The Year the White Rabbit Caught Me
Personal Essay | Focus: "burnout female founders," "perfectionism business owners," "sustainable success women entrepreneurs," "alignment vs achievement"
I've been doing everything right for ten years. 2025 was the year I realised "right" was killing me.
I opened my first business at eighteen.
A beauty salon. I had 800$ in my account, signed the lease, hired staff, and built systems. By nineteen, I had two locations. By twenty, I was franchising.
At sixteen, I started B0LD as a blog—just writing, just words, just me trying to make sense of self-development, marketing and business and the world. At 17, I was a published author. By twenty-one, it was generating consistent income. By twenty-three, it was an agency, I became a digital nomad and travelled across the Americas.
I did university full-time while running multiple businesses. Perfect grades. Perfect attendance. Perfect execution.
I didn't drink. Didn't smoke. Didn't go out to clubs or waste weekends on hangovers. I was building empires through discipline and deprivation.
I woke at 5am. Meditated for twenty minutes exactly. Worked out—every single day, no exceptions. Ate clean. Tracked macros. Read personal development books. Journaled my goals. Reviewed my metrics. Optimised my systems.
I was the girl everyone pointed to as proof that you could have it all if you just worked hard enough, wanted it badly enough, stayed disciplined enough.
Tranquil. Quiet. Focused. Nerdy on the sides. Never too much. Always just enough. Perfectly controlled.
On paper, I was winning.
In reality, I was disappearing.
So fake and structured, sp calculated, that without the math of a routine, I had no clue who I was, what I loved outside of a perfectly crafted version of me that I could show up in public as, but who was in private? When everything was quiet, I had no clue what to do with myself.
The Performance of Perfection
Here's what nobody tells you about being the "successful young female entrepreneur": you become a performance piece.
Not intentionally. Not at first. But somewhere between the first business success and the tenth LinkedIn post about productivity, you stop being a person and start being a persona.
The girl who has it all together. The woman who makes it look easy. The founder who proves that discipline beats talent, that systems beat chaos, and that wanting it badly enough makes anything possible.
People started introducing me as "the most disciplined person I know." I still hear it all the time. Clients hired me because I seemed to have figured out what they were struggling with. Friends asked me for advice on everything from business strategy to morning routines to how I "stayed so focused."
And I gave it. Generously. Because I believed the performance.
I genuinely thought I'd cracked the code. That perfection was the path. That if I just controlled every variable—my food, my schedule, my sleep, my work, my relationships, my body, my mind—I could build the life I wanted without the messiness I watched destroy others.
I looked at friends who partied and struggled. Who made emotional decisions and paid for them. Who lived chaotically and wondered why their lives felt chaotic. And I felt... not superior exactly, but validated. Confirmed. See? Discipline works. Control works. Perfection protects you.
I built systems for everything. Morning routine, evening routine, weekly review, monthly assessment, quarterly planning, annual visioning. I had frameworks for decision-making, templates for everything, and processes that eliminated variables.
My businesses ran smoothly because I ran them smoothly. My body looked a certain way because I controlled it precisely. My life appeared successful because I performed success meticulously.
But here's what I was actually doing: I was running from myself.
All that discipline? It was control masquerading as self-care. All that perfection? It was fear dressed up as ambition. All that optimisation? It was avoidance disguised as achievement.
I wasn't building a life. I was constructing a cage and calling it success.
The White Rabbit (When Alice Finally Catches You)
The White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland is always rushing—late, frantic, obsessed with time. Alice follows him down the rabbit hole, and everything she thought she knew becomes unrecognisable.
2025 was my White Rabbit year. Except I wasn't following it—it caught me.
It started small. Subtle. The kind of cracks you can ignore if you're committed enough to the performance.
I couldn't sleep. Not like before—I'd always been a good sleeper, one of my "perfect habits." But suddenly, I'd lie awake at 3am with my heart racing over nothing. Or everything. I couldn't tell anymore. I was stressed about money, about business, about my love life, about the feeling of loneliness that inhabited me, about who I was to the people that mattered to me.
My workouts stopped feeling energising and started feeling obligatory. Then exhausting. Then, like punishment to be leaner, make myself more into the standard. But I kept doing them because that's what disciplined people do.
I'd sit down to write—something I'd always loved, the whole reason B0LD existed—and nothing would come. Or worse, something would come, but it would sound like everyone else. Borrowed wisdom. Performed insight. Words that looked right but felt hollow.
Client calls that used to energise me started draining me. Not because the clients changed, but because I had nothing left to give. I was showing up empty, performing fullness, hoping nobody noticed.
My friendships started feeling like another task on the optimisation list. "Schedule social time. Maintain relationships. Be a good friend." As if connection was something you could systemise instead of something you feel.
