Ryan Holiday is one of my favorite authors. He introduced me to stoicism, a thought with which I am madly in sync. I listen to his books on Audible, but I also re-read the text of his work. I remember his voice and allow the words to envelop me, to develop me, to shape me, to carry me, to move me. There is a section in “Discipline Is Destiny” where he talks about doing the right thing for the right reason. He discusses taking care of others, with the only reward being the feeling we get when we help others—essentially a helper’s high. As I heard this discourse, I was magnetized to the righteousness of his comments.
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“Yes!” I wanted to scream elatedly, as if I had discovered life’s missing secret. As we carry others, let the fact that we carry them be the sole reward for that. Moving forward, I will need no further honorarium, no gratitude; I will rest in knowing that taking care of other people is a privilege in and of itself. And that lasted for a while. Until it didn’t. And when it didn’t, I felt defective. Exhausted and defective.
Being a practice owner, a practicing dentist, a breadwinner, and, as of late, an author and speaker, I have many spinning plates in the air. I am willing to bet that almost any person reading this article can relate; so many of us carry multiple roles. I don’t just mean dentists. I mean dental assistants who are single moms, hygienists who might be going through a divorce, or administrators who volunteer within their communities. Many of those roles carry dependents of sorts, meaning people who, in some way, count on our help in some capacity. As a breadwinner, my family depends on me financially—not just today, but into the future, into the years of my daughter’s college years, and into our retirement.
As a mother, my teenage daughter depends on me emotionally, even if she doesn’t want to admit it. As a wife, I do the best I can to be present and supportive of my husband, though many times I feel like I am failing, as I do not fill this role in its traditional sense. As a practice owner, I work tirelessly to plan and execute a business plan to keep all 15 of us employed. But more than just employed, I don’t rest until I strike a balance of my team feeling supported, connected, elevated, seen, and loved.
As a practicing dentist, my learning journey never stops—reviewing cases at 6 AM, taking 100+ CE hours annually, watching modules late into the evenings, and flying across the U.S. on weekends. I push myself day after day to work through lunch and outside of my scheduled hours literally every day. I care more deeply about the clinical presentation of my patients’ mouths than they often do, to my own detriment. I hold their hands as they struggle with the burden of anxiety, tooth loss, and financial strain. As an author and speaker, whatever hours I have left over, I sit at my computer writing, researching, practicing my talks, and spending time in meetings with experts to elevate my skills. As I speak or write, as I am doing now, I revel in the fact that maybe one single person in my audience might feel less alone moving forward.
I doubt that many of you are much different. As we add up all the hours of our responsibilities, somehow it still adds up to 24 hours per day, just like everyone else’s day. And yes, we gain much energy in knowing that we serve others, per Holiday’s discourse—until the day comes that we don’t. Until the day comes that what we have given, in the way of taking care of others, has depleted our energy so much that we have nothing left to give to them, but more so, nothing left to function on.
This hit me especially hard on my last trip. As a rising speaker, I had my first two engagements in one week. I’d been chosen as the opening keynote for Smile Source in Asheville, with the largest audience of my career, and a few hours later, I was on a plane to be the closing keynote (along with Dr. Eric Roman) at the 20th-year anniversary workshop for the Productive Dentist Academy (PDA) in Dallas. I was honored at that conference with PDA’s Hall of Fame award. As I came back to Chicago, my presence was barely noticed.
My husband picked me up from the airport and held me as I broke down and sank into his arms. I spent the rest of the weekend alone on the couch, with no one bothering to ask me how my talks went and no one asking to see my pretty award. There was no ‘congratulations’ hug waiting for me at work either. For all I’d given to the people around me, it felt like very little was given back in return to me. My family, my friends, and my co-workers all saw how hard I’d worked the entire year preparing for that weekend, and it broke me when no one asked how it had gone. I came home from stages where I’d been seen and applauded by a thousand to now being around the people who really mattered to me. And surrounded by the people whose warmth I intensely needed, I felt unimportant, unrecognized, and irrelevant. I spiraled. I ended up taking a week off work to recover, emotionally and physically.
