About Me
I ran the script both ways.
Eighteen years ago I had two businesses, good and steady income, a house in a posh neighbourhood, every box on the list ticked.
And I was miserable.
I was doing exactly what a successful entrepreneur is supposed to do. Scale. Expand. Hire help. I followed the playbook to the letter, and the businesses turned into endless administration and the weight of being responsible for other people's livelihoods. The stress was relentless. The creative joy was gone. I'd become the administrator of my own life. Middle management of my own soul, reporting to a CEO who was also me and never once said well done. A gilded cage, and I'd built every bar of it myself.
The maddening part is I knew what I wanted. I'd wanted it since I was a kid in Bergen whose entire livestock empire was two guinea pigs. A small farm. Animals. Open space. Freedom. So why did I sit on it for years, inside a life I couldn't stand? Because wanting more than the success I was supposed to be enjoying felt ungrateful. What will people think? The fear isn't stupid. It's just far louder than it deserves to be, and it will keep you in a life you hate for decades if you let it audition as caution.
Then I did the first thing in years that was purely for me. I hadn't sat on a horse in fifteen years, so the sensible re-entry would have been a calm old gelding. Naturally, I bought a three-year-old Friesian stallion. 500 kilos of black, called Nero, because some part of me had wanted exactly that since I was a girl and had apparently been outvoted ever since. Everyone had opinions. I boarded him twenty minutes from the house, and those drives became the best part of my week. At first I didn't even ride. I took him for walks, mucked out, groomed, learned his moods and let him learn mine. The riding came later, out in the forest. It disconnected me from the stress and connected me to my soul. No ROI. Didn't scale. The least strategic purchase of my life, and the closest thing I had to an off switch.
That barn was where I kept the woman I actually was, and you can only commute to your own soul for so long. So we moved. Not for a business plan, for the farm. Then I trained in horse-assisted therapy and coaching, earned my NLP Master Practitioner title, and flung the gate wide open. The stuck ones came, people stalled in the hard middle of something, and we did the work out in the arena, where the horses turned out to be better at it than I was. For the first time, my work meant something.
And that is exactly how it caught me. The second disappearance doesn't look like a trap, it looks like a calling. I finally had purpose, the word the entire self-help industry sells as the cure, and I followed that playbook exactly as obediently as the last one. I burned out. Not from work I hated. From work I loved. Because purpose is the one job you never clock out of. You'll set limits around work you can't stand and none around your calling, because resting from something that matters feels like betrayal. So you grind yourself to dust and call it devotion. The boardroom burned me out on obligation. The retreat burned me out on meaning. Same fire, holier fuel.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to see these weren't two problems. They were the same script in two dialects. Scale and hire, then find your purpose. They sound like opposites. They're the same instruction in different leggings: here is what a worthy woman does, now go do it until there's nothing left of her.
Awareness is where most women stop, and it changes nothing. The script doesn't die of being noticed. It dies of being crossed. And it keeps coming back in new clothes, so you cross it again.
I'm not a psychiatrist. No PhD. No TED talk. No 5 a.m. gratitude routine involving kale. What I have is this: I ran the script both ways, hollow success and holy burnout, so I know exactly how it feels to go missing from your own life while everyone congratulates you on how well you're doing. The one thing that brings you back is not more purpose. It's one small, gloriously pointless act of defiance this week that only the real you would want.
It's almost never sensible. That's how you know it's yours.
I bought the horse. I'm not here to tell you to buy one. I'm here to hand you the match.
Find out which script is running you.