I’m writing this from my deck with my rescue goats grazing in front of me. If I’m honest, the more I disconnect from hustle culture and the need to be perpetually “on” and achieving the less I want to go back. Now I can’t close up shop and live off grid in the woods (as much as I may want to, honestly) because running a farm animal sanctuary, and well life in general, takes money. And yet, my relationship to work, stress, and the constant cortisol addiction that kept me going is adapting.

The very identities I held for the last 40+ years are slipping away and I’ve lost the interest in grasping at them. I’m sure it’s a cocktail of Uranus Opposition, understanding how undiagnosed ADHD contributed to identities that were built around rejection sensitivity and masking, as well as the less f*cks of perimenopause that have something to do with it.

But I truly get surrender now on a deeper level. and if there is one thing I can share it is this:

Your only job is to be true to your own nature.

That’s it. That’s the whole assignment.

And yet — that is exactly where we force.

We push. We perform. We build things that look right from the outside and feel hollow on the inside. We stay in rooms we’ve already outgrown because leaving feels irresponsible. Because the bills don’t care about your identity crisis and sometimes we have no choice but to shoulder on.

What you stumbled on is a love note for anyone who has been white-knuckling their way through a version of themselves that no longer fits. This is me, laying it all out — the ego death, the grief, the health wake-up call, and the Google Drive folder I kept opening and closing for four years.

This is the story of how I stopped feeding the machine that was eating me alive — and finally came home to what I actually came here to do.

What Led Us Here 

End of 2024. I was done.

Not burned out in the trendy, LinkedIn-post way. Done. I had built something I didn’t want to do or be in anymore.

People close to me — clients — stole my work. My podcast name. Someone had downloaded paid courses I’d created and uploaded them wholesale to their own website. We couldn’t even get to them through lawyers.

Layer on top of that: a new ADHD diagnosis. Perimenopause. Being the eldest daughter — which if you know, you know — meant I had been carrying heaviness since before I understood what that heaviness was. I was tired in the way that sleep doesn’t fix.

I’ve always known, at my core, that what matters to me is understanding human nature and helping people. It’s what got me into psychology. But I no longer knew what that looked like as work. And I was in a brutal limbo — because I have dozens of animals at our farm sanctuary who depend on me. I’m not independently wealthy. I couldn’t just stop.

I literally could not slow down.

That’s when a media manipulation story crossed my path, and I thought — I’ll give commentary on it. Something casual. Something to pass the time. I didn’t have big goals within it. But people got interested in the media manipulation angle on a trending pop culture story. So I followed that thread. I thought: this is a great way to use my gifts and help people not be manipulated. A way to not “waste” the time I had spent building a career in branding, marketing, & PR.

Then January 2025 arrived.

My husky Alaska — my best friend — got sick. We fought for him with everything we had. He survived the worst of it. Two weeks in ICU. And then he passed in my arms at home from a blood clot.

If you don’t have dogs, this might sound extreme. But my dogs are my kids. Losing Alaska at four years old broke something open in me that I wasn’t prepared for.

It sent me into the deepest functional freeze I’ve ever experienced. And still — I couldn’t stop. Dozens of animals. Bills. The channel. I had to pull my big girl pants up and survive. Yet, I did not have the capacity to work at the level I used to, or truly needed to. I turned down clients, passed on big projects, stopped launching courses. In the months where getting out of bed was the hardest thing I did, I pulled from savings to cover the difference.

And here’s where it gets complicated.

The channel did blow up with a wonderful community I fell in love with. I was invited onto podcasts with people I deeply admired. I even received a subpoena because someone (aka Blake Lively & Ryan Reynolds) assumed I’d been paid to take a side in a very public legal battle.

But here’s what I also found: most of the information I was putting out wasn’t being used to help people think more clearly. It was being taken, stripped of context, and weaponized. I was getting attacked from both sides. Immersed daily in finding the bad, the ugly, the manipulative — because that was the job. PR has become dark. Victims destroyed to protect brands. Smear campaigns run with zero shame.

And I had to face a truth that was hard to swallow:

Nothing I could do would change it.

The machine would rage on. The only thing my continued presence in it would do was destroy my health — and it was already starting to.

The Ego Death I Resisted 

There’s a concept in Buddhism and Taoism — the hungry ghost. The preta. A spirit that suffers from insatiable craving, never able to be satisfied, always consuming and never full.

In Zen teachings and modern psychology, the hungry ghost isn’t just a mythological figure — it’s a mirror. It represents our chronic addictions, our compulsive behaviours, our insatiable need for approval, for proof, for enough. Thich Nhat Hanh teaches that these ghosts can also represent unresolved ancestral wounds — patterns passed down through generations that we unconsciously keep feeding.

I was feeding a hungry ghost.

My history, trauma, and masking doesn’t just live in my memories — it lives in my nervous system. As do yours. It tells you: it’s never enough. Keep going. Don’t stop. Prove it.

Add ADHD to that and you have a perfect storm of burnout cycles.

