Here's what 18 years in corporate advertising buys you:
A title that feels important. A salary that makes you feel safe. A calendar so full it becomes an identity. The kind of exhaustion that masquerades as ambition because everyone around you is exhausted in exactly the same way, and nobody talks about it.
I was good at the job. Really good. BBDO. Hothouse. Clients like Coca-Cola, Deloitte, The Home Depot. I knew how to walk into a room and make people believe in something. I knew how to perform under pressure. I knew how to smile through the Sunday dread and call it dedication.
What I didn't know (or maybe what I refused to see) was how much of me had gone missing inside all of it.
The slow leak
The unraveling didn't happen all at once.
That's the thing nobody tells you about shedding an identity. It doesn't look like a lightning bolt moment. It looks like a slow leak. A growing quiet. A Sunday evening ritual of dread so familiar it stops feeling like a warning and starts feeling like just… life.
For me, it was a lot of things at once. The wine I was using to decompress that started to feel less like a choice and more like a requirement. The tension headaches that had become so constant I stopped noticing them. The achievement that felt increasingly hollow, like eating something that fills you up but doesn't actually nourish you.
I kept waiting to feel proud. I kept reaching the finish line and immediately looking for the next one.
And when the hollowness got loud enough… I did what a lot of high-achievers do.
I looked for someone to blame.
The story that keeps you stuck
Here's the part that took me the longest to see:
The story I was telling myself — that I was stuck, that circumstances had trapped me, that other people's choices had cost me mine — was the very thing keeping me locked in place.
Not the job. Not the industry. Not the calendar.
The story.
I work with a client right now who spent years carrying resentment toward her husband. The narrative she'd built was that she had sacrificed her law degree to support his career — a career that never quite landed. She had given up her dream for someone else's dead end.
When we finally got honest about it… a different truth emerged. She had been struggling to get into law school at that time. The fear of rejection was real. And her husband had become the convenient explanation for a decision that was always, underneath it, her own.
The moment she owned that — really owned it, without softening it — something shifted. The resentment didn't just soften. It dissolved. Because resentment needs a story to survive. Radical acceptance starves it.
That's not a therapy insight. That's a behavioral one.
You cannot integrate what you won't own.
Running toward
Leaving the industry wasn't dramatic. There was no blowout, no breakdown moment, no single day that was clearly The Last Day.
There was just a growing certainty — and eventually, a choice.
Not to run away from something. To run toward something I'd been deferring my whole adult life. Freedom. Adventure. A life built around my actual values instead of around the metrics that had always been handed to me.
I founded By Way of Grey in February 2024. I drove Uber. I went through yoga teacher training. I got sober. I started coaching. I rebuilt my entire relationship with time, with worth, with what it means to be productive.
And slowly (slowly) I started feeling like myself again.
Not the self I'd been pretending to be. A different one. Quieter, maybe. More grounded. Less impressed by the metrics that used to mean everything.
What I know now
Burnout isn't a workload problem. You can take a vacation and come back burned out. You can get a promotion and feel worse. Burnout is a misalignment problem — a gap between the life you're living and the life your nervous system recognizes as yours.
The body keeps score long before the calendar reflects the damage.
The high performers I work with now — the executives, the founders, the women who have built remarkable things and feel quietly terrible about it — they all say the same version of the same thing: I don't know who I am outside of what I do.
That's not a personal failing. That's a design flaw in the system we've all been handed. We were taught to optimize for output. Nobody taught us to optimize for wholeness.
The shift doesn't start with a new strategy. It starts with an honest audit — of your values, your strengths, your actual desires, and the gap between where you are and where you actually want to be. That's step one. Everything else gets built from there.
The messy middle. The between chapters. The season where you don't have the language yet for what you're becoming.
That's not failure. That's the work.
If any part of this resonated — if you're somewhere in the middle of your own unbecoming, I want you to know something:
You don't have to have it figured out to start moving.
You just have to be willing to own the story that's been keeping you stuck… and get in the car.