I didn’t wake up that morning expecting my life to change. I woke with a thud, disoriented and hollow, my body still shaking from a night that felt like it had stolen pieces of me. The room was spinning. My heart was heavy. And for a split second, I wasn’t sure if I was relieved or disappointed to still be here.
It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t loud. It was the kind of moment where the truth hits you so quietly that it takes the air out of your lungs. I remember lying there on the floor thinking, I can’t keep living like this. I wasn’t trying to leave the world because I didn’t want life. I was trying to escape the version of life I had been trapped in for so long. The emptiness. The shame. The feeling of never being enough. The way survival had become the only thing I knew how to do.
I grew up inside scarcity. Scarcity of money, of safety, of self-worth. You learn to live with what hurts because it feels familiar. You stop asking for help because you don’t believe you deserve any. I carried that into adulthood, right into the nights I couldn’t remember and the mornings I didn’t want to face. I had nothing. No money. No confidence. No sense that things could ever get better. And the scariest part was how normal that had become to me.
People talk about rock bottom like it’s a movie scene. Mine was quiet. Just a girl lying on the floor after a night that should have ended differently, realising she was so tired of the pain that she didn’t know how to keep going.
But in that stillness, something unexpected happened. I realised I didn’t want to die. I wanted the version of me that was suffering to die. I wanted the patterns and the self-destruction and the emptiness to end. I wanted a life that didn’t feel so impossible to carry.
I didn’t know it then, but that painful, disorienting morning became the first moment I ever chose myself. Not because I knew how. Not because I felt ready. But because something inside me whispered that there had to be more than this.
A shift in perspective
The early days were not beautiful. They were slow and uncomfortable and full of moments where I questioned everything. I didn’t trust myself. My nervous system was wired for chaos. I still woke up some mornings feeling like I was dragging the old version of me around by the ankles.
But something had shifted. I had made a decision.
I was going to live.
I was going to try.
I was going to figure out who I could become if I stopped abandoning myself.
Looking back, this was the beginning of my million-dollar inner pathway. At the time, I didn’t have language for it. I didn’t have a plan or a strategy. I was simply trying to put myself back together. But each time I chose honesty over hiding, each time I chose healing over numbing, each time I chose responsibility over blame, I was building the foundation of a woman I hadn’t even met yet.
If you had told the version of me on that floor that one day she would create a life of freedom and wealth, that she would build a business that changed lives, that she would stand in rooms teaching women how to rise, she would have laughed. She didn’t believe she was worthy of anything. She didn’t know how to receive. She didn’t know she had a future.
But she kept going anyway.
She shifted her identity one tear at a time.
She learned to trust herself.
She learned to rise after every fall.
She learned that survival wasn’t her destiny.
And slowly, piece by piece, she became me.
People see the life I live now and they often assume I was always this woman. But this woman was built from the inside out. She was built from every moment I chose truth over illusion. She was built from every time I sat with my pain instead of running from it. She was built from the decision to stop living in survival and to start creating a life that felt like freedom.
If I could rise from that floor to this life, then anyone reading this needs to know that your lowest moment is not the end. Sometimes it is the doorway. Sometimes it is the moment where life quietly asks if you are willing to choose yourself. Even a little. Even through shaking hands and a broken heart.
You can rise.
You can rewrite your story.
You can become someone your past self never believed was possible.
I did. And it all started on a morning I thought was the end – and turned out to be the beginning of everything.
Leisa Tindal
