Growing Through Hard Times

👋 Hi my name is Roslyn, I’m a 2x founder and executive coach. I help founders fall in love with building their companies again. Learn about working 1:1 here.

Hi there,

It's been a minute since I've had the honor of gracing your inbox. Four months to be exact.

I've been navigating chronic fatigue for those four months, and man I've missed writing to you.

But I needed to take a pause from most of my work. I didn't feel the spark of inspiration to write because my lifeforce was depleted. And not only that — there were a couple weeks where it was hard to do much more than get out of bed to eat or move to the couch. I'm not going to lie, it was bleak.

Today is the first day I'm feeling energized to write. I'm not saying I'm fully on the other side of the fatigue — I'm coming to understand that this healing is an ongoing thing.

But I am ready to crystallize and share some of the learnings from this period because MAN there have been a ton.

So if you're struggling with chronic stress, burnout, fatigue or misalignment — this one is for you. 💚

--

PS if you’re new here, typically this newsletter focuses on the inner and outer work of building startups, but this is more of a personal one.

And also if you’re in NYC, I’d love to see you at our next Within Walk!

It started, I thought anyways, with my sister's bachelorette weekend. As the planner and host, and recovering people pleaser, I took it upon myself to ensure everyone was having the best weekend ever. I drank more than I normally do, slept poorly, overgave my energy, and ended up catching a cold.

The cold lasted two weeks, then three, then four. I kept pushing through my workweeks thinking surely this will be over soon, no? At a month, I begrudgingly admitted this was no longer a simple cold — I was back in a chronic fatigue situation.

This was such a frustrating moment. I thought I'd "beaten" the founder burnout and come out the other side victorious. (If you’re new here, I had to transition out of my first company due to founder burnout). But no, here I was, back in depletion.

I'd been building real momentum — expanding into new opportunities, stepping into new facilitation work, creating community for founders. But behind all of this there was a shadow. While vision and purpose were pulling me forward, there was also a less healthy, unseen force pushing me from behind: fear. Of not being enough. A need to prove over and over that I am capable, worthy, valuable — because deep down, parts of me still think that I am not.

So I pushed through the sickness until my body said no more. I let it go on for so many weeks without slowing down because I wasn't ready to surrender to what was happening — and to what that would mean. Clearing my calendar indefinitely of coaching calls, new client calls, facilitation, events, community. All the opportunities and relationships I'd cultivated. But I had to.

It was disappointing, frustrating, and humbling. Turns out, at the end of the day, I control nothing.

When I cleared my calendar I didn't know if I was pausing for a week, a month, a quarter, or longer. It ended up being two weeks in bed — lying there unable to sleep, nervous system activated, trying to do body scans and slow breathwork to calm myself down.

And it was during that time that I finally allowed myself to grieve. To realize that the reason it hurt so much to slow down was because underneath it all, I didn't feel worthy without accomplishment. If I wasn't building and creating and helping others, I was worthless. So I allowed this part of me to feel that awful pain and be lovingly witnessed — by me.

Everyday: wake up, feel the frustration and disappointment of being bedridden, journal out the feelings, feel the pain of worthlessness, cry. Repeat.

And each day that I allowed the pain to come up and be felt, I felt just the tiniest bit lighter.

There are many things that supported me throughout this period — being held by my husband, friends and community; getting support from wonderful practioners; and perhaps most importantly, seeking spiritual understanding. It was in this period that I started to look for the greater meaning, lesson, or gift of this challenging season.

And oh man, did I receive it.

It started with a book that helped me zoom out and see my fatigue with more perspective — and maybe even see how it was happening for me. As I leaned in and learned more, I experienced a huge opening in my understanding of reality, myself, and my place in the world.

So without further ado — here are the 7 lessons.

THE LESSONS AND GIFTS OF CHRONIC FATIGUE

1) “We Manifest at the Speed of Safety”

I heard this quote (attributed to Tracy Litt) on a podcast and it resonated deeply with my situation. In the last couple of years on this healing and spiritual journey, I've been experiencing big upgrades and realizations about what alignment looks like for me — going from CPA/Founder/CFO to coach/facilitator/community builder in a few short years.

And while I've been shifting into this new identity, my nervous system hasn't necessarily caught up yet. When you grow, you also need to expand your nervous system's capacity to hold that growth.