My body—so carefully controlled, so meticulously maintained—just... stopped working properly, I became so inflamed, I gained almost 10 pounds overnight. Like it was saying, "if you won't listen to the whispers, I'll shout."
And still, I kept optimising. Kept perfecting. Kept performing.
Because admitting something was wrong meant admitting the system was flawed. And if the system was flawed, then what had the last ten years been for?
The Crumble (When Perfect Finally Breaks)
It happened on a Tuesday in August.
Nothing dramatic. No crisis. No external disaster. Just me, sitting at my desk, staring at my perfectly organised Notion dashboard with my perfectly planned week and my perfectly aligned goals, my relationship perfect to the public, miserable inside, my finances stopping to improve and realising:
I don't want any of this.
Not the business I'd built. Not the body I'd sculpted. Not the routine I'd perfected. Not the life I'd optimised.
I wanted to burn it all down and start over. Or maybe not start over. Maybe just... stop.
The thought terrified me. Because who was I without the performance of perfection?
I didn't know. I'd been performing for so long, I'd forgotten what being felt like.
So I did what any good perfectionist does when confronted with an inconvenient truth: I tried to fix it.
I researched burnout recovery protocols. I built new systems for rest. I created frameworks for alignment. I scheduled "self-care" like it was another business meeting.
And it didn't work. Because you can't systematise your way out of a problem created by too many systems.
You can't optimise yourself back to wholeness.
You can't perform your way to peace.
What I Learned While Crumbling
Here's what happens when you finally stop running:
The things you thought mattered... don't.
My metrics. My morning routine. My perfect meal prep. My optimised schedule. My disciplined habits.
None of it mattered when I was too depleted to care. None of it sustained me when the performance became unbearable.
What mattered: sitting on the floor of my apartment at 2pm on a Wednesday, crying for the first time in a year, finally letting myself feel how tired I actually was.
The life you think you want might not be the life you actually need.
I thought I wanted to scale to seven figures. Build a team of fifty. Speak on stages. Be known. Be impressive. Be proof that discipline wins.
But what I actually needed? Space. Permission to want less but meaningful things. Freedom to build something that felt like mine instead of performing someone else's version of success.
Achievement without alignment is just expensive emptiness.
I'd achieved everything I set out to achieve. Multiple businesses. Financial success. Respected positioning. Visible authority. Perfect relationship. Looking like I would never sweat through any of it.
And I felt... nothing. Because I'd achieved it all from performance, not presence. From discipline, not desire. From fear, not freedom.
Achievement is meaningless if you're not yourself while achieving it.
Your body will tell you the truth your mind refuses to hear.
Exhaustion that sleep didn't fix. Anxiety that meditation didn't calm. A nervous system stuck in survival mode despite living in complete safety. This year was horrible.
My body was screaming what my mind kept denying: This isn't working. This isn't sustainable. This isn't actually what you want.
The people who love you don't love your productivity.
I thought people valued me for what I produced. My output. My discipline. My achievements. My ability to help them optimise their own lives.
But the friends who stayed when I crumbled? They loved me for who I was when I stopped performing. The mess. The honesty. The humanity I'd been hiding under all that perfection.
They didn't want my systems. They wanted my presence. ( Hi B, Kinz and Lyn )
Sometimes the breakdown is the breakthrough.
I thought 2025 was the year everything fell apart.
Actually, 2025 was the year everything false fell away.
The performance. The perfectionism. The discipline was really just control. The optimisation was really just avoidance.
What remained after the crumble was something I'd forgotten existed: me. Actual me. Not the polished version I performed. Not the optimised version I pretended to be. Just me.
Messier. More human. More honest. More whole.
The Rebuild (How I'm Doing Business Now)
I'm not going to lie and say I've figured it all out. I haven't. I'm still learning how to build a business from alignment instead of achievement. How to run an agency from presence instead of performance.
But here's what's different now:
I stopped optimising my life and started living it, I started being fully in it, honestly and with integrity and I chose what I wanted.
I still work hard. But I don't work joylessly. I don't wake at 5am because that's what successful people do—I wake when my body is actually rested. Some days that's 5am. Some days it's 9am. Both are fine. The person I will choose to love, I will love with my whole heart, and I will be loved back for who I am, not what I can perform.
I still work out. But not every single day without exception. Some days I only walk. Some days I dance. My body is allowed to be a body, not a project. I found a passion for yoga and barre class, not for the aesthetics but marvelling at what my body and mind can do when in harmony.
I still eat whole foods and choose clean options. But I also eat a piece of chocolate when I want one. Food is fuel and pleasure, not moral performance.
I built systems that serve me, not systems I serve.
Remember those frameworks I created for 2026 in the preparation series? The audit, the plan, the implementation systems?
