The Belief That Ran My Life for Fifty-Eight Years
What I found when I finally stopped depending on no one — and started depending on something magnificent.
Image by Jerzy xxxxxx from Pixabay
I was sixteen years old when my father gave me the belief that would run my life for the next fifty-eight years.
He meant well. I know that now. He was trying to prepare my sister and me for a world he knew could be hard and unpredictable. What he said was simple:
Don’t depend on anyone. You have to take care of yourself.
I took it all the way to my heart.
I became a woman who was good at everything, being self-sufficient and ambitious to get some of the American Dream for myself. Dad always told me to be successful. To be successful, I needed to work hard. I worked so hard that I ran over my physical and mental needs.
I built two businesses, grossing half a million in the first one, and brought in six figures in income in the second one. I say that only to show you how ‘hard’ I worked to make money. I became too focused on making money.
I chased success the way our culture told me I should — achievement, forward motion, never stopping long enough to need anything from anyone. Including a spiritual life or getting in touch with my higher power.
I didn’t have a spiritual life. I didn’t have an interior life. I didn’t have a Psalm marked in my bible the way my grandmother did. I was operating on a completely different frequency — one where you earned your safety and security, and depended on no one. I believed that if I made a lot of money, I’d feel safe and secure.
What I didn’t know then was that I was also carrying more than I ever let anyone see. Losses that had no bottom. Pain, I didn’t have the tools to process. I kept moving because stopping felt dangerous.
For fifty-eight years, my father’s voice and my own willpower were the only things I trusted.
Then Came the Baja Desert
2017. A car accident that should have killed me.
And a brand new ambulance that was being delivered to a hospital in north Baja appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the Mexican desert — right after the crash.
I didn’t summon that ambulance. I didn’t work hard enough for it. It simply came. And in that moment, everything my life had been built on — self-reliance, control, achievement — became completely, undeniably insufficient. I surrendered my life to my higher power. I was helpless.
Six surgeries followed. My body had a slit from the breast to the pubic bone. Yet, I thought it was beautiful. It saved my life! I experienced a miracle - a shift in perception.
A planned future I lost and had to grieve. It was the one I thought I wanted, the one I had worked so hard to build. That grief was real, and it was not optional. I didn’t get to skip it.
During my near-death experience, a voice asked me:
You get to choose how you go through this experience. What will you choose?
I chose consciousness. I chose love. And that choice changed everything.
The Map I Didn’t Know I Was Walking
What I found on the other side of that grief was a map I didn’t know I was walking until I looked back at it.
Surrender. Grief. Acceptance. Love. Gratitude. Forgiveness. Trust. Faith.
Not as concepts. Not as a wellness framework. As a path, I walked on my hands and knees through the hardest years of my life.
The surrender came first, and it was the hardest.
For a woman who had spent fifty-eight years depending on no one, releasing control felt like dying. In some ways, it was. The version of me that needed no one had to go.
What replaced her surprised me.
I found that there is something richer, deeper, and more rewarding than anything the outer world has ever given me. I found that nature heals. That creativity is a form of prayer. That grace is real, and it doesn’t ask you to earn it first.
The women who already knew
I found that I had been surrounded by women who already knew this. My grandmother lived to 101 with Psalm 23 marked in her bible — The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil….
My mother, Dorothy, is 98½ and has survived losses that would break most people, carrying them on nothing but faith she never once put down.
They had an interior life I hadn’t yet built. A frequency I couldn’t yet receive.
The accident cracked me open to what was already in my bloodline, waiting.
I now trust what I can’t see.
Now I wake up every morning, and I pray. Not for what I want. Not for success or safety or control. I pray that my higher power’s (God of my understanding) will be done, not mine. That single shift — from my will to thy will — is the whole distance I traveled.
From don’t depend on anyone — to I trust what I cannot see.
If you’re reading this and you recognize yourself somewhere in that fifty-eight-year story — the achieving, the exhaustion, the quiet emptiness you don’t talk about — I want you to know something.
The way back to yourself exists.
I know because I found it. And I left the trail markers here for you.
XO, Sherold
P.S. This Wednesday, April 22nd, join me for our second Gathering on the High Road — the 100-Day Visualization Project. We’ll write together — just you and your own vision for what life could look like 100 days from now. I’d love to see you there. Details below.
Where Will Your Life Be 100 Days From Now?
That is not a rhetorical question.
One hundred days from now is August 1st. And the research on visualization is unambiguous: what you consistently hold in your mind with intention and emotion begins to shape what your brain notices, what you pursue, and what you create.
Alan Richardson’s famous study found that athletes who only visualized their practice — who never physically trained — improved by 23%. Nearly as many as those who showed up to practice every single day. Your brain cannot fully distinguish between a vividly imagined experience and a real one. That is not self-help. That is neuroscience.
But here is what most people get wrong about visualization: passive dreaming actually backfires. Research by psychologist Gabriele Oettingen found that people who simply fantasize about a desired outcome — without a clear process — are less likely to achieve it than people who never visualize at all. The fantasy drains the urgency.
Done right, visualization is one of the most powerful practices available to you. Done wrong, it keeps you comfortable while nothing changes.
Tomorrow — Wednesday, April 22, at 12 pm PDT — I’m teaching exactly how to do it right. In our Gathering on the High Road, I’ll walk you through the 100 Day Visualization Project: what it is, how it works, and how to build a daily practice that actually moves the needle on the life you want to be living.
This is not a webinar. It is a gathering — a small, live, intimate conversation with a community of people who are doing this work seriously. It will be recorded, so if you cannot make it live, you will still get everything.
This Gathering is for paid subscribers.
If you have been reading High Road to Healing as a free subscriber and wondering whether to upgrade, this is your moment. Here is what you get for $50 a year:
Monthly live Gatherings on Zoom — intimate, teaching-rich conversations on the exact topics this community needs most. Consciousness. Surrender. Fear. Resilience. The inner life, The Spiritual Practice of Aging. The practices that actually sustain you through the hard seasons.
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The April 22 Gathering is tomorrow. If you upgrade today, you’ll receive the Zoom link in time to join us live.
One hundred days from now is August 1st. The question is not whether time will pass. It will. The question is what you will do with it.
Come join us.
XO, Sherold
Wednesday April 22 · 12:00pm PDT · 1:00pm MDT · 2:00pm CDT · 3:00pm EDT