by Eiad Asbahi, Mindscape Founder and CEO
The most painful years of my professional life were the happiest years I had ever lived. I know how that sounds. It’s still the truest thing I know. And for most of my life I wouldn’t have believed it either.
If your world is coming apart right now, you probably read that and felt something push back. That’s fair. When the ground starts moving, you grab for anything that looks solid.
For more than forty years, I grabbed for the wrong thing.
What I Wish I’d Understood Sooner
I spent most of my life chasing one thing: external validation, in every form I could get it. Achievement was the most socially acceptable version, the one I chased hardest, and the one that finally got torn out of my hands.
I’m telling this story for one reason. If you’re in the middle of a collapse, there’s something I learned that nobody told me: there are two different things going on here. One is what’s happening to your life. The other is what’s happening inside you in response. They feel like the same event. They aren’t. And you have far more say over the second than you’ve been led to believe.
The Collapse
For thirteen years I ran an investment fund, and I was good at it long enough and at a high enough level that other people used the word “prodigy.” People listened when I spoke. Doors opened. Rooms full of respect.
And in all those years, with all that winning, I could not have pointed to a single stretch of real inner peace.
Driven to Prove Myself
I was a hamster on a wheel I could not get off of, chasing one hit of validation after another after another, and none of it held for longer than a moment. My head was full of thoughts I spent every day running from.
The respect held me up from the outside. Nothing was holding me up from the inside. Alone, with nobody watching, I could not bear my own company.
Then came a day I still think about. In December 2020, on the same day that I filed for divorce, the largest investment in my fund went vertical, and by the evening I was the wealthiest I had ever been.
Hitting the Peak
The two biggest storylines of my life crossed in a single afternoon: the marriage ending, the mountain finally summiting. I took it as an omen from God that I was on the right track. For the next nine months, I lived at the exact peak I had spent my whole life climbing toward.
Private jets. New highs. Every box I thought I needed to check. And standing at the very top, the thirst was not quenched. It never once said, “now, I have enough.”
The Fall
Whatever that December day meant, September 2021 showed me it wasn’t what I thought.
The investment collapsed, the fund fell with it, and that single day turned out to be the easy part. What followed was not a crash and a recovery. It was a drowning.
Year after year of decline, investors leaving, watching the faith people had in me drain away one conversation at a time. Every time I thought I was finally coming up for air, I went back under. It lasted five years, and it did not stop until the winter of 2026, when I finally retired the fund, the thing I had spent my life building.
Old Programming: The Fragile Shell
To understand why that should have ended me, you have to understand why I was so obsessed with winning. It was never really about money. It was proof.
See? I am someone. I am real.
Somewhere early, long before I had any say in it, I absorbed the belief that something was wrong with me. That I was defective.
Achievement became how I argued back.
That’s what I mean when I talk about old programming: the patterns laid down early, before you could choose them, that quietly decide how you handle conflict, closeness, and your own worth. Mine said: you are what you produce. You are what people see.
So I built a shell of success for the world to look at, and I kept it polished, because as far as I could tell, there was nothing behind it.
Why It Didn’t Break Me
The version of me who ran on that programming would not have survived those five years. I need you to hear that plainly. He would have gone down with the fund.
Strip the winning away, and what was behind the shell wasn’t actually nothing. It was a scared child pulling levers, keeping the show running so nobody would look too close.
That’s who the collapse should have found. But it didn’t.
Holding My Center
Months before I ever filed for divorce, the separation had already sent me inward, and by the time the collapse hit, the inner work had become the most serious thing in my life. I don’t mean I went to therapy once a week. I hunted.
I put myself in situations that triggered the old programming just so I could hear my own inner dialogue about them, and I wrote it down in the notes app on my phone, and I carried those notes into therapy and worked through them, over and over and over.
Turning Toward Healing
Somewhere in there, the strangest thing happened: healing became my passion. During the separation, I had gotten honest about what I actually wanted my life to be for, and every answer had my daughter in it.
I wanted her to grow up inside a life of harmony, and I finally understood that the harmony had to exist in me before it could exist around her. The energy I had spent studying the markets started flowing toward this instead. I still had a long way to go on my healing journey when the fall began. But I was just far enough.
