Whisper #2When Your Fire Consumes You
May 27, 2025 | Safwen Daghsen, 15 min read
10,374 rejections. That's where the counter stopped.
My dear reader, last week we walked through the flames of persistence—the infinite game where you don't need to win every battle, just refuse to lose the war.
But what happens when you finally win?
When the goal you've chased relentlessly suddenly stop running?
Kahlil Gibran once whispered:
And thus your freedom, when it loses its fetters, becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom.
~ The prophet
I never understood these words until I lived them.
This whisper carries a confession: sometimes the fire you feed to keep you warm will burn you from the inside out if you forget to step away from it.
The thing about obsession, it doesn't end when you reach your goal. It just finds new corners of your soul to consume.
Every grip we hold too tightly eventually shapes us into its own image.
Every identity we cling to becomes the cage we built for ourselves.
This is an invitation, to look at what you might think is You, but is not.
To see the goals, titles, and achievements you're gripping so tightly that your knuckles have turned white.
What would happen if you loosened that grip, just a little?
What might you discover about the hand underneath?
Your life is yours, my dear reader, and it's truly up to you to fuck around and find out.
I can only whisper what happened when I did.
Covid lockdown.
The world paused, but my mind wouldn't.
After years of rejections, I decided to become the opportunity I couldn't find.
I built a yoga platform for the Berlin studio where I taught, bringing the engineer and the yogi into one breathing body, Green Yoga .
I was busy—teaching classes, building code, finding harmony in this unexpected convergence.
And yet, some small, anxious part of me still threw job applications into the void.
Out of habit.
Out of fear.
Out of the identity I couldn't quite shed.
Until one day, I stopped, not from hopelessness, but from presence.
I was too alive in what I was creating to remember what I'd been chasing.
The counter stopped: 10,374 rejections.
Late 2020, a message appeared in my inbox from a stranger in the UK who'd found me on a digital nomad platform.
"Coffee over a call?"
I didn't mind.
The coffee became a tech talk.
The tech talk became an offer.
The offer became fate.
Ninth engineer at a British startup. Paid in pounds sterling.
And then it hit me, I had spoken this exact reality years before, during that first insulting job offer, when I bluffed:
"I work with clients in the UK, paid in pounds sterling." ( full story here )
See? Call it coincidence, call it randomness if you need to.
But words carry the weight of the emotion spoken with them.
They move through time differently than we do.
I saw the counter stop, and I took the job.
That first day, I worked eight hours.
The second day too.
By the third week, ten hours felt normal.
After years of wanting to work, I had an insatiable hunger.
Not for the work itself, but for something deeper, recognition, belonging, proof that those 10,374 rejections were wrong about me.
With Covid lockdown, I found myself in a whole different dimension.
When I first joined, everything felt perfect, like finding a tribe that understood my particular brand of madness.
We were all "crazy" in our own ways, all valued for our uniqueness.
The freedom was intoxicating – work whenever, wherever, however you wanted. How could I not fall in love?
But as any ancient forest would tell you: too much rain can drown even the strongest roots.
Too little sun leaves even the tallest trees withering.
I am referencing Echoes from the Ancient Wood: Cultivating Timeless Leadership
Remember, now I worked three jobs:
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Building the platform for the yoga studio
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Teaching yoga online
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This dream job that finally validated me
For someone who chased jobs for so long, I got what I asked for and more.
I was willing to bust my ass working, little did I know that reaching the goal was just a station, not the terminal.
My schedule got crammed.
I would work from 8am to 4pm as an engineer, teach yoga from 5pm to 7pm, and from 8pm to 2am work on the online yoga platform.
Drinking Red Bull at seven in the morning.
Not caring about balance nor my health.
Like a thirsty man walking the desert for three years, all I saw was water. And all I cared about was drinking, even if thirst was gone.
"You got what you asked for and more," I'd tell myself.
"Keep at it, you got no excuses."
I was so hungry after all those rejections, I wanted it all.
Until my body gave out.
I didn't understand then that this kind of fuel eventually burns the container that holds it. That this fire has a name, a particular pattern, that everyone is invited to observe—but at that moment, the fire was mine alone.
The yoga teacher in me knew better, but was silenced.
My body began sending signals I refused to receive.
My breath became shallow, efficient, just enough to keep coding.
"Tech is my real passion" I told myself, justifying the obsession.
"I'm finally doing what I was meant to do."
This job had to be secured at all costs.
The alternative was unthinkable, returning to that dark place.
The rejected place.
The fire was burning, and I was the wood.
Sometimes I would look at the horizon, past my screens, and whisper to myself:
"It's finally better."
"Life is better now."
