“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” ~Nelson Mandela
For the first time, I slept in a snow shelter at -20°C.
Second, I stood alone on stage in Montreal trying to make strangers laugh.
For the third time, I stuck my thumb out on the side of the highway, without a backpack, hoping a stranger would take me home, 1,200 kilometers away.
I did all these things on purpose, on purpose, as part of a project I called The Year of Fear. The idea was simple: face a new personal fear every month for a year, write about it honestly, and see what happened on the other side.
What I didn’t plan for was the month it all fell apart.
How it started
I was thirty-three years old and afraid of almost everything.
Not in an obvious way. I looked good on the outside—a successful engineer, a long-term relationship, an apartment in Montreal, a life that looked like it was going somewhere.
But underneath was a backpack full of fears that I never once looked directly at. Fear of rejection. Fear of conflict. I’m afraid of giving an honest opinion and people disagreeing. Fear of being alone. Fear of big changes. Fear of strangers.
And most of all – what colored everything else – the fear of not having enough.
I grew up in a lot of fear. It was not natural for me to walk towards difficult things. I was the kid who avoided confrontation, who changed his mind to suit the room, who kept himself small so that no one would have a reason to reject me.
At thirty-three, I looked back at my life and realized that fear had been making my decisions for me for as long as I could remember. It reduced my agency, stifled my resilience, and quietly limited the size of the life I was willing to live.
So I decided to do something about it. One month at a time.
The year of fear
January: In the dead of winter, I went snowshoeing into the frozen Canadian wilderness, built a snow shelter with my own hands, and slept in it overnight. I didn’t sleep much. But I woke up.
February: I did stand-up comedy at an open mic night in Montreal in front of a room full of strangers. Some of them laughed. Most people don’t. Anyway, I survived.
March: I hitchhiked 1,200 kilometers from Halifax to Montreal, entrusting my safety to strangers for three days straight. Everyone who hired him was nice.
April: I spent an entire weekend on a silent meditation retreat – no talking, no phone calls, no distractions. Just me and my own thoughts for forty-eight hours. This was tougher than the snow shelter.
May: I went bungee jumping. I stood on the edge of the canyon for a very long time before I jumped. But I jumped.
By May, I could already feel something changing in me. A quiet confidence that wasn’t there before. A growing feeling that I can do difficult things – this discomfort is not something to be run from, but something to be walked towards.
I built muscle I didn’t know I needed.
And then June came.
The month Everything fell apart
In the space of six weeks, three things happened that I had never seen before.
1. I got fired from my well-paying corporate job.
2. My grandmother died.
3. And my girlfriend of six years and I broke up.
the whole thing. Six weeks.
If you had asked me a year ago how I would handle losing my relationship, my income, and one of my favorite people on earth in the same month and a half, I would have honestly said: not well. I would have said I would probably collapse. Climb into a hole. Wait for someone or something to fix it.
But that’s not what happened.
Don’t get me wrong – it was brutal. I cried on the Montreal subway as I took everything to my boyfriend’s couch. The first night away from the apartment I had called home for years was one of the loneliest nights of my life.
But I got through it with more determination than I ever thought possible.
And since then, I’ve spent a long time trying to understand why.
What five months of facing fear had built
What I’ve come to believe is that the fears I intentionally faced in the first five months of the year built something in me that I couldn’t have built otherwise.
They built resilience – not as a concept, but as a lived experience. Every time I walked toward something that scared me and came out the other side, I added another piece of evidence to the growing mass of evidence: I can do hard things. Discomfort doesn’t kill you. Fear is information, not a stop sign.
So when the unexpected fears arrived—the ones I never chose, the ones that just showed up and demanded to be dealt with—I had muscle for them. It’s not perfect. Not one that would have made any of them pain free. But one is enough to move.
THE the breakup was the hardest of three losses, as breakups often do. When you’ve built your life with someone for six years, when you’ve built your routines, your future, and your sense of home around another person, losing that relationship isn’t just losing a person. You lose a version of yourself.
And I think that’s what makes breakups so uniquely terrifying.
It’s not just loneliness. This is the question of identity under loneliness: who am i now
Fear under fear
One of the reasons my relationship ended was something I had known for a long time but was too afraid to confront him directly: I wanted children and he didn’t.
I pushed this truth aside for years. Not because I didn’t know it was there, but because I was afraid. He is afraid of losing her. He is afraid of being alone. I dread starting over at thirty-three with no guarantee that the life I wanted would still be available to me.
People-pleasing fear is just wearing a friendlier mask. And in this relationship—and in most of my relationships—I’ve been people for a very long time.
When the breakup happened, I made a decision. I’m done, I let fear make my decisions.
From then on, I was exactly who I was. I wanted children and I said that early, clearly and without apology. I stopped softening my edges to make it more acceptable. I stopped changing my story to fit what someone else wanted to hear.
And when I approached a new person and got rejected—which happened many times—I learned to frame it as useful information, not as proof that I wasn’t enough. If someone wasn’t interested in the real me, they weren’t the right person. Simple. Clean. Nothing to take personally.
Rejection ceased to be something to be afraid of and he began to learn from it.
What letting go really looks like
In the years since the breakup, I’ve thought a lot about what it really means to let go.
I realized this to let go not a moment. This is an ongoing practice. I had to let go of the high expectations of others. Let go of the shame around professional failures. Let go of the need for closure from people who never wanted to give it to me. Let go of the idea that I can control the things I could never control.
It never ends completely. Letting go is the work itself.
But the common thread throughout was this: almost everything that causes us pain is something we cannot control. The end of a relationship. A job disappears. A man we love to die for. 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 giving that control over to someone who’s already gone. True closure is not something another person gives you. It’s something you choose to give yourself.
I know that’s not easy to hear when you’re in the middle of it. I know because I was in the middle of it. And it still took time, even after I knew intellectually, to actually feel it in my body.
But the moment I stopped waiting for permission to move on is the moment things started to change.
What I know now
I am now married to an incredible woman who loves me exactly as I am. I have two children that I always wanted. A life that I am truly grateful for every single day.
None of that would have happened if I let fear run the show. None of that would have happened if I stayed in a relationship that didn’t respect what I really wanted because I was too afraid to be alone. None of that would have happened if I waited for the world to arrange itself so that I would finally feel safe enough to be myself.
The breakup I never saw coming is one of the most important things that ever happened to me. Not because it was easy. But because it forced me not to run away from fear and to start learning from it.
Here’s what I want you to know if you’re reading this in the midst of your own heartbreak:
You are not broken. You are not behind. You are not too much or not enough.
You are someone who loved another person with everything you had. And you’re someone who figures out what’s next—not because it’s easy, but because you’re more flexible than you think.
The fear you feel right now? This is not a sign that something is wrong with you.
It’s a sign that you’re listening.
And this is exactly where the work begins.
About Eric Ibey
Eric is a professional engineer and breakup recovery coach in Canada. A decade ago, she wrote candidly about her toughest breakup and was amazed by the people who felt the exact same way. This experience led her to create The Breakup Challenge – a free 5-day email program to help people let go after heartbreak. You can apply at breakupchallenge.ca.
