Reaching the goal often fails to fill the emptiness because the goal was never able to carry what you asked it to carry. Achievement can change your circumstances. It cannot reach the hurt that was there before you started climbing, and it can hide that hurt better than failure ever could. Feeling hollow at the top does not prove you chose the wrong dream or that you are uniquely broken. It tells you something about where your hope has been resting.
Chantelle Anderson learned this at the top of her sport. She says she became the best high school player on the West Coast. She starred at Vanderbilt, was drafted second overall into the WNBA, and played six years in the league. Looking back at that peak, she says, “I had everything that I wanted. I had everything that I had ever wanted.” She also says that at the same time, “I was miserable and depressed and still self-harming.” Her verdict on the draft itself is plain: “that didn’t help, that didn’t make me enough.”
Her story does not argue against ambition. It shows what success can conceal, why familiar religious answers miss the person underneath, and what she means when she talks about learning to cope with Jesus.
Why can the brightest season feel the darkest?
Chantelle traces the emptiness back long before the draft. When her mother was diagnosed with a serious mental illness, she realized there were things happening at home she could not share outside it. After her parents divorced, she describes years of abuse and neglect, and she is careful to say this was not her mother’s fault. Two weeks before college, she was sexually assaulted and told no one. Somewhere in those years, she says, she became two people: one at school and in the spotlight, another at home and in private. In public she was the star. In private she struggled with eating disorders, burned herself with lighters and drank on weekends.
Success did not create that split. It gave the split a bigger stage. The more attention she received, the more the public self had to hold up, and the more the private self had to hide. She says that for the longest time, “I just wanted to be one person again.”
Her most searching observation is about light. Fame, parties and access filled her life with brightness, and she explains why that made things worse: “you don’t realize that the light is fake. And a lot of times when you don’t realize that the light is fake, you’re not gonna search out the true light of Christ.”
Bright circumstances do more than fail to satisfy. They switch off the alarm. When everything outside says you are thriving, the ache inside starts to look irrational, so you dismiss it. Chantelle remembers exactly that confusion: “my life is amazing. I don’t understand why I feel this way inside.” She adds, “I couldn’t see the darkness, but I felt the darkness inside.” She even suspects she would have recognized her need sooner if her life had been harder to admire: “I think that if my life around me hadn’t been so sparkly, I may have realized it a little earlier.”
Lisa Fields names the same pattern from another side. Many people imagine that unlimited access to money, attention and relationships would set them free. In her conversation with Chantelle, she observes that “having that much access often leads to more bondage.” Chantelle agrees from experience. Access let her chase control and numb pain, and she says it hurt other people, hurt her, and most of all hurt God.
What should we stop saying to someone who is empty at the top?
The usual responses tend to sound like this: Be grateful. Look at everything you have. You just need more faith. Each one misses the person in front of you.
Gratitude lists fail because the person already knows the list. Chantelle knew her life looked amazing. That knowledge was part of the torment, because it made her pain feel unjustified. Reminding someone how blessed they are can add shame to the emptiness without touching it.
A demand for more faith fails for a different reason. It turns a real human wound into a spiritual performance problem. Some emptiness is a spiritual hunger. Some is depression, which is a real condition that deserves real care. Often it is both, and a person reading an article cannot sort that out alone. Jude 3 teaches that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians. Prayer and professional help belong together. Neither replaces the other.
One part of Chantelle’s story needs to be said carefully. After tearing her Achilles while playing in Turkey, and before she was a Christian, she went home, got high and drunk, and held a gun to her head. She calls it the lowest moment of her life. If you are anywhere near that place, please do not wait to sort out your theology first. In the United States you can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any hour. If someone is abusing you now, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. Tell one person who can sit with you today.
What does Scripture do with someone who has just won and wants to quit?
When Chantelle describes learning to grieve, she points to Elijah sitting in the cave after Jezebel threatened him. The passage fits the question of this article closely.
In 1 Kings 18, Elijah has the most public triumph of his ministry. Fire falls on Mount Carmel and the people fall on their faces. One chapter later, a single threat sends him running into the wilderness. 1 Kings 19:4 records what he says there: “he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers.”
This is narrative. It describes what happened to a prophet; it does not hand us a formula. Still, the order of God’s response is worth noticing. Elijah gets no lecture about his lack of faith. He sleeps. An angel touches him and tells him, “Arise and eat” (1 Kings 19:5). He is fed again before the journey. Only after his body has been cared for does the question come: “What doest thou here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:9). Then God meets him in a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12) and not in the wind, earthquake or fire.
The text does not tell us how every person’s despair will resolve. It does show that a moment of victory and a wish to die can sit in the same life, even a faithful one. And it shows God tending to sleep and food before he asks anything. Chantelle says grief taught her to be silent before God and to lean on him, and to stop beating herself up for being human.
Why did one verse in John change how she saw the dark?
Chantelle began reading the Bible before she believed it. She describes the shift with a line she repeats often: “I started reading the book and accidentally fell in love with the author.” She started in the Gospel of John, and two verses stayed with her so firmly that she has them tattooed on her forearms.
John 1:4-5 reads in the King James Version: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” The word rendered “comprehended” can mean to grasp, either in understanding or by seizing hold. That is why many other translations render the line as the darkness “has not overcome it.” The darkness does not understand the light, and it does not master it either.
