“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” ~Nelson Mandela
First, I slept in a snow shelter at -20 degrees Celsius.
Second, I stood alone on a stage in Montreal and tried to make strangers laugh.
Third, I stuck my thumb on the side of the highway with nothing but a backpack and expected a stranger to drive me home 1,200 kilometers away.
I did all these things deliberately, 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 happened on the other side.
The month I didn’t plan for was when everything fell apart.
How did it start?
I was thirty-three years old, and I was afraid of almost everything.
Not in an obvious way. From the outside, I looked good – a successful engineer, a long-term relationship, an apartment in Montreal, a life that looked like it was going somewhere.
But underneath I was carrying a backpack full of fears that I never once looked directly at. Fear of rejection. Fear of conflict. Fear of giving my honest opinion and having people disagree. Fear of being alone. Fear of big changes. fear of strangers
And most of all—which colored everything else—the fear of not being enough.
I grew up with a lot of fear. It wasn’t natural for me to walk into difficult things. I was the kid who avoided conflict, who changed his opinion to fit the room, who kept himself small so no one would have a reason to reject him.
At age 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 diminished my agency, stifled my resilience, and quietly limited the life I was willing to live.
So I decided to do something about it. One month at a time.
year of fear
January: I snowed in the Canadian desert in the middle of winter, built a snow shelter 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 of them didn’t. Anyway, I survived.
March: I walked 1,200 kilometers from Halifax to Montreal, three days straight, trusting strangers with my safety. Every single person who picked me up was kind.
April: I spent an entire weekend at a silent meditation retreat—no talking, no phones, no distractions. Just me and my thoughts for forty-eight hours. That one was harder than the snow shelter.
May: I did bungee jumping. I stood on the edge of the precipice I felt for a long time before I jumped. But I jumped.
By May I can feel some changes in me. A calm confidence that wasn’t there before. A growing sense that I could do hard things – that there was no escaping the discomfort but something to walk towards.
I was building a muscle I didn’t know I needed.
And then June came.
The month 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.
It’s all. six weeks
If you had asked me a year ago how I would manage my relationship, my income, and one of my favorite people in the world in the same month and a half, I would have told you honestly: not well. I’d tell you I’d probably fall apart. Crawl into a hole. Wait for someone or something to come and fix it.
But it didn’t happen.
Don’t get me wrong – it was brutal. I carried everything I owned onto my friend’s couch in the Montreal metro and cried. That first night away from the apartment I’d called home for years was the loneliest of my life.
But I got through it with more poise than I thought I would.
And since then I’ve spent a long time trying to figure out why.
Five months of facing the fear has really built up
Here’s what I’ve come to believe: The fear I deliberately faced during the first five months of the year created something in me that I couldn’t have created any other way.
They created resilience—not as a concept, but as a lived experience. Every time I walked into 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. Discomfort doesn’t kill me. Fear is information, not a stop sign.
So when the unexpected fears came—the ones I never chose, the ones that just showed up and demanded to be dealt with—I had a muscle for them. Not a perfect one. Not one that made any of it painless. But enough to keep moving.
D The breakup was the hardest Among the three losses, breakups often occur. When you’ve built a life with someone for six years, when you’ve woven your routine and your future and your sense of home around another person, losing that relationship isn’t just losing a person. It is losing a version of itself.
And that, I think, is what makes breakups uniquely terrifying.
It’s not just loneliness. This is the question of identity beneath 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 face directly: I wanted children, and he didn’t.
I pushed that truth away for years. Because I didn’t know it was there but I was scared. Fear of losing him. Afraid to be alone. The fear of starting over at thirty-three with no guarantee that the life I wanted was still available to me.
Wearing a friendly mask only fears being people-pleasers. And I was a people-pleaser for a very long time in that relationship—and in most of my relationships before it.
When the breakup happened, I made a decision. I let fear make my decisions.
From then on I owned exactly who I was. I wanted children, and I said so quickly, clearly and unapologetically. I stopped softening my edges to be more receptive. I stopped changing my story to suit what someone else wanted to hear.
And when I’ve approached someone new and been rejected—which has happened many times—I’ve learned to reframe it as useful information rather than evidence that I’m not enough. If someone wasn’t interested in the real me, they weren’t the right person. Simple clean. Nothing to take personally.
Rejection stops being something to fear and starts being something to learn from.
What Letting Go Really Looks Like
In the years since that breakup, I’ve thought a lot about what it means to let go.
I understand it let go Not a moment. This is an ongoing exercise. I had to let go of the high expectations of others. Let go of shame around professional failure. Let go of the need to shut down from people who aren’t going to give it to me. Let go of the idea that I can control things that were never mine to control.
It never quite ends. Letting go is work.
But the common thread between them is this: almost everything that causes us pain is something we can’t control. The end of a relationship. A job is gone. A man we love to death. 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 controlling someone who’s already gone. Real closure is not something another person gives you. It’s something you decide to give yourself.
I know that’s not easy to hear when you’re in the middle of it. I know because I’ve been through it myself. And it still took me time, even after I knew it intellectually, to feel it in my body.
But the moment I stopped waiting for permission to move on was the moment things really started to change.
What do I know now?
I am now married to an incredible woman who loves me for exactly who I am. I have the two kids I always wanted. A life I am truly grateful for every single day.
None of this would have happened if I had let fear run the show. None of this would have happened if I had been in a relationship that didn’t respect what I really wanted because I was too afraid to be alone. None of this would have happened if I had waited for the world to arrange itself in a way that finally felt safe enough.
The breakup I never saw coming was one of the most important things that ever happened to me. Because it was not easy. But because it forced me to stop running from fear and start learning from it.
If you’re reading this in the middle of your own heartbreak, here’s what I want you to know:
you are not broken You are not behind. You are too much or not enough.
You are someone who loves another person with everything you have. And you’re the one who’s going to find out what happens next – because it’s not easy, but more resilient than you know.
Are you feeling scared right now? This is not a sign that something is wrong with you.
It’s a sign that you’re paying attention.
And right from there the work begins.
about Eric Ibe
Eric is a professional engineer and breakup recovery coach based in Canada. She wrote candidly about her toughest breakup a decade ago and was overwhelmed by the response from people who felt exactly the same way. That experience led him to create The Breakup Challenge — a free 5-day email program to help people get over heartbreak. You can sign up breakupchallenge.ca.
