup and was overwhelmed by the response from people who felt exactly the same way. That experience inspired her to create The Breakup Challenge – a free 5-day email program that helps people let go of heartbreak. You can sign up here breakupchallenge.ca.