Those weren't born from more optimisation. They were born from the crumble—from realising I needed systems that honoured my humanity, not systems that denied it.
Systems that include rest as a strategy. That builds in seasonal variation. That measures alignment alongside achievement. That allows for being human while building businesses.
I niched B0LD not to scale faster, but to stay more aligned.
When we repositioned B0LD to serve only female founders, it wasn't a growth strategy. It was a survival strategy.
I couldn't keep serving everyone while serving no one—including myself. Niching wasn't about market positioning. It was about life positioning.
Saying no to 60% of inquiries freed me to say yes to myself. To the clients who energised me. To the work that felt aligned. To the business that felt like mine. I lost a lot of money, but I found my whole heart in my business.
I started treating my business like it's run by a human, not a machine.
Our DFY retainers now max out at 5-8 clients because that's my actual capacity. Not my theoretical capacity. Not my "if I optimise perfectly" capacity. My real capacity.
Our DWY cohorts are limited to 8 participants because that's how many people I can actually show up for fully. Not performatively.
We publish content when it's ready, not according to an arbitrary content calendar that ignores creative cycles.
We take December off. Actually off. Not "off, but checking email." Off.
I stopped performing success and started defining it.
Success used to mean: scale, scale, scale. More clients, more revenue, more visibility, more proof.
Success now means: aligned clients, sustainable revenue, strategic visibility, peace.
I don't need to be the biggest agency. I need to be the right agency for the right people. That's enough.
I don't need to prove I can handle fifty clients. I need to serve eight clients exceptionally well. That's success.
I don't need to work eighty hours a week. I need to work forty hours effectively. That's an achievement.
I learned to live my life like I advise my clients to run their businesses: with boundaries, with seasons, with humanity.
Everything I teach female founders about sustainable positioning and strategic growth? I had to learn it by destroying myself first.
Every framework in our DIY kits is about energy audits and alignment assessments? Born from my own misalignment.
Every article about choosing dream clients over any clients? Written by someone who learned that lesson the expensive way.
I'm not teaching theory. I'm teaching scars.
The Invitation
I don't have this figured out. I'm still learning how to build a business that doesn't cost me my humanity. How to lead an agency without losing myself. How to achieve without performing.
But I'm learning in real-time. And I'm sharing what I learn with the female founders and wellness brands we serve at B0LD.
Not because I've arrived. Because I'm on the path. And if you're on it too—or ready to be—there's room here.
DIY Path:
Our Positioning Sprint in a Box ($199) includes the energy audit framework that helped me identify my misalignment. The seasonal planning templates that honor your actual capacity. The metrics that measure alignment, not just achievement.
DWY Path:
Our 90-Day Positioning Sprint ($1,800) is where we rebuild together. Month 1: Honest audit of what's working and what's costing you. Month 2: Strategic plan that honors your humanity. Month 3: Implementation systems that sustain instead of drain.
This isn't just business strategy. It's life strategy. Because your business should support your life, not consume it.
Next cohort starts March 1st. Limited to 8 female founders.
DFY Path:
If you're ready to hand over the marketing execution completely so you can focus on rebuilding your business foundation—we occasionally take on agency clients who are in transition, who need their visibility strategy handled while they figure out what aligned actually looks like.
We're selective. We max out at 5-8 DFY clients. But when there's alignment, we make space.
But whether you work with us or not—if you're performing perfection while disappearing inside, please hear this:
You're allowed to stop. You're allowed to rest. You're allowed to rebuild from alignment instead of achievement.
The business you've built perfectly might not be the business you actually want. And admitting that isn't failure.
It's the beginning of building something true.
What Comes Next
I don't know what 2026 looks like. For the first time in ten years, I'm not planning a year in advance with complete certainty.
I'm planning with flexibility. With seasons. With the understanding that what I want in January might evolve by June, and that's allowed.
B0LD will continue serving female founders and wellness brands. We'll keep teaching positioning precision and strategic visibility. We'll keep publishing content that tells the truth about building businesses that don't destroy you.
But we're doing it differently now. With more humanity. Less performance. More presence. Less perfection.
And if you're ready to build differently too—with systems that honor your seasons, strategies that measure what matters, and support that doesn't require you to perform—we're here.
Not as people who've figured it all out.
As people who crumbled, rebuilt, and are learning to build businesses that feel like ours instead of someone else's version of success.
The White Rabbit caught me in 2025.
In 2026, I'm not running anymore.
More personal essays from B0LD:
The Art of Doing Less: A Holiday Manifesto for Women Who've Been Doing Too Much
How B0LD Became a Niche Marketing Agency (And Why We'll Never Go Back)
She Said No to Everyone: How Specialisation Saved My Agency
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The most successful businesses aren't built by people who figured it out perfectly. They're built by people who crumbled, rebuilt, and had the courage to share both stories.
