A year after losing everything in the LA fires, I am not on the other side. I am still in the middle. And something unexpected is emerging.
Chapter 1: The Year Nobody Prepares You For
We came back to nothing.
I do not mean that as a metaphor. I mean we landed from our spiritual journey, four days after getting married, and we had nothing. No home. No clothes. No toothpaste. No phone charger. No Mother’s Day cards. No grandmother’s pearls. No letters from my father who has been gone for twenty years. Nothing that was meaningful, sentimental, irreplaceable. Gone. Burned at two thousand degrees. Not damaged. Not salvageable. Vaporized.
The first days were a blur of logistics. Where do we sleep? What do we wear? Where do we get the basics? And underneath all of that was something we did not have language for yet. A grief so heavy and so disorienting that we genuinely did not know which way was up.
People were extraordinarily kind. The outpouring of support from people we knew and people we had never met was something my husband and I still cannot talk about without getting emotional. And yet even in the middle of all of that generosity, there was this strange feeling of not being anchored to anything. Of reaching for something familiar and finding only air.
We had lost the physical containers of our life. And without those containers, we were not quite sure who we were anymore.
Nobody prepares you for that part. The self-help books do not cover the weeks where you cannot focus. Where a simple decision feels impossible. When you don’t care how you look. No makeup, I didn’t use a blow dryer for months.
Where you find yourself standing in the bathroom staring at the sink not remembering if the hot water is to the right or left. Grief does not follow a schedule or respond to productivity hacks. And nobody tells you that sometimes the most honest thing you can say is — I took my eyes off the ball. And I do not know yet when I will get them back.
Chapter 2: The Pressure To Be Further Along
Somewhere around the six month mark, a different kind of weight started to settle in.
We should be further along by now.
I heard it in my own head. I heard it in the way well-meaning people asked how things were going, their voices carrying just a hint of expectation that the answer should be better by now. I felt it in the gap between where I thought we would be at this point and where we actually were.
The phoenix rises from the ashes. That is what they say. Strength is forged in fire. What does not kill you makes you stronger. Out of the darkest moments come the greatest breakthroughs. We have all heard these things so many times they have become wallpaper. We say them to people who are suffering because we do not know what else to say. Because the alternative — sitting with someone in the reality that some things just take a very long time and there is no shortcut — is uncomfortable for everyone.
I want to tell you something honest. A year out, we are not the phoenix yet. We are not standing on the mountain looking back at the fire with hard-won wisdom and a clear vision of what it all meant. We are still in the valley. Still rebuilding. Still some days not entirely sure what rebuilding even looks like. We have yet to break ground.
And I have had to make peace with that because pretending to be further along than you are is its own kind of loss. It is the loss of the truth. And after losing everything else, I am not willing to lose that too.
So here is where we are. A year in. Still in it. Still moving. Not yet on the other side.
Chapter 3: Then The Health Wake Up
And then, as if the year needed one more thing, my body sent the bill.
On the one-year anniversary of the fires, I was hospitalized for five days. Emergency surgery. Serious enough that my husband flew to get me. Serious enough that the recovery took months. Serious enough that I spent the better part of this year not just rebuilding from the fire but rebuilding my physical self at the same time. And an almost weird relief that while I was in the hospital nobody expected anything from me. I was being cared for because I could not care for myself.
There is only so much you can absorb before the question becomes less philosophical and more visceral. How much more do I need to handle? When does it get to be enough?
The health wake up did something to my sense of timeline that I am still processing. When your body stops you, when it physically removes you from the equation for weeks and months at a time, the gap between where you are and where you thought you would be gets wider. And the pressure — internal, mostly, but relentless — does not pause while you recover.
Shouldn’t we be further along?
I keep coming back to that question. And I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable answer. We are not further along. We are here. Exactly here. Still in the process. Still in the middle of something that does not yet have an ending I can show you. Still searching for the gift that everyone keeps promising is in here somewhere.
I will let you know when I find it. But I am not going to manufacture a resolution I do not yet have. I am not performing anymore. And frankly, you deserve better than that from me.
Chapter 4: Personal Reflection — The Message I Did Not Ask For
Here is what I expected.
I expected that at some point in this process — in the meditation, in the grief work, in the quiet moments of rebuilding — I would receive some kind of clear directive. A blueprint. A download. The thing that would make sense of all of it and point me toward the next chapter with clarity and purpose and maybe even a little relief.
What I got instead was this.
Give it all away!
I want you to understand what that means in context. I am a strategist. I have spent decades developing frameworks, systems, methodologies, trademarks, and business models that I have fiercely protected as intellectual property. It is how I built my career. It is how I created value. It is the foundation of everything I built professionally. You have to protect your intellectual property, Your IP.
And in the middle of the worst year of my life, the message was not — here is how you rebuild. The message was — stop protecting what you know and give it to Founders of the Future.
Let that sink in for a moment. Give it away.
Not just what you do. How you do it. The entire system. The business model mechanics. The diagnostic frameworks. The alignment tools. Everything. To the founders who are building what comes next. Because this moment — the breaking of the old systems, the collapse of the structures that were never going to hold anyway — this is the moment that needs builders. And builders need tools. That’s my job. That’s what the voice said.
But this one thing — this inconvenient, expensive, completely counterintuitive directive — I am listening to. For the first time ever I am opening the LAB. Because the message was clear and I have learned, at significant cost, what happens when you do not listen.
If you are a Founder of the Future — and if you are reading this, you are — then what I have spent decades protecting is now yours. The episode is out. The masterclass series is coming. And everything I know about how business actually works, what stage you are in, what is misaligned, and how to go out and make sales in this market right now — all of it — is yours.
I will let you know when I find the phoenix. Until then, I am in the ashes with you. And apparently I am handing out blueprints to anyone who wants to know how to build a business.
Here is the episode and here’s the Masterclass. It’s live.
Let’s grow,
Beate
