There was a time when I held the golden ticket.
Not the glittering fantasy one — the real one.
The kind you earn with blood and grit and twelve-hour shifts and a nervous system running on fumes.
ER nurse. Travel nurse.
A woman who could drop into chaos and stitch the world back together with her bare hands.
I had the job that could dig me out of any hole in a week — three grand at a time.
Until the day my own mind and body finally mutinied.
Severe anxiety. PTSD. A system that chewed me up and then had the audacity to call me the problem.
Fired. Pushed out. Left holding a career that suddenly burned too hot even to touch.
And in the fog of all that loss, it felt like my golden ticket got ripped straight out of my hand —
like I was Charlie Bucket swallowed by a mob, watching everything I’d built slip away.
But here’s the truth no one tells you:
the ticket wasn’t nursing.
The ticket was me —
and I didn’t lose it.
I just couldn’t keep paying the price required to use it.
The Unraveling: The Spiral No One Sees
After the dust settled, the silence hit harder than any shift I ever survived.
No monitors beeping.
No call bells blaring.
Just me, my thoughts, and the echo of a career that used to be my backbone.
And suddenly the world moved on without me.
Everyone else climbing ladders, making moves, leveling up —
while I was relearning how to breathe without my chest seizing.
Trying to remember who I was when I wasn’t the one holding the IV bag, the chaos, and the whole damn room together.
You don’t realize how much of your identity is built on survival
until survival stops being an option.
And when the job that once saved you becomes the thing that breaks you…
that’s a grief nobody prepares you for.
Bills pile.
Your confidence cracks.
You feel little.
You feel late.
You feel like you’ve failed some invisible test everyone else secretly passed.
Everywhere you look, someone’s “ahead.”
New job.
New house.
New success story.
And you’re standing there with your nervous system still shaking,
fighting to remember that staying alive was, in itself, an accomplishment.
That’s the part no one talks about —
the humiliation of being someone who used to “handle anything,”
now needing gentleness, slowness, space.
Feeling like you lost your usefulness.
Feeling like you lost your edge.
Feeling like you lost your whole damn self.
You didn’t.
You were in the in-between — the chrysalis part, the dissolving,
the brutal middle where life breaks down the version of you that was never meant to make it to the next chapter.
The Shift: When Survival Becomes Rebirth
But here’s the part no one tells you —
rock bottom isn’t a pit.
It’s a doorway.
A low, narrow, inconvenient-as-hell doorway you can only crawl through on your hands and knees…
but a doorway all the same.
One day — not a dramatic day, not a movie-scene day —
you just wake up and feel the faintest flicker of something you haven’t felt in months:
a pull.
A whisper.
A tiny, stubborn spark.
The quiet thought:
Maybe I’m not done yet.
And at first, it shows up in ridiculous ways.
You answer a phone call you normally ignore.
You fill out one job application and actually hit “submit.”
You open a blank page in Skool.
You take a step.
A single, microscopic step.
Nothing changes right away.
But you do.
Because showing up — even cracked, even scared, even exhausted — is an act of rebellion.
A declaration that your story isn’t over, no matter how loudly your past tries to scream otherwise.
You start realizing that “behind” was never a location —
it was a spell.
And you were hypnotized by the illusion that your value lived in your productivity, your paycheck, your ability to swallow trauma and keep walking.
But when you stop running long enough to hear your own breath,
you notice something wild:
You didn’t lose your edge.
You lost your chains.
The nervous system that once forced you to collapse
is the same one now guiding you toward a life that doesn’t require self-destruction to succeed.
Slowly, painfully, beautifully —
you start putting the pieces of yourself back together.
Not the old pieces.
Not the old shape.
Not the old identity that demanded your sanity as payment.
Something new.
Something steadier.
Something truer.
And for the first time in a long time,
you understand:
You’re not behind.
You’re rebuilding — and rebuilding is a kind of becoming.
The Remedy: The Truth You Hold When Everything Feels Lost
Here’s the truth — the one your shame won’t say out loud but your soul is begging you to hear:
You’re not behind.
You’re on chapter two of a story that pretended to end at chapter one.
You’re not late.
You’re not failing.
You’re not broken.
You’re not running out of time.
You are in the becoming phase —
the phase no one glamorizes,
the phase everyone hides,
the phase that looks like ruin until you realize you’re standing on fertile ground.
Feeling “behind” is not a sign you’ve messed up.
It’s a sign that the map you were following stopped matching who you are.
And that’s not a tragedy.
That’s alignment.
Your nervous system didn’t betray you;
it rerouted you.
It refused to let you keep living a life that required you to die a little every day.
You didn’t lose your golden ticket.
You outgrew the story it required you to stay in.
And the moment you understand that,
everything shifts:
You realize your worth isn’t tied to a badge, or a job, or a title,
or how quickly you can bounce back,
or how much hell you can endure without breaking.
Your worth is in the rebuilding.
In the resilience.
In the honesty.
In the refusal to quit, even when quitting would’ve been easier.
It’s in the way you rise — slowly, quietly, imperfectly —
and start creating a life that doesn’t devour you just because you’re exceptional.
So if you feel behind, hear this:
You’re not behind.
You’re at the beginning.
And beginnings are sacred.
Keep going.
Keep becoming.
Keep taking the tiny steps that pull you toward the version of you who no longer flinches at her own power.
The world hasn’t seen what you’re building yet.
But you have —
and beginnings always start with a whisper only you can hear.