When things get hard, it’s really quite difficult to find a reason to keep going. Today, we have an incredible guest, Shaun Flores, talking about what keeps us going. This was a complete impromptu conversation. We had come on to record a podcast on a completely different topic. However, quickly after getting chatting, it became so apparent that this was the conversation we both desperately wanted to have. And so, we jumped in and talked about what it’s like in the moments when things are really difficult, when we’re feeling like giving up, we are hopeless, we’re not sure what the next step is. We wanted to talk about what does keep us going.  This is, again, a conversation that was very raw. We both talked about our own struggles with finding meaning, moving forward, and struggling with what keeps us going. I hope you find it as beautiful a conversation as I did. My heart was full for days after recording this, and I’m so honored that Sean came on and was so vulnerable and talked so beautifully about the process of finding a point and finding a reason to keep going. I hope you enjoy it just as much as I did. Shaun: Thank you so much for being able to have this conversation. Kimberley: Can you tell us just a little background on you and what your personal, just general mental health journey has looked like? Shaun: Yeah. My own journey of mental health has been a tumultuous one, to say the very least. For around five to six years ago, I would say I was living with really bad health anxiety to the point where I obsessed. I constantly had an STI or an STD. I’d go to the clinic backward and forward, get tested to make sure I didn’t have anything. But the results never proved to be in any way, shape, or form sufficient enough for me to be like, “Okay, cool. I don’t have anything.” I kept going back and forward.  How I knew that became the worst possible thing. I paid 300 pounds for the same-day test results. Just to give people’s perspective, 300 pounds is a lot. That’s when I was like, “There’s something wrong. I just don’t know what it is.” But in some ways, I thought I was being a diligent citizen in society, doing what I needed to do to make sure I take care of myself and to practice what was safe sex. But then that fear migrated onto this sudden overnight change where I woke up and I thought, “What if I was gay?”  overnight. I just quite literally woke up. I had a dream of a white guy in boxes, and I woke up with the most irrational thought that I had suddenly become gay. I felt my identity had come collapsing. I felt everything in my world had shaken overnight.  I threw up in the toilet that morning, and at that time I was in the modeling industry. Looking back now, I was going through disordered eating, and I’m very careful with using the word “eating disorder.” That’s why I call it “disordered eating.” I was never formally diagnosed, but I used to starve myself. I took diuretics to maintain a certain cheekbone structure. Because in the industry that I was in, I was comparing myself to a lot of the young men that were there, believing that I needed to look a certain kind of way.  When I look back at my photos now, I was very gaunt-looking. I was being positively affirmed by all the people around me. I hated how round my face was. If I woke up in the morning and my face was round, I would drink about four liters of water with cleavers tincture. I took dandelion extracts. Those are some of the things that I took to drain my lymphatic system. I went on this quest for a model face. And then eventually, I left the industry because it just wasn’t healthy for me in any way, shape, or form. I was still living with this fear that I was gay. If I went to the sauna and steam room in the gym, I would just obsess 24/7 that if I could notice the guy’s got a good-looking body, or if he’s good-looking, this mean