The Fear I Thought I Left Behind
When my business contracted, it felt like someone had pulled the rug out from under me.
Not just professionally.
Personally.
Financially.
Emotionally.
Almost overnight, everything that had felt solid suddenly didn’t.
Looking back, that’s the part that surprises me most. The impact was real. The uncertainty was real.
But what happened inside my head was something else entirely.
Within days, as I was thinking through rebound plans and pivots, I was also carrying a completely different conversation inside myself.
I failed.
I’m a fraud.
I don’t know what I’m doing.
I’m back to having nothing.
All those years... all those sacrifices... they were for nothing.
I remember how quickly my mind, my body, my subconscious all went there.
It didn’t stop at the business.
It rewrote my entire life.
It told me I had been wrong.
Wrong to spend years of my life pouring everything into building a company.
Wrong to sacrifice so much of my twenties and thirties.
Wrong to believe that if I just worked hard enough, one day I would finally arrive somewhere that felt secure.
As I've reflected on that period, I don't think I was grieving the business as much as I thought I was. I think I was confronting a fear I thought I had left behind.
The fear of not having enough.
The fear of instability.
The fear that everything could disappear overnight.
The fear that no matter how hard I worked, I could end up right back where I started.
That last sentence is uncomfortable to write.
Because if you met me professionally, you probably wouldn’t describe me as someone motivated by fear.
You’d probably describe me as ambitious. Driven. Resilient. Maybe even fearless.
And all of those things are true. They were true then, and they’re still true today. My life decisions certainly suggest that.
But lately I’ve been wondering if they tell the whole story.
I grew up in Lebanon during a time when stability wasn’t something you expected. It was something you hoped for.
Wars.
An unpredictable economy.
A father whose work—and presence—were inconsistent.
Arguments at home that made you wonder what tomorrow might look like.
Periods where my family depended on my grandparents financially.
I didn’t think of those experiences as trauma. They were simply the backdrop of my childhood.
When I moved to the United States at seventeen, I never consciously thought I was trying to escape instability. I thought I was chasing opportunity.
Part of me was. Another part of me, I can see now, was running away from a future that looked all too familiar.
But looking back now, I wonder if I was chasing something else too.
Safety.
In my last essay, I wrote about always having a next thing to chase.
I don’t think I realized then why I needed there to always be a next thing.
At the time, I thought I was simply ambitious.
Now I wonder whether momentum itself made me feel safe.
As long as I was building, growing, achieving, there wasn’t much room to stop and ask what I was actually running toward—or away from.
Momentum kept me focused on what was ahead. It also kept me from noticing what was still following me.
Every milestone I achieved felt like another brick in a wall I was building between myself and the life I never wanted to return to.
I thought I was building a business.
I was.
I thought I was building financial security.
I was.
What I didn’t realize was that I was also trying to build emotional security.
A life where I would never have to feel that fear again.
Looking back now, I can see that business cycles are part of entrepreneurship. Markets change. Governments change. Priorities shift. Leaders are forced to make painful decisions they never wanted to make.
I understand that today.
I couldn’t see it then.
Almost overnight, I felt like I was seventeen again.
Not because my circumstances were the same.
They weren’t.
Objectively, they couldn’t have been more different.
I wasn’t broke.
I wasn’t starting over.
I wasn’t alone.
But fear doesn’t seem particularly interested in objectivity.
It doesn’t review balance sheets.
It doesn’t care about the evidence you’ve accumulated over twenty-five years.
It reaches for the oldest story it knows.
Mine sounded something like this:
Everything can be be taken away.
You’re not safe.
You’re back where you started.
That’s what caught me off guard.
Not the business.
My subconscious’ reaction to it.
For months, I couldn’t understand why the contraction had shaken me so deeply.
I told myself it was because I cared so much about the company.
Because I felt responsible for my employees.
Because I hated letting people down.
All of those things were true and still are.
But they weren’t the whole truth.
The business contraction didn’t just threaten my future. It resurrected my past.
It pulled old fears into the present and made them feel current again.
Once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it.
It also forced me to admit something I hadn’t fully recognized before.
Somewhere along the way, it had become difficult to separate the performance of the business from how I felt about myself.
The business had stopped being something I built. It had quietly become the thing standing between me and every fear I had spent twenty-five years trying to outrun.
Looking back, I don’t think I attached my self-worth to the business overnight.
I think I attached something even more fundamental.
My sense of safety.
That realization didn’t happen immediately.
In fact, I couldn’t see any of this while I was living through it.
It took months of reflection—and an experience that deserves its own essay—for me to recognize just how intertwined those things had become.
Not because I consciously decided that my worth depended on the success of my business.
I never would have said that.
But because somewhere along the way, success quietly became proof that I was safe.
And if success meant safety...
Then struggle must mean danger.
No wonder the business contraction felt like freefall.
The strange thing is that none of this has made me think less of ambition.
Or entrepreneurship.
Or building.
I still love building.
I still love creating.
I still want to continue scaling the business that I love and care so deeply about.
I already am.
And I still have new ideas I hope to bring into the world one day.
What has changed is what I expect success to do for me.
For a long time, I think I expected it to quiet that old fear.
One more contract.
One more milestone.
One more achievement.
Eventually I’d arrive at a place where uncertainty no longer had a seat at the table.
Maybe that was never a promise success could keep.
Maybe success creates opportunity.
Freedom.
Choices.
Impact.
Maybe it was never meant to create permanent emotional safety.
I’m still sitting with that.
Some days those old fears still show up. They’re quieter now.
Not because I’ve conquered them. Because I recognize them.
When they tell me I’m back where I started, I know that isn’t actually true.
It’s just an old story trying to convince me that the past is happening again.
Maybe that’s the work now.
Not eliminating fear.
Not pretending it doesn’t exist.
But learning to recognize which fears belong to my present...
...and which ones have simply been waiting for an invitation to return.
xoxo 💋
Paola