There was a five-year stretch of my life that felt like drowning in presentation decks and investor calls. My creative instincts were shelved, my energy drained into pitch decks and meetings, and my home life was unraveling in ways that were way too big to ignore. I wasn't building anything. I was surviving. Barely. The Chase That Broke Me Here's the reality. When you're a creative who's desperate for money, and money is the thing you're chasing, money runs the other way. You start second-guessing yourself. You jump lanes, trying to be someone you're not. You shelve your best ideas and start contorting into whatever shape you think will unlock funding. It doesn't work. What happens instead? You start to look desperate. You lose the small wins that fuel your momentum. No dopamine hits. Just a string of dry, soul-sucking days. And people feel that, even when you're sure you're hiding it. It repels the exact opportunities you're trying to attract. That was me. I thought I was being strategic. Really I was just drifting further from the stuff that made me valuable in the first place. The Cost of Shelving Your Creativity My last startup became a cautionary tale. I tried to play the traditional CEO game. Raise capital, push the product, manage the optics. All while burying the parts of me that had built everything up to that point. The creativity. The curiosity. The spark. Meanwhile the financial pressure was relentless. My home life was a disaster. My kids were going through some truly awful stuff. And me? I was fried. Depressed. Burnt out. I wasn't leading. I was barely showing up. My face showed it too, those deep frown lines that basically moved in full-time between my eyebrows. Enter the Sherpa At one of my lowest points, my old business partner Jeff connected me with a guy named Kirk. Kirk's a kind of work-life sherpa. The guy who shows up when you're lost in the fog and hands you a flashlight. We did a session together and it landed like a gut punch. He looked at me and just saw it. The stress. The burnout. The internal tug-of-war. He told me straight up: "Your left brain's gasping for air, and your right brain's trying to take the wheel just to keep you alive." Yep. Nailed it. Rewiring My Voice, My Circle, and My Mindset Kirk and Jeff didn't just point me in a direction. They helped me change how I talk to myself and to the world. I stopped undermining my own ideas. I cut the self-deprecating humor that had turned into a weird safety blanket. I started leading with what lights me up instead of what I thought would sound safe or smart or fundable. Post-COVID, my social circle had gotten narrow. Like a lot of people, I stopped doing external meetings and quietly defaulted to being a homebody. So I had to force myself back out. To connect. To re-engage with people and energy that actually lit something up in me. That shift wasn't automatic. But it changed everything. The Advice That Realigned Everything Kirk left me with a line that still rings in my ears: "Focus on what you love to do, what you're great at, and the right opportunities will come find you." And he was right. Once I started doing that, getting back into creative flow, trusting my gut, chasing ideas that felt like me, the shift was real. The spark came back. The energy. The right people started showing up. Not overnight. But consistently. It's Still Work. But It's the Right Kind. Let's be real. It still takes work to stay out of that rut. It's easy to slide back into the old habits. It takes discipline and daily intention to keep choosing the path that lines up with your creative core. But here's the thing. It's the right kind of work. The kind that gives you energy instead of draining it. The mojo's coming back. The wins are stacking. And I'm showing up as me again, not the exhausted, filtered version built for somebody else's expectations. So if you're a creative founder who's stuck, here's my unsolicited advice. Step back. Reset your voice. Reconnect with what makes you special. Let go of the chase. The opportunities will come. But only when you finally show up as yourself. Further Reading The financial challenges of ADHD and how to overcome them (Investopedia). Practical solutions for impulsive spending and money management. How entrepreneurs with ADHD can manage their money (Forbes). A business-psychology angle. Financial decision-making in adults with ADHD (PLOS ONE). A research study on impulsive buying and spontaneous decision styles.