Let me tell you a story about trying to stand up while you are still falling. When nothing feels steady. When every attempt to stand only leads to another stumble. When you lose everything you built in a lifetime. When you lose faith in everything you ever believed in. And yet, you choose to keep rising.
Resilience is not a character trait. It is a choice we must make.
At its core, this is not just about starting over. It is about the deeply awkward, imperfect act of changing one's life publicly. It is about accepting a reality you never wanted to accept because the alternative would be to simply give up.
This is not the clean comeback story I ever expected for myself.
I did not plan for it. I did not see it coming. It arrived uninvited, bringing chaos, loss, and deep grief when I least expected it. Above all, it forced a severe reckoning with some extremely uncomfortable truths about the world.
But before I continue, I want to be clear. Everyone must face their own challenges on their own time. Writing this story is my attempt to face my owns.
At the age 45, I find myself having to start all over again.
How It All Began
My work life began around the age of 17, my first job was tech support for Microsoft. Not long after that, I moved onto building and fixing computers. In the late 90s, this was a cultural moment. Building your own PC was a rite of passage. I loved the absolutly everything about that time in my life.
And then, that's when the bug of entrepreneurship first bit me.
Coming up with ideas, building them in the shape of a business and turning thoughts into reality was incredibly exciting. The thought of building my own business was exciting, still is today. At that time, I lost any interest in working in a place where my agency was limited by other people.
I turned my passion for tech into a service. That service turned into sales. Eventually it became my first actual business: a internet cafe.
In all truth,it was more of a gaming house than a place for coffee. Kids lined up after school to play Counter Strike. It did well, right up until it didn't. A competitor chain moved in nearby, and overnight, my customers vanished.
That was my first lesson in business.
If you are not agile enough to adapt to market conditions, your success has a short shelf life. This failure forced me to look closely at the data. I realized I had built something people wanted, but I lacked the systems to track and scale it properly.
I was in my early 20s when I decided to go back to school to close that gap. I earned myself an undergraduate degree in Communications with a specialisation in Marketing and Advertising. It felt like the correct next move at the exact time.
The First Agency
Whilst going to university, I took on a job at the marketing department of a major consumder goods company, and towards the end of my course, I teamed up with friends to launch an advertising agency. The partnership was a tense blend of deep friendship and professional rivalry. It pushed us all to grow faster.
One of my partners became a major influence in my life. There was a degree of friction between us that helped us both fuel our ambitions and grow.
After a few years, our visions pulled apart. We had different distinct dreams pulling us in new directions. Parting ways was a tough moment to process. But that event taught me about deep trust. It taught me the sheer power of having people around who actively challenge you.
Scratching an Itch
If you expect anything you read here to make sense you nee to know that I grew up in Brazil, but I never truly felt at home. My cultural mindset has always been heavily shaped by American and British media. My own way of processing hard logic always felt totally foreign compared to my local peers.
I grew up on a steady diet of heavy rock music. I loved the dry absurdity of classic British comedies. American blockbusters filled my weekends, but so did gritty British crime films. I tracked the rise of raw tech founders with a deep fascination. My library was composed of authors who never sat foot in Brazil. My cultural identity formed thousands of miles away from my actual childhood home.
This unique mix came from having a solid base. My parents bought me a great education. It gave me total access to big ideas far beyond the local norm.
Eventually, I made my move to London.
At the age of 28, I was starting completely over. But from the moment my feet hit the solid floor, I felt a deep peace I had never known. There is more to dig into there, but I leave the details of that story for another day.
Building a New Life
Before leaving Brazil, I had a difficult talk with my girlfriend at the time. I shared my fast dreams and tight goals for the future. I put absolutely everything on the table. I asked her if she wanted to take the risk of building a life with me abroad.
Her answer was simple: "Wherever you go is my home."
We married and started building a joint family project. I brought my tight design systems. She brought her deep sales experience. The plan was to build a web esign studio. I would do the work, she would do the talk. It was a perfect match.
But life has a cruel way of wrecking the simplest plans.
