I’m 41 years old, and I have a very good life.
I know that.
I’m grateful for it. I feel privileged. I’ve built multiple companies that do good work in the world. I own a home. I travel. I have enough financial security that I am no longer making decisions from a place of immediate survival. I’ve spent years experimenting with systems, leadership, delegation, and empowerment until the businesses I built became capable of functioning, for the most part, without me.
From the outside, I think my life looks successful.
I seem to always get the pat on the back.
People see my resume, experience the businesses, hear what I’ve built, and there is usually some version of, Wow.
And I agree.
Wow.
I did some impressive shit.
But let me pull back the skirt because I’m not sure I have been equally willing to show what was underneath it.
For nearly twenty years, I poured almost everything I had into business. Not just my time, but my attention, my creativity, my curiosity, my relationships, my capacity for intimacy, my ability to rest, my ability to e somewhere without simultaneously being somewhere else in my head.
I tried to divorce my husband multiple times. Not because he had done something terrible, but because I was so overwhelmed by work that sustaining another human relationship sometimes felt impossible.
I didn’t have children. That may have always been my choice, but I genuinely don’t know. Now that there is finally some quiet around me, I sometimes wonder what I might have chosen if I had ever had enough space to hear myself clearly.
I didn’t maintain close friendships. I could keep a girlfriend for a year or two before the relationship required more time, attention, or presence than I felt capable of giving.
I didn’t call my parents enough. I didn’t invest much in my husband’s family either, although fortunately he did, which meant those relationships stayed alive around me even when I wasn’t particularly helping keep them alive.
I traveled, but I worked while I traveled. Our honeymoon was three weeks long, but there was not a single day that we didn’t work for multiple hours. Three weeks sounds luxurious on paper, yet I find myself asking now: was that actually a three-week honeymoon? Or did I simply take my business somewhere beautiful? When I’m honest with myself, it was both, but the priority was always the business.
Even my wedding wasn’t completely mine. I answered emails while I got dressed. I talked business with people who were there.
There was almost nowhere the business couldn’t follow me. Not even in the bathroom or in my sleep.
I think while this was happening, I was convinced that this was devotion. Defined by responsibility, leadership, and ambition. I believed—sometimes because other people told me and sometimes because I told myself—that if I stopped attending to every need of the business, it might die. I made rest dangerous. Stepping away was irresponsible. Another priority was a threat.
So I kept feeding business.
And feeding it.
And feeding it.
And feeding it.
Until nearly everything else went into drought. Including me.
For years, I used to complain about mothers who seemed to have no identity outside of their children. You’d ask them how they were doing and they’d tell you how their kid was doing. I completely missed the irony. Ask me how I was doing and I would tell you how the company was doing. Revenue was up. The team was struggling. We were launching something. We had a problem. We solved a problem. We created another problem. I wasn’t disappearing into motherhood (thank god, I used to tell myself). I had disappeared into entrepreneurship. That lose of identity into an external thing was apparently way cooler… joke’s on me. It’s the same thing.
Being an entrepreneur was the primary relationship of my adult life.
It’s important to acknowledge that I mostly loved it. This isn’t a story about twenty years spent doing something I hated. I love business. I love building things. I love solving complex problems. I love translating chaos into something understandable. I love helping people do work they are proud of. I love imagining how a system could become more human and then trying to build it.
That’s partly what made the whole thing so difficult to see. The thing consuming me was also a thing I genuinely loved. There was no obvious villain.
The business didn’t take everything from me. I gave everything to it.
Now I’m sitting inside the space created by finally stopping, and I think I am grieving. I don’t want to go backward, and I don’t believe I chose the wrong life. I don’t suddenly wish I had a minivan, four children, a group text with my seven best friends from elementary school, and Sunday dinner at my parents’ house with my in-laws.
That isn’t the point.
I’m grieving because I never really got to know what I might have chosen. There was so much noise. Too much speed, an immense amount of (artificial) pressure. There was so little room between stimulus and decision. My life narrowed to the thing directly in front of me, and eventually I became narrow with it.
