All About Ian Hern

I have always been different. Now I love that difference, but it has not always been that way. I am the son of a Baptist pastor, so I was always the “religious kid”, and on top of that I was weird and sensitive and I would not defend myself. That made me a perfect target for bullies. At the same time I was constantly trying to live up to what I now know was a false standard of spirituality, which led to seeing myself as a failure as a Christian.

When I was 15, I came very close to killing myself. I made it through, but the lesson I learned was to pretend that I was okay. By age 18 I had mastered the art of pretending, to the point that I could have flipped the mask I wore for each person, so that they only saw who I thought they wanted to see. I became so good at pretending who I was that I lost all sense of who I really was or wanted to be. 

As you can imagine, that loss of my genuine self had far-reaching implications. I became very angry, I developed a mental illness that went undiagnosed for 2 decades, I walked away from my faith, and I worked very hard to remove any chance of vulnerability from my life. It has taken 30 years to even realize the depths to which I had damaged myself, to learn how to recover the emotions and vulnerability that I locked away, and to value living a genuine life. 

Now I embrace self-awareness, I have learned the skill of being resilient, and it has become my passion to use my experiences and what I have learned to help other men learn the value of developing their own mental health and living a genuine life. I love having the opportunity to walk alongside others in their journey toward finding the strength to be vulnerable.