What No One Tells You About Starting Over When You’re Already Successful

On pregnancy, power, grief, and the quiet cost of becoming someone new.

Everyone talks about starting over like it is something you do from nothing.

Like reinvention is for the woman who lost everything and is building from the ground up, brick by brick, with nothing but grit and a story that will eventually be inspiring. We celebrate that narrative. It is clean, it is cinematic, and it makes for an excellent keynote.

But here is the version nobody talks about: starting over when you are already successful. When you already have the career, the reputation, the network, the track record. When people look at your life and see someone who has no reason to change. When the thing you are walking away from, or the thing that is falling apart beneath you, is something most people would kill for.

That kind of starting over does not get the same sympathy. Because from the outside it looks like you are being reckless. Or ungrateful. Or dramatic. How could you leave when things were going so well? How could you be struggling when you have so much? What could possibly be missing?

I will tell you what is missing, because I have lived it.