I repeated this until I almost felt it was true.
A year later, I ended up breaking up with my partner.
The relationship had been crumbling beneath the weight of my obsession and my emotional absence.
I barely noticed until the ruins were at my feet.
Funny thing about heartbreak—I had a fix.
I glued the cracks with more work.
I wrapped the pain in productivity.
Work became my meditation, my medication, my salvation.
4 AM wake-ups to tackle code before the world stirred.
Midnight oil burning until my eyes couldn't focus. I'd volunteer for my teammates' tasks, hungry for more distraction.
Pride is a seductive companion until it becomes your prison guard.
I'd do anything—everything—to fill the hours that might otherwise force me to face my reflection.
To avoid the questions that lived in silence.
To escape the feeling of my heart splitting open in my chest.
I never asked myself how I felt.
I knew the answer would require attention I wasn't willing to give.
I knew my heart was breaking.
I knew I probably had some fucked up things to heal.
But the only medicine I recognized came in the form of:
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Lines of code.
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Weights at the gym.
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Problems I could solve.
The thing about workaholism is its perfect disguise as virtue.
You work because "it's your responsibility."
Because "who else is gonna do it if you don't?"
Because "this is what committed people do."
And the worst part? It delivers results.
Goals achieved.
Teammates impressed.
Skills sharpened.
Promotions granted.
The mind can't argue with outcomes. and the heart can only whisper beneath the noise.
So I kept going, fueled by external validation, until my salary was raised twice in less than four months without even asking.
I crossed into six figures.
The boy from Africa who once earned 30 dollars a week now made more money than he'd ever imagined possible.
I didn't know how to hold this reality.
I didn't know how to manage these emotions.
The only thing I knew when overwhelmed by anger or joy, it didn't matter was to walk.
I remember that day, walking for 4 hours, crying my heart out with gratitude.
Tears streaming down my face with no one to witness them.
My body trying to release what my mind couldn't process.
Little did I know that moment of gratitude was just the beginning of a disastrous end. The fire I'd been feeding was now consuming me from inside.
My body began sending louder signals:
Insomnia that medication couldn't touch.
Muscles that ached even in stillness.
A mind that raced even in exhaustion.
A heart silenced beneath layers of mental justification.
The mind, my dear reader, is not You. It is only a tool.
Untamed and ridden by your ego, it carries you further and further from what matters most.
But what does your heart say when you finally let it speak?
Meanwhile, the company transformed around me.
As the organization grew, the delicate ecosystem changed. What once felt like a family began to feel like a system. The spirit that had brought life and creativity began to shift into something mechanical.
In nature, no tree stands alone – its strength comes from a network of roots intertwining beneath the surface, communicating through fungi and sharing resources. When that underground network is severed, even the mightiest oak becomes vulnerable.
From being the 9th engineer, I watched as we grew to nearly 200 employees. I became the veteran, the institutional knowledge, the reliable pillar. The one jumping between teams, helping everywhere, coaching new engineers, onboarding fresh talent.
And then the sweetest irony—I found myself on the other side of the interview table. The guy whose worth was questioned 10,374 times now became the one who assessed others' worth.
Interviewing candidates from Twitter, Netflix, and other prestigious companies.
I felt a dark pride in this reversal of fortune. I was the guy from Africa, the one rejected countless times, now the gatekeeper who could welcome or turn away.
I found belonging in being needed.
I found worth in being essential.
I found identity in being the one who could never fail.
Until things got tense.
Until my mind lost its edges.
Until I found myself:
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Leaving keys stuck in doors
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Eating dinner foods for breakfast
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Forgetting where I'd parked my car for days, not hours
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Diagnosed with cognitive fatigue, a clinical term for a mind that's been burned to ash
I was working entirely from home, barely meeting people in real life, my screen the only window to a world beyond my walls.
When my team finally burned out, everyone falling sick simultaneously, I held the roof alone for two weeks—one person doing the work of many.
I cracked. Not a clean break, but a fracture that could no longer be ignored.
They forced me to take two weeks off. I fought against it. I didn't even recognize I was burning.
The fire had become so familiar I'd forgotten what it felt like to be cool.
The first day of my forced sick leave, I panicked—not from the absence of work, but from the sudden presence of silence.
Two years had evaporated like morning mist.
Two years without a single day off.
Two years of relationships crumbling while I stared at screens.
Two years working like a mad dog, chasing validation I couldn't seem to grasp.
I hadn't traveled as I promised myself.
I hadn't taught yoga.
I hadn't even unrolled my mat and my heart beat only because of an over-caffeinated system that couldn't afford to rest.
