When Everything Else Falls Away

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t written a blog for nearly 3 months. For someone who has been very active on LinkedIn, posting regularly, sharing thoughts, and joining conversations, that silence stands out. I have been acutely aware of it over the last few weeks. And it's not just blog articles, or keeping on top of social media. Email messages have stacked up. Ideas for articles, for training and for development of my business have come and gone without being acted upon.

It wasn’t intentional for this to happen. I didn’t decide to step back to be reflective, strategic, or selective. I didn’t plan a pause. I simply ran out of physical and mental capacity.

Over the past few months, life has narrowed my focus in ways I did not choose but could not avoid. A lot of the things that normally demand attention lost their urgency overnight. Not because they stopped mattering, but because something more immediate and more human took precedence. It became a period where priorities were stripped back to their simplest form. A period where everything else falls away.

At the beginning of November, my wife went into hospital for some planned surgery. It was meant to be serious but manageable. There was an expectation of recovery, disruption, and then a return to some kind of normal rhythm. Instead, it didn't go as planned. Complications followed, leading to her being readmitted just before Christmas and needing further procedures just before the New Year.

The run up to Christmas became something entirely different from what it usually is. It turned into hospital visits, phone calls, waiting rooms, and long stretches of uncertainty. Trying to create moments of calm and normality while carrying the quiet fear that comes when someone you love is not well and the outcome feels unclear. Time compresses in those moments. Days blur together. The outside world keeps moving while your own shrinks to hospital corridors, updates, and the next small decision.

At the same time, in mid November, I went into a severe ME crash. For anyone unfamiliar with ME, the word crash can sound dramatic or vague. In reality, it is brutally specific. It is your body shutting down systems you rely on. Energy disappears. Cognitive function drops. Even simple tasks can feel overwhelming. Recovery is not a choice. It is a demand.

Under normal circumstances, that would have meant stopping almost everything. Cancelling commitments. Reducing life to the bare minimum and resting for as long as it takes.

These were not normal circumstances.

The house still needed running. Meals still needed cooking. Paperwork still needed dealing with. Christmas still needed preparing for in whatever reduced form was possible. Appointments still needed attending. Unavoidable work commitments needed fulfilling. And of course, my wife needed practical care and emotional support. So I kept going, doing what needed to be done while my body protested constantly.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from having no real choice. From knowing you are operating beyond your limits and also knowing that stopping is not an option. You ration energy minute by minute. You make decisions based on what will hurt least later. You become very familiar with the cost of every action. And with ME there is always a cost. While everyone experiences it differently, most will attest to bone crushing fatigue, major flu-like symptoms, severe body aches. For me I ended up with all of this and severe nerve pain in my face, teeth and jaw. Physically I was a mess.

But alongside the physical strain is a quieter emotional weight. Responsibility sharpens. Awareness heightens. You are constantly scanning for what might go wrong next. You try to stay calm and present for someone else while managing your own fear, fatigue, and frustration. That kind of emotional labour rarely shows, but it drains just as deeply.

On top of all this, there were other issues with friends and family. Nothing dramatic in isolation. No single crisis that would justify stopping everything. Just enough additional strain to add pressure at exactly the wrong moment. When several things collide at once, even small tensions take up more space than they normally would. Emotional capacity shrinks quickly when there is no room to recover.

This period forced me to confront, very directly, what actually matters and what quietly falls away (and should) when life becomes difficult.

We talk a lot about work being important. We build our identity around it. We measure ourselves by output, momentum, reputation, and recognition. We sacrifice evenings, weekends, health, and relationships because work feels urgent, visible, and measurable. When things are going well, work becomes a convenient shorthand for who we are. If we are a success at work we see ourselves as a success in life.

When things fall apart, that identity becomes fragile.

This experience has been a blunt reminder that work isn't more important than family. No matter how senior you are, how specialist your role feels, or how central you believe yourself to be, work adapts when you step away. Projects move on. People adjust. Systems find workarounds. You might be missed briefly, but rarely for long.

Family (whether biological or close friendship) does not behave like that.

Time with people you love is finite. You do not get it back. You cannot store it for later or compensate for it with success. When someone you care about is ill, frightened, or vulnerable, being present is not something you can outsource or postpone. Looking back, no piece of work completed, no opportunity taken, no recognition gained would ever justify not being there.

