Again.

Failure, burnout, and refusing the neat little label.

The Lambda collage | Featuring Sisyphus by Antonio Zanchi

Last September I decided to kill my Startup.

I had been working on it non-stop for over a year and a half. The idea had plenty of potential, it still does, but for many reasons I couldn’t work on it any longer. I had to let it go.

Safe to say, it wasn’t an easy decision.

But the aftermath of this failure, and the lessons it has taught me, have led to an ongoing internal expansion I had been aching for.

I faced many challenges—one was particularly painful, almost jarring.

From the beginning I knew I wanted to be outspoken about my journey. Both as a trust-building marketing strategy, which was genuine, and as a way to offer myself an expression outlet that I’ve been called to pursue ever since I was a little kid.

Empowered by my newly found sense of freedom I wanted to share my voice with the world, contributing in my own way, being an active agent, no matter how small, pushing for the change I wanted to see taking place.

And for a while I was able to stay true to my intentions. Especially at the beginning, in the exploratory phases, when I felt free to share the plurality of my experience. The joys and tribulations of an adventure that was pulling at every one of my edges.

But when I found the “right idea” and the time came to do the “real work”, I found myself lost in the hustle culture discourse, the business hacks, and the get-there-quick falsehoods the algorithmic gods rightfully identified as proper ways to poke at my very human weak points.

Every word I wrote, every graphic I designed, and almost every thought I had became an instrument for one thing only—the growth of the business. The attraction of a bigger audience. The conversion of paying clients.

With no true separation between work and life, since I was dedicating almost every waking hour to trying to make the project a viable reality, what was intended to be expansive, became reductionist. I made myself one thing only—Founder of X.

And although I’m proud I didn’t quite succumb to making my own content manipulative and I prioritized value and genuine care for what I was doing, I still contorted myself into a tiny single-dimensional square that kept gnawing at my soul.

The burnout didn’t happen overnight. I didn’t burst into flames as I suddenly felt confronted with the reality of the ways in which I was betraying myself. It happened subtly. Reality diminished by my own optimism. Self-inflicted gaslighting driven by my own passion and determination, by my eagerness to move forward, to make it work, to defy the odds and conquer the struggle.

A little frog in a slowly heating pot, waiting to be boiled alive.

But I woke up—snapping out of my slumber, barely escaping baneful blistering bubbles.

The violent epiphany of realizing myself a prisoner of my own making, of having manufactured the shackles, wrapping them around my wrists, and turning the key in my own pursuit of an unchained life, led to a powerful reckoning—I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t, keep reducing myself to one single thing any longer.

I’ve been silent for months. Making sense of the tracing of my steps. Leaving room for a new unbridled vision to arise. Working up the muscles to become a steward, a protector, of my own untetheredness.

And now I’m ready to speak again.

Just last week my very dear friend and mentor, Grace Aimoto, published a beautiful and exquisitely poignant essay titled The interiority of Hope. The depth and lucidity of her words spoke directly to my struggle, which I know I share with many, and echoed all the reasons that troubled my insides prompting my awakening.

In it, she shared a quote:

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”

– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51

I believe she had already shared these words with me in previous conversations. But tucked in the bedding of her prose, framed within her wisdom—the words struck me with a particular precision.

Before her essay hit my inbox I was on my 14th iteration on the first piece I wanted to publish in here. And the pressure of re-introducing myself, sharing the failure of what had defined me for months, and articulating whatever this is, kept me circling endlessly on what I wanted to say versus what I was expected to say or how I was supposed to say it.

I’ve expressed myself, my ideas, my artistry, publicly many times before. I have had this impulse ever since I wrote with intention for the very first time when I was 9 years old and I rushed to share the fruits of my carefully worded imagination to my parents.

But every time, ever since the teachings of capitalism did their workings on my teenage mind, I have felt the need to package it, me, a certain way. To give the encasing of my work a purpose. A clear direction. A stupid fucking niche. A neat little label that every single time, without exception, has come back to bite me in the ass—a ribboned treasonous snake choking me into complying to the confines of the cage I eagerly built for myself and my ideas.

However—not wanting to compare myself with Walt Whitman—I am large, I contain multitudes.

I do. We all do.

And if I contradict myself. So fucking be it.

I want to do things differently this time. And this place, The Lambda, will be, when I’m ready, very loosely defined.

For now, let it hold no promise other than its intention to be an exploration of my own expansion. Not to teach, but to share.

From my own multitudes, to those of others.