I Feel Like A Failure

After a conversation with my mom about a particular hard time I was going through — deciding if I should shut down my start-up — I called my husband to vent. “I feel like a failure,” I said. And it’s true. After 2 years of working on my company, which isn’t a very long time in start-up standards, I was thinking about shutting it down. The decision was spurred by a combination of things, one of the important ones being my mental health.

Those 2 years are/were the worst of my life, although so many “great” things were happening to me. I got engaged and then married, accepted into a great accelerator, and had tons of great PR and accolades for my company. On the outside everything looked great, but in reality it was usually me alone just trying to make the business run for that day. Between hiring and managing hourly employees (which opened my eyes to a totally different part of “professional” America), trying to crack our marketing strategy, raising money, dealing with a lot of rude customers, and making tons of decisions on a daily basis, I was truly burnt out.

But when I said this sentence to my husband, he literally laughed in my face. From his perspective, I had accomplished things at a young age that many people just think or dream about. And most of the time I truly forget that. When you immerse yourself in something as all-consuming as a start-up, it’s so easy to embed yourself into the bubble entirely. In some ways, it’s important and beneficial to surround yourself with people in similar circumstances. But it can also make you forget to appreciate just how far you’ve come and why every little step you take is significant, even (especially) if you may not think so. And in the stressful environment of a start-up, these kind of reminders are very important.