I Was Strapped to a Hospital Bed at 27. Here's What Came Next. | Episode 1

This is episode one of Success, Rewritten. Before I start interviewing other people about the moments that changed everything, I thought you should know mine.

I sat down with my dear friend Shelby Forsythia, a grief coach, author, and podcaster, to do something I don't usually do: let someone else ask the questions. What came out of that conversation is the foundation for everything this show is going to be.

The article below is the short version … or you can go watch the long one. (Be sure to subscribe to the YouTube channel!)

I grew up in Wisconsin, oldest of two, surrounded by a big extended family that showed up for everything. My parents worked hard and made sure we did too. I babysat at 12, waited tables and worked internships through college, and by the time I graduated I was already wired to equate doing with being. Work wasn't just something I did. It was a significant part of how I understood myself.

That identity followed me to San Francisco, where I took a sales job at Yelp in my mid-twenties basically on impulse. The kind of decision that doesn't make financial sense on paper but feels completely right in the moment. Within a year and a half I'd moved into a role that took me around the country speaking at conferences, hosting events for small business owners, building community. I loved it. I was good at it. I said yes to everything.

For years, that was the whole story.

Then, in October of 2018, I got a puppy.

That sounds like a strange place for things to go sideways. But that's exactly the point. I wasn't in crisis. I wasn't falling apart. I was in the middle of an exciting work project and I'd just done something happy. The cards, it turns out, had been stacking for a long time: years of overwork, undersleep, no real boundaries, a relationship with my job that had quietly become the center of my identity. One genuinely good thing tipped everything over.

Within about five days I was in full-blown mania. If you've never seen it or experienced it, mania is an elevated mood state where your thoughts are racing, your body is running on what I can only describe as fumes, and you don't feel tired even when you desperately are. By day six I was in psychosis. I was pacing around my apartment, exhausted and completely detached from reality, telling myself I just needed to shower and sleep while doing neither.

My then-boyfriend (now husband) called my parents. When they arrived I was still pacing, barely dressed, completely unreachable. They got me into a car, called a family friend who told them to go to the emergency department, and from there things moved quickly. The ED staff had to physically manage me. I was convinced I was an actor running a training simulation for them. They strapped me down and sedated me.

I was sedated for about 12 hours. When I woke up, I was taken to Rogers Behavioral Health in Wisconsin. A doctor told me I had bipolar disorder. Then they let me sleep for another day before treatment began.

I want to be honest about something: I was lucky. Lucky to have parents who came immediately and knew to get me to the ER. Lucky to have good insurance that covered inpatient and seven weeks of outpatient treatment after. Lucky to work for a company that honored my medical leave and held my job. Not everyone who goes through something like this has any of those things. I did, and it made an enormous difference.

What came next was three months of learning how to live differently. More sleep, 2-3 hours more every night, non-negotiable. No email before 9am. Off by 5:30pm. No multitasking. Changes that felt, at the time, like they were going to end my career.

They didn't. If anything, they made me better at my job. I came back, implemented the boundaries, got promoted, and slowly realized that almost every constraint I'd been living under was one I'd invented myself. Nobody was waiting on my 10pm email. I had just decided that sending it was what success looked like.

A year after being hospitalized, I went public with my diagnosis. I launched Bipolar Brought Balance, started speaking about my experience, and found, as I always do when I share the hard stuff, that it opened doors instead of closing them. Yelp didn't just support it. They encouraged it.

That chapter lasted until November 10, 2025. My 11-year anniversary at the company, to the day. I got a same-day meeting invite from my director. I had a therapy appointment beforehand, which meant I had an hour to sit with the possibility before it became real. When HR appeared on the call, I already knew.

I was laid off along with the rest of the small business content team. The podcast I'd hosted for five years, Behind the Review, with 200+ episodes and 1.6 million+ downloads, was over.

By Wednesday of that week, something had shifted. If they'd offered me another role at Yelp on Monday, I would have taken it out of pure fear. But by midweek I knew: I would have stayed for the wrong reasons. The insurance, the stability, the salary. Not because it was still the right place for me.

So I spent November and December thinking. Talking to people. Dreaming, honestly. And what kept coming back was: I don't want to stop making a show. I want to make one that's mine. One that goes deeper. One that has room for the intersection of entrepreneurship and mental health and all the complicated, unfinished ways that people actually live and work and succeed.

That's Success, Rewritten.

The guests you're going to hear on this show are entrepreneurs, executives, athletes, and leaders who've hit a moment that rewrote everything. Not all of those moments are tragedies. Some of them started the same way mine did: with something good, something chosen, something that quietly changed the direction of everything.

The show isn't going to tell you what to do. It's going to sit with people who've had to figure out what comes next, and let you draw your own conclusions.

Episode one is this conversation. My story, in full, with a friend who knew exactly which questions to ask.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube. And if you think this would resonate with someone in your life, share it with them.