The Cost of Refusing the System

Something I have never really talked about clearly is the sacrifice that comes with trying to live outside of the system.

And when I say “system,” I mean the thing that tells you your time, your body, your energy are only valuable if they can be exchanged for survival. Where your worth is measured in productivity. Where you sell your labour just to exist.

I have been trying to live outside of that logic for a long time now. Not because I had a blueprint. Not because I saw someone do it in a way that felt honest and real. But because I could not find a way to fully belong inside of it without betraying something in me.

And I want to be honest about something that often gets left out of the conversation online.

Most of the people I see teaching “freedom” or “financial independence” or “building a life outside the system” are not fully naming the privilege they started with. Or the safety nets that existed before they made it look like a clean leap.

My experience has not been that.

I have never had a model that showed me how to do this in a grounded, transparent way. I have mostly been learning through trial, survival, intuition, and consequences I did not always know how to carry.

And I am not saying this as a guide for others to replicate.

I am not encouraging people to live the way I have lived.

This path has been an experiment in inner autonomy. In listening to my own knowing even when it made no financial sense. Even when it made no social sense. Even when it isolated me.

Sometimes that has brought me into incredibly beautiful, life expanding experiences. And sometimes it has stretched me so thin that I do not think most people would understand what it actually costs to choose that kind of inner alignment without external safety.

I have never made more than about 30,000 in a year from my business. I have always had to figure things out month by month, decision by decision.

There has been no financial backup. No inherited cushion. No family structure waiting to catch me if I fell.

When I started my business, I was also becoming a mother.

Not in theory. In reality.

And then, a few years into building what I thought was my life, I found myself going through the end of my relationship, custody processes, depression, anxiety, PTSD that I already carried but never fully understood the depth of.

So I was not just building a business.

I was rebuilding a life while trying to hold myself together emotionally, mentally, financially, and as a parent.

I had been working as a dental assistant at one point, studying, carrying student debt, trying to find stability, while also being a new mother with no real financial family support to lean on.

And there was something in me that understood early on, I can survive hardship.

I have always known how to survive.

But building something stable, something sustainable, something outside of the system I was raised in, that was a different challenge entirely.

Because the system I was in was constantly asking me to extract from myself.

Work more. Give more. Produce more. Fit in. Obey. Make it make sense.

But it never made sense to me.

Not emotionally. Not spiritually. Not as a mother.

The expectation was simple.

Put your child in daycare. Get a job. Be productive. Contribute. Keep going.

And something in me could not accept the cost of that exchange.

Not because I think I am above it.

But because I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and I do not trust the idea of handing my child over to systems or people without deep internal resistance. That shaped me more than I often say out loud.

So I made a decision that put me in an impossible position.

To raise a child alone while building a business from scratch is not something I would recommend to anyone. It is destabilizing in ways that are hard to explain.

But I also knew one thing with absolute clarity.

I was not going to let someone else raise my daughter.

And I was not going to build a life where my worth was determined by how many hours I could give away from her.

Because what was being normalized did not feel like life to me.

It felt like extraction.

It felt like a slow trade of presence for survival.

And I could not do it.

So I did something that made very little logical sense at the time.

I chose a different path.

And part of that path eventually meant leaving Canada and moving to Colombia, because financially I could not sustain the kind of life I wanted here without overworking myself into disconnection.

That was not a romantic decision. It was a practical one.

If I stayed, I would have had to work more just to maintain a basic standard of living. And I was trying to also be present as a mother, and build something from nothing, and not lose myself in the process.

Something had to give.

And I refused for it to be my time with my child.

But I also need to be honest about the cost.

This choice has been isolating. It has been financially unstable. It has required me to confront parts of myself that were not always resourced enough to hold what I was carrying.

And still, I do not regret it.

Because I chose it.

And I think that is the part many people avoid.

We are afraid to choose. Because choosing means taking responsibility for a life that does not follow the script.

And instead, we normalize things that quietly destroy us.

We normalize drinking every weekend just to cope. We normalize relationships that feel empty or harmful. We normalize rent that consumes our entire lives. We normalize working in ways that disconnect us from our bodies, our children, our creativity, our joy.

We normalize survival as if it is the only option.

And I have refused that.

Not perfectly. Not without contradiction. Not without struggle.

But consistently enough to know that something else is possible.

And I also want to say this clearly.

There is privilege in my story too.

If I did not have the option to leave the country, I would have had to navigate this very differently. That matters. I do not want to romanticize my situation or erase that truth.

But even with that privilege, it has still been hard.

Because what I am really speaking about is not just personal struggle.

It is systemic pressure.

It is the way the system is designed to keep people exhausted enough that they cannot imagine alternatives.

And I have felt that in my body.

I have felt it in inflammation. In exhaustion. In depression cycles that come from pushing myself beyond what is sustainable just to survive financially. In the pressure to turn myself into a machine so I could produce enough to stay afloat.

At one point, I realized I was recreating the exact system I was trying to escape.

I was extracting from myself the way corporations extract from people.

And my body started speaking.

Pain. Eczema. Back issues. Emotional collapse. Nervous system overload.

It was not abstract anymore.

It was physical.

And I had to change.

I had to stop treating myself like a machine.

I had to learn that I am cyclical. That I am not designed for constant output. That my value is not tied to production.

And I had to rebuild my work from that truth.

Because the deeper truth is this.

It is not just about mindset.

It is not just about alignment.

It is not just about strategy.

There is a system that benefits from you believing that if you just fix yourself enough, you will succeed inside it.

And I do not think that is the full truth.

Some people are struggling not because they are broken, but because they are trying to survive inside structures that were never designed for their wellbeing.

That is not an excuse. It is an observation.

And I think the real work is learning the difference between personal responsibility and systemic reality.

Because both exist at the same time.

What I know now is that I am building something, not just surviving something.

And that shift changes everything.

But it also requires community.

It requires people. Real people. Not just audiences. Not just followers. Not just content.

Actual relationship.

Because if there is anything I am certain of now, it is that isolation is one of the biggest costs of trying to live differently.

And even with all the sacrifice, I would not go back to pretending the system is neutral.

It is not.

It asks you to give up your time, your energy, your life force, and often your presence with the people you love most.

And I chose not to do that in the same way.

For my daughter.

And for myself.

And I am still in the in-between.

Not fully out. Not fully in.

Still navigating how to build something that is financially sustainable without abandoning myself in the process.

But I know now that I am not the problem.

And neither are you, if you feel this tension too.

There is a system that makes freedom expensive. That makes rest expensive. That makes presence feel like a luxury.

And the courage, for me, has been in refusing to fully normalize that.

Even when it meant not being understood.

Even when it meant building slowly.

Even when it meant uncertainty.

And I think what I am really committed to now is this:

Building a life, a body, and a business that does not require self-abandonment to survive.

And remembering that we are not meant to do this alone.