The Sacred Fall: When Breaking Apart Breaks You Open
Adobe Stock AI Image by felix_brönnimann, prompt 'Rugged coastal landscape with a female figure’
There's a moment in every high-achieving woman's life when the very foundations we've built our success upon begin to crumble. Not because we've failed, but because we've outgrown the person we had to become to get where we are.
This week, I'm sharing a story a friend told to me, with permission to share here with you. It's from a woman who had it all—thriving business, international speaking career, long-term relationship—and who made the radical choice to walk away from everything when she realized she'd lost herself in the building of it all.
Her story isn't just about falling apart. It's about the sacred nature of that falling—how sometimes we have to let everything we've constructed collapse so we can remember who we actually are underneath all the achievement, all the doing, all the proving.
For those of us who've built our identities around being indispensable, this story offers something rare: permission to stop. Permission to question. Permission to choose ourselves, even when it looks like failure from the outside.
A few years back, things had to reach a turning point for me. I simultaneously left my partner, my country, and sold a large portion of my business, as well as stopped speaking on stage from anxiety—these work components had been a huge sense of identity for me for over 15 years.
The key for me in the "falling down" was in the relationship. At the time I had deluded myself that my partner of 5 years was truly ready to sell his home and business and relocate to a country of his language, Spanish. But the closer we got to ever having the conversations, the more I realized he was never going to leave and I had to make the move north solo. When he was refusing offers on his home and taking on more work projects, I started to get the message.
I found myself in Spain, where everyone looked and sounded just like him and his children—adding salt to the wound as I cried every day. After a conscious silence of three months for us to both reconfigure where we were at, I had to finally walk away to find myself again. I spent more time crying alone in restaurants and while out walking than I care to remember, as I processed the loss on all levels. I didn't know how I was going to face life again and make a new life on my own in the northern hemisphere—and a huge part of the learning was that I had handed over so much of my self-worth and true self-belief to this toxic relationship that from the outside looked dandy and divine. My inner circle knew how destructive it was to me.
After our three months silent time, I still waited another 2 weeks to even hear from him. I chatted to three very close guy friends to figure out if I was the one in the wrong—fully expecting them to tell me to suck it up, apologize, and get with the programme as he was a busy man. All three of them seemed to tell me the same thing—his actions were speaking louder than words and I was never going to get what I wanted. I ended it from thousands of miles apart—something that shocked me!
At the same time I was feeling totally cut off and detached from my business—something that had been my cornerstone all my life. I decided to also walk away from much of the online mentorships as I realized I was burned out and fed up to the core. I needed to help myself now, not others. The selling of my online IP to a client gifted me the ability to take some time off to regroup, and I started a deep dive into my own healing, just as lockdown hit the world.
I realized I had fallen out of integrity with myself, that I had looked to another to fill me and that I never listened to my intuition when I realized the first time we were not for each other. But I carried on, pretending to myself all was okay. I accepted something way less than what I wanted, and I needed to start finding out why—healing from the inside out.
I went from being one of the busiest people I know to living on a tiny remote Scottish Island to take time out and time off. I rested, I slept, I learned to be IN retreat and swim in freezing cold water. I needed to spend time with ME again. Not a date, not clients, not being busy. My power now lies in saying NO when it is a NO, and not jumping to say YES to everything. Sounds so stupidly simple as I type this, but listening to my real needs was the healing. It still is. Navigating life from my core, caring less what others think.
Only 5 years later am I starting to date again with a renewed sense of self, sense of purpose, and delighting in the adventure of sharing life again. I am less afraid to stick to my boundaries, I stand my ground more in the areas that really matter. I walk away from things before they go beyond their sell-by date. I seem to have cultivated a deeper relationship with when to stay and when to leave—a person, a place, a client. It's a work in progress that I believe is the human path.
Meditation, breathwork, writing, prayer, yoga, walking and swimming are my liquid gold, where my sense of self is restored.
KE’s story stays with me because it captures something we don't talk about enough in executive circles: the courage it takes to admit when our success is built on a foundation that no longer serves us.
The woman who shared this story didn't just walk away from a relationship or a business model—she walked away from a version of herself that had stopped listening to her own truth. And in that walking away, she found something more valuable than any career milestone: she found her way back to herself.
For every woman reading this who's achieved everything she thought she wanted and still feels empty, who's saying yes when everything inside her screams no, who's built a life that looks perfect from the outside but feels hollow within—this story is for you.
The sacred fall isn't about failure. It's about having the courage to let go of what no longer fits so you can discover what's actually yours to build.
Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is stop building altogether and remember who we are when we're not performing, not achieving, not proving anything to anyone.
Your intuition is calling. The question is: are you ready to listen?
What resonates most with you from this story? I'd love to hear your thoughts—reply and let me know what spoke to your heart.