What Progress Actually Looks Like When It's Not Pretty | On My Own Terms: Ep. 01
The Month I Cried on My Closet Floor on Mother’s Day… and Went to the Gym Anyway
Let me tell you about the last few minutes before my husband and I were supposed to leave for Mother’s Day dinner.
I was standing in my closet trying on clothes. One outfit. Then another. Then another. Nothing fit. Not the things I bought recently. Not the things I thought would give me some grace. Nothing.
And I completely fell apart.
I sat down on the floor of my closet and cried. Full breakdown. The ugly kind. Because here I am, someone who has been fighting for her health for years, years of doing everything right, working with coaches and doctors and specialists who all looked at me and said “you eat better than anyone I know, I have no idea why this isn’t working” and I’m sitting on the floor of my closet on Mother’s Day unable to zip up a pair of pants.
That is the moment this month started for me.
And I am telling you this because I think a lot of people see someone’s progress and assume the path was clean. They miss all the moments on the closet floor.
I Finally Found Someone Who Actually Got It
I have struggled with my weight for about ten years. Not the kind of struggle where you know exactly what the problem is and just need to fix it. The confusing, demoralizing kind where every single person you work with tells you they don’t understand why it’s not working.
I did everything I was supposed to do. I worked with health coaches, doctors, nutritionists, all kinds of practitioners. I ate well, genuinely well, not “I think I eat well” well. And the weight stayed. And the answers never came. And slowly, quietly, it started to erode something in me.
Then I found Dr. Danielle: Wellness of Wilderness.
She sat with me and did something nobody else had really done before, she looked at the whole picture. The full history. The patterns going back years and years. And she started connecting dots that had never been connected before. Things I’d been dealing with my entire life that I had written off as just “how I am” turned out to be part of a larger story my body had been trying to tell me for a very long time.
Her explanation for why the weight showed up when it did was the thing that finally made sense. She told me my body had just hit its limit. It had been holding on, compensating, managing, pushing through, and at some point it simply could not handle anything more. The weight wasn’t random. It was my body waving a white flag and saying I am done. I have nothing left.
I am not going to get into every detail here because it is a longer story than one update can hold. But if you are someone who has been told everything looks fine while your body is clearly telling you something different, please drop a comment below. I want to know I am not alone in this, and I am happy to share more of what I have learned along the way.
What I will tell you is this: working with the right person changes everything.
And that brings me to May.
Five PRs and a Closet Floor, In the Same Four Weeks
Here is the thing about this month that nobody would have guessed from the outside.
In the four weeks before I sat on that closet floor crying, I had hit five personal records in the gym. Five. In four weeks. My strength has been building in a way it never has before. My energy, which had been completely non-existent for longer than I want to admit, is starting to come back. Real energy, not the kind you perform so nobody asks questions.
For context on how depleted I was: my nervous system was so overtaxed that I would stand up off the couch, walk across the room, and my entire body would start shaking. Not from fear. Not from excitement. Just from existing. It was like my body had been running on fumes for so long that the tank wasn’t just empty, there was nothing left to even run on.
I had five PRs in the gym. And I gained weight. Both things are true. Both things happened in the same month.
And when I put on the clothes that didn’t fit and sat down on that closet floor, I understood it logically. I knew I was detoxing. I knew my body was doing hard things internally. Dr. Danielle had explained exactly what was happening and why the scale sometimes goes the wrong direction when your body is healing. I knew all of it.
Knowing it didn’t make it hurt less.
That is the part they don’t tell you about the journey. The part where you are doing everything right and the results are not showing up in the way you can see yet. The part where you have to trust the process even when you are sitting on the floor in clothes that don’t fit, two hours before you are supposed to go out and celebrate yourself.
I called Danielle. She walked me through it. She reminded me what was actually happening in my body and why. She made it okay, not by telling me what I wanted to hear, but by telling me the truth in a way that made me feel held instead of hopeless.
And then I dried my face, put on something that fit, and went to dinner with my husband.
Nobody Sees the Quiet Choices
I have been thinking about this a lot, the way building a business and building your health require exactly the same thing from you.
Discipline. Trust. And the willingness to keep going when the results are not showing up in the way you expected.
Nobody sees the days you chose not to have the thing you wanted. They don’t see you choosing the gym when you had a hundred reasons not to go. They don’t see you staying up late to finish the thing that moves your business forward, or getting up early when everything in you wanted to stay in bed. They don’t see the hundred quiet choices that add up to the result they eventually notice.
They see the result. They assume the path was easy.
It never is.
And here is the thing I keep coming back to from that closet floor moment: I wanted to quit. Not dramatically, I didn’t want to blow everything up. I just wanted to stop. Stop the protocol, stop the discipline, stop trusting a process that wasn’t showing up on the outside yet. I wanted relief from the feeling of trying and not seeing it pay off the way I expected.
But I knew, the same way I know it in business, that if I threw in the towel, I would stay exactly where I was. If not worse. You do not get better by quitting when it gets hard. You just stay stuck in the version of yourself that was sitting on the floor.
So I kept going.
And I will keep going next month.
Where the Business Is Right Now
May has been a month of building the infrastructure before anyone can see the infrastructure.
Built On Her Terms launched this month. The articles are live. The Notes are going out. The strategy is in place. And from the outside it probably looks like things are just getting started in a quiet, steady way, because they are.
What it looks like from the inside is a lot of systems being built in the background while also serving clients, also working on my health, also being a mom, also figuring out this whole Substack thing in real time.
I am not going to pretend it all feels tidy right now. It doesn’t. There are days where I look at the to-do list and laugh because there is genuinely no version of the math that works. Too many things, not enough hours, real life happening on all sides.
But the foundation is getting solid. And I keep coming back to the same thing I said about my health, trust the process. Trust that the work you are doing right now, even when you cannot see the payoff yet, is compounding in ways you will only be able to measure later.
I started this Substack because I believe in building businesses on your own terms. On your timeline. In a way that fits your actual life. And the honest truth is that right now, my actual life is a health journey and a business launch and a family happening all at once.
That is what building on your own terms actually looks like.
Not a highlight reel. This.
What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know on May 1st
I think May was about learning to trust the process even when the evidence is not showing up in the way you expected.
It was about PRs and closet floors. About finding the right practitioner after years of being told everything was fine. About five quiet weeks of discipline that nobody saw except me. About a dinner I almost didn’t go to and a husband who waited patiently while I pulled myself together.
It was about doing the hard thing anyway.
Next month I will show up here and tell you where things are. The health numbers, the business reality, the life moment I didn’t expect. All of it.
Because this is what On My Own Terms actually looks like.
And I wouldn’t have it any other way. 👊
About Crystal Sullivan
Crystal is the founder of Empowered AF and the creator of Built On Her Terms — the no-BS Substack for wellness entrepreneurs who are done building someone else’s version of their business.
With 20+ years in design and brand strategy, Crystal helps wellness coaches, practitioners, and solopreneurs build strategic brands, recurring revenue systems, and businesses that actually work on their own terms. She is based in Pennsylvania and yes, Amish buggies really do drive past her window.
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