The day I walked away from everything I thought I wanted

What luxury retail taught me about power, silence, and creative integrity

I was brought in to fix a broken team.

On the surface, it was everything I’d worked for. High-end sophistication, prestige, money, indulgence. It was that kind of place with thick carpet, champagne flutes, and display cases holding more wealth than most people will see in a lifetime.

Customers would walk in, surrounded by silence and symmetry, and feel like they had stepped into another world. And that’s exactly what it was: a world carefully curated to project elegance, power and status.

But behind the scenes, something else was going on. Fistfights. Actual fistfights in the back room. The air in that stockroom didn’t smell like exclusivity or influence. It smelled like tension, fear, ego, and breakdown. And I had been brought in to fix it.

They hired me to “sort out” the team. To bring order, restore professionalism and improve sales. I was told - “you’re exactly the kind of presence we need here” - calm, experienced, emotionally intelligent.

What they didn’t tell me was that the team wasn’t just disorganised, it was traumatised. There was a reason why people had checked out, turned on each other, or disappeared quietly into sick leave. And the more time I spent there, the more obvious it became.

The problems in the team were symptoms of a deeper structural cause. The manager. The manager who had been there for the last 18 years.

The irony was that it was this manager who had spent six months pursuing me. Relentlessly selling the dream of growth, leadership and influence. She knew she needed help and she had picked me to help her turn the ship around. And now that I was inside, I saw it clearly: she was the reason the place was falling apart. It was heartbreaking.

After a distressed internal dialogue I decided I had to flag it. I did so, quietly at first, then formally. HR nodded and took notes. Head office made sympathetic sounds. But nothing changed, no one would speak out, not the senior salespeople, not the new starters. They were frozen. Afraid. Conditioned to protect the hierarchy. Even when everyone knew the truth, silence was the safer option.

Eventually, after a year of pressure, political mind games and tension so tight my back snapped, the company shuffled her sideways into a new “position”. A manufactured title that stripped her of employee responsibilities but allowed her to remain in the room. (This is what happens in a place with very strong labour laws).

That was the moment everything sharpened into focus.

I had been climbing this ladder for years. Building a reputation. Earning trust. Taking on more responsibility. Learning how to manage teams, people and emotions. And yet, the system wasn’t interested in truth. It wasn’t interested in fairness. All that it was interested in was self-preservation.

And I realised, I don’t want her job. I don’t want any job in a system like this. I don’t want to become successful in a structure that rewards suppression and punishes integrity.

So I walked. There were no dramatic speeches or tough confrontations, not even a final blaze of glory. I just left quietly. Because staying there any longer would’ve been a bigger betrayal than anything I’d already witnessed.

What followed was not a triumphant pivot into entrepreneurship. It was more like a collapse. The kind of tiredness that seeps into your bones. The kind that doesn’t go away with a weekend off or even a month off.

For the first time in years, I stopped trying to become something. I didn’t know what came next. I just knew I couldn’t keep pretending.

That’s when I started to write in an attempt to work out what had gone wrong and to slow down my racing thoughts.

At first it was small: journal entries, basic notes, private essays. Then, eventually, I started a YouTube channel. I launched a Substack. I began writing publicly. Tentatively, but honestly and something shifted. Not just in what I was doing, but in who I was becoming. I was essentially trying to build a new self. Trying to wake up that part of me that had gone quiet during all those performance reviews and team meetings. The part that already knew something was wrong.

Slowly, I started writing about the questions that had haunted me:

Why do we stay in places that make us sick?

How can we create a life that means something beyond the usual metrics of success?

What happens when you reject the path you were trained to walk?

Other people started to find my work. People who were also tired. People who didn’t want to shout online but still wanted to matter. People who weren’t looking to go viral they were looking to feel alive again.

This is what I’ve come to believe:

If you don’t do work that aligns with who you truly are, you will eventually break. Any system that prioritises its own survival over honesty or growth is already collapsing. And no one—not your boss, not your peers, not society—can define success for you.

That’s your job.

It won’t come overnight. You won’t get a certificate for doing it right. But the moment you start building a life on your own terms, you begin to reconnect with a part of yourself that’s been waiting a long time.

If you’ve ever felt like the system is rigged against your integrity, you’re not wrong.

If you’ve ever felt that quiet dread on Sunday evening, the one that whispers you can’t keep doing this, you’re not alone.

And if you’ve ever looked around and thought, I don’t want her job, maybe it’s time to walk away.

Not into chaos. Not into delusion. But into something slower, quieter and more true to yourself.

That’s what I’m building. And if you’re here, maybe you are too.

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