I Walked Away From a $500k Career With No Back-Up Plan. So… What Now?
Part I of my mental health story
A year ago, I walked away from a cushy, $500k+ influencer career with no back up plan. So… what now?
Last week, I started to share my mental health story. How I went from flying first class and working as an ALDI spokesperson… to standing in ALDI, unemployed, mentally broken, picking through marked-down meat.
But it begs the question, what’s next?
Because walking away is one thing. Figuring out what you’re walking toward is something else entirely. Can I get an amen??
Before I picked up my feet to start on that walk, there was someone I needed to talk to first… my mom. For days, the conversation lived in my body before it ever left my mouth.
And before I go any further, it’s important to understand who she is in my life. She’s one of my greatest role models, mentors and unlike most moms: my dependent. For the past seven years, her financial livelihood has been my responsibility. By my choice, not hers. But still… that’s weight. The kind of weight that makes you rehearse a conversation in your head before you have it.
So there I was… stomach in knots, mentally workshopping sentences before they ever left my mouth, trying to make what I was about to say sound thoughtful instead of completely unhinged.
She was the first person I spoke my newly envisioned mission to—
Wild, I know. I didn’t stop there…
“I want to make films… in Hollywood.”
The words felt heavy sitting in the air between us. Reckless, even. Then a long pause followed by the whammy “Oh–and I want to be an artist,” a cruel nightmare for a parent who sacrificed everything for their child and expected them to be a thought-leader in STEM. Looking back, I fully expected resistance and disappointment.
For her to push back, hound me with questions:
why?
How are WE going to survive?
WHY??
Because from the outside, I was potentially walking away from a career that had finally “made it” for a path where most people quietly fail, run out of money, or give up before anything ever materializes… I had the kind of career and success people spend night after night praying for.
Real money, real momentum traded in for real instability disguised as passion.
And not in a cute, romanticized “struggling artist in a studio apartment” kind of way. I mean genuinely uncertain. The kind of path where belief has to arrive long before proof does.
So naturally, I expected my mother to be the voice of reason in the room.
Because she usually is.
She’s a woman of logic. The kind that meets emotional conversations with practicality and fact. She looked at me and said—
“You can do it. I believe in you.”
That was it. Well… mostly. No panic, no lecture, no “be realistic, honey.” Just trust.
I felt a LOT of things in that moment. A goosebumps up your arms kind of moment. I felt relief, mostly. But more than anything, it felt like the first real confirmation that I wasn’t walking away from my life.
I was finally walking toward it.
While we can’t predict the future, we can always look at the past and find patterns. This will click in just a sec. You might hear my mission “help the world heal,” and think it sounds a bit overzealous.
Fair.
But the data, and my very unconventional yet oddly consistent track record, say otherwise. Because this ain’t the first time I’ve looked at my life and thought, oh this ain’t working for me, no mo.
And every time, it felt just as uncertain and uncomfortable. Every reset required me to let go of a version of myself I had worked hard to build, then blindly step into something I couldn’t fully see yet.
But this time feels different. Not easier. Just… deeper. For the first time, I don’t feel driven solely by ambition or reinvention.
I feel called to step into this chapter.
Now, admittedly, I didn’t really answer the “so what now?” part yet. This was more the story of what happened immediately after the fall—and the pattern that quietly led me there in the first place.
As for what comes next…
We’ll get into that next time.
— Kasim