Choosing to Stay Present
So while everything external was sinking, something that I’d never known before was rising inside me. I would close the laptop on another brutal day, walk out of that room, and the day would not follow me through the door. Whatever was dying in there, stayed in there.
On the other side of the door was my daughter. Somewhere in that stretch, four years old, she told me: Daddy, my favorite thing about you is when you play with me. And I actually heard her.
I didn’t smile and file it away like the old me would have. The TV went off, the phone went away, and I got down on the floor and just played, in the middle of the worst years of my professional life.
Then I started asking her a question back: What’s Daddy’s number one favorite thing to do? And she’d answer, because she knew: spend time with me.
She’s years older now, and when I ask, she still answers without a flicker of doubt. Imagine being a kid and knowing that like you know your own name? That’s what we were building while the fund burned down.
I was living in gratitude for the first time. Not as a practice I forced. As the actual water I was swimming in.
What No One Can Take Away
There’s a voice memo I recorded in June 2022, nine months into the decline. I still have it. In it, I say:
My worth is not tied to what happens to my business. Even if it all fails, nothing inside changes. The love is here. It’s inside of me now.
I recorded that in the middle of the worst professional stretch of my life, and I wasn’t performing for anyone. It was just true.
If that sounds abstract, let me make it as plain as I can. What I had built, for the first time in my life, was a source inside me that did not depend on anything outside me.
I know it was real for one reason: everything outside me went away, and it held. Pain stayed pain. It never once became a verdict on who I was.
Two Things Can Be True At Once
I recorded a second memo, hours apart, on the same day. In that one, I describe how the decline has been brutalizing me month after month. That I’ve lost all motivation. That I feel incapacitated.
Both memos were true. That’s the most honest thing I can tell you about those years: the engine was dying, and the floor was holding. At the same time, in the same man.
My drive for the work died completely. The old fuel had been fear, and the healing had taken the fear. When it left, the hunger left with it. For a long time, nothing rose to replace it. I kept thinking I had lost the thing that made me successful.
Eventually I realized something else had happened. The engine that ran on proving myself was gone. What remained was someone who didn’t have anything to prove.
The Human Operating System
The floor that held me has a name now. Beneath your circumstances and even your thoughts is what I call the human operating system: the internal architecture that determines how you experience your life, what you believe is available to you, and what happens inside you when things get hard.
Mine had been rebuilt just enough that when everything on top of it fell, it held. The collapse was real. The drowning was real. And through all of it, I was the happiest I had ever been, because for the first time the happiness wasn’t standing on anything that could be taken away.
This Fire Never Goes Out
About two years before the end, in the middle of the decline, a spark came back. Not the old fuel. Something new, pointed at building something new. I wasn’t rebuilding a career. I was learning, from scratch, how to be a human.
By the time I let the fund go, the spark had become the fire that became Mindscape. And for the record: the happiest stretch of my life is no longer those years. It’s now.
There’s something I’ve said to my daughter since she was three, through every move and every change:
The only thing that doesn’t change is the love inside of you, and the love between you and me. Everything else will change. But you still have yourself, and you will always have me inside your heart. You can take that anywhere.
If life is falling apart around you right now, I won’t call it a gift or a lesson. Some of it is just loss, and loss deserves grief. But what falls apart around you doesn’t have to become what falls apart inside you. Those two can be separated. I’m not special, and I wasn’t born with the ability to distinguish between them. I built that capacity, later in life than I’d like to admit, starting withworse wiring than a lot of people.
There is a place inside you that remains untouched by your circumstances. You don’t have to know how to reach it yet.
I wrote this because the first step is simply knowing the door exists. I found it. Other people have found it. And you can too.
Eiad Asbahi is a founder and father. He spent nearly two decades managing an investment fund before a divorce sent him inward, and the next five years rebuilding his relationship with himself. He founded Mindscape to make the kind of guided, medically supervised care that changed his life easier to find and navigate.
To watch a video about Eiad’s journey, visit our About page.
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