In the stillness of that first day off, a terrible truth emerged: I had become a slave to my own goal. I was imprisoned by the very freedom I had fought for.
I will not bore you with corporate details, but as the company grew wildly, policies changed. That's when the slap in the face came.
I was suddenly classified as a TIER 4 employee, a new system separating people by regions. The boy from Tunisia who had climbed so high was reminded of his place in the global hierarchy.
Imagine the cosmic joke of being from a "third world country" and now being labeled a "fourth class employee"
It didn't matter how good an asset you were.
It didn't matter how long you'd been loyal.
It didn't matter how many nights you'd sacrificed.
You are expandable. Replaceable. Disposable.
No matter how much you gave.
No matter how much heart you poured into the job.
No matter how much you believed.
Burnout after burnout, something shifted. I began speaking up about social justice, questioning leadership, challenging the system that had once seemed like salvation but now felt like a prison.
I watched as my seniority was stripped away by new policies. I felt the walls closing in, trapped once again in exactly what I had tried to escape.
The most painful realization: I had become my job, and my job had become me.
I had identified so completely with my role that I forgot the golden rule of business: Never love a company that can't love you back.
I transformed from the eager, grateful worker to the vocal, unsatisfied employee who always had something to say about every injustice.
Trapped in a new system. Full circle.
Late 2023, I found myself in an exit interview.
Signing an NDA to not speak of why. (Remember, this fire has no name, though my first word as a child was "Why")
And here I am.
Fired.
Again.
I remember, 5 AM the morning after.
Made myself a coffee.
Opened my laptop automatically, muscle memory taking over.
Forgetting I was laid off yesterday.
My access was revoked. My email was deleted. My digital existence, erased.
And that's when it hit me, like a wave crashing against stone:
Three years had gone by.
Three years of my life burned as offering.
Who the fuck are you now? Without your job? Without your titles? Without your fat salary?
The identity I'd built, the self I'd constructed so carefully, collapsed like a house of cards.
I choked on air.
I panicked in stillness.
I cried without sound.
Never in my life had I lost myself to that point. I'd survived rejections, crossed seas, built new lives. But this was different, I had become so identified with what I did that I'd forgotten who I was.
I didn't even know what had happened.
Nor who I was anymore.
I'd become the fetters I once escaped.
Money won't make you feel your emotions.
Titles won't mend your broken heart.
This isn't about hating money or success.
This is about the wisdom of not letting them define who you are.
I over-identified with my work because it gave me a crutch.
A way to skip feeling my emotions.
A path around my darkest shadows.
Workaholism burned me from inside out, and the only reason was that I was:
Delusional.
Afraid to feel.
So stuck in the head.
Mistaking mental understanding for heart-knowing.
The obsession was a signal that something inside wasn't aligned.
The titles were just filling a void. The extreme hours were just me putting my head in the sand.
I led people, coached them. If we ever worked together, you've probably heard me say: "Take a breath."
I was the one choking on air. I was derailing from who I truly am.
And then came the question that shattered everything:
Who are you without your job?
Without your titles? Without your partner?
Without your money?
"Senior engineer. Team lead. Tech lead."
All those titles suddenly felt void and hollow. "A yoga teacher," my mind whispered. But that was also a title, one that could be stripped away.
I now understand that true wisdom lies not in finding belonging in a company, but in becoming the forest yourself, diverse, resilient, capable of weathering storms and droughts alike.
The most ancient trees know their worth isn't measured by the clouds above, but by their own deep roots and steady growth.
The true spirit moves like wind through branches – unseen but essential, nurturing what matters most.
I am no one. But this fire has a name.
So my dear reader, that story wasn't a rant.
It was a whisper.
I hope it seeds in you that you're much more than what you think you are. That pride in your work is beautiful, but you are more than what you do.
The obsession I've described here isn't only about work.
It's about answering these questions:
What are you avoiding?
What part of your life are you obsessing over?
What are you distracting yourself from?
This story is about work, but it could be anything— with a positive or negative connotation.
It doesn't matter.
Work, fitness, binge-watching all justifiable to the mind.
A good thing.
A duty.
A responsibility.
Addiction, smoking, alcohol—they hold negative connotations, but in the mind of the addict, they too are justifiable.
Take a breath.
Feel the space between your identity and your essence. That space is where freedom lives.
This isn't about leaving your job, or dying to find one.
You may blame it on your workspace, the toxic people around you.
But originally your life is a single player game.
Your intention, the choices you make consciously and subconsciously, and everything around you are a manifestation of a combination of your soul, heart, ego and shadows.
So fuck around and find out who's causing the bad taste in your experience.
It’s probably you.
And at any point, if your mind thinks you don't have a choice, think again .