I Gave Up Everything I Built (And It Saved Me)
What happens when you stop chasing the future everyone expects
You can see me in my bedroom, back against my headboard. I have my LED mood lights on, casting a gentle purple glow across the walls. My window is open, letting in a cool breeze that makes the curtains dance slightly. It is quiet enough to hear the distant sounds of the neighborhood settling in for the night. The pile of things to sell is still stacked by the door, gathering a thin film of dust. The same pile that has been sitting there for months now, a silent reminder of my shapeshifting future. These were supposed to be gone already. By now, I was supposed to be moved, fully transitioned into my new home in Switzerland, starting fresh, living the life I imagined.
But I am still here.
I keep telling myself I will finish packing tomorrow, but tomorrow keeps arriving, and I keep staying still. At first, I thought it was procrastination, maybe even a little fear. Now I think it is honesty. Something in me, something wiser than my conscious mind, knows I cannot move until I have learned what this stillness is trying to teach me.
The Quiet Echo of Silence
I won’t talk about the details much, but I want you to know this: when a relationship goes quiet, it echoes in places you do not expect. It does not just take away a person. It takes away the rhythm of your days. It rearranges your nervous system. The way you sleep changes. The foods that taste good change. Even the music you loved suddenly feels like it belongs to a different version of you.
This time, though, I chose differently. I chose to honor myself first, even when my body ached to return to the familiar pattern. This silence could have been easily solved if I had just ignored the very thing I am working on building. If I had ignored my needs to prove my love and worth. But this time I could not.
I stopped the cycle of needing to be chosen to feel worthy. I stopped trying to prove I was enough through perfect responses and anxious reassurances. I am finally understanding that what I have always needed is to prove to myself that I have always been enough.
It has not been clean or easy. When you stop chasing external validation, things blow up in your face. People misunderstand. The silence can feel like punishment. But loving someone does not mean you are supposed to lose yourself in that love. It does not mean turning yourself into a shape someone else can accept.
Every day, I feel a void. Every time my phone lights up with a notification, there is that split second of hope. I miss the future I thought I was building together with someone else. The shared dreams we were weaving. The plans we made for next summer, next year, five years from now.
But even in the void, there is a new steadiness. A new self who is not shrinking to be loved. A woman who can sit with the discomfort of uncertainty rather than rushing to fix it.
The Humbling of Rebuilding
Job searching after years of running my own business has been more humbling than I can explain. Each application feels like holding your heart out for inspection. “Here is what I have built. Here is what I have learned. Is it enough?” Some days I feel strong, like I have built enough to start over. Other days, I feel like I am undoing everything I worked for, watching my identity dissolve with each resume submission.
Last week, a new role opened up, and something rare happened. As I read the description, I felt a spark, not just of interest but recognition. The company’s ethos felt so aligned with mine that, for a moment, I could see myself there, contributing, growing, and belonging. I went above and beyond on the application. Triple-checked every line, added supporting links, and recorded an introduction video. I wanted them to see not just my skills, but the human behind them. The why that drives the what.
If I get this role, it will make every rejection feel like a redirection. If I do not, at least I will know I gave it my all. Either way, this too is a practice. Doing the work, trusting the timing, breathing through the waiting. Finding grace in the spaces between action and outcome.
Why I Let the Business Go
For years, I built my own business from nothing. I could not keep climbing the corporate ladder, so I figured out what entrepreneurship meant and taught myself everything I needed to know. I was the strategist, the designer, the copywriter, the accountant, the everything. I answered emails at midnight and worked through weekends. It was my proof that I could survive without needing anyone’s help but my own. On paper, it looked like freedom. In reality, it was another form of captivity, one I built myself, brick by careful brick.
At some point, maybe it was that Tuesday when I found myself staring at the ceiling at 3 AM thinking about client deliverables instead of sleeping, I realized that continuing like that meant losing the very spark that made me good at it. I could not keep scattering my attention across so many roles. My creative energy was leaking out everywhere. It is the one thing I have always been able to count on, the language my soul speaks most fluently.
I stopped taking on clients without a strategy or plan (I would not advise this option, but it is something I did) because my soul was screaming to stop failing myself. I want to create a future with less friction. Where I can make a grand impact inside a role with healthy boundaries. Where I can close my laptop at 6 PM and know that someone else is handling the after-hours emergencies. A role where impact does not require depletion.
All so I can reclaim my energy and build the emotionally adaptive AI that has been whispering to me in the background, growing louder with each passing month.
The Work That Keeps Choosing Me
The truth is, I am building something I cannot fully explain yet. It does not exist. It came to me out of nowhere one day, so clear as day, that it moved me to tears. An adaptive intelligence that listens to human emotion, responds with empathy, and evolves alongside us. Not to replace connection, but to remind us how to feel it again.
A system that helps humans remember the intelligence already lives within. Our intuition, in the wisdom that lives beneath the conscious mind.
