Kirsten Breidenbruch

Summary

Kirsten Breidenbruch spent a decade at BlackRock. She made VP. She was making great money. From the outside, she had everything figured out. From the inside, she was waking up two hours early every day just to calm herself down enough to walk to work. Her feet felt like cinder blocks. Her body was rejecting the life she built. In this conversation, Kirsten takes us inside the war between the identity she spent years constructing and the person she was becoming underneath it, the panic attacks she masked, the mindfulness sessions she led at work while quietly falling apart, the spreadsheet she made to see if she could afford to quit (and then ignored for months), and the walk on the beach with her dad where she finally said it out loud. She talks about what it actually feels like to dismantle a life that looks perfect, why she wore a white Anthropologie dress to her quitting meeting, and the moment her boss called an hour after she resigned and said "I'm kinda jealous." This is for anyone who has everything they're supposed to want and still feels like something is fundamentally wrong.