Then I removed myself from almost any social media interaction for at least another month. As humans, we desperately need to feel seen. We need to feel like our presence matters, like our efforts aren’t in vain, and like we are wanted. We want to feel like someone loves us, not because we give them jobs or because we pay the mortgage, but because we are lovable. Because there is something inside of us that is worthy of being loved and desired. There was a very stark dichotomy that weekend for me—in being displayed on stage in front of a thousand people, being seen, and being heard and remembered, and coming home to feel invisible and forgotten. And so Holiday’s words of simply giving for the sake of giving and being glad to give at the sake of that gift, in that instance, didn’t ring true. No matter how much I wanted his words to prove true, I needed more.
I remember in 2023, I ran into Dr. Jeff Horowitz (an industry leader, educator, speaker, and author) at the Academy of General Dentistry meetings where we were both speaking. During the tight hug and a few minutes to reconnect, Dr. Jeff said, “Be careful what you wish for” as a warning. I giggled and responded with, “Right?” seeming to understand that context; but really, I felt lucky to be flying around the country here and there. I felt fortunate to be receiving notoriety and invitations. My sense of self-worth was becoming dependent on the promotions and propositions. What complicated matters slightly more in all of this was that my rise to the stage and my spread of authorship happened very quickly.
The first time I set foot on a stage, I did so to fill in for a then-friend because she was too anxious to speak in front of her study club, an audience of about 30 people. Four years later, I was keynoting for almost 1,500 people in two different cities across the United States. All of this I wanted; all of this I loved; all of this felt aligned with my dharma. For all of this, I was terribly emotionally unprepared. And as vulnerable as I was to the highs and lows of my new life, those around me might have been equally caught off guard by my absence.
In the days following my return from the Asheville/Dallas weekend, I continued to look for proof that I was unloved. With enough reflection, I came to realize that it wasn’t all about me. Perhaps I had a hand in deserting those around me. Perhaps, in the last several months, I had been choosing my audiences over my daily responsibilities. I had chosen to make these changes in my life, chosen to walk away from ‘just being a dentist’ without anyone else’s input, without considering how that might impact my inner circle. Did I feel deserted because I had deserted them first? I came to realize that I carried the guilt of where I had arrived. With minutes, hours, and days, the guilt and my own sense of abandonment grew stronger, and there was no valve to release it. I found myself in the closet with a noose around my neck—not the proverbial one.
Through a series of mental gymnastics, I pushed the pain aside, called my husband, and did what was necessary to pull myself out of the darkness. I posted about my challenge on social media and received an incredible outpouring of support from my colleagues. And while all of that mattered, none mattered as much as being able to hold my husband’s hand through it all for the thousandth time in my ensuing dance with suicidality. My dance is one that involves running away from life, imagining that ending it all is a solution. But there are other dances we turn to when we feel deserted or when we can no longer carry guilt; they involve infidelity, addiction, alcoholism, gambling—anything to numb the pain. In the days that followed, I continued to be gentle with myself, carried by my husband, who, in reality, never abandoned me. I turned off social media for almost a month. I’ve just been healing, finding balance, finding answers, and figuring out how to prevent this from happening in the future.
One thing I want to make absolutely clear to anyone who is reading—whether it be my past friend, a colleague, a potential meeting planner, or an audience member I have yet to meet—is that the series of events that happened prior to the ‘noose’ did not lead to the noose being wrapped around my neck. It wasn’t the stress of flying across the country; it wasn’t the stress of performing; it wasn’t even the lack of attention that brought me to that point. My dance with suicidality is a culmination of all that has happened in my life, and depending on what you might believe, it could even be carried within by DNA via generational trauma. This is something that I have dealt with and am very familiar with. I have been in therapy since the age of 17 without stopping and am under the constant care of a psychiatrist and a psychologist.
I am a compliant patient, take my medication as prescribed, and have an incredibly supportive circle of people to call on in those dark moments. The sense of wanting to end my life is my dark passenger, and it isn’t a sensation that has just sprouted within me. It is and will be my constant battle until my last breath. Much thought has gone into deciding whether or not to include that very raw excerpt in this piece. From wondering whether my 14-year-old daughter or her friends will ever find it in the wild and vast internet space to considering if people might accuse me of seeking attention, I also needed to think about whether writing about my very real thoughts of ending my life would jeopardize my speaking career, making meeting planners run for the hills, nervous about some self-assigned liability in associating with me. In the end, I decided to keep it, as you can tell.
