Nobody warns you about this part.
They talk about the financial risk of starting a business. The long hours, the stress, the uncertainty. What they don't tell you is what a decade of fighting to keep something alive does to who you are.
I became someone I didn't recognise. Harder. More defensive. Quicker to anger. The qualities that kept the business alive, the refusal to back down, the aggression when cornered, the ability to absorb pressure and keep moving, had seeped into everything else. Into how I dealt with people. Into how I saw myself.
I told myself it was necessary. That I'd go back to being myself once things stabilised. But things never stabilised, and I kept becoming more of the person the business needed and less of the person I wanted to be.
You don't have to have run a business for this to be familiar. A decade in a demanding career does the same thing. A profession that rewards a particular kind of toughness. A role where the version of you that survives is harder, more guarded, and further from the person you set out to be. The mechanism is different. The result is often identical.
At my worst, I couldn't see a way through at all. If you've ever been in that place you'll know what I mean. I'm not going to dress it up.
What pulled me back was not a plan or a strategy. It was simpler and more human than that. The people I was doing it all for in the first place.
The exit from the business didn't fix everything overnight. But it started something. Space to breathe. Room to ask who I actually wanted to be now that survival mode was no longer required. Time to look at the whole picture, financial and personal, and start making decisions that were about living rather than just enduring.
I should be clear. I'm two months out of the business. I'm not standing here with everything resolved and a perfect life to point at. I'm still working through it, the same as you might be.
But something is already shifting. People close to me are telling me they can see it, the tension that used to follow me everywhere, the stress, the edge, it's starting to lift. Two months in and I can already feel the difference between building something to survive and building something because you want to.
That's what I want for you. Not perfection. Just that shift.
I'm closer to the person I intended to be when I started. That's what this is really about. Not just the money. The whole picture.