I could build businesses. Then, eventually, I learned how to take care of my body. Then I learned how to take care of my mind. Then my emotional life. But each new priority often felt like something I had to master while continuing to carry everything that came before it. I didn’t really learn to integrate. I kept learning how to accumulate.
Somewhat hilariously, I have now begun trying to master not mastering anything. I stepped away from work. I started meditating more. I went into plant medicine. I separated myself from technology. I created slow mornings. I gave myself days with no plans. I practiced doing less.
And almost immediately, my brain began asking:
Am I doing this correctly?
Am I healing enough?
What is my purpose now?
What am I supposed to do with my life?
What wisdom am I supposed to steward?
What should I build next?
How do I transform this conditioning?
How do I get better at being present?
How do I make my curiosity more meaningful?
How do I build a system—
And there it is. Fuckin’ A. There it is AGAIN.
How do I build a system so I don’t have to be human?
Honestly, I’m impressive. I have somehow managed to turn surrender into a performance metric.
This is why the quiet has occasionally felt so unbearable. There is legitimately nothing to win here. No quarterly report for presence. No promotion for sitting on the deck. No award for successfully watching a thunderstorm. No finish line where someone finally hands me a certificate confirming that I have become fully integrated.
Sometimes I am bored. Deeply bored. Sometimes I want the businesses to disappear completely because I can feel how easily I could still crawl back inside them. Email is familiar. Problems are familiar. Urgency is familiar.
Give me something complicated and I know exactly who to become.
Give me an empty afternoon and apparently I need to ask seventeen hundred existential questions about the nature of consciousness…
Even now, I am walking alone with my dogs while a storm is moving in. Leaves are softly crinkling beneath us. Thunder is rolling somewhere in the distance behind me. Light rain has started falling. It is beautiful, and I can barely pay attention. My body is enjoying the walk. The dogs are having a grand fucking time. All the while, my brain is conducting a symposium on the meaning of my existence.
Part of me wants to call this a failure.
Here I am, in nature, with nowhere I need to be, finally possessing the exact spaciousness I spent years saying I wanted—and I am talking into my phone to record a voice memo about whether I know how to be alive.
Why am I doing this? And also, why am I fighting the reality that I am doing this?
The weather doesn’t give a shit about me witnessing it or chatting into an iPhone. The leaves don’t tantrum for my presence. My dogs are not waiting for me to achieve enlightenment before enjoying themselves and sniffing every single fucking plant along the road.
Everything around me is simply continuing to be what it was.
Am I doing that, too?
Is success not that I finally stopped thinking, but that I was aware I was thinking. That I could hear my upstairs machine running a marathon. I could feel my body walking. I could notice the rain. I could watch myself attempt, once again, to escape the discomfort of not knowing.
And I’m actually not trying to solve any of it. I’m just being weird little me, showing up in the way I can show up in this moment.
Admittedly, that feels extraordinarily small compared to the things I used to call accomplishments. I’m sure that’s the whole point. For most of my adult life, success meant building something substantial enough that I could point to it and go, “Look, mom. Look! Do you see it? It’s so visible! It’s so big! It’s so impressive! Tell me I did a good job!”
Success might also be defined by something almost impossible to show anyone. Like staying for a conversation, calling someone back, turning off my phone during a dinner with my husband, letting the afternoon remain empty, being with the person in front of me without calculating their usefulness. It could be letting myself try something without need it to become anything or making room for a life wide enough that business can exist inside it without becoming the whole goddamn thing.
I don’t regret what I built, and I don’t want to romanticize what I missed. I’m simply trying to hold both.
The success AND the failure.
The pride AND the grief.
The incredible things I created AND the things I neglected while creating them.
They are not competing versions of the story. They are the whole story.
Success casts some kind of shadow, I’m sure, and I think my maturity is not about erasing the shadow, but becoming willing to see what is standing in it.
I can’t believe I’m old enough to say that I have spent more than twenty years learning how to build.
I suspect the next part of my life may be learning how to remain…
And, unfortunately for the part of me that would very much like the syllabus, I don’t think anyone is going to tell me how.