For example, towards the end of 2025, I felt really called to build community — to create safe spaces for founders to feel seen, supported, and connected. And I moved fast to make that happen. Within a few months: an online community with monthly calls, several events a month, a position facilitating forums for post-exit founders, and my first retreat.

Meanwhile, there was a part of me still terrified of the increased visibility in all of it — anxious about being perceived, judged, or not seen as capable enough by the very groups I was trying to serve. It pushed me to overprepare, rehearse, and make everything "perfect." So you can see how exhausting that would be. Spirit was asking me to step into service in this way. My body and nervous system weren't ready yet.

The big takeaway: sourcing inner safety needs to happen in parallel with the outer upleveling. For me that looks like working with a nervous system coach biweekly, reorienting from accomplishment to expression, and patiently working with the parts of me that are trying to protect me — slowly showing them that I have the wisdom and resources to hold these groups without overpreparing.

2) Suppressed Emotions Need to Be Felt Eventually

One of the reasons so many of us can't rest — activated nervous systems, always needing to go, do, achieve, produce — is because we have suppressed emotions under the surface. Grief, anger, sadness, shame. Emotions many of us learned we weren't allowed to feel and express when we were younger.

That was the case for me. As my body forced me into stillness, there was finally space for these unexpressed emotions to rise up. Grief especially — tears every morning, just coming up and out. Sitting on the couch bawling my eyes out (my husband low key a bit freaked out lol). Most of the time I didn't even know what the grief was about, and if it was even mine — I just knew it felt good to feel it and let it out.

A lot of the time, we have parts of us that are scared of us feeling these feelings, so they try to protect us — perfecting, people-pleasing, numbing, trying to control — anything to make sure we never feel the hurt again.

When we allow ourselves to feel the hard feelings fully in our body, and witness ourselves lovingly, those protector parts can finally relax. Our anxiety decreases. We act from alignment rather than self-protection. We take things less personally. We regard ourselves with more kindness. This is what becomes possible when we let ourselves feel what's been stored deep in the body.

3) Rest is Safe, and Needed

Resting and slowing down is a part of moving forward. My body forced me to learn this lesson over and over. Every time I regained a little energy and used it too hard — diving into a big chunk of work, doing a full strength workout like before the fatigue — I'd experience a post-exertion crash and be wiped for a day or two. Each time, back through the lesson of surrender.

Eventually I learned to treat myself with more gentleness: work for 45 minutes and go lie down. Take a break after each exercise and check in. These days there are big, hours-long chunks of open space in my calendar, and that spaciousness actually feels good. It used to feel safer to have it all blocked out. Now I understand that space is what lets intuition decide what I'm working on — or not — each day.

4) Time Does Not Equal Money

I've always subconsciously believed that more time, more hustle leads to more success. Having to scale back to 0%, then 25-50% capacity these last few months, has shown me that I can still attract income while working less. While I haven't signed new clients during this time (I haven’t been doing any discovery calls), my current clients have renewed, increased frequency, and even enrolled their employees in coaching with me. I've been offered the opportunity to grow my facilitation income. I’ve been earning the same or more income as before the fatigue while working significantly less hours.

These experiences have really shifted how I think about money. It's doing work where I’m a vessel for something greater — wisdom, healing, vulnerability, deep listening —  that attracts income and opportunities, not the number of hours I'm putting in.

5) Reorienting from Achievement to Soul Expression 

This was by far the biggest gift of my chronic fatigue. As I started to inquire into how this experience was serving me, I kept being guided to books that helped me understand it more deeply. I listened to this podcast, then read Robert Schwartz's Your Soul's Plan — which explores how before we're born, our souls plan out the lives they want to live, including the challenges they'll face, and the lessons those challenges are meant to teach. My fatigue, and the spiritual rabbit hole it took me down, helped me orient to the idea that I'm a soul here to learn, embody, and serve in a way that's uniquely mine.

As I embodied this knowing, my sense of purpose shifted. Five months ago I would have told you my purpose was about supporting conscious business building. Now I believe it's more about guiding people to wake up on their own healing and consciousness journeys. Through this shift, a vision of writing a book came through. And while it feels scary to put that in writing and share with you — it also feels really good. That clarity likely wouldn't have come as quickly without the fatigue. And for that, I am eternally grateful.

