I’ve been thinking.

I think I accidentally made myself boring on the internet.

Which is funny, because I don't think I actually became boring.

I think I just stopped telling the story.

For almost two decades, so much of my life happened out loud.

I built businesses. I built brands. I made things with my hands. I sold things. I figured things out when I had absolutely no business knowing how to figure them out.

And somewhere along the way, I built an audience that didn't just know what I was selling.

They knew me.

Then I went to Silicon Valley.

And almost without realizing it, I stopped sharing.

I went from building my own thing to building someone else's.

I entered tech through sales.

I went through SV Academy as a student, learning an entirely new industry after years of entrepreneurship.

And then something happened that I never could have planned.

I went back.

Except this time, I wasn't the student.

Eventually, I became Head of Community & Brand Experience—and quite literally, one of the faces of the company that had once trained me.

My face was in the marketing. My story was part of the brand. My videos were everywhere. Pieces of my life and even stories about my sons became part of how we showed people what was possible.

And behind the scenes, I was helping build it.

I worked alongside incredible founders, executives and leaders in tech. I helped create experiences and programs designed to give people access to careers they might never have imagined for themselves.

I got to travel.

I got to build.

I got access to rooms I hadn't been in before.

I made more money than I had ever consistently made in my life.

Six figures. Benefits. Bonuses. Stability.

For an entrepreneur who had spent years being responsible for making the money appear every single month?

That kind of stability can be intoxicating.

So can Silicon Valley.

And I loved it.

I want to be very clear about that.

That chapter gave me an extraordinary amount.

It stretched me. It exposed me to new ideas. It taught me how venture-backed companies operate. It showed me what happens when entrepreneurship meets infrastructure, capital, technology and scale.

It also taught me things about myself.

Some of them flattering.

Some of them considerably less so.

I've always had an enormous amount of drive.

My mother has been telling me to sit down somewhere for most of my life.

I work hard. I move fast. I see possibilities everywhere. I believe I can figure things out.

That has built a lot of beautiful things in my life.

It has also occasionally convinced me that being capable means I should always be moving, fixing, building, proving or becoming.

Silicon Valley rewarded that part of me.

And, in some ways, it exposed it.

Because there is a difference between being an entrepreneur and being an employee—even when you're entrepreneurial inside the company.

There are things I understand now about leadership, ego, organizations, power, timing, communication and business that I simply didn't understand when I walked into that world.

I had to learn some of them the expensive way.

Meanwhile, something else was happening.

I was becoming incredibly good at showing up for someone else's brand.

And increasingly absent from my own.

Not because someone told me I couldn't have both.

Not because SV Academy took something from me.

I was busy.

Really busy.

And I didn't know how the woman I'd been online fit with this new version of my life.

What was I supposed to post?

The meetings?

The flights?

The strategy sessions?

The executives?

The programs we were building?

The woman who had built businesses with rhinestones, Swarovski Crystals and audacity was suddenly sitting in rooms talking about SaaS, customer success, community, sales and venture-backed growth.

I didn't know how to connect those two women.

So instead of figuring out the bridge between them, I mostly stopped telling the story.

And that's the part I understand differently now.

They were never two different women.

The woman who built Bling and the woman who built in Silicon Valley were using the exact same muscles.

Curiosity.

Storytelling.

Sales.

Community.

Customer experience.

Resourcefulness.

The ability to make people believe something was possible before all the evidence existed.

I just hadn't learned how to see the through-line yet.

And then...the company sold and with a lot of other amazing people, I got laid off.

I didn't see it coming.

Maybe that was naïve.

But I was blindsided.

One day I had the salary, the benefits, the title, the team, the work, the identity and the future I thought I was building.

And then I didn't.

I could tell that part of the story as one about what someone else did to me.

But after enough time, I don't think that's the most interesting version.

Companies make business decisions.

People make business decisions.

Sometimes you're part of the plan.

Sometimes you're not.

That doesn't erase what you contributed while you were there.

And it doesn't erase what the experience gave you.

What interests me much more now is what happened afterward.

Because I had spent so much time building inside someone else's world that when it disappeared, I wasn't quite sure where mine was anymore.

And if I'm being truthful, I've been finding my way back ever since.

Not back to the woman I was before Silicon Valley.

I don't want to be her again.

Back to myself—with everything I learned while I was gone.

Maybe that's why I'm finally ready to tell these stories.

For a long time, I thought the years when I wasn't sharing much online were somehow the missing years.

They're not.

They might be some of the most important years.

They're where I learned that stability isn't the same thing as security.

That a title can be meaningful without becoming your identity.

That being incredibly valuable to a company doesn't mean the company can promise you permanence.

That ambition is a gift—but it needs somewhere intentional to go.

And that while you're helping build someone else's dream, you probably shouldn't completely stop tending to your own.

But maybe the biggest thing I learned is this:

Nothing was wasted.

Not Bling.

Not Silicon Valley.

Not the salary.

Not the layoff.

Not the jobs that came afterward.

Not the things I've tried that worked.

And definitely not the things that didn't.

They're all part of the same story.

I just hadn't connected the chapters yet.

So maybe I didn't disappear.

Maybe I just stopped telling the story.

And maybe it's time I started again.

I'm not here to tell you what to think. I'm just here to give you something to think about.

XX,
@PoshTori