The reason for my taking the stage, the reason for disclosing the things most people seek to hide, is to make all of us feel less alone. Selfishly, it’s something that also helps me heal. Speaking out about what I feel has never been about advancing my career. It’s always been about connection and community. It’s far more important for me to be true to what started it all for me than to book more speaking gigs.
Onto a resolution? I say this every time I have an opportunity to speak from the stage: Brené Brown taught me that when we feel like we don’t belong (or feel unloved), we look for proof in each interaction to support that belief. Once we gather that proof, we live our lives feeling as though we don’t belong. It’s heartbreaking. But the reverse can also be true. We can look out into the world for proof that we do belong and that we are loved. It’s all a matter of perspective. When I came home, I looked for proof that I was unloved.
However, if I had adjusted my perspective, I could have seen that my husband picked me up from the airport and held me as I folded into tears in his arms as proof of his love for me. So much of what we feel is a choice, and so much of what we feel is driven by perspective. Changing that perspective isn’t easy; it requires effort and accountability. I’ve seen it within myself. When you feel yourself being pulled in an emotional direction, ask yourself, “What is driving it?” Now, mind you, I speak from a place of having been in therapy non-stop since the age of 17. It’s far easier for me to do these mental gymnastics today than it was even five years ago. As you can see from the paragraph above, I still fail miserably at course-correcting my emotions sometimes, but not always. That gives me hope—hope that I can pass on to you.
The other part of the resolution is to find acceptance. It’s important to recognize the dichotomy between the two worlds of our existence and to attend to it, preparing for it emotionally. Without finding some equalizer, some healthy balance between the two, an addiction might become the regulator—infidelity, alcoholism, gambling. Something else will fill the void to make the highs coexist with the lows, and it won’t be on our terms, as I mentioned before. The way to find acceptance is perhaps to divide the two worlds. One of my stage heroes is Dr. Eric Roman, with whom I had the great honor of sharing the stage during my two-hitter weekend. Eric, like me, is married with kids, but he’s been on stages for years, maybe even decades. I disclosed to him the discomfort of the ups and downs I was beginning to encounter in speaking and asked for advice.
“The way I see it,” he said, “I get to live two lives. Two amazing lives. Who else is lucky enough to do that?”
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When you think in terms of leading two different lives, it’s not the unhealthy kind. I get to be all the wonderful things I have always been: a wife, a mom, a friend. I tend to that with utmost importance—a key dynamic here. I provide for my family, my team, and my patients by being a practice owner and a dentist, something I have now done for 20 years. That’s Life One. Life Two is woven with time spent on the road with this incredible community of speakers, educators, and authors—a place where I feel like I very much belong, where I get to live out my purpose and passion.
I think the mistake I made was to ask my Life One to blend with my Life Two. Maybe they aren’t meant to. Perhaps I shouldn’t expect them to. Finding acceptance for their separation is key. When I am home, I want to laugh with my husband about how our daughter is texting us from the next room instead of coming downstairs. In huddles, I want someone to make a funny joke at my expense. I want my patients to feel carried and supported by all of us at Happy Tooth. And I will be okay if none of those parties read any of my articles, follow me on social media, or come to see me speak. Because when I travel, I have an incredible community of people who I feel supported by and who I hope feel equally loved by me.
They know me in a different dimension, in an undiscovered capacity, an energy I am still discovering. When I have written all of this out and made it congruent in my mind, I feel like I’ve discovered a multiverse and am ready to start living that reality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Maggie Augustyn, FAAIP, FICOI, is a Dawson-trained practicing general dentist, owner of Happy Tooth, author, and inspirational keynote speaker. Featured on 4 dental magazine covers and recognized by Dentistry Today as one of the top 250 leaders, she inspires others through her writing, helping them find healing and connection. Dr. Augustyn serves as the national spokesperson for the Academy of General Dentistry and as a faculty member for the Productive Dentist Academy. She contributes monthly to her “Mindful Moments” column for Dentistry Today and AGD Impact and writes for other publications as well. With unwavering compassion and a dedication to excellence, Dr. Augustyn addresses audiences ranging from a few dozen to thousands, guiding them toward fulfillment and meaningful impact. To contact her, email drmaggie@myhappytooth.com.
