For years I built one thing steadily upward, with more revenue and new people arriving every year, all telling me it works. I never questioned it. It worked.
On the way up you don’t notice how high you’ve gone. Your eyes stay on the next step, ahead of you. Each step feels right because the one before it did.
At the top, people listen when you speak. You adjust to that quickly, and soon forget how it felt before anyone did.
Then the fall came, sudden and entirely out of my control. Everything was gone. I’ll skip the details.
Here is the part that still surprises me, even though someone had explained it to me beforehand, in exact terms: the fall goes down as far as the climb went up. The warning slides off you anyway, because you want the success, and people only ever sell you the top. The descent stays unmentioned, because it’s uncomfortable to explain.
After the fall I started listening differently, and noticing what people leave out.
Someone told me once that money wasn’t important to them, that it was about the cause. I recognised the sentence. They were lying to themselves, the same way I lied to myself for years.
I expected the loss to be the hardest part. What stayed with me longer was this: I had been wearing a mask, and it had started to feel like my own face. I could no longer find the line between the role and the person underneath it.
I still don’t know exactly what happiness means once success is gone. In my case, it showed up only once I stopped performing.