There is another layer to this that sits alongside family, and that is health. It is easy to treat health as something flexible, something we can temporarily trade away and recover later. We tell ourselves we'll rest once this project is finished, once things calm down, once we're through the next busy period. The problem is that health doesn't work like that. You can't keep borrowing from it indefinitely without consequences.

Work is often happy to accept that trade. Deadlines don't care how you feel. Clients rarely see or think about the cost of delivery. Organisations benefit quietly when people ignore pain, exhaustion, or warning signs. Yet the reward for pushing past your limits is usually more work and higher expectations, not space to recover. Over time, that bargain becomes one sided.

When your health deteriorates, everything else becomes harder. Work takes longer. Decisions feel heavier. Relationships strain under the weight of fatigue and irritability. Even rest stops being restorative. At that point, work is no longer something you do. It becomes something that actively takes from you.

This has been a clear reminder to me that health isn't something that sits alongside ambition. It underpins everything. Without it, productivity becomes fragile, plans become unrealistic, and identity built around work starts to collapse. No role, contract, or reputation is worth sustained damage to your body or mind.

The hardest part is accepting that stepping back is not failure. It feels like letting people down. It feels like falling behind. In reality, protecting your health is what allows anything to continue at all. Ignoring it does not make you more committed or more resilient. It just shortens the distance between coping and collapse.

Work will always ask for more. Health sets the limit. Learning to respect that limit is not weakness. It is one of the few boundaries that actually matters.

This period has also exposed how fragile even careful planning really is. I plan. I think ahead. I try to be realistic about capacity and risk. None of that stopped plans from unravelling when life intervened. Planning has its value, but it does not offer protection. Sometimes the most sensible response is to stop trying to control outcomes and accept that progress will look different for a while.

This year is also the first for a while where my business has not won some kind of award. On paper, that might look like a step backwards. In another year, it might have felt like failure. But this year, it feels almost irrelevant. If anything, this has been the year where I have had to try the hardest. I have dealt with more disruption, more complexity, and more emotional strain than in years where recognition came easily. I have been productive in many areas, just not in ways that are visible or easy to package. Much of the work has been quiet, unseen, and focused on holding things together rather than pushing them forward.

We know this, but awards say very little about the reality of running a business. They do not measure resilience. They do not capture what it takes to keep going when circumstances are hostile. They say nothing about the effort involved in showing up when your personal life is heavy and your capacity is reduced. Judging a business, or yourself, by those markers alone misses most of the story.

Working for yourself while living with chronic illness and disability is horribly difficult. There is no safety net. No automatic sick leave. No one to quietly absorb the impact when you cancel work. When you step back, the gap is immediate and personal. This year I have had to pull out of a number of major pieces of work because my health simply would not allow me to deliver them. In a financially difficult year, that is frightening. It forces hard decisions and uncomfortable conversations. It also brings guilt, even when the decision is unavoidable.

That guilt is rarely spoken about. The guilt of letting people down. The guilt of lost income. The guilt of feeling unreliable in a world that values consistency and availability above almost everything else. But chronic illness does not care about those expectations. It sets limits and enforces them whether you are ready or not.

There is a quiet loss that comes with reduced capacity. When output drops, identity often goes with it. When visibility fades, it can feel like you are disappearing. It is easy to start believing that reduced productivity means reduced worth. That belief runs deep, especially in cultures that tie value so tightly to work.

I am not writing any of this for sympathy or admiration. I am writing it because it is easy to judge ourselves harshly when life strips away the usual markers of success. When visibility drops. When output slows. When recognition disappears. Even when the views on social media drop. Often, that judgement is misplaced. Often, we are not failing at all. We are simply carrying more than usual.

This period has reminded me that health matters more than momentum. Family matters more than work. Time matters more than recognition. Sometimes the real achievement is not progress or growth, but getting through the day with honesty, care, and as much kindness as you can manage, for others and for yourself.

If you are reading this while feeling behind, stretched thin, or quietly disappointed that your efforts are not producing the results you expected, you're not alone. Life doesn't pause for our plans. It doesn't reward endurance neatly or fairly. All we can do is keep sight of what truly matters, when everything else falls away.