Chantelle drew a direct conclusion. All the light in her life was on the outside, and all the darkness was on the inside. Outside light could not reach that place. Of Jesus, she says, “I need to find a way to get him inside me, because that’s where the darkness is.”
The surrounding passage supports her contrast between fake light and true light. A few verses later, John 1:9 says of the Word: “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” John is not describing a better kind of spotlight. He is describing a person who brings life itself into a world that does not grasp him. Notice also what the verse does not say. It does not promise the darkness disappears overnight. It says the darkness does not win.
Isn’t Jesus just one more summit that will let you down?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. If someone spent years believing the next achievement would fix them, telling them to “find Jesus” can sound like the same promise with a new label. Climb this, and you will finally feel whole.
Chantelle’s own story does not support that version of faith. Years after her baptism, in February 2020, her father was diagnosed with fast-progressing dementia. He died that April. She believes he died outside the faith. She says she had to fight for her faith in a way she never had before, and that when she wrote about hope and about God’s protection, she did not feel hopeful or protected. “I literally had to fight for those convictions,” she says. She found that grief did not move in tidy stages. It came in waves, and she could be fine one moment and overwhelmed the next.
So faith did not make her life painless. What it changed was where her hope stood when the pain came. Thinking back to the night with the gun, she says she used to tell people “basketball saved me, but basketball didn’t save me.” Her conclusion is that her hope in basketball was what brought her to rock bottom once the sport was threatened. The principle she drew from it is simple: “when my hope is in anything else, it can be taken away.” She also realized something about her grief. Her hope “had been in my version of happily ever after, instead of God’s version of happily ever after in heaven.”
That is the real answer to the objection. Jesus is not offered as a better summit that guarantees good feelings. He is offered as the one hope that a torn tendon, a lost career or a death cannot remove. That hope can hold while the feelings are still awful.
What does coping with Jesus actually look like?
Chantelle is honest that becoming a Christian did not end her need to cope. Before faith, she coped with alcohol, weed, sex and partying. After faith, the pull remained. “When you become a Christian, you don’t lose the desire to cope. You just need to cope with Jesus,” she says. She also says “coping isn’t always bad, it just depends on what you cope with.” During her father’s illness and death, she made a specific decision not to go back to drinking or casual sex.
Lisa Fields presses the point further. Many people are so used to drinking, smoking or sleeping around that “they don’t even realize that they’re coping because of deep pain.” For them, she says, “the activity is not coming from a place of health, it’s coming from a place of hurt.” Seeing the hurt underneath the habit is what makes a different choice possible.
Chantelle Anderson admits that for years “I didn’t realize I was coping.” Now she catches herself in ordinary moments. When she has been scrolling social media for a long time, Chantelle Anderson tells herself, “Chantelle, you’re numbing right now. Stop it.” Then Chantelle Anderson asks, “what do I need to pray about.” That small exchange holds the whole practice. Notice the numbing. Name the pain under it. Bring that pain to God and not just the behavior.
Coping with Jesus also means bringing emotions to God and not only conclusions. Chantelle Anderson calls herself a logical thinker who can lean hard on what the Bible says. Grief taught Chantelle Anderson that “it’s okay to go to God and just cry your tears and not dry them before you’re done crying them.”
Lisa Fields adds that reason matters in faith, but Lisa Fields says “our emotions need to be intertwined with that.” She points to Psalm 56:8: “put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?” She also points to 2 Corinthians 1:4, which describes God “Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble.”
Chantelle Anderson found that kind of comfort in a God she describes this way: “he was crying with me.”
Where does that leave you if you are empty right now?
Begin smaller than a spiritual breakthrough. Notice what you reach for when the quiet gets loud. Ask what hurt sits under it. Tell God the truth about the emptiness without first tidying it into gratitude. Tell one person too, whether a pastor, a counselor or a friend who will not be impressed by your résumé. If the heaviness has lasted, or it is affecting sleep, eating or your will to keep going, see a clinician. That step is part of stewarding your life, not a step away from God.
Chantelle says God has healed her, and that is her testimony to give. It is not a timetable anyone can promise you. Pay attention, though, to what she names as the gift she is most thankful for. It is not the draft or the six-figure salary. It is this: “God has really healed me, and I am able to be one person.” She can now be the same person in private that she is in public. No title gave her that. The emptiness at the top was pointing toward it the whole time.
Quick answers
Can you reach your biggest goal and still be depressed?
Yes. Chantelle Anderson was drafted second overall into the WNBA and says she was miserable, depressed and self-harming at the time. Success can make pain harder to see, even for the person carrying it.
Does feeling empty after success mean I lack faith?
No. The emptiness may point to spiritual hunger, depression, unhealed wounds or all three. Jude 3 teaches that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and prayer and professional care work together.
What does John 1:4-5 mean for someone in this place?
It says that life and light are found in the Word, who is Jesus, and that darkness neither grasps nor overcomes that light. For Chantelle, it explained why outside brightness could not touch inner darkness. The verse promises the darkness will not win. It does not promise the darkness vanishes at once.
Is it wrong to cope?
Chantelle says coping is not always bad and that it depends on what you cope with. The goal is to notice when a habit is numbing pain and to bring the pain itself to God, to people you trust and to qualified help.
What if I am in crisis right now?
In the United States, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at any time. If you are in immediate danger, contact local emergency services, and talk to someone you trust today.