Losing It All And Winning More Back: Staging A Comeback When The Game Looks Over

When you’re making a comeback you need tenacity.

June 03, 2021 at 10:35 pm

Losing It All And Winning More Back: Staging A Comeback When The Game Looks Over — Photo Credit: Getty Images

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Every week I’m blessed to share the stories of people who’ve made comebacks in their lives on my podcast called Comeback with Erica Cobb. My motto is “everyone is deserving of the comeback they are willing to earn.” Right now, as the pandemic edges closer to an end, I’m doing a series profiling Black-owned business owners to see if they’re making comebacks following the big push in the last year to #SupportBlackBusiness. Truth is, I know a thing or two about making a comeback.

2013 was the personal “pandemic” year of my life. I was unemployed, going through a divorce and bankruptcy. During this time I remember watching the Being Mary Jane premiere. In the episode, Mary Jane was asking what she had to show for being a good girl, and I felt that with my whole soul. I graduated from university, did the internships, landed at the heritage radio station as “the morning girl” in a top market and married. So, how did I get here?

There were days in my setback season when I couldn’t get out of bed, drank way too much and had such little regard for my own existence that I put myself at risk, seemingly tempting fate. It was my mom, who was on her knees every night praying, that helped me turn things around. She eventually motivated me to show up and fight for myself. The tempting fate in my life was actually killing her. I couldn’t let her carry that, and I couldn’t go out like that.

I had created a life that looked really great on paper and social media, but had no real foundation or substance. I achieved my 12-year-old childhood dream job of being a morning radio host on my favorite Chicago radio station. I thought I could coast from that point forward. I married a really great person, but we both realized it was a first date that never ended. I had manufactured an image of success, creating an inevitable financial reckoning. So, I had to get real — like for real, real — and create a comeback for the life I knew I truly deserved. I share my comeback story with you in hopes that you find the inspiration to stage your comeback too.

Let Ego Go

After a deeply personal audit, my findings were I never quite spent as much time solidifying the life I wanted, as much as I spent making it look a certain way. I had to let my ego go. So, as I came clean about where my life truly was, I decided to do the same in every space where I had created a smoke and mirror image.

I took to social media to share my story with the audience who had been riding with me, in what would become my first Comeback with Erica Cobb weekly video. In hindsight, I wanted to have power in owning my own mistakes and narrative. But I also invited people to come along as my accountability partners and me theirs.

Reaction from the video was a tough experience. Truth is I needed the jeers as much as the cheers. They both prepared me for the path I was about to take, and I needed to be a new kind of brave. I would post a new video talking about my journey in real-time each week for a year — a stripped-down chronicle of my personal comeback.

Clean Your Mess

Your setback season is going to be hella messy; starting over doesn’t come with a clean slate. I started with laying out my mess to prioritize how to clean it up. That included finally taking my vehicle out of hiding from the repo man, filing for divorce and meeting with a bankruptcy attorney.

In hindsight, it was a good thing I was unemployed because tackling all of this at once proved to be a full-time job. But baby, by the end of 2014 I felt a freedom that I’d never experienced in my adult life. Being officially divorced and on a monthly payment schedule for the bankruptcy, I was actually free. I owned nothing but my name and my experiences, and that’s what I banked on to find my next career opportunity.

New Chapter, New Goals

Comfort will keep us small. I was holding onto a goal for more than 20 years of my life, thinking that it was the end game when really it was just the beginning. People would ask me when was I going to move to TV. I hated this question because I was hearing it as if radio, my first love, wasn’t good enough. What I wasn’t hearing was, when am I going to expand my horizons and take another career leap? I realized the answer was now.

I took my last two months of employment in radio and put a plan in place using the same format that had gotten me my radio dream job. I reached out to people I knew in the industry for advice, signed up for bootcamps and seminars, and took anything from my 15-year radio career that could apply to this new television goal. I knew I was starting from the bottom in television, but I had found a new goal and new challenge.

You Don’t Have To Go Alone

When I was the most focused on rebuilding myself, I met someone special named Anthony. To be honest, I thought he had come into my life too early. He was in the most successful chapter of his life thus far and I was starting over. I thought, surely the long distance would make things fizzle out, but feelings just grew stronger. We shared the same goals for expansion, love of opportunity and our families became close. We got married and became a team. The power of partnership was something that had been modeled by my parents, my original comeback teachers.

2021 marks 41 years of marriage for my parents. While things have never been perfect, they built a team together, culminating in our family of six living to our highest potential, even after major tragedies and adversity. My parents had no template for this path, but together they created it. It made me want to trust I could build a team with someone too.

We are taught, especially as Black women, we must always be the strongest. But, the truth is no one is equipped with that much strength. We are only afforded so much in our arsenals. So, if your team doesn’t come in the form of a romantic relationship, please find other strong partnerships for your life. We all need a team.

Set Your Aesthetic Timeline

I am a firm believer in setting timelines. At this juncture of my life, I had two, and the first was purely aesthetic.

I did the big chop in May of 2016. My natural hair journey hit the five-year mark during this year. My hair has this weird way of reminding me just how far I’ve come.

But the true timeline was the one-year goal I gave myself to land my first full-time television job. I marked June 2017 as my deadline to achieve this goal or recalibrate how to achieve it. Each month I set a schedule for continuing education (bootcamps, chats with mentors and internships) and practical application (freelancing, original content creation and running my Comeback brand like an actual business). The final piece was self-care (meditation, working out and goal assessment).

Each month I would add more time to each category — a gradual five minutes here and 10 minutes there, so it didn’t become overwhelming. By the one-year mark in June 2018, the national talkshow Daily Blast Live was casting for hosts in Los Angeles. In the description, they were calling for all sorts of personalities, but one of them was a radio host. And even more of an indication that this is what I had been preparing for was the show was being produced just two miles away from my home in Denver. I flew out to audition with every belief in my heart this opportunity was mine. I firmly believed it was my reward for sticking to the plan for my life. In the end, it truly was and continues to be. I landed the job, and by premiere week I shot my 52nd Comeback video on set.

What a fairytale story, right? Not so much. But it is a powerful comeback story. When you’re making a comeback you need tenacity. You must factor in for things to go wrong, for self-doubt and anxiety to creep in as you’re on your way. But you have to stay on course. We often give up because we want the goal, but aren’t quite ready to do what it takes to get there. Auditing the reasons why you’re not fully prepared to break through on your comeback is a part of making the comeback.

I hate to break it to you, but you’ll need to strengthen all of those uncomfortable muscles of adversity, disappointment and self-doubt. All of those things will be amplified when you achieve your goal and you’ll need to know how to handle them. The comeback path is a training ground filled with wins and losses. If you can harness that power and stay consistent in reaching your goals, there are no true losses there.

What I’ve learned in my years of trying to stay in an old goal is that no matter how great it looks to everyone else, you don’t need to stay there. The world will continue to evolve and you’ll have to as well.