Sherry F. Adams, a 40-year-old mother of one and former high-level executive, never imagined she'd find joy and meaning delving into the depths of strangers' emotional lives to help them overcome tragedies or actualize dreams, but today she's doing just that. Nearly finished with a masters in mental health counseling at the Northwestern University, and seeing clients under supervision, she couldn't be happier. "I feel so enriched to be working with them: Let's go into the shadows. What are you afraid of? What do you want? What brings you pleasure or joy?" she says, conjuring the weighty questions they dig into.
Three years before, however, on May 31, 2019, Adams struggled to answers those questions for herself.
On a "wonderful New York City spring day," she recalls, she stood outside her daughter Sabine's first grade classroom, gearing up to celebrate her seventh birthday, with far too much to hold: a bag full of Riot Grrrl! zines slung over her shoulder, a box full of grapes on skewers alongside bottles of whipped cream for dessert, and her cellphone, always on, always pinging, tightly fastened to her ear.
It wasn't uncommon for Adams, who regularly clocked 60-hour workweeks, to let her job spill into special moments like this. Such dedication, along with her creativity, intelligence and business savvy, caught the attention of the C-suite fairly early in her career at eMarketer, a subscription-based research firm headquartered in New York, where she started as a senior director of business development in 2011 and in a short snap of time made three impressive professional leaps, becoming VP of account management in 2015, SVP of account management in 2017, and then later that year SVP of content.
The former art student was 17 months into her new role and on track, or so she thought, to be appointed the president of the newly formed eMarketer and Business Insider Intelligence after a recent merger. "I'm on a call with the CEO, who's also my mentor, and folks on the leadership team. And he shares that the incoming CEO has made the definitive decision to select the president from his own team....and that was that. I totally disassociated. I stood in the hallway looking at myself looking at myself."
She gracefully hung up the phone and entered Sabine's classroom, unsure how she'd manage the mess of emotions knocking about inside. "I go in and it's just kid energy. Kids bouncing off the walls. Sabine had made a playlist, and all the kids were moving in discombobulated ways and dancing and the energy was just, like, joy and play, and the kids were coloring the zines we had made. It was so fun, and I was like, What am I doing? Why am I missing this? Why am I spending 50 or 6o hours a week for a company that makes unilateral decisions about my future? I realized in that moment that I was only ever in proximity to power—that I never actually had it."
Over dinner that night with her husband, Corey, she proposed an impromptu plan: "Let's move to the Catskills. Let's just do it. I want to be a wife. I want to be a mother. I want to be a person. I want to be present," she recalls saying. In 2017, the couple had purchased a "mountain house" in the region, where they'd grown accustomed to going on the weekends. "Our hearts were there," she says. Corey, luckily, was all-in.
At 8 a.m. the next work day, she handed in her resignation to her boss, whom she describes as "magnanimous," "approachable," "intellectual," and "someone who cares about people and is very loyal." An hour later, he sent her an email with a quote from writer Kurt Vonnegut that read: "Be patient. Your future will soon come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are."
As the family of three settled into their new life, Adams initially struggled to adapt to a life that didn't include the old metrics of success and validation. "I built up this whole life based on achievements. Once that was stripped away, I was vacant. I was deflated. I didn't know who I was. The search for my true self became the focus of those 10 months," she says.
She decided to do all the things she rarely had time for in her former life—she got involved in the PTA; she read books to help herself evolve (Alice Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child and The Heart of Change, and Essentialism, by George McKeown); she joined a feminist book club; she went on long meandering walks through the woods, listening to Tara Brach, PhD, the renowned Buddhist meditation teacher and psychologist; she made new friends and started creating art again, which eventually brought her to her new career.
One art project helped her friends process grief. She created what she calls "memory totems" for friends who lost loved ones, which required close collaboration. To help her friends deal with the tender emotions her project unearthed, she started working with a therapist-mentor. In the process of helping people work through their own losses through art, she worked through her own grief—over family members who'd recently passed and the death of her old identity—and realized she wanted to be a professional therapist.
Through her studies—she'll receive a master's degree in mental health counseling in December—and her work as a supervised clinician, she's come to realize that the answers to our questions are within us: "I want to be able to use credible well-researched, and evidence-based practices to help people live richer, fuller lives and to trust that everything they need is right in their bodies," Adams says of the somatic therapy she's studying to treat patients, which has also helped her fuse her own mind and body connection.
"Before, I didn't know I had a body," she explains. "I operated from the neck up. Now I am a person who's aware of my senses, who can feel your energy and connect with you. I'm connected to myself. I'm connected to nature. I'm connected to family."
And as Adams explains, this new path is a true gift. "Once I had that whole ego death experience, I was able to show up for my life as a human being," she adds. "It was actually a huge gift that I didn't continue to pursue the path I was on, that I was given this whole other life that is like much more authentic and content and filled with nature, presence, and splendor."