In less than a week I had found my cultural fit in London, but people are different. She dealt with the shock of a new country slightly differently. I pulled back on our plans. I hoped that time would be enough to make everything fall in its place.
I started freelancing. She took on a job. The plans were postponed.
A Wild Ride
It was around that time, late 2013, that I ended up stumbling into something completely unexpected. The cryptic and fascinating world of Bitcoin.
The freelancing was paying the bills, but the financial returns were not scalable. What I started to make from crypto investments was crushing my freelance earnings. This was a much more profitable line of business.
I did not think twice. I dove straight into the deep end.
At the time the crypto space was fascinating. I was hooked. It scratched my deep, fast interest in tech and it gave me freedom that I could not imagine.
The crypto community was small. People believed this was the clean start of a new digital economy, a new financial system. Those were the real golden years.
My wife was thriving in her job. I was banking in crypto. Life was simple.
We never returned to the our original life plans. The path crypto offered gave me a fast new target. I decided to stack a massive crypto pot. The goal was to increase my portfolio enought to buy a paid upfront and live off the interest.
My days were spent tracking daily data, running hard numbers, and betting on new launches. The strategy worked almost perfectly. I aggressively managed my risk. I pulled great, solid returns. I stacked a huge, digital portfolio.
But the market had other plans.
Facing Hard Truths
A few years later, I had my first child. That changed my mindset to go back to our life original plan of building a family business. But this time, instead of a massive design studio, I aimed for something less ambitious. We walked through the idea of starting a second-hand shop. It felt solid.
The idea is that the business would allow our family to live a more stable life. We planned to split our time between the child and the store. My bet was on the idea that a small shop would lower our total personal stress. I wanted to actively escape the total chaos of online trading and build something more tangible.
Sadly, reality did not match our math.
Bittersweet Symphony
Becoming a father shifted my core reality in ways I could not predict. Even with the brutal friction, it remains the ultimate focal point of my life. Anyone who claims children hold you back does not understand hard human mechanics.
But parenthood rarely follows a clean blueprint.
We both stepped into this new role with high hopes that totally clashed with the raw reality of it. What I failed to firmly grasp then was the severe depth of our internal struggles as human beings, not parents.
We hit emotional walls. We had zero tools to correctly navigate them, much less completely fix them. Through the rising chaos, I learned a brutal lesson. Love is not always enough to bridge the massive gap between two deeply different people.
I was pushed to an absolute psychological breaking point.
My head was completely out of the trading game. I made fatal mistake after fatal mistake. I missed fast entry signals everywhere. I totally failed to cash my profits. I stood and watched as my crypto portfolio completely burned.
I went from absolute total stability sideways into a total, brutal crash. I watched years of hard work, slip straight through the cracks in the floor.
The emotional strain and heavy mental load I withstand during that time in my life broke the very foundations about everything I knew about myself. Suddenly, I was absolutely no longer an expert investor or a focused builder.
I was just a husband trying to hold the broken roof up. I was a father frantically trying to shield a child from an emotional storm.
The Modern World & Mental Health
This total collapse changed everything I believed about myself. It forced me to sharply face my own limits. It forced me to rebuild my rigid definition of true psychological toughness. I realized exactly how deeply mental health tears a person down, dragging the people around them quickly with them.
This is the cold, hard reality of human friction. The journey inward is physically ugly, and most people are simply not ready to take the trip.
No matter how hard you aggressively try to pull someone along the right path, it fundamentally fails. They have to walk it on their own, on their time.
We are all moving at our own pace. That is perfectly fine.
Nowadays I look at society and what I see is that we have engineered a system that values the comfort of lies over the hard reality of truth. We favor cheap frivolous distractions over facing who we are and what we need to change.
And in the process of doing that, we are failing our children.
I worry about the system my daughter inherits. It is a system where people frantically demand simple, packaged answers to highly complex, dangerous physical realities. Where people are coddled instead of challenged.
I am facing the hard math now. I am letting go of dead ideas. I am accepting the brutal fact that I must start completely over. I am accepting the world as it is, not as I wish to be. I am doing it because I need to in order to be a good father.