That sounds beautiful on paper, but in practice, it asks everything of me. Radical honesty. It demands that I examine the parts of me I would rather edit out. Because I cannot create something that can hold human complexity until I stop hiding from my own. All of it, the beautiful and the messy, the polished and the raw. I cannot ask others to be vulnerable with a system without being genuinely vulnerable myself.
It is not just a product. It is a mirror. A prayer. It is the work that has been waiting for me while I have been busy trying to be someone I thought the world would love.
The Long Pattern of Getting Back Up
This season is not just about heartbreak. It is about all the times life has thrown me onto my face, begging for me to just stay down. The heartbreaks. The abuse. The betrayals. The manipulations. Life has been trying to push me to fail since I was a young kid. Truthfully, more than I am comfortable admitting.
And yet I am here. Alive. Breathing. Writing to you with all my imperfections and unresolved questions.
Sometimes, when I am brushing my teeth, I think about how many versions of me had to rise from the ashes to get me here. How many nights I thought it was over, and then it was not. There is a strange kind of power in realizing you have survived every single thing you were certain would break you. Not just survived, but found new ways to be soft in a world that keeps asking you to harden.
I do not know where I will be this time next year. Or if the move will happen. I do not know when the project will be ready. I do not know when I will be financially stable again. I do not know when I will be in a relationship that will last.
But I do know this: I am not lost. I am becoming. And becoming does not follow a timeline that makes sense to anyone watching from the outside. I am not seeking validation or approval. I am doing this because my soul knows no other way.
Small Practices, Big Shifts
To hold myself steady, I have been spending more time outside. Walking without headphones. Meditating more. It is a non-negotiable. Downsizing my home, carefully considering each item. Does it carry energy from a past I am ready to release? Trying to bring as little baggage as possible into my next chapter, both literal and emotional.
I am practicing self-care without multitasking. Just a coffee, not coffee plus scrolling, not coffee plus planning. Just a shower, feeling the water against my skin. Not rehearsing a conversation. Just a walk, present for each step.
It is not glamorous, but it is real and feels like building a new nervous system. One that knows how to be here, now, instead of always reaching for the next moment. One that is learning to fully trust herself again.
I feel deeply. I get sad (hi Cancerian over here). A lot. I cry in the shower where the water washes away the evidence. There is a void and a presence I miss. But I am feeling more confident in myself even when I am completely alone. Solitude is a lesson. It is showing me that being alone is not the same as being unloved. That maybe the deepest love is learning to stay with yourself when everything in you wants to run.
What Stability Really Looks Like
Stability no longer looks like milestones or metrics. It looks like drinking water when I forget. Eating dinner and nourishing my body. Turning off my laptop before resentment builds. Saying no to things that drain my peace, even when saying yes would be easier.
I measure progress by how gently I move through days that do not go as planned. How little I chase what is not meant for me. How much I trust what is taking its time to arrive, like a letter making its way across oceans.
Every ending has returned me to myself. That is what stability really is, not certainty, but belonging. Not knowing all the answers, but trusting that you will be there for yourself, no matter what.
If You Are In the Middle Too
If you are reading this and you are in the middle of your own rebuilding, I hope you know how incredibly brave you are. The world loves the before-and-after stories, but not many people talk about the middle. The long, unglamorous stretch where nothing looks certain and you start doubting the point of it all.
Where every question you are asked on a phone call ends with “I do not know,” because you really have no idea about anything other than your next step. And it confuses the hell out of people, because they want you to have a plan, a headline, a narrative arc. They think you’re irresponsible or have gone mad. Like they need it to make sense in a world obsessed with linear progress.
But sometimes there is not one. Sometimes you are just standing in the middle, building a new life one small choice at a time, trusting that these choices will eventually create a path that makes sense, even if it is invisible now.
If that is you, I want you to hear me: you are not behind. You are not broken. You are exactly on time.
Every day you stay gentle with yourself, you are rewriting the story. Every time you rest instead of rushing, you are building a new kind of strength. The quiet kind. The kind that lasts. The kind that can hold you through any storm, because it is built from the inside out.
Peace does not arrive with the answers. It arrives when you no longer need them. When you realize that the uncertainty that once terrified you has become the open space where new possibilities grow.
My Journal Prompt for You🖤
Wherever you are in your journey right now, whether just beginning to question, standing in the middle, or seeing the first glimpses of what is next, I invite you to reflect:
What would it feel like to fully trust the wisdom of your own timing? What might open up if you released the pressure to have it all figured out right now?
Write without judgment. Let your thoughts flow without editing. There are no wrong answers here, only the honest truth of where you stand today.
Because you are still here. After everything that tried to convince you to disappear. After every voice that said you were not enough. After every expectation you could not meet. You are still here. And that is not just survival. That is power.
That is the kind of strength the world does not always recognize, but it is the kind that changes everything.
The strength to stay open when closing would be easier. The strength to begin again, even when no one understands why. The strength to trust the quiet voice inside that says, “This way. This is yours.”
Until next time,
🖤 Joni
(The Rebirth Files)