Three years ago, I was standing in the rubble.

I was starting over with my business and my life. Everything I had built had collapsed. The company, the income, the identity I had constructed around being someone who had it figured out. All of it, gone. I remember looking around at what was left and thinking: okay, this is rock bottom. This is where I rebuild from. This is the worst it gets. I had no idea how wrong I was.

The last three years have been an absolute shit show. There is no other way to say it. I have had more ups and downs than I can count. Moments where I thought I was finally gaining traction, followed by crashes that made the original collapse look like a warm-up. Successes that felt like turning points, followed by failures that made me question everything I thought I knew about myself and what I was capable of.

Periods of hope, periods of despair, and long stretches of that gray middle ground where you are not sure if you are moving forward or just treading water. Days when I felt like I was finally figuring it out, followed by weeks when I wondered if I would ever figure anything out again.

I rebuilt the business. Then I watched parts of it fall apart again. I found new clients. Then I lost them. I developed new skills. Then I discovered they were not the skills I needed. I made plans. Life laughed at my plans. I made new plans. Life laughed harder. Every time I thought I had found solid ground, the ground shifted beneath my feet.

And then, on September 20th, 2025, I walked out of jail.

I am not going to spend this article relitigating how I got there. That story has been told elsewhere, and the details matter less than the meaning I am trying to make from it. What matters for this piece is the moment itself: standing outside those doors, blinking in the sunlight, holding a plastic bag with my belongings, and realizing that I was starting over. Again. For the third time. Maybe the fourth. I had lost count.

Three years ago, I thought rock bottom was losing my business. Turns out rock bottom has a basement. And the basement has a sub-basement. And you can keep finding new floors beneath the floors you thought were the lowest. The ground you think is solid can always give way to something deeper, darker, more disorienting.

But here is the thing about standing in rubble for the second time, or the third time, or however many times it takes: you start to notice patterns. Not just in what went wrong, but in how you responded to what went wrong. Not just in the circumstances, but in yourself. The external chaos starts to reveal internal structures that were invisible when everything was going well.

The Pattern I Finally Saw

When I walked out of that facility in September, I had a lot of time to think. Weeks of time with nothing but my thoughts and a growing clarity about the patterns that had shaped my life. No distractions. No ways to avoid the uncomfortable truths. Just me and the mirror.

The pattern goes like this: build something, push hard, ignore the warning signs, hit a wall, crash, pick up the pieces, build again. Repeat. Over and over. Different circumstances, same cycle. Different details, same trajectory. I could trace this pattern back decades. It was not new. It was just finally visible.

Three years ago, when I first stood in the rubble, I did what I always did. I pushed through. I worked harder. I told myself that discipline and effort would fix everything, that I just needed to grind my way back to where I was. I treated the collapse like a temporary setback rather than a signal that something fundamental needed to change. I saw it as a speed bump, not a stop sign.

And it worked. Sort of. For a while. I rebuilt enough to feel like I was making progress. But the foundation was the same. The patterns were the same. The way I approached work, relationships, stress, all of it was the same. I was rebuilding the same structure that had already collapsed once, just with different materials. Same blueprint, different bricks. Same destination, different route.

So of course it fell apart again. How could it not? I was running the same program and expecting different results. The definition of insanity, they say. Except I did not feel insane. I felt like I was doing everything right. I was working hard. I was being responsible. I was pushing through the hard stuff. All the things you are supposed to do. All the things that are supposed to lead to success.

But hard work in the wrong direction just gets you further from where you need to be. Discipline applied to the wrong things just makes you more efficient at wasting your life. Pushing through is only valuable if you are pushing toward something worth reaching. I had been so focused on the pushing that I never stopped to question whether the direction made sense.

The weeks I spent locked up gave me something I had been avoiding for years: the inability to distract myself. No phone. No email. No projects to throw myself into. No busyness to hide behind. Just me and the patterns I had been running, finally visible because I could not look away. Finally undeniable because there was nowhere else to look.

The Stories That Stopped Working

I had a whole collection of stories that I told myself. Stories that explained who I was and why I did what I did. Stories that made sense of the chaos and gave me permission to keep operating the way I had always operated. Stories that felt true even when the evidence suggested otherwise.

The story about how I was just unlucky. Bad breaks, bad timing, circumstances beyond my control. If only this had happened, if only that had not happened, everything would be different. It was a comfortable story because it meant I did not have to change. The problem was external. I was fine. The universe was just against me.

The story about how hard work always wins eventually. Just keep grinding. Just keep pushing. The universe rewards effort. Success is inevitable if you refuse to quit. It was a motivating story, but it ignored a crucial detail: effort without strategy is just exhaustion with extra steps. You can work yourself to death moving in the wrong direction.

The story about how I could handle anything. I was tough. I was resilient. I did not need help. I did not need rest. I did not need to slow down. I could push through whatever life threw at me because that is what strong people do. Except pushing through everything meant never stopping to ask whether I should be on that path in the first place. Strength became stubbornness. Resilience became rigidity.

The story about how complexity meant sophistication. If my life was complicated, if my business was complicated, if everything required my constant attention and involvement, then I must be important. I must be essential. I must be doing something significant. Except complexity was often just a failure to make decisions, a way of keeping options open that should have been closed, a hedge against commitment that kept me spread too thin to do anything well.

