You Are Allowed to Outgrow Why You Started
The fire that got you off the ground was never meant to be load-bearing — and mistaking its cooling for your collapse is the most expensive misreading you can make.
A board member forwards the founding email on the company's 10th anniversary—your own midnight message, all caps, more exclamation points than sentences, the one where you swore you'd burn down the comfortable life to build this thing. You read it in the parking lot before going in. And you feel nothing. Not contempt for the kid who wrote it. Not nostalgia, not even embarrassment. Just a flat quiet, the emotional temperature of a waiting room. You sit there longer than you should, and the thought arrives fully formed: if I really still believed in this, that email would still light me up. You think this is burnout, but it isn't. Burnout still hurts. This is worse, because it presents itself as a verdict. The cooling passion, it whispers, is your disqualification.