Dear readers, friends
a little update
It’s been three years since I started writing this Substack, and I’ll always be so grateful for how it saved me during a bad bout of burnout. A few years ago, I quit many aspects of my shiny career and life. I’m proud of what I achieved in my twenties, but I can no longer play in that arena—the costs to my mental health became too high. As I write about in The Success Myth, behind the ‘career highs’ of travelling the world and speaking on big stages were some of the loneliest moments of my life. As a dear friend said to me, “Sometimes it sounds like you’ve spent your entire life trying to be an extrovert when you are deeply introverted.”
Burnout wasn’t ideal, but it turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. It brought me back down to Earth with a bang and forced me to protect the writer in me—the part that wants to go gently, live my life, enjoy my home, see my friends, write books, read books, and explore nature. I couldn’t do all of those things when I was on the Big Career Train. I was so busy collecting gold coins that I had neglected my actual life.
A coach once said to me that it’s not an ‘either/or’— I’m not choosing a ‘smaller’ life per se, just a deeper one. This is the life I now choose. In order to do big things, you also have to rest along the way and accept those moments when you need it—even when it feels ‘inconvenient’ to the productivity mindset most of us are taught to have early on. When my brain tells me I ‘can’t’ take a break, no matter how small, this is when I know I need one the most.