6) Aligned Community is Deeply Healing

Something that has healed me so much in this period is community. For a lot of my life I've had this feeling of being an outsider, of not fully fitting in — largely because who I really am hasn't always been a fit for the environments I've been in. A deep spiritual soul, an empath, a teacher and healer, who spent years earning success and approval through achievement, logic, and strategy in traditional business settings: business school, CPA at a professional services firm, Founder & CFO/COO of a sports media startup.

Now I've had the freedom to choose communities and friends that feel like a real fit — who see me for who I am, not just the value I bring. Those friendships carried me through this period in the vulnerable cocoon of transformation. Members of becoming collective coached me through my initial weeks of fatigue. My coaching program Aletheia gave me safe space to just be. My coach accountability pod — a group of ambitious, deeply human and spiritual friends — cheered me on as I announced that my weekly goal, every week, was simply to rest and take care of myself.

Healing happens in community. So much of our suffering as humans comes back to the fear of rejection, of not being accepted, of not being lovable. Being fully accepted has been a key piece of healing — and I know it will continue to be a key piece of expansion as I move forward.

7) We’re Breaking Down to Wake Up

I think this experience of my body breaking down in order for me to wake up to a higher calling is indicative of something happening in the collective right now. When I shared on social media that I was going through chronic fatigue, a number of people reached out immediately: me too. I'm burned out. I'm in a season of fatigue.

So many of us are exhausting ourselves being everything to everyone, fueled by fear. And it's keeping us from leading from a deeper place of wisdom, creativity, and love — which is exactly what the world needs right now, as it too breaks down to make space for something new.

We need to be the ones building that something new. And we can't do that running on empty.

So if you're reading this feeling the weight of chronic stress, overwhelm, suppressed emotions, unhealed trauma — I feel you, and I'm with you. You are not alone.

And also, let this be your invitation to wake up from the way you've been living. To get honest with yourself. To listen to what your soul is calling you toward. To claim your desires and gifts. You don't have to change everything today. Just take one small shift that brings you closer to yourself.

Healing from Chronic Fatigue

I want to share the healing tools, practices, and practitioners that have supported me — and continue to. What worked for me might not work for you, but I'm offering all of it in case any of it is meant for your journey too.

Physical Healing

• Functional Health with Parsley: bloodwork panels to evaluate health, plus supplement recommendations to support healing.

• Traditional Chinese Medicine with Dr. Margarita Russolello: addressing my Qi (life force) deficiency through acupuncture and herbs.

• Nervous system coaching with Amy Bonaduce-Gardner at Prism: teaching my nervous system to return to a parasympathetic state — significantly helpful.

• Diet: I've been tracking macros and calories through Claude, and using AskPetal (a women's health AI agent) for cycle-synced recipes and workouts.

• Exercise: pacing myself — one strength workout a week and daily walks.

• Tracking sleep and stress with Oura.

Emotional Healing

• Grief work with Robert Volinsky: a somatic and Inner Space Therapy healer — this has been life changing.

• Emotional release journaling: letting the emotion run wild on the page, often combined with somatic movement (stomping, pushing the wall, screaming into a pillow — whatever fits the feeling).

Spiritual Healing

These books helped me shift from the achievement paradigm to the soul journey paradigm:

• Broken Open by Elizabeth Lesser

• Your Soul's Plan by Robert Schwartz

• Being Ram Dass by Ram Dass

• The Last Frontier: Exploring the Afterlife and Transforming our Fear of Death by Julia Assante

For spiritual community, I've been loving being a part of becoming collective. You can get $20 off your first month with code BECOMINGFRIEND.

And finally — if you're experiencing chronic fatigue, burnout, overwhelm, or just feeling like life could be more fulfilling and aligned than it is right now, you're always welcome to book a 1:1 conversation with me. I'd love to see how I can help.

Sending you so much love, and hope to be back with you on the reg soon!

Roslyn

Within Walks

Join us for our next Within Walk for female founders next Friday, June 18th at 7:30am.

We’ll be walking and talking about our fear of being seen.

RSVP here.

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Thanks for being here. I’m so grateful.

With love,
Roslyn 💚