Jonathan, 29 – Saved by his daughter

You can do whatever you want but you can’t choose the consequences.”

Trials and error are the two main factors Jonathan describes his journey as. Two factors he is grateful for, because, without them, he wouldn’t be the person he is today.

“I was just not happy for quite a while.”

“There is a period of time when it was probably when I was going through a divorce, I had a drinking habit, which is on the borderline of an addiction. I was smoking a lot of pot and I was doing a lot of things that probably weren’t going to lead to anything good. I was depressed, I didn’t learn how to recognize it yet and I had a lot of anger. A combination of all of that put together is a bad recipe.”

“I don’t think I know what started it. It was just the choices that I made, they weren’t in accordance to what God’s will is in my life.”

Do you regret anything?

“No, absolutely not. I literally have no regrets.”

“At the time, when I was going through all of this I didn’t love myself but I did love my daughter so my love for her and my desire to see her grow up and raise her the way that I should, and my desire for her to have the life that she deserves triggered a lot of personal change.”

After divorcing his ex-wife Jonathan fell further down into misery. In addition to his daughter helping him climb out of the darkness, there was one more special thing that lifted him up; Running.

“I hated running. I was still deeply depressed and this is when it got really bad. It was affecting my sleep. I had never suffered from really really bad anxiety but did at that point. I began having no desire to do anything, at all. I couldn’t sleep and that was the biggest most difficult thing for me.”

“The pain of depression made me want to distract myself from it.”

“My sister which I was living with at the time, there’s a park right behind with a ton of trails and climbs and mountains. And I thought of my childhood and I was like ‘Dude, I used to love going hiking when I was in the boy’s scouts.’ – ‘ I am literally gonna run to the top of that mountain even if it kills me’ and that’s exactly what I did. I just did.”

“In that moment which was only 7/10 of a mile, I didn’t feel depressed. I was just in so much physical pain that I didn’t think about my mental-emotional state that I was in. I was so tired that when I got home I slept. I hadn’t slept for weeks.”

“It was a way to cope with depression.”

Today, Jonathan is a professional runner and runs ultra marathons.

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“The happiest moment in my life would probably be the birth of my daughter… She was born 8 pounds, 11.7 ounces, 22 inches long. Big baby. I remember it like it was yesterday. They were about 10 minutes of having a C-section, but fortunately, that didn’t happy. ”

Jonathan was 20 when his daughter was born.

“As much as I love the blessings that I have and the times things are easy, I ‘m grateful for my trials as well. It does make me happy to be able to overcome and to do things that are difficult cause it’s empowering.”

“Happiness, it really is a choice. The mind is pliable and extremely flexible. You can change a lot. So I would say, choose to be happy cause that’s something that you actually have control over.”