It went up for a long time. More revenue every year, new people every year telling me: It works. I didn’t question that. Why would I. It worked.
The problem is: when things are going up, you don’t notice how high you already are. You don’t look down, you look at the next step. And that step always feels right because the last one did too.
At some point I was at the top. And the world looks different from up there. You have recognition. People listen when you talk. And you get used to it so fast that you forget what it was like before.
Then I fell. Not slowly, not in a controlled way. Just gone. I’ll skip the details, here’s the point: the drop is exactly as deep as the climb was high. And even if someone spells it out for you beforehand, it slides right off you. You want success, and all anyone sells you is what you already want. So all they show you is the summit. The way down they stay quiet about, because it’s uncomfortable to explain.
After the fall, I started looking differently. Not at what people say, but at what they leave out. I heard someone say: Money isn’t that important to me, it’s about the cause. And I knew that wasn’t true. Not because that person wanted to lie. But because they were lying to themselves, the same way I had lied to myself for years.
The hardest thing after the fall wasn’t the loss. It was realizing I had been wearing a mask that felt like my face. I couldn’t tell where the role ended and where I began.
I still don’t know exactly what happiness is when success drops away. I only know that the answer doesn’t lie in what we tell each other. It comes on its own at some point. When you stop pretending.