Nobody wants to stand next to you when the ground gives way. What nothing can ever prepare you for is not just the grinding humiliation of your business breaking. It is the silence that follows coupled with the internal torture of your own thoughts tearing at every part of what's left of you.
The exact same reassurance that was holding you up disappears overnight. Your supporters scatter. They treat your ruin like a contagion, terrified that if they get too close, whatever broke you might infect them, too. And you are left alone with the loudest, cruellest company you will ever keep, your own thoughts.
Before the fall, the noise of success is intoxicating. When the thing you've built finally catches fire, the validation is blinding. Revenue doesn't just grow; it catapults you skyward. The people from the magazines and newspapers you love are suddenly sitting in your living room, and you become the story.
Your phone never stops. You become entirely enveloped in this aura of winning, and various crowds flock to it. They want different pieces of it, and they want their piece of you. They need proximity to the magic, believing that if they stand close enough, some of that brilliance will rub off on them.
At first, you resist it. You view the adulation with a quiet, healthy suspicion. But eventually, the sheer consistency of it wears you down.
The constant reassurance seeps into your thoughts and eventually makes its way into your sense of self. You start to believe that this overwhelming support and momentum might be real.
As you look closely at those that vanished, you realise of course that most of them never really stepped into the arena themselves. Or they had previously tried, failed and quietly stepped back out, and buried the remains of their own losses.
Failure. What a word. What a thing it is. It's bad enough hearing it whispered by the vanishers, but when it comes from the mouth of your teenage son, who hears it from his grandfather, it seems to instantaneously implant itself inside not just the core of your being, it actually appears to activate within every cell.
You become that which you are not. You literally begin to embody it, and so starts the journey deep into a place beyond darkness. A journey with no light, no path or signs to guide or warn where you are going. A swirling vortex that sucks you in so fast that there's no chance of leaving any crumbs to chart your way back.
No nightmare can describe it, no jump or fright can mirror its unrelenting, beckoning, berating. You're permanently awake to it wherever you are, whatever you are doing. Awake or asleep, conscious or unconscious.
And meanwhile, around you, the Schadenfreude, the harm-joy, becomes evident, tangible. Like the winning team celebrating not just their win, but the loss of their opponents. The tall poppy has fallen. The tribe is preserved. It really is that primal.
And yet, there's apparently no pile of black boxes of shared personal failures for others to listen to, however traumatic the cries might be. No, these stories invariably get left at the depths of the ocean of an individual's pain, rarely to surface. Is it the shame that stops us sharing, or is it that no one would want to listen and learn?
One only has to glance to be drowned by stories of supposed success all around us. People standing on some peak or another, drumming their messages to the scrolling crowds that mindlessly watch and partly listen. Their perfect lives, partners, families, holidays, friends, homes, businesses that run while they sleep. For others, it's the summit of enlightenment, perfect alignment, total self-awareness, the ultimate spiritual flex.
Attached to almost all of it is the oldest promise in the world: Follow my method, my way. Do what I did, and you too will have this. And look how seductive it is, because who isn't searching or yearning for some kind of summit.
There appear to be very few accounts written by anyone who has sat in the wreckage, willing to look you in the eye and admit what a complete and utter mess they made of things. Because the loudest lie we are told is about the cost of losing.
The true price of a collapse isn't failing to get the money, the status, or the thing you were chasing. The real cost is far heavier, and far more personal. And the tragic irony is that the few people who do manage to hold onto the summit often sacrifice the exact same fundamental things as the people who faceplant the grit at the bottom.
But sometimes, it is only by sifting through the rubble of the life you thought you wanted that you uncover the truth of who you actually are. You discover what you were ultimately looking for, or rather, what you desperately needed to find and what's more, who is really left around you.
I've spent four years thinking about whether I had the right to write this. I'm still not entirely sure. But I've come to believe that waiting for complete clarity might mean waiting forever and that the most honest thing I can offer you is not a finished story with a tidy resolution, but the truth of what I found while I was still inside it.
I am not here to sell you a method or hand you a blueprint. I don't believe in those things, not for something this fundamental. What I believe in is the value of someone opening up their own black box and showing you exactly what was inside and hope that by doing so you will find your journeys a little lighter or easier.
Whatever brought you to these pages then, I hope it saves you a stumble. But more than that, I hope it changes how you see the stumble itself. Because what I discovered through the loss of my company, all my money, and my home and yes, my health, were understandings I never would have found otherwise.
The thing we are all desperately searching for isn't necessarily the thing we actually need to find.
If you are here to understand what it takes to completely ruin a beautiful thing, and more importantly, what remains under the rubble, you are in exactly the right place. Welcome, I wrote this for you.