These stories served me for a long time. They got me through hard periods. They gave me reasons to keep going when quitting would have been easier. But somewhere along the way, the stories stopped being useful and started being limiting. They stopped describing reality and started distorting it. They became prisons disguised as protection.

Walking out of jail in September, I knew the old stories were done. They had led me here. They could not lead me forward. Whatever came next required new narratives, new frameworks, new ways of understanding who I was and what I was doing.

What Starting Over Actually Means This Time

I have started over before. Multiple times. But this time feels different, and I have been trying to understand why.

Part of it is that I have fewer illusions now. Three years ago, when I first rebuilt, I still believed that I could get back to where I was. That the goal was restoration, returning to some previous state of success. This time, I know that going back is not an option. The person I was, the business I had, the life I was living, none of it exists anymore. And honestly, none of it should be rebuilt. That structure had fundamental flaws. Rebuilding it would just mean waiting for the next collapse.

Part of it is that I am moving slower. My instinct has always been to sprint out of the gate, to prove that I am still capable, to show that the setback did not define me. But sprinting is what got me here. Sprinting is the pattern. This time, I am walking. Intentionally. One step at a time. Building a foundation before building walls. It feels frustratingly slow. It also feels more sustainable than anything I have tried before.

Part of it is that I am being more honest. With myself, with others, with what I actually want versus what I think I should want. The performance of having it together is exhausting, and I do not have the energy for it anymore. What you see is what you get. The mess is the reality. I am not going to pretend otherwise. There is a strange freedom in that honesty, even when it is uncomfortable.

And part of it is that I have accepted that I do not know what comes next. Three years ago, I had a plan. A detailed plan for how I would rebuild and where I would end up. That plan failed spectacularly. This time, I have a direction but not a destination. I know what I am moving toward, but I am holding loosely to the specifics. Life has a way of rewriting your plans whether you like it or not. Better to stay flexible than to clutch a map that does not match the territory.

The Lessons Written in Scar Tissue

If I had to name what the last three years taught me, here is what I would say.

First, you cannot skip stages. I spent years trying to jump from where I was to where I wanted to be without going through the necessary middle steps. I wanted the results without the process. I wanted the transformation without the discomfort. But growth does not work that way. You have to go through the stages, not around them. Every shortcut I took eventually became a detour that cost me more time than it saved.

Second, systems beat willpower every time. I used to believe that discipline and effort could overcome any obstacle. And they can, for a while. But willpower is a finite resource. It runs out. Systems do not. If your life requires you to be at your best every day to function, you do not have a life. You have a crisis waiting to happen. Build systems that work even when you are depleted, distracted, or broken.

Third, rest is not a reward. It is a requirement. I treated rest as something you earn after the work is done. But the work is never done. There is always more. So I never rested, not really, and I paid for it with my health, my relationships, and eventually my freedom. Rest is not laziness. Rest is maintenance. Skip it long enough and the machine breaks down in ways you cannot easily repair.

Fourth, the stories you tell yourself shape the reality you experience. This is not woo-woo positive thinking. It is practical truth. The stories determine what you notice, what you ignore, what you pursue, what you avoid. Change the story and you change the trajectory. The stories that got you here will not get you there. Sometimes you have to burn the old narratives completely and write new ones from scratch.

Fifth, grace is not optional. I spent most of my life being hard on myself. Pushing through. Never cutting myself slack. Treating any failure as evidence of inadequacy that needed to be overcome through more effort. But that approach is not sustainable. It leads to burnout, to self-destruction, to the kind of crash that lands you in places you never thought you would be. Grace is not weakness. Grace is the recognition that you are human, that humans fail, and that failure does not have to be the end of the story.

Where I Am Now

It has been about a hundred days since I walked out of that facility. A hundred days of rebuilding, again. A hundred days of trying to do it differently this time. A hundred days of testing whether the lessons I learned will actually stick or whether I will fall back into the same patterns that brought me here.

I am not going to pretend I have arrived somewhere. That would be falling into the old pattern of acting like I have it figured out when I am still figuring it out. The truth is, I am in the messy middle. The part of the story that does not look good on a highlight reel. The part where you are not sure if you are making progress or just moving. The part most people skip when they tell their success stories.

But something feels different. Not easier. Different. More grounded. More honest. More aligned with who I actually am rather than who I thought I should be. There is less performance and more presence. Less striving and more building. Less sprinting and more walking.

The new year is coming. Everyone is talking about fresh starts and clean slates. And I understand the appeal. But for me, this is not a fresh start. This is a continuation. The work I have been doing since September, the lessons I have been learning for three years, it all counts. It all matters. I do not want to erase it. I want to build on it.

Three years ago, I stood in the rubble for the first time and thought it was the worst moment of my life. I was wrong. There were worse moments to come. But there were also better ones. Moments of clarity, connection, growth. Moments that only happened because the collapse forced me to look at things I had been avoiding for years.

Now I stand in different rubble, but I stand differently. Not as someone who is trying to get back to where they were. As someone who is trying to become who they need to be. Not as someone who has the answers. As someone who is finally asking better questions.

That feels like progress. Slow, uncertain, unglamorous progress. But progress nonetheless.

One step, one day. Grace over guilt.