@alex.petrakieva: I know you probably don’t see this side of me often because I don’t share every feeling in real time, but this actually happens more often than you’d think. I don’t think my mind has fully caught up with how much my life has changed. Sometimes I stop and think about how dramatically I’ve changed the trajectory of my life, and it feels… huge. I actually wrote a Substack about something similar last week because I was working through the same feelings. The simplest way I can explain it is this: everything has happened incredibly fast, and the height of the fall feels much higher now. When I worked in corporate, sure, layoffs were always in the back of my mind. But I never let that fear fully consume me because I believed I could always find another job. Building a business and a personal brand feels different. The highs are higher, but the lows feel much lower too. There’s a level of uncertainty that is mentally much heavier than I expected, and if I’m being honest, it’s unlocked a whole new kind of fear for me. And yet... it has been 100% worth it. Because I know I could have never created this kind of life in two years if I had stayed where I was. That said, I’ve noticed I’ve lost some of my creativity lately. I think when content becomes a machine, it’s easy to forget why you started making it in the first place: to connect with people and to actually enjoy the process. There’s a project my husband and I have been wanting to work on for a while, and I think I need to give myself permission to slow down the short-form content hamster wheel for a bit so I can focus on that. It probably sounds dramatic if you’ve never done it, but producing short-form content every single day is genuinely draining. And I think when you’re constantly in output mode, it gets harder to access the creative part of your brain. Anyway, this is all part of it. Nothing is wrong. If anything, these are good problems to have. I’m just making space to get back in sync with myself... and I’m really excited to find my groove again.

Alex Petrakieva

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Tuesday 19 May 2026 13:54:07 GMT