So even when the channel was succeeding by every external metric, I was still operating from scarcity. Which was no different than how I constantly felt scarcity regardless of how much money I made in my business previously. And no different than how I always felt scarcity no matter how much I climbed the corporate ladder or won championships in sports prior to that.

Ra Uru Hu always said deconditioning takes seven years. I’m coming up on my seventh. And I can tell you — it’s real. We want the quick answer, THE answer, the right move. But that only ever satisfies the ego. The real work is in letting the layers fall away until you can actually see what’s underneath.

I’ve invested extensive funds into mentors, guides, and coaches to help me get here. I also spent egregious amounts of money on certifications, continuing education, and deeper discoveries to not only help myself but to support clients on their journey as well.

I am grateful for each one. Not one is a regret, even if at the time it didn’t make sense.

Yet, recently, my husband asked me what I’d do when our house sells and we downsize and move across the country to lower cost of living (praying this happens soon!). He assumed I’d say: focus strictly on YouTube.

At first, I thought so too.

Then came the health crisis.

I went to the doctor for one thing and casually mentioned something else. The doctor told me that something else should have cleared up by now. A specialist referral. Strict instructions: less stress, more rest, eat at maintenance (I had been working on getting back into athletic competitive shape again & lowered my calories). And when he told me the worst case — either now or long-term if I didn’t change course — something cracked open.

I opened a folder in my Google Drive that I hadn’t touched in years. If it had been a physical book I’d have had to shake the dust off. It was something I worked on, and developed with, a business mentor who also happened to be a Positive Psychologist.

The Radical Happiness Movement.

You’ve probably heard me mention it at times.

I’d first created it four years ago — just a month before we bought the farm. I closed it then because it wasn’t the right time with all the new expenses. And here I was, four years later, telling myself the same story: not yet. After the move. After things settle.

And something in me finally said: when?

It is never going to be the right time. There will always be something. And I realized — this is the hungry ghost talking. This is the voice that kept me in survival mode, kept me chasing proof, kept me building things I didn’t actually want.

At some point you realize you are feeding the machine you need out of.

You also realize a brutal truth: Until you let go of the past that no longer serves you do not have the space or capacity to welcome the opportunities that come with the new.

What’s Next 

So what does this actually look like now?

I’m no longer forcing it. I’m choosing slow mornings, time with my chickens, and writing in the quiet with my goats, over fast paced content creator or the branding & PR industries with 100+ messages awaiting me in Whatsapp or Signal first thing every morning (as well as 7 days a week).

I have the Holistic Human Design Podcast & ADHD + Human Design Podcasts which will have new episodes weekly yet no more daily content creation. Focusing on more evergreen models & long term private clients in my 1:1 spaces.

What I am also doing is this:

I’m writing the book — Radical Happiness in Under 30 Days. I’m returning to Astrology and Human Design sessions, approached through a psychology lens — helping people understand their strengths, their shadow patterns, and whatever void they’re personally navigating. The tools have always been the same for me: Positive Psychology, Polyvagal Theory, Human Design, Astrology, Gene Keys. The science and the “woo,” held together. A holistic approach to actually thriving.

It’s not a flashy pivot. Happiness doesn’t sell the way outrage does — and I’m at peace with that now. The right people will find me. The people who sit up at night and truly their problem is “how can I just be… happy… in my life again”. Because ultimately, isn’t that the whole point of this life? To live a meaningful & fulfilling life? Positive Psychology would say it is and I tend to agree.

I’ve seen far too many people, and many house hold names I worked privately with, that are miserable despite their success. So if I truly want to help this feels like the most powerful way to use the toality of my experience for good.

It just feels… right.

My whole life has been about understanding human behaviour — it’s what drew me to psychology, what made me good at reading how narratives are built and how people are influenced. But I want to apply that understanding now to what actually makes people flourish — and help them get there.

I’m deeply, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally affected by the work I do and what I immerse myself in. I can’t keep immersing myself in darkness and expect to lead myself or others toward light.

So this is the new chapter. Not a performance of reinvention. Just the thing I kept finding in old folders, kept closing, kept returning to.

The Radical Happiness Movement isn’t a trend. It’s where I was always headed.

I’m just done forcing the detour.

If you, or someone you know is going through the void, or the liminal space between who they were and who they are becoming, have compassion.

This isn’t an easy time. It feels like a death because it is. The only ones who judge are the ones that judge themselves for it.

And there is no reason to judge yourself for it.

I’ll end by saying this:

The question, especially as you hit Uranus Opposition in your early 40’s, is not ‘how do I get back to who I was?’ That version is done. The question is — who am I when I stop performing?”

And here’s what I know for certain after doing this work: you cannot think your way to that answer. The high achiever’s instinct is to research and optimize and solve this the same way they’ve solved everything. But you can’t intellectualize your way out of the trap of the mind because the mind is what holds it all in place.

Thank you for being here with me. For paid subscribers of Substack I have some wonderful things planned including sneak peeks into the upcoming book.

Here’s to more happiness, joy, and light in a world that profits off of us being consumed by darkness.

ashley