What I Was Hiding: When Success Feels Empty

I've been away for a while.

Percolating. Crossing a threshold I'd been standing at for years. I stepped back from this newsletter to finish the crossing. And now I'm on the other side, still walking, still evolving, but writing to you from a different ground than before.

I want to tell you where it started.

At the peak of what anyone looking in from outside would have called success, something silently cracked open in me.

I had the title. The income. Every box on the external checklist ticked. And instead of feeling like proof of my worth, I felt more worthless than ever. Because I believed it had all come too easily.

And none of it filled the black hole in my soul.

I would close my office door and fall apart. Outwardly at the top. Inwardly certain I was a failure.

What I didn't know then, what I couldn't see, was that the very thing I believed I had failed at was the thing I was best at in the world. My former boss had already told me I was the best developer of people she had ever worked with. But I didn't believe her. I thought I sucked.

That crack became louder until I couldn't drown it out with nights on Netflix. It was the beginning of the deepest self-development journey of my life. The journey that eventually brought me to the other side of good enough. I’m still growing.  But the false premise no longer runs the show.

That's what this newsletter has always been about. And it's what I'm coming back to write.

Now look at what was always there. 

The pattern you see emerging is my InnerGenuity logo, a stylized paisley. I chose a paisley deliberately because paisleys are fractals. Self-similar at every scale. Complete at every level of zoom.

It represents always good enough. Not as something to earn, achieve, or work hard for. Good enough as something you already are, at every stage, in every season, however far along the journey.

What I didn't know then was that the black hole where all my achievements evaporated was actually a portal to another way. The pattern was always there in the static. It just needed time and the right conditions to become visible.

That's what I see when I look at the leaders I work with. The wholeness is already present. The pattern is already formed. We are simply doing the work of making it visible together.

And here's what I know to be true after all of it: you are not so different from who I was. You may be standing where I once stood. The outward success assembled. The inner crack quietly spreading. The question forming that you haven't quite let yourself ask yet.

I see you because I was you.

And there is another side.

Join me.

Liz